Chapter 13

The Stornaway parlours were very brilliant that evening in a Willowfield sense. Not a Burton, a Larkin, or a Downing was missing, even Miss Amory Starkweather being present. Miss Amory Starkweather was greatly respected by the Stornaways, the Downings, the Larkins, and the Burtons, the Starkweathers having landed upon Plymouth Rock so early and with such a distinguished sense of their own importance as to lead to the impression in weak minds that they had not only founded that monumental corner-stone of ancestry, but were personally responsible for the Mayflower. This gentlewoman represented to the humorous something more of the element of comedy than she represented to herself. She had been born into a world too narrow and provincial for the development of the powers born with her. She had been an ugly girl and an ugly woman, marked by the hopeless ugliness of a long, ill-proportioned face, small eyes, and a nose too large and high--that ugliness which even love's eyes can scarcely ameliorate into good drawing.

The temperament attached to these painful disabilities had been warm and strongly womanly. Born a century or so earlier, in a French Court, or any great world vivid with picturesque living, she would in all probability have been a remarkable personage, her ugliness a sort of distinction; but she had been born in Willowfield, and had lived its life and been bound by its limits. She had been comfortably well off--she had a large square house with a garden, an income sufficient to provide for extremely respectable existence in Willowfield, but not large enough to allow of experiments with the outside world. She had never met a man whom she could have loved, who would have loved her, and she was essentially--though Willowfield would never have dreamed it--a woman who should have loved and mated. A lifetime of narrow, unstimulating years and thwarted instincts had made age treat her ill. She was a thin woman with burning eyes, and a personality people were afraid of.

She had always found an interest in John Baird. When he had come to Willowfield she had seen in him that element which her whole long life had lacked. His emotional potentialities had wakened her imagination. If she had been a young woman she knew that she might have fallen tragically and hopelessly in love with him; as an old woman she found it well worth her while to watch him and speculate upon him. When he had become engaged to Agnes Stornaway, she had watched him and secretly wondered how the engagement would end; when it had ended in marriage she had not wondered, but she had seen many things other people did not see. "He is not in love with her," had been her mental decision, "but he is emotional, and he is in love with her being in love with him. There is no foretelling what will come of it."

Baird had found himself attracted by Miss Amory. He did not know that if she had been young she would, despite her ugliness, have