Just how tight was the cordon around her, Sylvia learned when Harriet Atkinson arrived, fresh from a honeymoon-voyage to the Mediterranean and the Nile.
“Why, Sunny, what’s this?” she demanded. “Why wouldn’t you see me?”
“See you?” echoed Sylvia. “What do you mean. I haven’t refused to see you.” It transpired that Harriet had been writing and ’phoning and calling for a week, being put off in a fashion which would have discouraged anyone but the daughter of a self-made Yankee. “I suppose,” she said, “they thought maybe I’d come from Frank Shirley.”
Sylvia’s face clouded, but Harriet went on—“My dear, you look like a perfect ghost! Really, this is horrible!” So she set to work to console her friend and drag her out of her depression. “You take it too seriously, Sunny. Beauregard says you make a lot more fuss about the thing than it deserves. If you knew men better——”
“Oh don’t, Harriet!” cried the other. “I can’t listen to such things!”
“I know,” said Harriet, “there you are—the thing I’ve always scolded you for! You’ll never be happy, Sunny, while you persist in demanding more than life will give. You say what you want men to be—and paying no attention at all to what they really are.”
“Are you happy?” asked Sylvia, trying to change the subject.
“About as I expected to be,” said the other. “I knew what I was marrying. The only trouble is that I haven’t been very well. I suppose it’s too much rambling about. I’ll be glad to settle down in my home.” She was going to Charleston to live in the old Dabney Mansion, she explained; at present she was paying a flying visit to her people.
“Well, Sunny,” she remarked, “you are going to give him up?”
“I suppose you couldn’t—with that adamantine pride of yours. And of course it _was_ awkward that he had to get into the papers. But Beau says these things blow over sooner than one would expect. Nobody thinks it’s half as bad as they all pretend to think it.” (Harriet, you must understand, felt rather sorry for Frank, and thought that she was pleading his cause. She did not understand that her few words would do more to damn him than all that the family had been able to say.)
But she perceived that Sylvia did not want to talk about the subject. “Well, Sunny,” she said, after a pause, “I see you’ve got a substitute ready.”