Their great contention was that Rose would cut herself off; and
certainly if she wasn't afraid of that she wasn't afraid of anything.
Julia Tramore could only tell her mother how little the girl was
afraid. She was already prepared to leave the house, taking with her
the possessions, or her share of them, that had accumulated there
during her father's illness. There had been a going and coming of
her maid, a thumping about of boxes, an ordering of four-wheelers; it
appeared to old Mrs. Tramore that something of the objectionableness,
the indecency, of her granddaughter's prospective connection had
already gathered about the place. It was a violation of the decorum
of bereavement which was still fresh there, and from the indignant
gloom of the mistress of the house you might have inferred not so
much that the daughter was about to depart as that the mother was
about to arrive. There had been no conversation on the dreadful
subject at luncheon; for at luncheon at Mrs. Tramore's (her son never
came to it) there were always, even after funerals and other
miseries, stray guests of both sexes whose policy it was to be
cheerful and superficial. Rose had sat down as if nothing had
happened--nothing worse, that is, than her father's death; but no one
had spoken of anything that any one else was thinking of.
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