Read Snow Shadow for Free Online Page B

at the time—suggested a theater to give plays made from the novels. Somehow he awakened a spark in Dr. Edward, and almost overnight the carriage house was enlarged, turned into a little theater, with Blackmur in charge. He had had some stage experience, and from all I have heard he was a charmer. Perhaps he thought he could manage the old man after he got the theater. They gave just one play, made from Pride and Prejudice. Then Elinor and he were caught publicly in an unmistakably intimate scene of their own. There were more fireworks than the start of World War II, and Elinor and Blackmur were shown the gate—fast.
    “It was made very clear that Dr. Edward did not intend to welcome any suitors. It might mean that some of Tillie’s lovely money would be diverted from his own beloved pursuit. Tillie, I gather, was thoroughly crushed by that time. Her father had brought her up in the woman-is-property-and-a-servant belief, from his European background, and she just never had a chance to exert herself.
    “Emma escaped by charming Horvath—he was younger than Dr. Edward but not much. And he was rich. She saw that he was about the only escape she would ever get when she met him at her grandfather’s house. I think he fancied Tillie at one time, before theold man thought Dr. Edward’s social connections might mean a step up for his daughter. So she had her wedding big enough to plaster all the newspapers before, during, and after. She traveled in Europe, after Horvath conveniently died, and she cut quite a swath there as one of the semi-Jet Set. Then, when she began to age she could not stand losing any sign of youth among them, and came back here to play great lady frog in the small puddle of Ladensville.
    “Anne got herself a man, too. Through Emma, really—an attaché, naval—at one of the smaller embassies. She and Emma were fairly close. They had the same outlook on things. Captain Frimsbee rose in rank, due to the attrition of the war, and went down with his ship in late ’44. Now Anne pushes along on her pension and spends her life trading on naval connections for long visits. She makes herself useful to such hostesses as will give her room and board, while Emma, finding Anne’s connections no longer of any great use, has written her off. Emma did fix up the carriage house and present it to Anne’s son, who was a naval officer and a good escort now and then. But when he married and then was invalided out of the picture in Vietnam, she speedily decided that Irene and son were no longer necessary. Irene does tend to be a dreary soul, and Emma, as I hear it, dislikes any suggestion of ill health or trouble about her.
    “Poor Miss Elizabeth was the one who was caught. Her mother was an invalid—real or imaginary—for a good many years. I would think that any wife of Dr. Edward might well take to her bed to escape. And during those years, she ran the house. Not only that butshe found her own fanciful retreat. Deliberately or not, she became a period piece, out of a much earlier period. I think she really picked the year of her birth—1899—and decided to stay in it as either her mother or her grandmother. She does it magnificently and has become a kind of timeless symbol of another age.”
    “Why, I wonder?” Another kind of retreat? Did Miss Elizabeth feel secure only wrapped in the trappings of an era where there was a certain solidity to life which we had never known and could probably never know in the future either? We speak of that immediate past now with sneers, with stimulated horror at its narrowness. Still, those contemporary with it were the last to see life as a solid and firm thing. For the persons who abided by its rites and customs, there had been that security.
    “Miss Elizabeth is probably the only one who knows. If she is happier playing that role, then she deserves to be allowed to do so. She certainly has little in the modern day to make her even passably content Dr. Edward kept his grip