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Updated: June 28, 2025
Dr. Ellridge was quite stout. She wondered how her mother could, and then she wondered how Dr. Ellridge could. Lily loved her mother, but she had relegated her to what she considered her proper place in the scheme of things, and now she was overstepping it. Lily called to mind vividly the lines on her mother's face, her matronly figure.
Lily loved Maria, but she did not want George Ramsey to love her. When Lily entered the house, to her great astonishment she found Dr. Ellridge there. He was seated beside her mother, who was lying on the sofa. "Why, mother, what is it are you sick?" Lily cried, anxiously, while the doctor looked with admiration at her face, glowing with the cold.
She always welcomed the opportunity of being left alone of an evening, because she realized the very serious drawback that the persistent presence of a pretty, well-grown daughter might be if a wooer would wish to woo. She knew perfectly well that if Dr. Ellridge called, Lily would wonder why he called, and would sit all the evening in the same room with her fancy-work, entirely unsuspicious.
Lily knew that Dr. Ellridge would accompany her mother home. She wondered what she should do, what she should be expected to do take the doctor's other arm, or walk behind. She had seen the doctor with two of his daughters seated, when she and her mother passed up the aisle. She knew that the two daughters would go home together, and the doctor would go with her mother.
The shadow looked like that of the older man, she thought, and she was not mistaken. Lily, on entering the sitting-room, found Dr. Ellridge with her mother, and her mother's face was flushed, and she had a conscious simper.
She remembered how shabby and mean his little house had looked when she had passed it in the sleigh with George Ramsey, that very day. She said to herself that Dr. Ellridge was only marrying her mother for the sake of the loaves and fishes, for a pretty, well-kept home for himself and his daughters. Lily had something of a business turn in spite of her feminity. She calculated how much rent Dr.
Ellridge could get for his own house. That will dress the girls, she thought. She knew that her mother's income was considerable. Dr. Ellridge would be immeasurably better off as far as this world's goods went. There was no doubt of that. Lily felt such a measure of revolt and disgust that it was fairly like a spiritual nausea.
She thought of George Ramsey. Now and then as the concert proceeded she twisted her neck slightly and peered around, but she saw nothing of him. She concluded that he was not there. But when the concert was over, and she and her mother were passing out the door, and Dr. Ellridge was pressing close to her mother, under a fire of hostile glances from his daughters, Lily felt a touch on her own arm.
It really seemed to her that she was called upon to marry the Ellridge girls, and that was the main issue. "They are very nice girls," repeated Mrs. Merrill, and there was obstinacy in her artificially sweet tone. "Everybody says they are very nice girls.
"Say, Maria," she said, "it is to be a very short engagement. It will have to be, on account of mother. A double wedding would be too ridiculous, and I want to get away before all those Ellridges come into our house. Dr. Ellridge can't let his house before spring, and so I think in a month, if I can get ready." Lily blushed until her face was like the heart of a rose.
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