Читать книгу Indian Summer - Emily Grant Hutchings - Страница 10

Lavinia stood in the sun-room, staring perplexedly across the lawn in the direction of Vine Cottage. She was trying to decide a ponderous question. To call on the new tenant ... or to wait the prescribed two weeks? David and the children felt that a neighbourly visit was already overdue. Probably, Larimore had said at breakfast, Mrs. Ascott knew nothing of the silly custom which prevailed in Springdale, and would think her landlady either hostile or rude. For once in her life Lavinia Trench was uncertain. The new tenant was a woman of the world. Ominous distinction. How could one gauge a neighbour who had crossed the ocean sixteen times and had lived in every European capital from London to Constantinople? She did not wear black. Incomprehensible for a widow. Likely as not, she held Springdale unworthy the display of her expensive weeds. Or perhaps she was saving them for some adequate occasion. Just going to Dr. Schubert’s laboratory to work ... one’s old clothes would serve for that. Besides, there were so many new fads about mourning. It might be that taupe was the correct thing. She would write and ask Sylvia about it.

Sylvia was the one member of the family whose opinion was accorded a meed of respect—now that she had gone to Detroit to live. It was too bad that she should have moved to another city, just when a woman who might have been of service to her had come to Springdale. It was always that way. Life offered the great desideratum—after the wish or need for it had gone by. Life, Lavinia Trench’s life, was an endless chain of disappointments. Of this there was no shadow of doubt. David and the children had heard the statement reiterated with such consistent regularity that they failed now to hear it at all—like the noise of the trolley cars on Sherman Avenue, behind the Trench home, that at first made such a deafening clatter.

“You seem to get everything you ask for,” her second son, Robert, had once reminded her. “That’s more than you can say for the rest of us.” Whereat she reeled off such a catalogue of woes that even Bob was silenced.