Explore "The Cords of Vanity" by James Branch Cabell on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
By a disastrous chance did Bettie Hamlyn spend that spring, as well as the preceding year, in Colorado with her mother, who died there that summer; and to me Fairhaven proper without Bettie Hamlyn seemed a tawdry and desolate place; and I know that but for Mrs. Hamlyn's illness -- a querulous woman for whom I never cared a jot -- my future life had been quite otherwise. For, as I told Bettie once, and it was true, I have found in the world but three sorts of humanity -- "Myself, and Bettie Hamlyn, and the other people."
So I still wrote to Bettie Hamlyn on the seventh of every month -- because that was her birthday -- and again on the twenty-third, because that was mine.