Читать книгу At the Sign of the Fox. A Romance онлайн

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For many years the Lawtons lived in an ample old-fashioned house in one of the streets converging at Washington Square, where Brooke and young Adam had been born. Here Mrs. Lawton had passed many days of quiet content and social comfort, entertaining in the open-hearted southern way that does not admit of push or hurry. True, the neighbourhood was changing, and others more ambitious were moving away; in fact, Adam Lawton had one day said the time had come when he was ready to build a modern house, in a part of the city where a home more suited to his position and a good investment could be combined, for with him the two propositions always went together.

Mrs. Lawton had sighed, but said nothing. She loved the wide, sunny house, with its colonial mantels and irregular staircase, and secretly she hoped that no one would buy it. Faint hope, for in a week from the day the matter was broached, Adam Lawton announced that the house was sold. A business building had purchased the adjoining property and virtually gave him his price. They could live in an apartment hotel pending the building of the new house. It would give his wife a rest, for he was beginning to notice that she was looking rather worn, and did not attribute it to the real cause or the flight of years, but to some extraneous reason that that most dubious of all acts, “a change,” might overcome. So Mrs. Lawton was spending her second winter at the St. Hilaire, living apart from her own life, as it were. True, she had been listless and not very well of late, but it was more from inertia than any constitutional weakness. No one could expect to keep for thirty years the radiant type of blonde beauty with which Pamela Brooke had glowed at twenty. Mrs. Lawton was still in a sense a beautiful woman, but the vivacity that often outlives freshness of tint and distinctiveness of feature had died first of all. Her charm lay in a certain refinement of outline; colour and features had grown dim as the reflection of a face in a mirror blurred by dust, and her mass of waving golden brown hair, that in its lights and shades had once surpassed even Brooke’s, was of a clear white, as of the days of powder, and gave the delicate features an almost dramatic setting.