The Hidden Goddess Read Online Free Page B

Costs.”
    Emily hardly noticed when Hortense paused after a final thrilling stanza. Miss Jesczenka drew an appreciative breath.
    “Such genius!” she said, as simultaneously, with one slender hand, she pushed the newspaper out of the range of Emily’s searching gaze. When Emily’s eyes came up, Miss Jesczenka gave her a frosty look of rebuke. “Don’t you agree, Miss Edwards?”
    Emily returned Miss Jesczenka’s look with a scalding glare of her own. For the umpteenth time, Emily found herselfmissing Penelope Pendennis. Emily felt certain that the big opinionated woman could have offered many clever and useful tricks for getting out of Wordsworth readings. But Miss Pendennis was off on a worldwide lecture tour, and the Institute had provided Miss Jesczenka as Emily’s social duenna. And whatever the Institute wanted, it got.
    “Oh sure,” Emily said finally. “Genius.”
    Mrs. Stanton was not so caught up in skylarks that she did not notice the subtle misbehavior. She frowned, and Emily quickly adopted her most angelic look (which, she reflected, was much akin to the look she put on when it profited her to look incredibly stupid) and cast her eyes to the ground in a fashion that she assumed was maidenly.
    “You must be worried about things at
home.
” Mrs. Stanton spoke the last word with the kind of delicate revulsion she might have used with any other four-letter word. “Such terrible reports one reads.”
    “I hadn’t heard,” Emily said.
    Mrs. Stanton raised an inquiring eyebrow. “You can
read
, can’t you?”
    That Emily Edwards was from California was considered extremely unfortunate by Mrs. Stanton. In Mrs. Stanton’s rigidly ordered mind, the larger concept “California” contained only three subclassifications: gold, cattle, and whores. Emily was pretty sure which of the three subclassifications Mrs. Stanton put her into. And it wasn’t gold.
    The Stantons, on the other hand, were pure gold—twenty-four-karat gold with gold handles and some gold leaf smacked on top. Mrs. Stanton came from a very old family, and her husband was the senior Senator from the State of New York. Such people did not have daughters-in-law from California. Oranges for their breakfast table, maybe. But not daughters-in-law.
    “Of course I can read,” Emily muttered, before adding democratically: “Not as nicely as Hortense, though.” She was determined not to spoil the progress—small as it was—that she’d made with her future mother-in-law. Over the past few weeks, Mrs. Stanton’s physical revulsion had tempered into smoldering distaste. Despite occasional barbed sallies on thetopics of California, Emily’s table manners, and her tendency to scrunch her nose unattractively, the old woman had apparently come to accept that her ungrateful son was going to marry Emily despite his mother’s noble exertions to the contrary. The battle-ax had even offered to host a lunch in Emily’s honor, scheduled two days hence, to which many prominent city women had been invited. It was a start, and Emily was determined to make the most of it.
    Her determination was so great, as a matter of fact, that despite her inclination to bite her tongue off rather than say it, she meekly suggested: “Perhaps we could have another poem?”
    Mrs. Stanton did not smile, but neither did she frown. Another small victory.
    “Certainly,” Mrs. Stanton said, glancing at Hortense. “Let’s have a nice
long
one.”
    Miss Jesczenka, who was always pleased when Emily did something socially acceptable, rewarded her with a smile. It did not make Emily feel any better.
    “ ‘To the Cuckoo’!” Hortense announced the poem, then cleared her throat.
    “O blithe newcomer!
I have heard, I hear thee and rejoice:
O Cuckoo! shall I call thee bird,
Or but a wandering Voice?”
     
    Emily closed her eyes to keep from rolling them. The things she put up with for Dreadnought Stanton were
appalling
.
    Thinking of her fiancé made Emily scrunch her