"The years slip around disgustingly. It seems only yesterday I was
at my first party." Usually, in spite of Linda's eagerness to hear
of that time when her mother was a girl, the elder would stop
abruptly. On rare occasions solitary facts emerged from the recalled
existence of a small town in the country. There were such details as
buggy-riding and prayer-meetings and excursions to a Boiling Springs
where the dancing-floor, open among the trees, was splendid. At
these memories Mrs. Condon had been known to cry.

But she would recover shortly. Her emotions were like that--easily
roused, highly colored and soon forgotten. She forgot, Linda
realized leniently, a great deal. It wasn't safe to rely on her
promises. However, if she neglected a particular desire of Linda's,
she continually brought back unexpected gifts of candy, boxes of
silk stockings, or lovely half-wilted flowers.

The flowers, they discovered, although they stayed fresh for a long
while pinned to Linda's slim waist, died almost at once if worn by
her mother. "It's my warm nature, I am certain," the latter
proclaimed to her daughter; "while you are a little refrigerator. I
must say it's wonderful how you keep your clothes the same. Neat as
a pin." Somehow, with this commendation, she managed to include a
slight uncomplimentary impatience. Linda didn't specially want to
resemble a pin, a disagreeable object with a sharp point. She
considered this in the long periods when, partly by preference, she
was alone.

Seated, perhaps, in the elaborate marble and deep red of the
Boscombe's reception-rooms, isolated in the brilliant expensive
throng, she would speculate over what passed in the light of her own