Though the entire hotel was watching her Hannah was actually unconscious
of Clint Darrow's attentions, or their markedness, until her son-in-law
Ed teased her about him one day. "Some gal!" said Ed, and roared with
laughter. She resented this indignantly; felt that they regarded her as
senile. She looked upon Clint Darrow as a fat old thing, if she looked
at him at all; but rather pathetic, too. Hence her kindliness toward
him. Now she avoided him. Thus goaded he actually proposed marriage and
repeated the items of the European trip, the pearls, and the unused
house on Woodlawn Avenue. Hannah, feeling suddenly faint and white,
refused him awkwardly. She was almost indignant. She did not speak of
it, but the hotel, somehow, knew. Hyde Park knew. The thing leaked out.

"But why?" said Marcia, smiling--giggling, almost. "Why? I think it
would have been wonderful for you, Mother!"

Hannah suddenly felt that she need not degrade herself to explain
why--she who had once triumphed over her own ordeal of marriage.

Marcia herself was planning a new career. The children were seven and
nine--very nearly eight and ten. Marcia said she wanted a
chance at self-expression. She announced a course in landscape
gardening--"landscape architecture" was the new term.

"Chicago's full of people who are moving to the suburbs and buying big
places out north. They don't know a thing about gardens. They don't know
a shrub from a tree when they see it. It's a new field for women--in the
country, at least--and I'm dying to try it. That youngest Fraser girl
makes heaps, and I never thought much of her intelligence. Of course,
after I finish and am ready to take commissions, I'll have to be content
with small jobs, at first. But later I may get a chance at grounds
around public libraries and hospitals and railway stations. And if I
can get one really big job at one of those new-rich north shore places
I'll be made."

The course required two years and was rather expensive. But Marcia said
it would pay, in the end. Besides, now that the war had knocked Ed's
business into a cocked hat for the next five years or more, the extra
money would come in very handy for the children and herself and the
household.

Hannah thought the whole plan nonsense. "I can't see that you're
pinched, exactly. You may have to think a minute before you buy fresh
strawberries for a meringue in February. But you do buy them." She was
remembering her own lean days, when