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Updated: June 8, 2025
A first grown-up dance is often a terrible ordeal to a girl of eighteen, and Quenrede, though she had put on a few airs to impress the schoolgirls at the Rainbow League sale, was at bottom woefully bashful.
If only she had known people better, and the atmosphere had not seemed so stiff and formal, and she had not been so miserably shy, Quenrede might have enjoyed herself. As it was she began counting the hours. In one of the wallflower gaps of her program she took a stroll into the conservatory. It looked like fairyland with the colored lanterns hanging among the palms and flowers.
"It's a remarkably pretty costume." "Oh, I dare say, if I could beg, borrow, or steal it!" "You've no need to do either, my dear. I've had a brain-wave, and we'll fix it up for you at home. Yes, I mean it! Allow me to introduce myself: 'Miss Quenrede Saxon, Court Costumier. The very latest theatrical productions. I'll make you look so that your own mother will hardly know you!"
In the confusion of their transit she managed to secrete the piece of twine, the loss of which had been the cause of the whole upset, and presented it quite innocently to Lispeth, who, not knowing that she was receiving stolen goods, thanked her and tied the parcel. Ingred, who had watched the whole comedy, laughed, but did not give away the secret. "That child's an imp!" she said to Quenrede.
"Really, Ingred, they don't seem to teach manners at the College now!" said Quenrede one day. "The way you scowled at Mrs. Galsworthy and Gertrude was most uncivil. You didn't look in the very least pleased to see them." "I wasn't! They're the most stupid people on the face of the earth! And they stayed such ages. I thought they'd never go.
She had thrown out so many hints last term about the renewed glories of Rotherwood, that it was certainly humiliating to have to acknowledge that all the happy expectations had come to nothing. On the reputation of Rotherwood both she and Quenrede had held their heads high in the school; she wondered if her position would be the same, now that everybody knew the truth.
"I expect we'll all want to do just the same!" said Quenrede, looking from the gay flower-beds, which her own hands had planted, over the hedge to where the brown moors stretched away into the dim gray of the distance. "I thought it was going to be hateful when I came here, but, Muvvie, I think it's been the happiest year of my life! The country may be quiet, but it has its compensation.
"I don't think you, any of you, realize how slow it is just to stop at home!" sighed Quenrede. "There were sixteen dozen things I'd made up my mind to do, and I can't do one of them. It's going to be a hateful New Year for all of us just a New Year of going without and scraping and saving and economizing ugh! What a life!"
Mrs. Saxon went about with a cloud of distress on her face, and Quenrede, to whom Ingred applied for enlightenment, promptly and pointedly changed the subject. It was miserably uncomfortable, for father and son were like two Leyden jars charged with electricity, and ready to let fly at any moment. It was only the mother's influence that averted a family thunderstorm.
"It's so terrible to be poor!" sighed Quenrede, thinking of the old, happy pre-war days at Rotherwood, when everything came so easily, and there were no struggles to make ends meet. She talked the matter over afterwards with Ingred. "If I could only help somehow!" she mourned. "I've often thought I might go out and earn something, but Mother's not strong, and I really do a great deal in the house.
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