Spellbinders by Margaret Culkin Banning

The Thorstads had not gone back to Mohawk. Mrs. Thorstad had said that she would stay in St. Pierre until they heard further from Freda and since it was the school vacation her husband had agreed. After the first shock of disappearance they had accepted Freda's letter at its face value and decided to wait for news from her. It was all they could do, in fact. One alternative, publicity, advertising her disappearance, would have done only harm and have looked cruelly unnecessary in view of her farewell letter to her father. The other alternative, setting private detectives to work, would have been too expensive and again her letters did not justify that. They must wait. Mrs. Thorstad, after a bit, did not brood, nor indeed appear to worry greatly. She was quickly allied with clubdom and petty politics and was busy. Her husband, trying to interest himself in stray free lectures at the University and in the second hand bookstores, grew rather pallid and thin.

They stopped at an inexpensive boarding house on the West Side. It was a place of adequate food, adequate cleanliness and no grace. Mrs. Thorstad's reputation as a prominent club woman stood her in good stead in these rather constricted surroundings where most of the guests were men of sapped masculinity, high busted women dividing their time between small shopping and moving pictures. The men were persons of petty importance and men of small independence, but there was one strangely incongruous person in the company. He was the editor of the scandal paper of the city, a thin, elderly, eye-glassed person of fifty, who had maintained, in spite of his scavenging for scandals, some strange insistence on and delight in his own respectability. He was personally so polite, so gentlemanly, so apparently innocuous that it was almost incredible to think of him as the editor of the sheet which sold itself so completely on the strength of its scandal that it needed no advertising to float its circulation.