The Blue Castle Read Online Free PDF Page A

somewhere. On the steep mountain trails around her Blue Castle only gaily caparisoned steeds might proudly pace; in real life Valancy would have been quite contented to drive in a buggy behind a nice horse. She got a buggy drive only when some uncle or cousin remembered to fling her “a chance,” like a bone to a dog.

CHAPTER 5
    Of course she must buy the tea in Uncle Benjamin’s grocery store. To buy it anywhere else was unthinkable. Yet Valancy hated to go to Uncle Benjamin’s store on her twenty-ninth birthday. There was no hope that he would not remember it.
    â€œWhy,” demanded Uncle Benjamin, leeringly, as he tied up her tea, “are young ladies like bad grammarians?”
    Valancy, with Uncle Benjamin’s will in the background of her mind, said meekly, “I don’t know. Why?”
    â€œBecause,” chuckled Uncle Benjamin, “they can’t decline matrimony.”
    The two clerks, Joe Hammond and Claude Bertram, chuckled also, and Valancy disliked them a little more than ever. On the first day Claude Bertram had seen her in the store she had heard him whisper to Joe, “Who is that?” And Joe had said, “Valancy Stirling—one of the Deerwood old maids.” “Curable or incurable?” Claude had asked with a snicker, evidently thinking the question very clever. Valancy smarted anew with the sting of that old recollection.
    â€œTwenty-nine,” Uncle Benjamin was saying. “Dear me, Doss, you’re dangerously near the second corner and not even thinking of getting married yet. Twenty-nine. It seems impossible.”
    Then Uncle Benjamin said an original thing. Uncle Benjamin said, “How time does fly!”
    â€œ I think it crawls ,” said Valancy passionately. Passion was so alien to Uncle Benjamin’s conception of Valancy that he didn’t know what to make of her. To cover his confusion, he asked another conundrum as he tied up her beans—Cousin Stickles had remembered at the last moment that they must have beans. Beans were cheap and filling.
    â€œWhat two ages are apt to prove illusory?” asked Uncle Benjamin; and, not waiting for Valancy to “give it up,” he added, “Mir-age and marri-age.”
    â€œM-i-r-a-g-e is pronounced mirazh,” said Valancy shortly, picking up her tea and her beans. For the moment she did not care whether Uncle Benjamin cut her out of his will or not. She walked out of the store while Uncle Benjamin stared after her with his mouth open. Then he shook his head.
    â€œPoor Doss is taking it hard,” he said.
    Valancy was sorry by the time she reached the next crossing. Why had she lost her patience like that? Uncle Benjamin would be annoyed and would likely tell her mother that Doss had been impertinent—“to me !”—and her mother would lecture her for a week.
    â€œI’ve held my tongue for twenty years,” thought Valancy. “Why couldn’t I have held it once more?”
    Yes, it was just twenty, Valancy reflected, since she had first been twitted with her loverless condition. She remembered the bitter moment perfectly. She was just nine years old and she was standing alone on the school playground while the other little girls of her class were playing a game in which you must be chosen by a boy as his partner before you could play. Nobody had chosen Valancy—little, pale, black-haired Valancy, with her prim, long-sleeved apron and odd, slanted eyes.
    â€œOh,” said a pretty little girl to her, “I’m so sorry for you. You haven’t got a beau.”
    Valancy had said defiantly, as she continued to say for twenty years, “I don’t want a beau.” But this afternoon Valancy once and for all stopped saying that.
    â€œI’m going to be honest with myself anyhow,” she thought savagely. “Uncle Benjamin’s riddles hurt me because they are true. I do want to be married. I want a house of my