The Happiest Time of Their Lives

The Happiest Time of Their
Lives

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Happiest Time of Their Lives , by
Alice Duer Miller
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: The Happiest Time of Their Lives
Author: Alice Duer Miller
Release Date: February 26, 2004 [eBook #11325]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES ***
E-text prepared by MBP, papeters, Mary Meehan, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team

THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES
BY ALICE DUER MILLER
Author of "Come Out of the Kitchen," "Ladies Must Live," "Wings in
the Nights," etc.
1918

TO CLARENCE DAY, JR.
... and then he added in a less satisfied tone: "But friendship is so
uncertain. You don't make any announcement to your friends or vows
to each other, unless you're at an age when you cut your initials in the
bark of a tree. That's what I'd like to do."

THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES

CHAPTER I
Little Miss Severance sat with her hands as cold as ice. The stage of her
coming adventure was beautifully set--the conventional stage for the
adventure of a young girl, her mother's drawing-room. Her mother had
the art of setting stages. The room was not large,--a New York
brownstone front in the upper Sixties even though altered as to entrance,
and allowed to sprawl backward over yards not originally intended for
its use, is not a palace,--but it was a room and not a corridor; you had
the comfortable sense of four walls about you when its one small door
was once shut. It was filled, perhaps a little too much filled, with
objects which seemed to have nothing in common except beauty; but
propinquity, propinquity of older date than the house in which they
now were, had given them harmony. Nothing in the room was modern
except some uncommonly comfortable sofas and chairs, and the pink
and yellow roses that stood about in Chinese bowls.
Miss Severance herself was hardly aware of the charm of the room. On
the third floor she had her own room, which she liked much better.
There was a great deal of bright chintz in it, and maple furniture of a
late colonial date, inherited from her mother's family, the Lanleys, and
discarded by her mother, who described the taste of that time as "pure,
but provincial." Crystal and ivories and carved wood and Italian
embroideries did not please Miss Severance half so well as the austere
lines of those work-tables and high-boys.
It was after five, almost half-past, and he had said "about five." Miss
Severance, impatient to begin the delicious experience of anticipation,
had allowed herself to be ready at a quarter before the hour. Not that
she had been entirely without some form of anticipation since she woke
up; not, perhaps, since she had parted from him under the windy
awning the night before. They had held up a long line of restless motors
as she stood huddled in her fur-trimmed cloak, and he stamped and
jigged to keep warm, bareheaded, in his thin pumps and shining

shirt-front, with his shoulders drawn up and his hands in his pockets,
while they almost awkwardly arranged this meeting for the next day.
Several times during the preceding evening she had thought he was
going to say something of the kind, for they had danced together a great
deal; but they had always danced in silence. At the time, with his arm
about her, silence had seemed enough; but in separation there is
something wonderfully solid and comforting in the memory of a
spoken word; it is like a coin in the pocket. And after Miss Severance
had bidden him good night at the long glass door of the paneled
ball-room without his saying anything of a future meeting, she had
gone up-stairs with a heavy heart to find her maid and her wrap. She
knew as soon as she reached the dressing-room that she had actually
hurried her departure for the sake of the parting; for the hope, as their
time together grew short, of having some certainty to look forward to.
But he had said nothing, and she had been ashamed to find that she was
waiting, leaving her hand in his too long; so that at last she snatched it
away, and was gone up-stairs in an instant, fearing he might have
guessed what was going on in her mind.
She had thought it just an accident that he was in the hall when