THE END OF THE PATH

Having decided that Laura was to be married on the nineteenth of December, Mrs. Payne had gathered not only the invitations, but the entire trousseau into the house three weeks before the date upon which she had fixed.  Laura, who had at first entered enthusiastically into the question of clothes, had shown during the last fortnight an indifference which was almost an open avoidance of the subject; and the lively old lady was forced to conduct an unsupported campaign against dressmakers and milliners.

“It’s fortunate, to put it mildly, my dear, that you have me to attend to such matters,” she remarked one day, “or you would most likely have started on your wedding journey a dowd—­and there can be no happy marriage,” she concluded with caustic philosophy, “which is not founded upon a carefully selected trousseau.”

“If his love for me depends on clothes, I don’t want it,” replied Laura in an indignant voice.

Mrs. Payne shook her false gray curls, until the little wire hairpins which held them in place slipped out and dropped into her lap.

“It might very well depend upon something more difficult to procure,” she retorted with reason.  Then in a last effort to arouse Laura into the pride of possession, she brought out her multitude of boxes and unfolded her treasures of old lace.

At the time Laura looked on with listless inattention, but two days later she returned in a change of mood which put to blush the worldly materialism of Mrs. Payne.

“Aunt Rosa, you’re right,” she said, “I haven’t paid half enough attention to my clothes.  I believe, after all, that clothes are among the most important things in life.”

“I regard it as a merciful providence that you have come to your senses in time,” observed the old lady, with a sincerity which survived even the extravagance into which her niece immediately plunged—­for, after looking carelessly over the contents of the large white boxes, Laura turned away as if disappointed, and demanded in her next breath a sable coat.

“Arnold admired a woman in a sable coat yesterday,” she said, with a gravity which impressed Mrs. Payne as almost solemn.

But her reaction into the vanities of the world was as short lived as her former disdain of them; and by the time the sable coat arrived she had almost begun to regret that she had ever asked for it.  Since the selection of it she had heard Kemper quite as carelessly express approval of an ermine wrap, and her heart had suddenly sickened over the fruitlessness of her ambition.  She was still trying on the coat under Mrs. Payne’s eyes, when Gerty, coming in, as she announced, to deliver a message, paused in the centre of the room as if petrified into an attitude of admiration.

“My dear, you’re so gorgeous that you look like nothing short of a tragic actress.  Well, you ought to be a happy woman.”

“If clothes can make me happy, I suppose I shall be,” rejoined Laura.  “Aunt Rosa has spared neither her own strength nor Uncle Horace’s money.”