“I believe there’s to be a musical show in Hastings Saturday night.”

Claude said he had heard something of the sort.

“I was thinking,” Bayliss affected a careless tone, as if he thought of such things every day, “that we might make a party and take Gladys and Enid.  The roads are pretty good.”

“It’s a hard drive home, so late at night,” Claude objected.  Bayliss meant, of course, that Claude should drive the party up and back in Mr. Wheeler’s big car.  Bayliss never used his glistening Cadillac for long, rough drives.

“I guess Mother would put us up overnight, and we needn’t take the girls home till Sunday morning.  I’ll get the tickets.”

“You’d better arrange it with the girls, then.  I’ll drive you, of course, if you want to go.”

Claude escaped and went out, wishing that Bayliss would do his own courting and not drag him into it.  Bayliss, who didn’t know one tune from another, certainly didn’t want to go to this concert, and it was doubtful whether Enid Royce would care much about going.  Gladys Farmer was the best musician in Frankfort, and she would probably like to hear it.

Claude and Gladys were old friends, from their High School days, though they hadn’t seen much of each other while he was going to college.  Several times this fall Bayliss had asked Claude to go somewhere with him on a Sunday, and then stopped to “pick Gladys up,” as he said.  Claude didn’t like it.  He was disgusted, anyhow, when he saw that Bayliss had made up his mind to marry Gladys.  She and her mother were so poor that he would probably succeed in the end, though so far Gladys didn’t seem to give him much encouragement.  Marrying Bayliss, he thought, would be no joke for any woman, but Gladys was the one girl in town whom he particularly ought not to marry.  She was as extravagant as she was poor.  Though she taught in the Frankfort High School for twelve hundred a year, she had prettier clothes than any of the other girls, except Enid Royce, whose father was a rich man.  Her new hats and suede shoes were discussed and criticized year in and year out.  People said if she married Bayliss Wheeler, he would soon bring her down to hard facts.  Some hoped she would, and some hoped she wouldn’t.  As for Claude, he had kept away from Mrs. Farmer’s cheerful parlour ever since Bayliss had begun to drop in there.  He was disappointed in Gladys.  When he was offended, he seldom stopped to reason about his state of feeling.  He avoided the person and the thought of the person, as if it were a sore spot in his mind.

XVII

It had been Mr. Wheeler’s intention to stay at home until spring, but Ralph wrote that he was having trouble with his foreman, so his father went out to the ranch in February.  A few days after his departure there was a storm which gave people something to talk about for a year to come.

The snow began to fall about noon on St. Valentine’s day, a soft, thick, wet snow that came down in billows and stuck to everything.  Later in the afternoon the wind rose, and wherever there was a shed, a tree, a hedge, or even a clump of tall weeds, drifts began to pile up.  Mrs. Wheeler, looking anxiously out from the sitting-room windows, could see nothing but driving waves of soft white, which cut the tall house off from the rest of the world.