CHAPTER VII

Mrs. Vertrees "sat up" for her daughter, Mr. Vertrees having retired
after a restless evening, not much soothed by the society of his
Landseers. Mary had taken a key, insisting that he should not come
for her and seeming confident that she would not lack for escort; nor
did the sequel prove her confidence unwarranted. But Mrs. Vertrees
had a long vigil of it.

She was not the woman to make herself easy--no servant had ever seen
her in a wrapper--and with her hair and dress and her shoes just what
they had been when she returned from the afternoon's call, she sat
through the slow night hours in a stiff little chair under the
gaslight in her own room, which was directly over the "front hall."
There, book in hand, she employed the time in her own reminiscences,
though it was her belief that she was reading Madame de Remusat's.

Her thoughts went backward into her life and into her husband's; and
the deeper into the past they went, the brighter the pictures they
brought her--and there is tragedy. Like her husband, she thought
backward because she did not dare think forward definitely. What
thinking forward this troubled couple ventured took the form of a
slender hope which neither of them could have borne to hear put in
words, and yet they had talked it over, day after day, from the very
hour when they heard Sheridan was to build his New House next door.
For--so quickly does any ideal of human behavior become an antique
--their youth was of the innocent old days, so dead! of "breeding"
and "gentility," and no craft had been more straitly trained upon