Ariel Custer by Grace Livingston Hill

Author:Grace Livingston Hill [Hill, Grace Livingston]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-62029-020-0
Publisher: Barbour Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2012-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

That same afternoon Emily Dillon had opened her bedroom door cautiously and looked out into the hall, listened for a second, and then tiptoed to the front window. Yes, it was as she had thought; Harriet Granniss was going out. Motionless in the shadow of the window curtain, she watched Harriet Granniss go down the front walk, between the flaring rows of portulacas that Harriet had planted without asking Emily if she liked them, to the ornate front gate painted white and swung between two ostentatious white pillars at the opening of the modest hedge that Harriet had caused to be erected also without consulting her housemate in the matter. One could see at a single glance of Emily Dillon’s refined cameo face that she never would have been the kind of woman to select portulacas for a border to the front walk, nor perpetrate an elaborate portal in the midst of the green simplicity of the old hedge.

That she allowed both to be, grew out of the quiet strength of her fortified life. Anyone seeing Emily Dillon seated in the dim end of the old Dillon pew under the gallery of the Methodist church, her eyes closed and her gentle head bent in prayer, would never have guessed that under the simple dark-blue taffeta blouse there often raged a tempest of rebellion and that portulacas and front gateways and many other things of like kind were causes for many prayers that went up from a much-tried heart.

Harriet Granniss, sitting heavily and importantly in the middle aisle seat of the new Congregational church, would have been most astonished could she have known that her beautiful borders and her noble front-gate architecture were the reason of so many prayers for patience. It seemed to her she had been a benefactor, and she nursed a continual grievance that her efforts were not appreciated.

It was not often that Emily Dillon took the trouble to demur at any of Harriet Granniss’s suggestions, because it was always long before she heard the last of it; for Harriet Granniss knew how to maintain a hunger strike better than the best suffragette who was ever arrested, and she could go around a house with a hurt look and a sigh or two and break the spirit of any human who dared to speak and call its soul its own against her. A few intensive treatments of this sort had finished any opposition Emily Dillon might have offered with regard to trivial details concerning her home and the way it should be ordered. She simply decided that it was not worthwhile to have trouble. About the matter of repainting the house pea-green with white trimming and an old-rose roof, she did hold her ground, maintaining that gray and white were the colors her father had always chosen, and gray and white were what it must be, until in a haughty wrath Harriet Granniss gave in for gray and ordered the paint. But such a gray! The kind

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