She remembered the clearness of
the fine eyes which had looked directly into hers. The woman had
been deciding then that she would have nothing to do with her--or
even with her child.
But the story of Robin worn by a bereft nursery passion for a little
boy, whose mamma snatched him away as a brand from the burning,
was far too edifying not to be related to those who would find it
delicious.
It was on the occasion, a night or so later, of a gathering at
dinner of exactly the few elect ones, whose power to find it
delicious was the most highly developed, that she related it. It
was a very little dinner--only four people. One was the long thin
young man, with the good looking narrow face and dark eyes peering
through a pince nez--the one who had said that Mrs. Gareth-Lawless
"got her wondrous clothes from Helene" but that he couldn't. His
name was Harrowby. Another was the Starling who was a Miss March
who had, some years earlier, led the van of the girls who prostrated
their relatives by becoming what was then called "emancipated"; the
sign thereof being the demanding of latchkeys and the setting up
of bachelor apartments. The relatives had astonishingly settled
down, with the unmoved passage of time, and more modern emancipation
had so far left latchkeys and bachelor apartments behind it that
they began to seem almost old-fogeyish. Clara March, however,
had progressed with her day.
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