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Updated: June 22, 2025
She had never brought herself to wear the tan silk stockings of invidious allure, and she still confined herself to her mother's plainest dressmaking, yearning secretly for the fancy kind, but never with enough daring. Lyman Teaford still came of an evening to play his flute acceptably, while Winona accompanied him in many an amorous morceau.
Here she sat at her neat desk of bird's eye maple, opened her journal, and across a blank page wrote in her fine, firm hand, "What Life Means to Me." It had seemed to her that it meant much. She would fill many pages. The name of Lyman Teaford would not there appear, yet his influence would be continuously present. She was not stricken as had been another reader of that fateful bit of news.
Lyman Teaford was an old man, chiefly notable, in Wilbur's opinion, for the remarkable fluency of his Adam's apple while with chin aloft he played high notes on his silver flute. Yet dimly at last he felt discomfort at Lyman's crude persistence with Pearl. He danced with others now only when Pearl was firm in refusals. Wilbur to her jested with venomous sarcasm at the expense of Lyman.
His working dress was again careless; he reeked with oil, and his hands hard, knotty hands seemed to be permanently grimed. Even Lyman Teaford managed his thriving flour and feed business, with a butter and eggs and farm produce department, in the garments of a gentleman.
Possibly Winona at thirty-two had developed a resilience not yet achieved by Wilbur at twenty. She was not going to die upon a field of battle for any Lyman Teaford. She would brave dangers, however. She saw herself in a neat uniform, searching a battlefield strewn with the dead and wounded. To the latter she administered reviving cordial from a minute cask suspended at her trim waist by a cord.
Anything less than a World War would have appeared inconsequent, anti-climactic, to these two so closely concerned in the preliminary catastrophe, and yet so reticent that neither ever knew the other's wound. Wilbur Cowan may have supposed that the entire Penniman family, Winona included, would rejoice that no more forever were they to hear the flute of Lyman Teaford.
Observe the bullet hole and those dark stains that discolour your proud features." Whereupon Mrs. Lyman Teaford would fall fainting to the floor and never again be the same woman, bearing to her grave a look of unutterable sadness, even amid the splendours of the newly furnished Latimer residence on North Oak Street. Winona's drama was less depressing.
Lyman Teaford, who for a dozen years had gone with Winona Penniman faithfully if not spectacularly; Lyman Teaford, dignified and genteel, who belonged to Newbern's better set, had one night appeared at an affair of the Friday Night Social Club. Perhaps because he had reached the perilous forties he had suddenly determined to abandon the safe highway and seek adventure in miry bypaths.
He hung a finished sheet of Sam Pickering's pencilled copy on a hook, and casually surveyed the sheet beneath. It was a social item, he saw the notice of a marriage. Then names amazingly leaped from it to sear his defenseless eyes. Lyman Teaford Miss Pearl King! He gasped and looked about him. The familiar routine of the office was under way.
Pearl must become his in the sight of God and man especially man with the least delay. He delighted Sam Pickering by continuing steadily at the linotype for five consecutive weeks, while business piled up at the First-Class Garage and old Porter Howgill was asked vainly to do everything. Then on a fateful night Lyman Teaford assumed a new and disquieting value in his life.
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