Through the Deep Waters by Kim Vogel Sawyer

Author:Kim Vogel Sawyer [Vogel Sawyer, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-73130-2
Publisher: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group
Published: 2014-05-06T04:00:00+00:00

Dinah

Dinah left Mr. Irwin’s office with his warnings ringing in her head. Someone must surely be very jealous to have run to him with the news of her invitation to the Calico Ball. But she would do everything Mr. Irwin said was necessary. She would finish her work before changing into her ball gown. At the ball she would conduct herself with the decorum expected of an employee of the hotel. And until the day of the ball, she would keep her attention on the tasks required of her rather than escaping into flights of whimsy.

Her face flamed with humiliation as she hurried back upstairs. How silly she must have looked, waving the feather duster and twirling like a child! If Ruthie had caught her instead of Mr. Irwin, she wouldn’t have been quite so embarrassed. Ruthie seemed to understand Dinah’s excitement. At least partially. No one understood the deepest reasons why the invitation meant so much. And no one ever would, because she wouldn’t tell.

Would she have ever imagined a man like Amos Ackerman asking her to attend a ball? No. Never. Yet he had. A niggle of guilt pricked. Would he have asked her if he knew who she was … and what she’d done? She shook her head hard. She wasn’t that girl anymore. What mattered was now. No longer Untamable Tori’s unfortunate mistake, she was one of Mr. Fred Harvey’s employees. Perhaps only a chambermaid in the Clifton Hotel now, but in nine more months when she turned eighteen, she would become—

She came to a stop right outside the door of the room she’d vacated at Mr. Irwin’s interruption. She hadn’t come to Kansas to be courted. When had she lost sight of her reason for accepting the position as chambermaid? She hovered in the doorway, as if it were a portal between two choices. Stay with her original intention to secure a position that would grant her the respect she’d never previously received, or move forward into the new opportunity that seemed to be presenting itself?

Ruthie had scolded the servers with the statement that any girl should be pleased to be courted by Mr. Ackerman. He’d asked her to the ball. Which meant—oh, how her heart pounded—he could very well be interested in courting her. A man didn’t invite a girl to something as important as the Calico Ball unless he truly liked her. But if she went, if she allowed herself to be courted, she wouldn’t be able to become a server after all. Servers weren’t allowed to court or marry during the year of their contract.

Which did she want more—to become a well-respected server or to have a beau?

As the golden days of September slipped away and October arrived with chilly nights and naked tree branches tapping their tips together in the wind, Dinah struggled with the question. During the weekdays when she performed her cleaning duties and observed the servers in their crisp telltale uniforms signifying them as Mr. Harvey’s specially chosen

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