Another Woman's House Read Online Free PDF Page B

hands.
    Walls surrounded the estate on three sides, shutting out the world, enclosing the house with the sea. Even the walls evidenced Phineas Thorne’s sturdy feeling for the substantial and the permanent; they were made of rough-hewn New England rocks which were now weathered with age, moss-grown and lined with great banks of laurel and hemlock and old whispering pines.
    Somehow Thorne House had escaped rebuilding during the extravagant, halcyon days of the eighties and nineties when there was no stopping the tide of money flowing into the Thorne coffers. The Thorne shipping line boomed into popular favor; its ships, built as well and solidly as Thorne House, went all over the world; the Thorne banks waxed fat and bursting with prosperity and Northern capital.
    But the period that saw monstrosities built all along the New England coast, a period that founded the fabulous and ridiculous houses of Newport and along Fifth Avenue, saw Thorne House already built and invulnerable. A wing was added in 1889, but it kept to the original dignified and generous line of the house; hothouses were built in 1893, but they glittered gently from beyond well-matured gardens and hedges which had been laid out at the time the house was built.
    Inside, of course, there were changes. It was Alice who had finally weeded out the ugliness and had restored and collected damaged or hidden beauties. She was efficient; she had time for everything. Even the gardens had improved under her painstaking care, so now the whole place, inside and out, measured up to the standard of beauty set originally by Phineas Thorne.
    A belt of woods lay inside the walls, between Thorne House and the public road; through it wound what had once been a narrow carriage drive, bordered with glossy banks of laurels. It was now wider and neatly graveled and emerged from the woods upon a sweep of green lawn, as smooth as the English turf old Phineas had admired.
    The gardens with their velvety turf paths, their dense clipped hedges of privet and box, lay along the south and east. In summer there were masses of bloom, a succession of color marching through the balmy days of early June with white lilies and blue campanula and slender spikes of pink and purple lupin and foxglove, and, later, great festoons of crimson roses, on into the brilliant orange and red of the August annuals. Now, in early spring, there were blue and white hyacinths and yellow daffodils and the pungent, bitter odor of the dark box.
    The terrace overlooked the Sound, which lay like a silver band below a slope of grassy lawn, more pines and then a sudden strip of rocky wilderness which descended sharply to the sand along the water’s edge. Paths wound downward here and there; there was a small sandy bathing beach and a new and modern boathouse; there Richard Thorne kept his sailing boat, the small and now rarely used yacht which had belonged to his father, and one or two motor boats, slow and utilitarian and, as with the yacht, rarely used. During the war yacht and motor boats had been loaned to the Coast Guard; since the war no one in the household had cared to use any of the boats. Perhaps they had grown accustomed to their absence; perhaps nothing about the place had quite resumed its former tempo since the war and since the June night during the war when Alice Thorne, the law later said, had taken a revolver in her beautiful hands and shot a man to death.
    Certainly there was something different. The routine, the gracious little forms and customs went on as smoothly and as carefully as if Alice herself was still there to supervise their performance with that astonishing efficiency of hers. The floors and the silver were as brightly polished, the linen closets as delicately scented with lavender, the flowers as beautifully arranged, the turf paths as green and closely clipped, the menus as neatly written out in Miss Cornelia’s small, old-fashioned handwriting as when Alice had typed them,