The Precipice | Page 5

were in the parlor, where the Dresden vases stood on the marble mantel and the rose-jar decorated the three-sided table in the corner. "It was just his luck to be called into the country. If it had been a really sick person who wanted him, I wouldn't have minded, but it was only Venie Sampson."
"Still having fits?" asked Kate cheerfully, as one glad to recognize even the chronic ailments of a familiar community.
"Well, she thinks she has them," said Mrs. Barrington in an easy, gossiping tone; "but my opinion is that she wouldn't be troubled with them if only there were some other way in which she could call attention to herself. You see, Venie was a very pretty girl."
"Has that made her an invalid, mummy?"
"Well, it's had something to do with it. When she was young she received no end of attention, but some way she went through the woods and didn't even pick up a crooked stick. But she got so used to being the center of interest that when she found herself growing old and plain, she couldn't think of any way to keep attention fixed on her except by having these collapses. You know you mustn't call the attacks 'fits.' Venie's far too refined for that."
Kate smiled broadly at her mother's distinctive brand of humor. She loved it all--Miss Sampson's fits, her mother's jokes; even the fact that when they went out to supper she sat where she used in the old days when she had worn a bib beneath her chin.
"Oh, the plates, the cups, the everything!" cried Kate, ridiculously lifting a piece of the "best china" to her lips and kissing it.
"Absurdity!" reproved her mother, but she adored the girl's extravagances just the same.
"Everything's glorious," Kate insisted. "Cream cheese and parsley! Did you make it, mummy? Currant rolls--oh, the wonders! Martha Underwood, don't dare to die without showing me how to make those currant rolls. Veal loaf--now, what do you think of that? Why, at Foster we went hungry sometimes--not for lack of quantity, of course, but because of the quality. I used to be dreadfully ashamed of the fact that there we were, dozens of us women in that fine hall, and not one of us with enough domestic initiative to secure a really good table. I tried to head an insurrection and to have now one girl and now another supervise the table, but the girls said they hadn't come to college to keep house."
"Yes, yes," chimed in her mother excitedly; "that's where the whole trouble with college for women comes in. They not only don't go to college to keep house, but most of them mean not to keep it when they come out. We allowed you to go merely because you overbore us. You used to be a terrible little tyrant, Katie,--almost as bad as--"
She brought herself up suddenly.
"As bad as whom, mummy?"
There was a step on the front porch and Mrs. Barrington was spared the need for answering.
"There's your father," she said, signaling Kate to meet him.
* * * * *
Dr. Barrington was tall, spare, and grizzled. The torpor of the little town had taken the light from his eyes and reduced the tempo of his movements, but, in spite of all, he had preserved certain vivid features of his personality. He had the long, educated hands of the surgeon and the tyrannical aspect of the physician who has struggled all his life with disobedience and perversity. He returned Kate's ardent little storm of kisses with some embarrassment, but he was unfeignedly pleased at her appearance, and as the three of them sat about the table in their old juxtaposition, his face relaxed. However, Kate had seen her mother look up wistfully as her husband passed her, as if she longed for some affectionate recognition of the occasion, but the man missed his opportunity and let it sink into the limbo of unimproved moments.
"Well, father, we have our girl home again," Mrs. Barrington said with pardonable sentiment.
"Well, we've been expecting her, haven't we?" Dr. Barrington replied, not ill-naturedly but with a marked determination to make the episode matter-of-fact.
"Indeed we have," smiled Mrs. Barrington. "But of course it couldn't mean to you, Frederick, what it does to me. A mother's--"
Dr. Barrington raised his hand.
"Never mind about a mother's love," he said decisively. "If you had seen it fail as often as I have, you'd think the less said on the subject the better. Women are mammal, I admit; maternal they are not, save in a proportion of cases. Did you have a pleasant journey down, Kate?"
He had the effect of shutting his wife out of the conversation; of definitely snubbing and discountenancing her. Kate knew it had always been like that, though when she had been young and more passionately