The Sayre house stood on the hill behind the town, a long, rather low
white house on Italian lines. In summer, until the family exodus to the
Maine Coast, the brilliant canopy which extended out over the
terrace indicated, as Harrison Miller put it, that the family was "in
residence." Originally designed as a summer home, Mrs. Sayre now used it
the year round. There was nothing there, as there was in the town house,
to remind her of the bitter days before her widowhood.
She was a short, heavy woman, of fine taste in her house and of no taste
whatever in her clothing.
"I never know," said Harrison Miller, "when I look up at the Sayre
place, whether I'm seeing Ann Sayre or an awning."
She was not a shrewd woman, nor a clever one, but she was kindly in the
main, tolerant and maternal. She liked young people, gave gay little
parties to which she wore her outlandish clothes of all colors and all
cuts, lavished gifts on the girls she liked, and was anxious to see
Wallie married to a good steady girl and settled down. Between her son
and herself was a quiet but undemonstrative affection. She viewed him
through eyes that had lost their illusion about all men years ago, and
she had no delusions about him. She had no idea that she knew all that
he did with his time, and no desire to penetrate the veil of his private
life.
"He spends a great deal of money," she said one day to her lawyer. "I
suppose in the usual ways. But he is not quite like his father. He has
real affections, which his father hadn't. If he marries the right girl
she can make him almost anything."
She had her first inkling that he was interested in Elizabeth Wheeler
one day when the head gardener reported that Mr. Wallace had ordered
certain roses cut and sent to the Wheeler house. She was angry at first,
for the roses were being saved for a dinner party. Then she considered.
"Very well, Phelps," she said. "Do it. And I'll select a plant also, to
go to Mrs. Wheeler."
After all, why not the Wheeler girl? She had been carefully reared, if
the Wheeler house was rather awful in spots, and she was a gentle little
thing; very attractive, too, especially in church. And certainly Wallie
had been seeing a great deal of her.
She went to the greenhouses, and from there upstairs and into the rooms
that she had planned for Wallie and his bride, when the time came. She
was more content than she had been for a long time. She was a lonely
woman, isolated by her very grandeur from the neighborliness she craved;
when she wanted society she had to ask for it, by invitation. Standing
inside the door of the boudoir, her thoughts already at work on
draperies and furniture, she had a vague dream of new young life
stirring in the big house, of no more lonely evenings, of the bustle and
activity of a family again.