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Ebook has 1467 lines and 67413 words, and 30 pages

Release date: December 31, 2023

Original publication: NYC: George H. Doran Company, 1920

THIS MARRYING

BY MARGARET CULKIN BANNING

NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

VIOLA ROSEBORO

THIS MARRYING

"You should have been a bridesmaid," said Aunt Caroline. "Everyone was so surprised that you weren't. And the yellow would have been so becoming with you so dark."

Horatia smiled and her smile carried no regrets for her lost opportunity. Everyone, as her aunt said, had been surprised at her refusal to be a bridesmaid at the wedding of her friend. But with a quick reminiscent glance back at the ceremony, Horatia congratulated herself again on the decision that had held out against the requests of Edna and the expostulations of her aunt. She recalled the hurried fussy little ceremony, and the curious people, the space reserved in the front parlor with its tall cathedral candles, its lavish ten yards of white satin ribbon and the rose pink prayer rug. A faint odor of candles and coffee and perfume clung to the memory. In the minds of her aunt and West Park these things were vastly suitable, just as to them Edna Wallace was still her "best" friend, because they had played together as children and gone through High School together. But Horatia realized that her college experience and her four years of absence from West Park had made great gaps between her and the bride of last night as well as between her and this middle-aged aunt and uncle with whom she sat at breakfast. She looked just then as if not only yellow but any color would become her. She was fairly tall and well made and carried herself with the easy distinctive swing that comes from perfect health and no corsets. Her hair was brown and heavy and shaded into the brown of her eyes to add still another tone to the whole that her aunt characterized as "you so dark." Her clothes were simple for she scorned on principle all the minor affectations of dress and quick changes of fashion, but she had an eye for color and line which developed gowns which were sometimes beautiful and sometimes startling. Not that there was an unlimited number of them. Uncle George was generous but generous by West Park standards and by Aunt Caroline's expenditures, and Aunt Caroline still considered fifty dollars a scandalous price for a suit or cloak. Horatia never grumbled about money or about clothes. This morning she was dressed for the City and her satin blouse and slim tailored suit set off her young health perfectly. Even her aunt and uncle were conscious of fresh energy at the breakfast table.

"I didn't want to be a bridesmaid," she answered. "It always makes me seasick to try to walk to music."

"Horatia's waiting," said Uncle George, over the top of his newspaper, "until she can be the chief performer."

Horatia smiled at him. "You want to get rid of me, don't you, and you don't care what I take. I'll tell you what I am going to do. I'm going to town this morning to get a job. When I try that for a while I'll decide whether I want to get married or not."

"Get a job? What do you want a job for? You want to stay home with your aunt and me now." Uncle George went so far as to put his paper down and repeat himself. "What do you want to do that for?"

"Earn money."

He reached for his check book in all seriousness, but Horatia leaned over and put her hand on it.

"Truly I want to earn it. Everyone earns money nowadays, unless she is feeble-minded--or married. I don't particularly want money just now anyway. I still have some of that last fifty. But I want to work. All the people I know are either married or going to be or working. I must get in some class. Of course I don't mean to leave you. I'd be here nights, you see."

"They'd probably find a position for you at the High School if you feel that way," said Aunt Caroline, with the consciousness of being an important member of the community to whom even educational gateways were glad to open.

Uncle George rose with heavy dignity.

"Well--let me know when you get broke." He went out of the room with masculine indifference to these whims and in the knowledge that Horatia was only marking time in her own way until the inevitable happened. She'd marry. Of course she'd marry. And chuckling a little, he went down the street.

Aunt Caroline was more inquiring. She rose from the table, not being one to linger and keep the "help" waiting. But she followed her niece into the hall.

"Is it this social work you want to do?" she asked, remembering dimly things she had heard of new standpoints.

"Why, I don't think so. I thought I'd try to get on a newspaper. And if that doesn't work, I cut some ads out of the paper."

"You don't mean you'd do housework!" gasped her aunt to whom advertisements in newspapers meant "girl wanted for general housework."

Horatia laughed in pure joy. It was one of those rare free moments which come at the beginning of new work and new adventures and she enjoyed shaking up Aunt Caroline.

"Not--especially." Then from the foot of the steps she turned to wave back at the stout lady on the doorstep.

"Don't fret," she called. "Home for dinner."

"Everyone," she sang to herself as she went down the hill, "has the right to shock an older person once in a while. It's the breath of youth. And the old dears really love it. So long as you are respectable--they love it."

As she turned the corner she looked back for a moment at the house she had left, dramatizing her new freedom and the house too as a sober symbol of what she was so gladly leaving. The Grant house stood high on a hill overlooking the lake. It was built of blackish stone, which at one time had been the material of wealth and dignity in the city, and it still looked down on the stucco and plaster new houses which clustered beneath it, with a kind of glum faith in its superiority. But the illusion was its own. It awed no one any more, least of all Horatia, who had been brought up to respect it.

Inside were rooms papered in browns and streaked green and filled with walnut furniture which had all the ugliness of an ugly outworn fashion and yet none of the interest of antiques. There were several unsoftened leather sofas--unsoftened because the Grants had never been a family to "lie down in the daytime," and the chairs were chairs--so many places to sit down, but boasting neither beauty nor comfort. At the windows curtains of imitation Brussels lace gave the finishing touch to the unimaginative furnishings. They too were stiff and artificial, like the stone dog who sat so grimly on the terrace outside. Horatia had called the place home since she was six years old. She had no quarrel with it but it had ceased to interest her. It stood still--impassive--and she, like the breeze and the sunlight, was moving.

It was a clear morning--a bright morning, one of the days on which someone always should start out to seek a fortune. There was energy in the wind and good luck in the sunlight and romance in the face of everyone she met. Even on the way to the suburban train, though she knew nearly everyone she met, they all seemed imbued with new spirit and more interesting qualities. She met Miss Pettikin, and saw not the shabby little dressmaker but the heroine of some blighted romance. She saw the Reverend Williams, not as the man who had read the marriage service so stupidly the night before but as a man with a holy mission. She saw Joe Peter, the neighborhood gardener, and he became Labor just as Mr. Jeffry panting on his way to the train became Capital. She saw herself as a lovely and interesting young woman in whom everyone on the train was interested and she hoped that behind every newspaper lurked a man with a brain, worth her knowing. The world was full of life and interest and she was going to get her share of it. And as the train swayed and jerked as only a suburban train can do, she pulled out her notebook and speculated on her first adventure.

She had listed the newspapers with their addresses. There were four and it was quite within possibility that one of them would want her. She had several courses in journalism to her credit at the university and if there was a vacancy in any office she meant to press her claims hard. The mere idea of working stimulated her and as the train stopped at the city station she pushed out with the hurrying crowd, almost feeling already that she was one of those to whom being "on time" was a necessity.

The newspaper offices were down near the water-front. Below the main street of big shops and glittering restaurants, the streets became grey and businesslike. Wholesale houses, impassive and undecorated, with great trucks backed up before their entrances, dingy employment offices, the repair shops of garages that fronted gaily on the other street, and straggly buildings, without elevators, housing a multitude of little businesses, lived on this street. A block above, the streets were already filled with shoppers, looking in windows, loitering along, wondering what they would do next. But on Market Street everyone seemed to know where he was going and to be going there quickly. Horatia hastened her own footsteps, though her time was all her own. It made her feel less conspicuous.

"He's probably not in yet," said the boy, "doesn't get here until eleven o'clock, usually."

But Horatia's luck was working. A stout, shirt-sleeved man looked her over without getting up from his desk.

"We don't take on women reporters except in the society department," he told her. "There's to be a change there shortly. What experience have you had?"

"No experience except journalism courses at the University."

"They can't teach newspaper work at any university," growled the man. "Can teach them more here in a week than they'd get in ten years at any school, don't care where it is. Leave your name and if anything does turn up, or Miss Eliot--she's society editor--needs help--I'll have her take it up with you. Of course you understand she wants hack work. We've no room for essays, you know."

Horatia looked him over without a blush at his semi-insolence.

"No--I don't suppose you have," she said, and her stock went up with her tone. She left her name on the pad he pushed towards her and went out.

"What is your name?"

She told him and he seemed to connect it with Uncle George by a swift mental gesture.

"George Grant--dry-goods?"

"His niece. I live with him."

"Well." He thought again and then leaned forward with a confidential air that Horatia imagined him using habitually as he unearthed his scandals.

"We don't take on girls. But I don't say you couldn't be useful to us. If you could run a column of good gossipy stuff about the swells--particularly the women, of course. Nothing that would let us in for libel--well, I'd edit it anyway, of course. But the preliminary stuff to these scandals--the first rumors of divorces and elopements--particularly concerning women more or less in the public eye. We don't want stories about everyone. I could give you a list of people to watch. You know--the Town Topics sort of thing. Get us a lot more women readers."

Horatia was enjoying herself.

"But how would I unearth these stories about people I don't know?"

"Yes," agreed Horatia, wisely, "there are."

"Now of course a thing like that would be a trial column. Might not work out at all. Couldn't be long-winded. And then, too, it isn't worth an awful lot. But a girl like you, living at home, doing it for experience and pin-money, would realize that we couldn't pay too much."

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