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getting Uncle James’ approval. _Then_, they went to Dr. Ambrose Marsh
of Port Lawrence, who had married Second Cousin Adelaide Stirling.
But Valancy disliked Dr. Ambrose Marsh. And, besides, she could not get
to Port Lawrence, fifteen miles away, without being taken there. She
did not want any one to know about her heart. There would be such a
fuss made and every member of the family would come down and talk it
over and advise her and caution her and warn her and tell her horrible
tales of great-aunts and cousins forty times removed who had been “just
like that” and “dropped dead without a moment’s warning, my dear.”
Aunt Isabel would remember that she had always said Doss looked like a
girl who would have heart trouble—“so pinched and peaked always”; and
Uncle Wellington would take it as a personal insult, when “no Stirling
ever had heart disease before”; and Georgiana would forebode in
perfectly audible asides that “poor, dear little Doss isn’t long for
this world, I’m afraid”; and Cousin Gladys would say, “Why, _my_ heart
has been like that for _years_,” in a tone that implied no one else had
any business even to have a heart; and Olive—Olive would merely look
beautiful and superior and disgustingly healthy, as if to say, “Why all
this fuss over a faded superfluity like Doss when you have _me_?”
Valancy felt that she couldn’t tell anybody unless she had to. She felt
quite sure there was nothing at all seriously wrong with her heart and
no need of all the pother that would ensue if she mentioned it. She
would just slip up quietly and see Dr. Trent that very day. As for his
bill, she had the two hundred dollars that her father had put in the
bank for her the day she was born. She was never allowed to use even
the interest of this, but she would secretly take out enough to pay Dr.
Trent.
Dr. Trent was a gruff, outspoken, absent-minded old fellow, but he was
a recognised authority on heart disease, even if he were only a general
practitioner in out-of-the-world Deerwood. Dr. Trent was over seventy
and there had been rumours that he meant to retire soon. None of the
Stirling clan had ever gone to him since he had told Cousin Gladys, ten
years before, that her neuritis was all imaginary and that she enjoyed
it. You couldn’t patronise a doctor who insulted your
first-cousin-once-removed like that—not to mention that he was a
Presbyterian when all the Stirlings went to the Anglican church. But
Valancy, between the devil of disloyalty to clan and the deep sea of
fuss and clatter and advice, thought she would take a chance with the
devil.
CHAPTER II
When Cousin Stickles knocked at her door, Valancy knew it was half-past
seven and she must get up. As long as she could remember, Cousin
Stickles had knocked at her door at half-past seven. Cousin Stickles
and Mrs. Frederick Stirling had been up since seven, but Valancy was
allowed to lie abed half an hour longer because of a family tradition
that she was delicate. Valancy got up, though she hated getting up more
this morning than ever she had before. What was there to get up for?
Another dreary day like all the days that had preceded it, full of
meaningless little tasks, joyless and unimportant, that benefited
nobody. But if she did not get up at once she would not be ready for
breakfast at eight o’clock. Hard and fast times for meals were the rule
in Mrs. Stirling’s household. Breakfast at eight, dinner at one, supper
at six, year in and year out. No excuses for being late were ever
tolerated. So up Valancy got, shivering.
The room was bitterly cold with the raw, penetrating chill of a wet May
morning. The house would be cold all day. It was one of Mrs.
Frederick’s rules that no fires were necessary after the twenty-fourth
of May. Meals were cooked on the little oil-stove in the back porch.
And though May might be icy and October frost-bitten, no fires were
lighted until the twenty-first of October by the calendar. On the
twenty-first of October Mrs. Frederick began cooking over the kitchen
range and lighted a fire in the sitting-room stove in the evenings. It
was whispered about in the connection that the late Frederick Stirling
had caught the cold which resulted in his death during Valancy’s first
year of life because Mrs. Frederick would not have a fire on the
twentieth of October. She lighted it the next day—but that was a day
too late for Frederick Stirling.
Valancy took off and hung up in the closet her nightdress of coarse,
unbleached cotton, with high neck and long, tight sleeves. She put on
undergarments of a similar nature, a dress of brown gingham, thick,
black stockings and rubber-heeled boots. Of late years she had fallen
into the habit of doing her hair with the shade of the window by the
looking-glass pulled down. The lines on her face did not show so
plainly then. But this morning she jerked the shade to the very top and
looked at herself in the leprous mirror with a passionate determination
to see herself as the world saw her.
The result was rather dreadful. Even a beauty would have found that
harsh, unsoftened side-light trying. Valancy saw straight black hair,
short and thin, always lustreless despite the fact that she gave it one
hundred strokes of the brush, neither more nor less, every night of her
life and faithfully rubbed Redfern’s Hair Vigor into the roots, more
lustreless than ever in its morning roughness; fine, straight, black
brows; a nose she had always felt was much too small even for her
small, three-cornered, white face; a small, pale mouth that always fell
open a trifle over little, pointed white teeth; a figure thin and
flat-breasted, rather below the average height. She had somehow escaped
the family high cheek-bones, and her dark-brown eyes, too soft and