The happiest time of their lives

								


THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES
BY ALICE DUER MILLER
Author of “Come Out of the Kitchen,” “Ladies Must Live,” “Wings in the
Night,” etc.
1918

TO CLARENCE DAY, JR.

... and then he added in a less satisfied tone: “But friendship is so
uncertain. You don’t make any announcement to your friends or vows to
each other, unless you’re at an age when you cut your initials in the
bark of a tree. That’s what I’d like to do.”

THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES

CHAPTER I

Little Miss Severance sat with her hands as cold as ice. The stage
of her coming adventure was beautifully set--the conventional stage
for the adventure of a young girl, her mother’s drawing-room. Her
mother had the art of setting stages. The room was not large,--a New
York brownstone front in the upper Sixties even though altered as to
entrance, and allowed to sprawl backward over yards not originally
intended for its use, is not a palace,--but it was a room and not a
corridor; you had the comfortable sense of four walls about you when
its one small door was once shut. It was filled, perhaps a little too
much filled, with objects which seemed to have nothing in common except
beauty; but propinquity, propinquity of older date than the house in
which they now were, had given them harmony. Nothing in the room was
modern except some uncommonly comfortable sofas and chairs, and the
pink and yellow roses that stood about in Chinese bowls.
Miss Severance herself was hardly aware of the charm of the room. On
the third floor she had her own room, which she liked much better.
There was a great deal of bright chintz in it, and maple furniture of
a late colonial date, inherited from her mother’s family, the Lanleys,
and discarded by her mother, who described the taste of that time as
“pure, but provincial.” Crystal and ivories and carved wood and Italian
embroideries did not please Miss Severance half so well as the austere
lines of those work-tables and high-boys.
It was after five, almost half-past, and he had said “about five.” Miss
Severance, impatient to begin the delicious experience of anticipation,
had allowed herself to be ready at a quarter before the hour. Not that
she had been entirely without some form of anticipation since she woke
up; not, perhaps, since she had parted from him under the windy awning
the night before. They had held up a long line of restless motors as
she stood huddled in her fur-trimmed cloak, and he stamped and jigged
to keep warm, bareheaded, in his thin pumps and shining shirt-front,
with his shoulders drawn up and his hands in his pockets, while they
almost awkwardly arranged this meeting for the next day.
Several times during the preceding evening she had thought he was going
to say something of the kind, for they had danced together a great
deal; but they had always danced in silence. At the time, with his
arm about her, silence had seemed enough; but in separation there is