Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/354

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
344
THE BREATH OF SCANDAL

follows the full realization that one who has been a companion will never be seen again; and Marjorie was feeling particularly lost, because now she was aware that she had not planned beyond this service.

"I can't want to go back to Clearedge Street, Clara," she said. "I want to go home but not talk to people there. I want you to go home with me."

"Your father don't," Clara observed frankly.

"He's going to his office," Marjorie reported; and she went with Clara down to the car which he had left for her. Leonard was driving and, as it was the open car, Marjorie attempted little discussion with Clara on the way to Evanston; besides, she wished Clara to see her home before she talked. And Clara saw it much as it usually was, arriving in the car with Leonard out of his seat and opening the door for Marjorie and her guest to alight; with Leonard touching his cap and asking, "Anything to-night, Miss Hale?" Then Martin opened the screen door of the house; Sarah was waiting in the lower hall and another maid in the room upstairs.

"Gawd!" exclaimed Clara to Marjorie, in the first minute after she had escaped from their ministrations and the two of them were alone in Marjorie's room with the door shut. "Gawd, you gave up a lot. Why, if I had two men Miss Seeleying me like that pair of yours and another pair of females worryin' about nothing so much as maybe I'd forget myself and lift a finger, and also, it's perfectly plain, somebody else cookin' in the kitchen, I don't think it'd be long before I'd be pretty sure I was doin' enough for the world just by livin'."

"I guess," said Marjorie, pleased by the quickness with which Clara's incisive mind went under the surface of this strange life, "that's how people who live this