CHAPTER XXI

AN UNEXPECTED MEETING

The formally worded wedding card arrived in due course.  Following close came a letter from Linda Abbey, a missive that radiated friendliness and begged Stella to come a week before the date.

“You’re going to be pretty prominent in the public eye when you sing here,” Linda wrote.  “People are going to make a to-do over you.  Ever so many have mentioned you since the announcement was made that you’ll sing at the Granada concerts.  I’m getting a lot of reflected glory as the future sister-in-law of a rising singer.  So you may as well come and get your hand into the social game in preparation for being fussed over in July.”

In the same mail was a characteristic note from Charlie which ran: 

    “Dear Sis:

    “As the Siwashes say, long time I see you no.  I might have dropped a
    line before, but you know what a punk correspondent I am.  They tell
    me you’re becoming a real noise musically.  How about it?

“Can’t you break away from the fame and fortune stuff long enough to be on hand when Linda and I get married?  I wasn’t invited to your wedding, but I’d like to have you at mine.  Jack says it’s up to you to represent the Fyfe connection, as he’s too busy.  I’ll come over to Seattle and get you, if you say so.”

She capitulated at that and wrote saying that she would be there, and that she did not mind the trip alone in the least.  She did not want Charlie asking pertinent questions about why she lived in such grubby quarters and practiced such strict economy in the matter of living.

Then there was the detail of arranging a break in her engagements, which ran continuously to the end of June.  She managed that easily enough, for she was becoming too great a drawing card for managers to curtly override her wishes.

Almost before she realized it, June was at hand.  Linda wrote again urgently, and Stella took the night boat for Vancouver a week before the wedding day.  Linda met her at the dock with a machine.  Mrs. Abbey was the essence of cordiality when she reached the big Abbey house on Vancouver’s aristocratic “heights,” where the local capitalists, all those fortunate climbers enriched by timber and mineral, grown wealthy in a decade through the great Coast boom, segregated themselves in “Villas” and “Places” and “Views,” all painfully new and sometimes garish, striving for an effect in landscape and architecture which the very intensity of the striving defeated.  They were well-meaning folk, however, the Abbeys included.

Stella could not deny that she enjoyed the luxury of the Abbey menage, the little festive round which was shaping about Linda in these last days of her spinsterhood.  She relished the change from unremitting work.  It amused her to startle little groups with the range and quality of her voice, when they asked her to sing.  They made a much ado over that, a genuine admiration that flattered Stella.  It was easy for her to fall into the swing of that life; it was only a lapsing back to the old ways.