I'll go to the old print shop and see my Cousin Corinna."




CHAPTER III

CORINNA OF THE OLD PRINT SHOP


As Stephan left the Square there floated before him a picture of the old
print shop in Franklin Street, where Corinna Page (still looking at
forty-eight as if she had stepped out of a portrait by Romney) sat amid
the rare prints which she never expected to sell. After an unfortunate
early marriage, her husband had been Kent Page, her first cousin, she
had accepted her recent widowhood, if not with relief, well, obviously
with resignation. For years she had wandered about the world with her
father, Judge Horatio Lancaster Page, who had once been Ambassador to
Great Britain. Now, having recently returned from France, she had
settled in a charming country house on the Three Chopt Road, and had
opened the ridiculous old print shop, a shop that never sold an
engraving, in a quaint place in Franklin Street. She had rented out the
upper floors to a half-dozen tenants, had built a couple of rooms beside
the kitchen for the caretaker, and had planted two pyramidal cedars and
a hedge of box in the short front yard. "A shop is the only place where
you may have calls from people who haven't been introduced to you," she
had said; and of course as long as she had money to throw away, what did
it matter, Stephen reflected, whether she ever sold a picture or not? At
forty-eight she was lovelier, he thought, than ever; she would always be
lovelier than any one else if she lived to be ninety. There wasn't a