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Updated: June 2, 2025
How wonderful, she thought, to be able to dwell in such a beautiful place, to have as friends and companions such amusing and intelligent people as the stranger with whom she had talked! Were all the inhabitants of Silliston like him? They must be, since it was a seat of learning. Lise's cry, "I've just got to go away, anywhere," found an echo in Janet's soul. Why shouldn't she go away?
And it was the memory of this incident that suddenly threw a glaring, evil light on all of Lise's conduct during the past months her accidental dropping of the vanity case and the gold coin! Now she knew for a certainty what had happened to her sister. Having dressed herself, she entered the kitchen, which was warm, filled with the smell of frying meat.
She was looking at them with an expression they both knew, an expression thoughtful and sad. "You will change it, won't you?" said Lise. And as Princess Mary gave no answer, she left the room. Princess Mary was left alone. She did not comply with Lise's request, she not only left her hair as it was, but did not even look in her glass.
She was amused, too, by the thought that Lise's envy would be modified by the prospect of a heightened social status; since Lise, it will be remembered, had her Providence likewise. Hannah's god was not a Providence, but one deeply skilled in persecution, in ingenious methods of torture; one who would not hesitate to dangle baubles before the eyes of his children only to snatch them away again.
She glanced around the familiar, sordid room, at the magazine pages against the faded wall-paper, at the littered bureau and the littered bed, over which Lise's clothes were flung. It was hot and close even now, in summer it would be stifling. Suddenly a flash of sympathy revealed to her a glimpse of the truth that Lise, too, after her own nature, sought beauty and freedom!
The bed was unmade, and on the table beside two empty beer bottles and glasses and the remains of a box of candy suggestive of a Sunday purchase at a drug store she recognized Lise's vanity case. The effect of all this, integrated at a glance, was a paralyzing horror. Janet could not speak.
"Stick to him and you'll wear diamonds that's what he tries to put across," was Lise's comment on Mr. Frear's method, and thus Janet gained the impression that her sister's feelings were not deeply involved. "If I thought he'd make good with the sprinkler I might talk business. But say, he's one of those ginks that's always tryin' to beat the bank. He's never done a day's work in his life.
At any rate, the sight of these young gods of leisure, the contemplation of the stolid butler and plush footmen in the background never failed to make Lise's heart beat faster.
He never lost, however, in public at least, or before Lise's family, the fine careless, jaunty air of the demonstrator, of the free-lance for whom seventy miles an hour has no terrors; the automobile, apparently, like the ship, sets a stamp upon its votaries. No Elizabethan buccaneer swooping down on defenceless coasts ever exceeded in audacity Mr. Wiley's invasion of quiet Fillmore Street.
Lise's ambition to be supported in idleness and luxury to be condemned because she had believed her own to be higher? Did not both lead to destruction? The weight that had lain on her breast since the siren had awakened her that morning and she had reached out and touched the chilled, empty sheets now grew almost unsupportable. "It's true," said Janet, "all men are the same."
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