After her death I
secured a foothold in a New York house--I'd always wanted to live in
New York--and went up, step by step, from what may be called a
rookie in the outside office, to private secretary to the Head. And
I'd been a business woman for all of seventeen years when Great-Aunt
Sophronisba Scarlett departed at the age of ninety-eight years and
eleven months, and willed that I should take up my life in the house
where she had dropped hers.
"Oh, Sophy!" cried Alicia Gaines, the one person in the world who
didn't call me Miss Smith. "Oh, Sophy, it's like a fairy-story come
true! Think of falling heir to an old, old, old lady's old, old, old
house, in South Carolina! I hope there's a big old door with a
fan-light, and a Greeky front with white pillars, and a big old
hall, and a big old garden--"
"And an old stove that smokes and old windows that rattle and an old
roof that leaks, and maybe big, big old rats that squeak o' nights,"
I said darkly. For the first rapture of the astonishing news was
beginning to wear thin, and doubt was appearing in spots.
"Sophy Smith! Why, if such a wonderful, beautiful, unexpected thing
had happened to _me_--" Alicia's blue eyes misted.
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