The Magpies Nest by Isabel Paterson Page B

builds up slowly, like accretions to a coral reef, is more dangerous and difficult than a rumour that runs like sudden flame in dry grass. That will burn itself out, and new grass grow. But the other remains, fetters its hapless object; unless it concerns one of unusual mental and spiritual stature, who can calmly rise clear and use it as a footing. And that takes time.
    These tiny, ever-increasing tributes of idleness and malice Mary dreaded for Hope, saw them piling about her, and was helpless. Warn her? It would not help. The girl might struggle to amend, but wanted experience to perceive her error. She would be simply overwhelmed, frightened and sickened of the unprovoked baseness it would seem to show her in human nature. She had never injured anyone; lacking the flavour of reprisal, the attack would seem merely wanton. Hope still had that terrible sense of poetic justice discernible in young, and, unhappily, inarticulate children. She would see herself punished for an unintended fault. She would not know how to recover herself and strike back, and the wound would be poisoned thereby.
    There was nothing to be done. And perhaps luck would incline the other way. If there was such a thing as fool's luck—well, Hope deserved it. She juggled her own fortunes as carelessly as if they were ivory instead of crystal.
    Emily Edgerton's visit, though delayed, had materialised. She was much lunched and refreshed with vast quantities of tea by the local ladies, but Hope had met her first. Emily was just eighteen, but tall and well-grown, attractive with health and good nature and her father's millions. She was brown, and rather pretty; brown eyes, brown hair, a few golden freckles, and a figure rounded from tennis and dancing. She was armed point-de-vise with that knowledge of security which is the portion of daughters of the rich. Hope wondered and envied. Mary understood, and wished Hope might have a few years of the same ease, to put her on her feet.
    This was at tea, and they were planning some way to pass the evening without boredom—a difficult thing in that city. Nothing offered but a second-rate theatrical performance; it would undoubtedly be second-rate, since none others came so far from the centres of civilisation. But Edgerton and Emily professed themselves quite willing to take what chance there might be of a smile, and while he was thinking whom he might ask to complete the party—"I'd feel altogether too greedy, with three pretty women to myself," he said—Tony Yorke was observed on the veranda. He was brought in, like the wedding guests who were gathered in the hedges and by-ways; and the party was declared filled, for their box would not possibly hold more than five.
    So they sat very splendidly in the stage box; there were only four boxes and they were all stage boxes. One could not see all that went on on the stage, but Mary said the audience was much more amusing anyway. From the other side of the house, Mrs. Shane nodded to Mary, scrutinised Hope through an opera-glass and smiled at Tony.
    Tony and Mary tossed the ball between them at first. She knew him, heart and soul, reading him, perhaps, through another she had once known. But she had grown clever now: so that he could not guess how clever she was. "A silly muddle," she was saying to herself before the evening was well begun, looking at Hope, slim and shrinking in her black gown, with drooped lids, so that Mary's eyes outshone her, and the rose of Emily Edgerton's cheek. With a little pang at heart Mary saw that Edgerton still turned to her. After all, he was twice the man Tony was; it had never been her surface that had caught him. For all his simplicity, he phrased himself very neatly, apropos of what Mary did not catch.
    "I can see through a ladder when there's a lantern on the other side."
    "Well, daddy, I always told you I wasn't a ladder," remarked Emily cheerfully, and pinched his arm. That was about the depth of the conversation.
    "Aren't you?"