Book Description

It was a breathless August afternoon. Betty Wales, very crisp and cool in white linen, sat in a big wicker chair on the broad piazza of the family cottage at Lakeside. On the wicker table beside her were a big basket of family mending, a new novel, and an uncut magazine. In her lap was a fuzzy gray kitten. Betty Wales was deliberately ignoring the mending; she had been “perfectly crazy” to begin the new novel, but now she ignored that likewise; she had entirely forgotten the fuzzy gray kitten. She was busily engaged in the altogether delectable occupation, for a hot August afternoon, of doing nothing at all. Jim Watson,—Eleanor’s brother, you remember, and the architect in charge of Morton Hall, also a warm admirer of Morton Hall’s pretty little manager,—had been in Cleveland for a week “on business.” The business was connected with two big houses that his firm were building there. It had left all his evenings and most of his afternoons wholly at the disposal of the Wales’s family cook, alias the pretty little manager of Morton Hall. The cook had rushed through her work in a scandalous fashion that caused the Wales family to indulge in many loud complaints of too-early breakfasts, “snippy” lunches, and wildly extravagant dinners—Jim always got out to Lakeside in plenty of time for the dinners. He had left for New York the night before, after the very most elaborate and delicious dinner of them all, and the Wales’s family cook was tired, though she did not know it, and happy, in spite of a queer lonely sensation that was hopelessly mixed with relief at having a long, lazy afternoon all to herself, to spend with a kitten for company, a book for diversion, and plenty of mending in case the unwonted joys of idleness should pall. At four, when the postman came by on his afternoon round, Betty was still staring absently off at the blue lake, thinking vague, happy thoughts. She was so absorbed that she never even saw the postman, who obligingly walked across the piazza to her corner and dropped the afternoon mail in her lap, right on top of the gray kitten, who was too sleepy to care. Just one letter, and it was for Miss B. Wales, the address typewritten, the name of Jasper J. Morton’s world-famous banking house in a corner of the envelope. It was from one of Mr. Morton’s secretaries,—not the Harding graduate that Betty had sent him, but an energetic young man who had been with the firm for several years. It was he to whom Mr. Morton had delegated the task of marketing ploshkins in New York and elsewhere, and he and Betty had become quite friendly over the checks and reorders and other business arrangements.