The Sisters-In-Law | Page 4

and grinding timbers, and of the
eucalyptus trees behind her, whose leaves rustled with a shrill rising
whisper that seemed addressed to heaven; the neighing and pawing of
horses in the stables, the sharp terrified yelps of dogs; and through all a
long despairing wail. The mountains across the bay and behind the city
were whirling in a devil's dance and the scattered houses on their slopes
looked like drunken gnomes. The shot tower bowed low and solemnly
but did not fall.

III
As the earth with a final leap and twist settled abruptly into peace, the
streets filled suddenly with people, many in their nightclothes, but more
in dressing-gowns, opera cloaks, and overcoats. All were silent and
apparently self-possessed. Whence came that long wail no one ever
knew.
Alexina, remembering her own attire, sprang to her feet and ran
through the little side door and up the stair, praying that her mother,
with her usual monumental poise, would have disdained to rise. She
had never been known to leave her room before eight.
But as Alexina ran along the upper hall she became only too aware that
Mrs. Groome had surrendered to Nature, for she was pounding on her
door and in a haughty but quivering voice demanding to be let out.

Alexina tiptoed lightly to the threshold of her room and called out
sympathetically:
"What is the matter, mother dear! Has your door sprung?"
"It has. Tell James to come here at once and bring a crow-bar if
necessary."
"Yes, darling."
Alexina let down her hair and tore off her evening gown, kicking it into
a closet, then threw on a bathrobe and ran over to the servants' quarters
in an extension behind the house. They were deserted, but wild shrieks
and gales of unseemly laughter arose from the yard. She opened a
window and saw the cook, a recent importation, on the ground in
hysterics, the housemaid throwing water on her, and the inherited butler
calmly lighting his pipe,
"James," she called. "My mother's door is jammed. Please come right
away."
"Yes, miss." He knocked his pipe against the wall and ground out the
life of the coal with his slippered heel. "Just what happened to your
grandmother in the 'quake of sixty-eight. I mind the time I had getting
her out."

IV
It was quite half an hour before the door yielded to the combined
efforts of James and the gardener-coachman, and during the interval
Mrs. Groome recovered her poise and made her morning toilette.
She had taken her iron-gray hair from its pins and patted the narrow
row of frizzes into place; the flat side bands, the concise coil of hair on
top were as severely disdainful of untoward circumstance or passing
fashion as they had been any morning these forty years or more.

She wore old-fashioned corsets and was abdominally correct for her
years; a long gown of black voile with white polka dots, and a guimpe
of white net whose raff of chiffon somewhat disguised the wreck of her
throat. On her shoulders, disposed to rheumatism, she wore a tippet of
brown marabout feathers, and in her ears long jet earrings.
She had the dark brown eyes of the Ballingers, but they were bleared at
the rims, and on the downward slope of her fine aquiline nose she wore
spectacles that looked as if mounted in cast iron. Altogether an
imposing relic; and "that built-up look" as Aileen expressed it, was the
only one that would have suited her mental style. Mrs. Abbott, who
dressed with a profound regard for fashion, had long since concluded
that her mother's steadfast alliance with the past not only became her
but was a distinct family asset. Only a woman of her overpowering
position could afford it.
Mrs. Groome's skin had never felt the guilty caress of cold-cream or
powder, and if it was mahogany in tint and deeply wrinkled, it was at
least as respectable as her past. In her day that now bourgeois
adjective--twin to genteel--had been synchronous with the equally
obsolete word swell, but it had never occurred to even the more modern
Mrs. Abbott and her select inner circle of friends, dwelling on family
estates in the San Mateo valley, to change in this respect at least with
the changing times.

V
Alexina had washed the powder from her own fresh face and put on a
morning frock of green and brown gingham, made not by her mother's
dressmaker but by her sister's. Her soft dusky hair, regardless of the
fashion of the moment, was brushed back from her forehead and coiled
at the base of her beautiful little head. Her long widely set gray eyes,
their large irises very dark and noticeably brilliant even for youth, had
the favor of black