THE SINISTER SUMMER
There was a horror in the house that summer. It came with them and
settled itself over the place like a sombre pall, pervasive through the
lower rooms, gradually spreading and climbing up the narrow stairs until
it oppressed their very sleep. Anthony and Gloria grew to hate being
there alone. Her bedroom, which had seemed so pink and young and
delicate, appropriate to her pastel-shaded lingerie tossed here and
there on chair and bed, seemed now to whisper with its rustling curtains:
"Ah, my beautiful young lady, yours is not the first daintiness and
delicacy that has faded here under the summer suns ... generations of
unloved women have adorned themselves by that glass for rustic lovers
who paid no heed.... Youth has come into this room in palest blue and
left it in the gray cerements of despair, and through long nights many
girls have lain awake where that bed stands pouring out waves of misery
into the darkness."
Gloria finally tumbled all her clothes and unguents ingloriously out of
it, declaring that she had come to live with Anthony, and making the
excuse that one of her screens was rotten and admitted bugs.
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