"Unnatural," Mrs. Moses Feldt pronounced. And Linda, weary and
depressed, allowed her the last word.




XIX


Nothing further during the subsequent brief exchange of notes
between Miss Lowrie and Linda was said of the latter's intention to
visit her father's family. Mrs. Feldt, however, whose attitude
toward Linda had been negatively polite, now displayed an animosity
carefully hidden from her husband but evident to the two girls. The
elder never neglected an opportunity to emphasize Linda's selfishness
or make her personality seem ridiculous. But this Linda ignored from
her wide sense of the inconsequence of most things.

Yet she was relieved when, finally, she had actually left New York.
She looked forward with an unusual hopeful curiosity to the Lowries.
To her surprise their house--miles, it appeared, from the center of
the city--was directly on a paved street with electric cars,
unpretentious stores and very humble dwellings nearby. Back from the
thoroughfare, however, there were spacious green lawns. The street
itself, she saw at once, was old--a highway of gray stone with low
aged stone facades, steep eaves and blackened chimney-pots reaching,
dusty with years, into the farther hilly country.

A gable of the Lowrie house, with a dignified white door, a fanlight
of faintly iridescent glass and polished brasses, faced the brick