Don't let's think about it!"
Women who knew Mrs. Toland spoke of her as "wonderful." And indeed she
was wonderful in many ways, a splendid manager, a delightful hostess,
and essentially motherly and domestic in type. She was always happy and
always busy, gathering violets, chaperoning Sally or Barbara at the
dentist's, selecting plaids for the "girlies'" winter suits. Her married
life--all her life, in fact--had been singularly free from clouds, and
she expected the future to be even brighter, when "splendid, honourable
men" should claim her girls, one by one, and all the remembered romance
of her youth begin again. That the men would be forthcoming she did not
doubt; had not Fate already delivered Jim Studdiford into her hands for
Barbara?
James Studdiford, who had just now finished his course at medical
college, was affectionately known to the young Tolands as "Jim," and
stood to them in a relationship peculiarly pleasing to Mrs. Toland. He
was like a brother, and yet, actually, he bore not the faintest real
kinship to--well, to Barbara, for instance. Years before, twenty years
before, to be exact, Doctor Toland, then unmarried, and unacquainted, as
it happened, with the lovely Miss Sally Ford, had been engaged to a
beautiful young widow, a Mrs.
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