V
After a while the coat of clean white paint on the Jeffrey Curtain
house made a definite compromise with the suns of many Julys and
showed its good faith by turning gray. It scaled--huge peelings of
very brittle old paint leaned over backward like aged men practising
grotesque gymnastics and finally dropped to a moldy death in the
overgrown grass beneath. The paint on the front pillars became
streaky; the white ball was knocked off the left-hand door-post; the
green blinds darkened, then lost all pretense of color.
It began to be a house that was avoided by the tender-minded--some
church bought a lot diagonally opposite for a graveyard, and this,
combined with "the place where Mrs. Curtain stays with that living
corpse," was enough to throw a ghostly aura over that quarter of the
road. Not that she was left alone. Men and women came to see her, met
her down town, where she went to do her marketing, brought her home in
their cars--and came in for a moment to talk and to rest, in the
glamour that still played in her smile. But men who did not know her
no longer followed her with admiring glances in the street; a
diaphanous veil had come down over her beauty, destroying its
vividness, yet bringing neither wrinkles nor fat.
She acquired a character in the village--a group of little stories
were told of her: how when the country was frozen over one winter so
that no wagons nor automobiles could travel, she taught herself to
skate so that she could make quick time to the grocer and druggist,
and not leave Jeffrey alone for long.
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