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Candace, May, and I crouched in the front stairway, but things were so exciting we just had to keep the door open a tiny crack so we could see plain as anything. There had been nothing for Mrs. Freshett to do all afternoon, so she had gone over to visit an hour with Amanda Deam. Now Mr.
Bertram were carefully preserved by Amanda, and warmed over, with sundry garnishings of her own, for the various colored clubs to which she belonged.
In his over-wrought, nervous condition, he imagined he saw in one of the flickering, far-spent lights the waning life of Amanda Stott, and the horrible thought of eternal extinction at death laid its cold hand on the larger hope which he was struggling to keep aflame in his darkening soul.
"Every one would sympathize with you.... The whole thing is so natural.... People would be glad to forget very soon. They did with my mother." "No," said Amanda, "it isn't so easy as that." She seemed to come to a decision. "Pip," she said. "I want to talk to HIM alone." Easton's brown eyes were filled with distress and perplexity. "But why?" he asked. "I do," she said.
"I wash my hands of that! But I will say that if most girls are frothy, as you say, it's because most men seem to like them that way. Confess now, how many shallow, frothy girls grow into old maids? It's generally the butterfly that occasions the merry chase, straw hats out to catch it. You seldom see a straw hat after a bee." "Oh, Amanda, that's not fair, not like you!"
When the time for graduation drew near Amanda was able to carry home the glad news that she ranked third in her class and was chosen to deliver an oration at the Commencement exercises. "That I want to hear," declared Millie, "and I'll get a new dress to wear to it, too."
This sub-Amanda was perceptible next morning again, flitting about in the background of a glad and loving adventuress, a pre-occupied Amanda who had put her head down while the real Amanda flung her chin up and contemplated things on the Asiatic scale, and who was apparently engaged in disentangling something obscure connected with Mr. Rathbone-Sanders that ought never to have been entangled....
The moment she had passed, out peeped Amanda and crept after her barefooted, saw her to her joy enter the chamber and close the door behind her, then 'like a tiger of the wood, made one noiseless bound, turned the key, and sped back to her own chamber with the feeling of Mark Antony when he said, 'Now let it work!
At Iselle, on the frontier, they enacted a little farce for the benefit of the custom-house officers. Lavinia and Amanda had old passports, and had been told they would be needed. Mat had none, so she was ordered to try the rôle of maid. Before they arrived, she took out her ear-rings, tied up her curls under a dingy veil, put on a waterproof, and tried to assume the demure air of an Abigail.
"Oh, Mom," little Emma came running into the room, "I looked in at Mart and he's awake. Mebbe he wants somebody to talk to him like I did when I had the measles. Dare I go set with him a little if I keep quiet?" "Why," said Mrs. Landis, "that would be a nice job for Amanda. You go up," she addressed the girl, "and stay a little with him. He'll appreciate your comin' to see him."
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