She was a good woman, and she wanted her children's happiness more than

anything in the world, but she had a faint and sternly repressed

feeling of relief when Nina announced her engagement. Nina did it with

characteristic sangfroid, at dinner one night.

"Don't ring for Annie for a minute, mother," she said. "I want to tell

you all something. I'm going to marry Leslie Ward."

There had been a momentary pause. Then her father said: "Just a minute. Is that Will Ward's boy?"

"Yes. He's not a boy."

"Well, he'll come around to see me before there's any engagement. Has

that occurred to either of you?"

"Oh, he'll be around. He'd have come to-night, but Howard Moore is

having his bachelor dinner. I hope he doesn't look shot to pieces

to-morrow. These bachelor things--! We'd better have a dinner or

something, mother, and announce it."

There had been the dinner, with a silver loving cup bought for the

occasion, and thereafter to sit out its useless days on the Sheraton

sideboard. And there had been a trousseau and a wedding so expensive

that a small frown of anxiety had developed between Walter Wheeler's

eyebrows and stayed there.

For Nina's passion for things was inherent, persisting after her

marriage. She discounted her birthday and Christmases in advance, coming

around to his office a couple of months before the winter holidays and

needing something badly.

"It's like this, daddy," she would say. "You're going to give me a check

for Christmas anyhow, aren't you? And it would do me more good now. I

simply can't go to another ball."

"Where's your trousseau?"

"It's worn out-danced to rags. And out of date, too."

"I don't understand it, Nina. You and Leslie have a good income. Your

mother and I--"

"You didn't have any social demands. And wedding presents! If one more

friend of mine is married--"

He would get out his checkbook and write a check slowly and

thoughtfully. And tearing it off would say: "Now remember, Nina, this is for Christmas. Don't feel aggrieved when

the time comes and you have no gift from us."

But he knew that when the time came Margaret, his wife, would hold out

almost to the end, and then slip into a jeweler's and buy Nina something

she simply couldn't do without.

It wasn't quite fair, he felt. It wasn't fair to Jim or to Elizabeth.

Particularly to Elizabeth.

Sometimes he looked at Elizabeth with a little prayer in his heart,

never articulate, that life would be good to her; that she might keep

her illusions and her dreams; that the soundness and wholesomeness of

her might keep her from unhappiness. Sometimes, as she sat reading or

sewing, with the light behind her shining through her soft hair, he saw

in her a purity that was almost radiant.




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