The Turmoil Read Online Free Page B

HEARD of ‘em!”
    “I thought you were great friends with Sibyl,” Bibbs said.
    “Up to the time I found her out!” the sister returned, with continuing vehemence. “I’ve found out some things about Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan lately—”
    “It’s only lately?”
    “Well—” Edith hesitated, her lips setting primly. “Of course, I always did see that she never cared the snap of her little finger about ROSCOE!”
    “It seems,” said Bibbs, in laconic protest, “that she married him.”
    The sister emitted a shrill cry, to be interpreted as contemptuous laughter, and, in her emotion, spoke too impulsively: “Why, she’d have married YOU!”
    “No, no,” he said; “she couldn’t be that bad!”
    “I didn’t mean—” she began, distressed. “I only meant—I didn’t mean—”
    “Never mind, Edith,” he consoled her. “You see, she couldn’t have married me, because I didn’t know her; and besides, if she’s as mercenary as all that she’d have been too clever. The head doctor even had to lend me the money for my ticket home.”
    “I didn’t mean anything unpleasant about YOU,” Edith babbled. “I only meant I thought she was the kind of girl who was so simply crazy to marry somebody she’d have married anybody that asked her.”
    “Yes, yes,” said Bibbs, “it’s all straight.” And, perceiving that his sister’s expression was that of a person whose adroitness has set matters prefectly to rights, he chuckled silently.
    “Roscoe’s perfectly lovely to her,” she continued, a moment later. “Too lovely! If he’d wake up a little and lay down the law, some day, like a MAN, I guess she’d respect him more and learn to behave herself!”
    “‘Behave’?”
    “Oh, well, I mean she’s so insincere,” said Edith, characteristically evasive when it came to stating the very point to which she had led, and in this not unique of her sex.
    Bibbs contented himself with a non-committal gesture. “Business is crawling up the old streets,” he said, his long, tremulous hand indicating a vasty structure in course of erection. “The boarding-houses come first and then the—”
    “That isn’t for shops,” she informed him. “That’s a new investment of papa’s —the ‘Sheridan Apartments.’”
    “Well, well,” he murmured. “I supposed ‘Sheridan’ was almost well enough known here already.”
    “Oh, we’re well enough known ABOUT!” she said, impatiently. “I guess there isn’t a man, woman, child, or nigger baby in town that doesn’t know who we are. But we aren’t in with the right people.”
    “No!” he exclaimed. “Who’s all that?”
    “Who’s all what?”
    “The ‘right people.’”
    “You know what I mean: the best people, the old families—the people that have the real social position in this town and that know they’ve got it.”
    Bibbs indulged in his silent chuckle again; he seemed greatly amused. “I thought that the people who actually had the real what-you-may-call-it didn’t know it,” he said. “I’ve always understood that it was very unsatisfactory, because if you thought about it you didn’t have it, and if you had it you didn’t know it.”
    “That’s just bosh,” she retorted. “They know it in this town, all right! I found out a lot of things, long before we began to think of building out in this direction. The right people in this town aren’t always the society-column ones, and they mix around with outsiders, and they don’t all belong to any one club—they’re taken in all sorts into all their clubs—but they’re a clan, just the same; and they have the clan feeling and they’re just as much We, Us and Company as any crowd you read about anywhere in the world. Most of ‘em were here long before papa came, and the grandfathers of the girls of my age knew each other, and—”
    “I see,” Bibbs interrupted, gravely. “Their ancestors fled together from many a stricken field, and Crusaders’ blood flows in their