Love & Mrs. Sargent Read Online Free PDF

address system growled menacingly at Sheila. It was generating the heat of a blast furnace and she wasn’t entirely certain that it wouldn’t blow up in her face, maiming her for life.
    “Tell me frankly,” Sheila shouted, “wouldn’t you all like to call it a day and go home?”
    “No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!” the ladies bawled back.
    “Very well, then. Just one more question. . . . ”

VI.
     
    The white Thunderbird sped past the Sargent gateposts and screeched to a standstill.
    “Damn!” Allison said. “I’m really getting ga-ga. Thinking so hard about all those pictures that I drove right past my own home.” She put the car into reverse, backed up a few feet and turned into the gravel driveway.
    Unlike its more pretentious neighbors along the lake shore, the Sargent place did not advertise, did not give itself airs. It had no name such as Bellevue, Fairlawn or Monplaisir. Therewere no imposing gates wrought in the manner of Jean Lamour or copied from Devonshire House—imposing barriers that said Stay Out while still affording a seductive glimpse of the Very Rich to the proletarian Sunday driver. The Sargent place had no gate house, no sentry box, no stone walls, no towering hedges of clipped yew. The gateposts were white brick, topped with stone pineapple finials. The property nestled inside a white rail fence and from the highway nothing but woodland could be seen.
    Unlike its Lake Forest neighbors, Mrs. Sargent’s house was not militantly Georgian or Tudor, French or Spanish. And unlike the others, it was not for sale.
    The house had been built by a successful architect in the nineteenth century before Lake Forest was fashionable. Weary of creating town palazzi of brownstone, granite and marble along Woodland and Prairie Avenues, he had put up a country house in the truest of American styles. A little reminiscent of New England, a little reminiscent of the South, the white clapboard house rambled amiably across a rise that overlooked the lake. Ells and wings and porches had been added and subtracted over the years.
    Sheila, who had been quite content living in two rooms at the Drake Towers whenever she and her husband were in Chicago, had inherited the place from a bachelor great-uncle at the end of the thirties when large properties were a drug on the market. Unable to sell it, she made the best of things and determined to fill it with children. Circumstances had caused her to stop at two, so that now everyone in the family had several rooms to call his own. There was too much space, really. Even so, the Sargent place was comfortable and attractive and easy to live in. Sheila was forever fiddling with it—switching the furniture around, adding a bathroom, lopping off a porte-cochere. Her latest trick had been to join the house to the stables, the stables to a shed by a series of breezeways. The architect had spoken of the feat as “linking the unrelated elements into a unified mass.” Whatever it was, the effect was perfectly charming. Allison drove the car into a stall marked “Lady Lightfoot.” It harked back from the days when the garage really housed horses. She could tell by looking just who was in residence. Mrs. Flood’s little car was there, so was her brother Dick’s. The Lincoln was gone. That meant that Mother was still addressing the Daughters of Whatever. Allison switched off the ignition and walked dreamily along the breezeway leading to the house.
     
     
     
    In the kitchen, Bertha Taylor heaved a sigh of relief, put her spectacles back on and sat down to finish off the Chicago Sun-Times. Her interview with Mrs. Flood had lasted only fifteen minutes, during which Mrs. Flood, in her role as majordomo and arbiter of taste, had learned from Bertha that the service plates were Davenport, not Derby; that the centerpiece was Derby, not Meissen; and that Beaune was a Burgundy, not a Rhone. Mrs. Flood had chirped and fluttered around the dining table, pronounced it to be perfect—”Just as I