Explore "Hermia Suydam" by Gertrude Atherton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
A few weeks later Hermia gave a dinner to Cryder. The other guests were Mr. Overton, Mr. Simms, Alan Emmet, a young author who combined the literary and the sensational in a manner which gave him much notoriety, Mr. Langley, Cryder's publisher, and Ralph Embury, a noted young journalist. Helen Simms was there to chatter serious thought to ambush, and Miss Starbruck, primly alert, and waiting to be shocked.
Poor Miss Starbruck! She drifted like a gray shadow through Hermia's rooms, and longed for her modest cottage at Nantucket. She had been an active member of sewing-circles and reading-clubs, and the farther down her past's perspective did this unexciting environment retreat, the oftener did she sigh as she contrasted its cool shadows with the hot glare into which fate's caprice had suddenly cast her. But Hermia was considerate-if Miss Starbruck appeared at her niece's dinners and receptions, and drove with her occasionally, she could sit up in her room and dream of Nantucket and bewail duty as much as she pleased. Mrs. Dykman was chaperon-in-chief.