She remembered a dinner engagement with a
pleasant reflection that it could not be kept. To-morrow, too,
with its engagement to play cards and dine and dance, was now
freed. And Monday--when she had promised to go to town and look
for hats with Dorothy, and Tuesday, when those women were coming
for lunch--it was all miraculously cancelled. A mere chance had
loosed the bonds that neither her own desperate resolution nor
Bert's could break. She was Nancy Bradley again, a wife and mother
and housekeeper first, and everything else afterward.
What would they do now--where would they go? She did not care. She
had been afraid of a hundred contingencies only this morning,
fretted with tiny necessities, annoyed by inessential details. Now
a real event had come along, and she could breathe again.
"I wonder what I've been afraid of, all this time?" mused Nancy.
And she smiled over a sudden, mutinous thought. How many of the
women she knew would be glad to have their houses burned down
between luncheon and dinner on a summer Saturday? She turned to
Bert. "Pierre and Pauline may now consider themselves as
automatically dismissed," she said.
"They have already come to that conclusion," Bert said, with some
relish.
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