peared on each side of the granite approach, a large round flower-bed of red-leafed canna, such as cemeteries delight in, always neat and well groomed, edged by salvia. David Jerome, and David's father before him, liked flowers well enough, they said, but they liked them in their proper places, like children and dogs.
On this cold January afternoon, when the spruces, as early as four o'clock, were casting long slim triangular shadows on the white expanse about them, Rebecca Jerome sat by a western window inside the big, bare cube of forbidding gray architecture at the top of Chestnut Street, and sewed—in a desultory fashion. It had snowed a little the night before, and she glanced up every now and then to watch the sprinkling of dry powder on top of the crust outside whirl into tiny hurricanes—pink as the sun got lower—scud across the slippery surface and disappear in a cloud over the edge of the snow-covered curb.
This was January third. This was her birthday. She was twenty-five years old to-day. She sighed every now and then.
"Good gracious, Reba," Aunt Augusta had flung at her, from the sewing-machine, five minutes ago, "are you taking breathing exercises for your lungs, or what, I'd like to know?"
Reba made no reply to her aunt's inquiry. It wasn't necessary. She simply sighed more quietly
They called her Reba for short, pronouncing the first syllable with a long "e"—never Becky. "I don't like names ending in 'ie' and 'y,'" Aunt Augusta had announced before Rebecca was old enough to have any voice in the matter. "They sound sentimental. Soft!"
