Read Online This Proud Heart by Pearl S. Buck - Free Book Online Page A

and rang the bell.
    “Mrs. Fontane, please,” she said resolutely to the white-capped maid.
    “Mrs. Fontane is in the garden, with guests.” The maid was hesitating, but Mrs. Fontane had swept in through open French doors, her arms full of roses.
    “Oh, why, here you are!” she exclaimed. “We were just talking about you. My dear, everybody is mad about my little Cupid! I’m going to show it to David Barnes the minute he gets here. Come out into the garden. Dora, put these into water!”
    She felt Mrs. Fontane’s arm thrust through her own, and she was swept along on Mrs. Fontane’s warm voice, in which there was no doubt now of her Cupid, now that everybody was mad about it. “They all want Cupids, my dear!” Mrs. Fontane waved her other arm energetically at the women sitting indolently about the pool, their dresses splashes of blue and yellow and red against the hedge of dark evergreen behind them.
    “She’s here—the Cupid girl!” Mrs. Fontane called. And when she drew near they lifted kind, well-bred faces to her, and she shook slender soft ringed hands, and their voices said warmly, “I love that little boy looking at himself in the pool!” “You’ve made more than a Cupid!” “What will you make for me?”
    “What do you want?” Susan asked abruptly. She would not tell Mark she had come here.
    “She calls herself Mrs. Mark Keening,” Mrs. Fontane was booming in her big voice, “but really she’s Susan.”
    They took her at once, gaily, carelessly. “Oh, Susan, come and see my garden and make me something—a fountain, perhaps.”
    “Susan, do you do heads? I’ve an adorable child with a head like a young Christ!”
    She promised them, drawn by their lovely warmth. “Yes, of course, I’ll come and see your garden. I’d love to see your boy.”
    It became like a page from a story book, this garden, this soft September air, these pretty rich women. Why were the rich so warm, so kind? She thought of poor eager anxious little Mrs. Sanford. But Mrs. Fontane was saying, “She has an extraordinary gift—someday she’s going to do something to surprise us.”
    She looked up, half frightened, to see Mrs. Fontane’s assured kind smile.
    “Oh, I don’t—” she began.
    “Yes, you will,” Mrs. Fontane said positively, fanning herself with her hat. “Some day I’ll point to that Cupid and tell everybody, ‘Yes, that’s an original early Susan Gaylord. She used to live here, you know. Her childhood home—’ Oh, I have a rose thorn in my thumb!” She winced and put her thumb to her mouth.
    “Let me,” said Susan, and taking Mrs. Fontane’s hand, she put her own thumb and finger delicately together and pulled out the thorn.
    “Look at those hands of yours!” Mrs. Fontane said suddenly, seizing her hands and turning them over and over. “Ever see hands like those?”
    They bent over her hands in breathless interest. Not even Mark had looked at her hands like this. “See those fingertips?” Mrs. Fontane demanded. “Broad and strong and still delicate as antennae! You can bend them any way.” She bent Susan’s forefinger backward like a spring. Susan sat looking at her own hands as though they did not belong to her. Was there indeed something in her hands? Mrs. Fontane laid them on Susan’s lap gently, with a pat.
    “When you brought me that Cupid I knew what you were,” she said firmly. “I don’t mind saying I was afraid at first you would do me something impossible—talented daughter of a local citizen, you know. But when you brought the Cupid I knew it didn’t matter in the least where you were born or who your parents were or whom you married or anything. Some day—”
    “I wouldn’t think of leaving this town,” Susan said quickly. “It’s my home—my friends, my family—I couldn’t think of living anywhere else.”
    Mrs. Fontane smiled and yawned. “You’re a child, Susan Gaylord,” she remarked. “Oh, dear, I’m sleepy. I wish you’d all go home!