CHAPTER III

CORINNA OF THE OLD PRINT SHOP

As Stephan left the Square there floated before him a picture of the old print shop in Franklin Street, where Corinna Page (still looking at forty-eight as if she had stepped out of a portrait by Romney) sat amid the rare prints which she never expected to sell.  After an unfortunate early marriage, her husband had been Kent Page, her first cousin, she had accepted her recent widowhood, if not with relief, well, obviously with resignation.  For years she had wandered about the world with her father, Judge Horatio Lancaster Page, who had once been Ambassador to Great Britain.  Now, having recently returned from France, she had settled in a charming country house on the Three Chopt Road, and had opened the ridiculous old print shop, a shop that never sold an engraving, in a quaint place in Franklin Street.  She had rented out the upper floors to a half-dozen tenants, had built a couple of rooms beside the kitchen for the caretaker, and had planted two pyramidal cedars and a hedge of box in the short front yard.  “A shop is the only place where you may have calls from people who haven’t been introduced to you,” she had said; and of course as long as she had money to throw away, what did it matter, Stephen reflected, whether she ever sold a picture or not?  At forty-eight she was lovelier, he thought, than ever; she would always be lovelier than any one else if she lived to be ninety.  There wasn’t a girl in his set who could compare with her, who had the glow and charm, the flame-like inner radiance; there wasn’t one who had the singing heart of Corinna.  Yes, that was the phrase he had been trying to remember, trite as it was—­the singing heart—­that was Corinna.  She had had a hard life, he knew, in spite of her beauty and her wealth; yet she had never lost the quality of youth, the very essence of gaiety and adventure.  When he thought of her, Patty Vetch appeared merely cheap and common, though he felt instinctively that Corinna would have liked Patty if she had seen her in the Square with the pigeon.  It was a part of Corinna’s charm perhaps, certainly a part of her enjoyment of life that she liked almost every one—­every one, that is, except Rose Stribling, whom she quite frankly hated.  But, then, people said that Rose Stribling, twelve years younger than Corinna and as handsome as a Red Cross poster, had run too often across Kent Page in the first year of the war.  Kent Page had died in Prance of Spanish influenza before he ever saw a trench or a battlefield; and Rose Stribling, all blue eyes and white linen, had nursed him at the last.  At that time Corinna was in America, and she hadn’t so much as looked at Kent for years; but a woman has a long memory for emotions, and she is capable of resenting the loss of a husband who is no longer hers.  Rumour, of course, nothing more; yet the fact remained that Corinna, who liked all the world, hated Rose