"Who's
running this shebang anyway?"
Once after Alma had guarded her well for days, scarcely leaving her
side, Carrie laughed sardonically up into her daughter's face, her eyes
as glassy and without swimming fluid as a doll's.
"I get it! But wouldn't you like to know where? Yah!"
And to Alma's horror she slapped her quite roundly across the cheek.
And then one day, after a long period of quiet, when Carrie had lavished
her really great wealth of contrite love upon her daughter and husband,
spending on Alma and loading her with gifts of jewelry and finery to
somehow express her grateful adoration of her; paying her husband the
secret penance of twofold fidelity to his well-being and every whim,
Alma, returning from a trip, taken reluctantly, and at her mother's
bidding, down to the basement trunk room, found her gone, a modish
black-lace hat and the sable coat missing from the closet.
It was early afternoon, sunlit and pleasantly cold.
The first rush of panic and the impulse to dash after, stayed, she
forced herself down into a chair, striving with the utmost difficulty
for coherence of procedure.
Where in the half hour of her absence had her mother gone? Matinee?
Impossible! Walking. Hardly probable. Upon inquiry in the kitchen
neither of the maids had seen nor heard her depart.
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