Clipped Wings; A Novel (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III IT was less than an hour after Sheila had left Mrs. Vickery's when Mrs. Jerrems was on the telephone, plaintively demanding, "Who on earth is this Kemble child?" Mrs. Vickery told her what she knew, and Mrs. Jerrems sighed: " A stage-child! That explains everything. She's got Tommy simply bewitched." Besides the requisition for costumes and accessories that turned every attic trunk inside out there was an uneasy social complication. Mrs. Jerrems and Mrs. Burbage knew each other only slightly and liked each other something less than that. Yet Tommy and Sheila had arranged that Mrs. Burbage and her husband and her mother and the strangers within their gates should all descend upon Mrs. Jerrems and pay five cents apiece for the privilege of entering her drawing-room. Only one thing could have been more intolerable than obeying the children's embarrassing demand, and that would have been breaking the children's hearts by refusing it. So Sheila's mother and father, her grandmother and her aunt, were all browbeaten into accepting the invitations that Mrs. Jerrems had been browbeaten into extending. Sheila assumed that Mrs. Jerrems was as much interested in Mr. Shakespeare's success as she was. And she rather took control of the house, saying a great many "Pleases," but uprooting the furniture from the places it had occupied till they had become almost sacred. Shehad half of the drawing-room cleared of chairs and the other half packed with rows of them. She commandeered two of Mrs. Jerrems's guest-room sheets (the ones with the deep hemstitching and the swollen initials). These she pinned upon a rope stretched from two nails driven into the walls, with conspicuous damage to the plaster, since the first places chosen did not hold the nails?and came out with t...