She knew the ugliness of that room by heart-knew it and hated it. But her laughter was very superficial and presently she lay there, a huddled, futile little figure, listening to the rain pouring down outside and watching, with a sick distaste, the chill, merciless light creeping into her ugly, sordid room. For that matter, there were a good many things about Valancy that nobody suspected.

The thought of her mother's expression made Valancy laugh-for she had a sense of humour nobody in her clan suspected.

It is not, Valancy could hear her mother's prim, dictatorial voice asserting, 'it is not maidenly to think about men.' Suppose, thought Valancy with a ghastly grin, I answered with the plain truth, 'I am crying because I cannot get married.' How horrified Mother would be-though she is ashamed every day of her life of her old maid daughter.īut of course appearances should be kept up. And she was afraid her mother would notice her red eyes at breakfast and keep at her with minute, persistent, mosquito-like questions regarding the cause thereof. She had had a spell of it after she had got into bed-rather worse than any she had had yet. She was afraid that crying might bring on another attack of that pain around the heart. She dared not let herself cry as hard as she wanted to, for two reasons.

The tears came into her eyes as she lay there alone in the faintly greying darkness. What hurt her was that she had never had a chance to be anything but an old maid. After all, she thought, being an old maid couldn't possibly be as dreadful as being married to an Uncle Wellington or an Uncle Benjamin, or even an Uncle Herbert. Valancy did not mind so much being an old maid. But Valancy herself had never quite relinquished a certain pitiful, shamed, little hope that Romance would come her way yet-never, until this wet, horrible morning, when she wakened to the fact that she was twenty-nine and unsought by any man.Īy, there lay the sting. One does not sleep well, sometimes, when one is twenty-nine on the morrow, and unmarried, in a community and connection where the unmarried are simply those who have failed to get a man.ĭeerwood and the Stirlings had long since relegated Valancy to hopeless old maidenhood. Valancy wakened early, in the lifeless, hopeless hour just preceding dawn. But it did rain and you shall hear what happened to her because of it. She would have gone, with the rest of her clan, to Aunt Wellington's engagement picnic and Dr.

If it had not rained on a certain May morning Valancy Stirling's whole life would have been entirely different.

Lucy maud montgomery the blue castle