"It was a present," replied Annie humbly, but she for the first time looked a little disturbed. That mourning emblem with her father's and mother's, and a departed sister's hair in a neat little twist under a small crystal, grated upon her incessantly. It struck her as a species of ghastly sentiment, which at once distressed, and impelled her to hysterical mirth.

"A present," repeated Margaret. "If anybody gave me such a present as that, I would never wear it. It is simply in shocking bad taste."

"I sometimes fear so," said Annie. She did not state that her Aunt Jane never allowed her to be seen in public without that dismal adornment.

"You are a queer girl," said Margaret, and she summed up all her mood of petty cruelty and vicarious revenge in that one word "queer."

However, little Annie Eustace only smiled as if she had been given a peculiarly acceptable present. She was so used to being underrated, that she had become in a measure immune to criticism, and besides criticism from her adored Mrs. Edes was even a favour. She took another bungling st.i.tch in the petal of a white floss daisy.

Margaret felt suddenly irritated. All this was too much like raining fierce blows upon a down pillow.

"Do, for goodness sake, Annie Eustace, stop doing that awful embroidery if you don't want to drive me crazy," said she.

Then Annie looked at Margaret, and she was obviously distressed and puzzled. Her grandmother had enjoined it upon her to finish just so many of these trying daisies before her return and yet, on the other hand, here was Margaret, her adorable Margaret, forbidding her to work, and, moreover, Margaret in such an irritable mood, with that smooth brow of hers frowning, and that sweet voice, which usually had a lazy trickle like honey, fairly rasping, was as awe-inspiring as her grandmother. Annie Eustace hesitated for a second. Her grandmother had commanded. Margaret Edes had commanded. The strongest impulse of her whole being was obedience, but she loved Margaret, and she did not love her grandmother. She had never confessed such a horror to herself, but one does not love another human being whose main aim toward one is to compress, to stiffen, to make move in a step with itself. Annie folded up the untidy embroidery. As she did so, she dropped her needle and also her thimble. The needle lay glittering beside her chair, the thimble rolled noiselessly over the trailing fold of her muslin gown into the folds of Margaret's white silk. Margaret felt an odd delight in that. Annie was careless, and she was dainty, and she was conscious of a little pleasurable preening of her own soul-plumage.

Margaret said nothing about the thimble and needle. Annie sat regarding her with a sort of expectation, and the somewhat mussy little parcel of linen lay in her lap. Annie folded over it her very slender hands, and the horrible hair ring was in full evidence.

Margaret fixed her eyes upon it. Annie quickly placed the hand which wore it under the other. Then she spoke, since Margaret did not, and she said exactly the wrong thing. The being forced continually into the wrong, often has the effect of making one quite innocently take the first step in that direction even if no force be used.

"I hear that the last meeting of the Zenith Club was unusually interesting," said little Annie Eustace, and she could have said nothing more hapless to Margaret Edes in her present mood. Quite inadvertently, she herself became the irritant party. Margaret actually flushed. "I failed to see anything interesting whatever about it, myself," said she tartly.

Annie offended again. "I heard that Mrs. Sarah Joy Snyder's address was really very remarkable," said she.

"It was simply a very stupid effort to be funny," returned Margaret.

"Sometimes women will laugh because they are expected to, and they did that afternoon. Everything was simply cut and dried. It always is at Mrs. George B. Slade's. I never knew a woman so absolutely dest.i.tute of originality."

Annie looked helplessly at Margaret. She could say no more unless she contradicted. Margaret continued. She felt that she could no longer conceal her own annoyance, and she was glad of this adoring audience of one.

"I had planned something myself for the next meeting, something which has never been done," said she, "something new, and stimulating."

"Oh, how lovely!" cried Annie.

"But of course, like all really clever plans for the real good and progress of a club like ours, something has to come up to prevent,"

said Margaret.

"Oh, what?"

"Well, I had planned to have Lydia Greenway, you know she is really a great artist, come to the next meeting and give dramatic recitations."

"Oh, would she?" gasped Annie Eustace.

"Of course, it would have meant a large pecuniary outlay," said Margaret, "but I was prepared, quite prepared, to make some sacrifices for the good of the club, but, why, you must have read it in the papers, Annie."

Annie looked guiltily ignorant.

"I really do not see how you contrive to exist without keeping more in touch with the current events," said Margaret.

Annie looked meekly culpable, although she was not. Her aunts did not approve of newspapers, as containing so much information, so much cheap information concerning the evil in the world, especially for a young person like Annie, and she was not allowed to read them, although she sometimes did so surrept.i.tiously.

"It was in all the papers," continued Margaret, with her censorious air. "Lydia Greenway was obliged to leave unexpectedly and go to the Riveria. They fear tuberculosis. She sailed last Sat.u.r.day."

"I am so sorry," said Annie. Then she proceeded to elaborate her statement in exactly the wrong way. She said how very dreadful it would be if such a talented young actress should fall a victim of such a terrible disease, and what a loss she would be to the public, whereas all that Margaret Edes thought should be at all considered by any true friend of her own was her own particular loss.

"For once the Zenith Club would have had a meeting calculated to take Fairbridge women out of their rut in which people like Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Sturtevant seem determined to keep them," returned Margaret testily. Annie stared at her. Margaret often said that it was the first rule of her life never to speak ill of any one, and she kept the letter of it as a rule.

"I am so sorry," said Annie. Then she added with more tact. "It would have been such a wonderful thing for us all to have had Lydia Greenway give dramatic recitals to us. Oh, Margaret, I can understand how much it would have meant."

"It would have meant progress," said Margaret. She looked imperiously lovely, as she sat there all frilled about with white lace and silk with the leaf-shadows playing over the slender whiteness. She lifted one little hand tragically. "Progress," she repeated. "Progress beyond Mrs. George B. Slade's and Mrs. Sturtevant's and Miss Bessy d.i.c.ky's, and that is precisely what we need."

Annie Eustace gazed wistfully upon her friend. "Yes," she agreed, "you are quite right, Margaret. Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Sturtevant and poor Bessy d.i.c.ky and all the other members are very good, and we think highly of them, but I too feel that we all travel in a rut sometimes. Perhaps we all walk too much the same way." Then suddenly Annie burst into a peal of laughter. She had a sense of humour which was startling. It was the one thing which environment had not been able to subdue, or even produce the effect of submission. Annie Eustace was easily amused. She had a scent for the humorous like a hound's for game, and her laugh was irrepressible.

"What on earth are you laughing at now?" inquired Margaret Edes irritably.

"I was thinking," Annie replied chokingly, "of some queer long-legged birds I saw once in a cage in a park. I really don't know whether they were ibises or cranes, or survivals of species, but anyway, the little long-legged ones all walked just the same way in a file behind a tall long-legged one, who walked precisely in the same way, and all of a sudden, I seemed to see us all like that. Only you are not in the least like that tall, long-legged bird, Margaret, and you are the president of the Zenith Club."

Margaret surveyed Annie with cool displeasure. "I," said she, "see nothing whatever to laugh at in the Zenith Club, if you do."

"Oh, Margaret, I don't!" cried Annie.

"To my mind, the Zenith Club is the one inst.i.tution in this little place which tends to advancement and mental improvement."

"Oh, Margaret, I think so too, you know I do," said Annie in a shocked voice. "And my heart was almost broken because I had to miss that last meeting on account of grandmother's having such a severe cold."

"The last meeting was not very much to miss," said Margaret, for Annie had again said the wrong thing.

Annie, however, went on eagerly and unconsciously. She was only aware that she was being accused of disloyalty, or worse, of actually poking fun, when something toward which she felt the utmost respect and love and admiration was concerned.

"Margaret, you know," she cried, "you know how I feel toward the Zenith Club. You must know what it means to me. It really does take me out of my little narrow place in life as nothing else does. I cannot tell you what an inspiration it really is to me. Oh, Margaret, you know!"

Margaret nodded in stiff a.s.sent. As a matter of fact, she _did_ know.

The Zenith Club of Fairbridge did mean very much, very much indeed, to little Annie Eustace. Nowhere else did she meet _en ma.s.se_ others of her kind. She did not even go to church for the reason that her grandmother did not believe in church going at all and wished her to remain with her. One aunt was Dutch Reformed and the other Baptist; and neither ever missed a service. Annie remained at home Sundays, and read aloud to her grandmother, and when both aunts were in the midst of their respective services, and the cook, who was intensely religious, engaged in preparing dinner, she and her old grandmother played pinocle. However, although Annie played cards very well, it was only with her relatives. She had never been allowed to join the Fairbridge Card Club. She never attended a play in the city, because Aunt Jane considered plays wicked. It was in reality doubtful if she would have been permitted to listen to Lydia Greenway, had that person been available. Annie's sole large recreation was the Zenith Club, and it meant, as she had said, much to her. It was to the stifled young heart as a great wind of stimulus which was for the strengthening of her soul. Whatever the Zenith Club of Fairbridge was to others, it was very much worth while for little Annie Eustace. She wrote papers for it, which were astonishing, although her hearers dimly appreciated the fact, not because of dulness, but because little Annie had written them, and it seemed incredible to Fairbridge women that little Annie Eustace whom they had always known, and whose grandmother and aunts they knew, could possibly write anything remarkable. It was only Alice Mendon who listened with a frown of wonder, and intent eyes upon the reader. When she came home upon one occasion, she remarked to her aunt, Eliza Mendon, and her cousin, Lucy Mendon, that she had been impressed by Annie Eustace's paper, but both women only stared and murmured a.s.sent. The cousin was very much older than Alice, and both she and her mother were of a placid, reflective type. They got on very well with Alice, but sometimes she had a queer weariness from always seeing herself and her own ideas in them instead of their own. And she was not in the least dictatorial.

She would have preferred open, antagonistic originality, but she got a surfeit of clear, mirror-like peace.

She was quite sure that they would quote her opinion of Annie Eustace's paper, but that did not please her. Later on she spoke to Annie herself about it. "Haven't you something else written that you can show me?" She had even suggested the possibility, the desirability, of Annie's taking up a literary career, but she had found the girl very evasive, even secretive, and had never broached the subject again.

As for Margaret Edes, she had never fairly listened to anything which anybody except herself had written, unless it had afforded matter for discussion, and the display of her own brilliancy. Annie's productions were so modestly conclusive as to apparently afford no standing ground for argument. In her heart, Margaret regarded them as she regarded Annie's personality, with a contempt so indifferent that it was hardly contempt.

She proceeded exactly as if Annie had not made such a fervent disclaimer. "The Zenith Club is the one and only thing which lifts Fairbridge, and the women of Fairbridge, above the common herd," said she majestically.

"Don't I know it? Oh, Margaret, don't I know it," cried the other with such feverish energy that Margaret regarded her wonderingly. For all her exploiting of the Zenith Club of Fairbridge, she herself, unless she were the main figure at the helm, could realise nothing in it so exceedingly inspiring, but it was otherwise with Annie. It was quite conceivable that had it not been for the Zenith Club, she never would have grown to her full mental height. Annie Eustace had a mind of the sequential order. By subtle processes, una.n.a.lysable even by herself, even the record of Miss Bessy d.i.c.ky started this mind upon momentous trains of thought. Unquestionably the Zenith Club acted as a fulminate for little Annie Eustace. To others it might seem, during some of the sessions, as a pathetic attempt of village women to raise themselves upon tiptoes enough to peer over their centuries of weedy feminine growth; an attempt which was as futile, and even ridiculous, as an attempt of a cow to fly. But the Zenith Club justified its existence n.o.bly in the result of little Annie Eustace, if in no other, and it, no doubt, justified itself in others. Who can say what that weekly gathering meant to women who otherwise would not move outside their little treadmill of household labour, what uplifting, if seemingly futile grasps at the great outside of life? Let no one underrate the Women's Club until the years have proven its uselessness.

"I am so sorry about Lydia Greenway," said Annie, and this time she did not irritate Margaret.

"It does seem as if one were simply doomed to failure every time one really made an effort to raise standards," said Margaret.

Then it was that Annie all unconsciously sowed a seed which led to strange, and rather terrifying results. "It would be nice," said little Annie, "if we could get Miss Martha Wallingford to read a selection from _Hearts Astray_ at a meeting of the club. I read a few nights ago, in a paper I happened to pick up at Alice's, that she was staying in New York at the Hollingsgate. Her publishers were to give her a dinner last night, I believe."

Margaret Edes started. "I had not seen that," she said. Then she added in a queer brooding fashion, "That book of hers had an enormous sale. I suppose her publishers feel that they owe it to her to give her a good time in New York. Then, too, it will advertise _Hearts Astray_."