Once Alma, mistakenly, too, she thought later, had suspected a chauffeur
of collusion with her mother and abruptly dismissed him, to Louis' rage.
"What's the idea?" he said, out of Carrie's hearing, of course. "Who's
running this shebang, anyway?"
Again, after Alma had guarded her well for days, scarcely leaving her
side, Carrie laughed sardonically up into her daughter's face, her eyes
as glassy and without swimming fluid as a doll's.
"I get it! But wouldn't you like to know where? Yah!" And to Alma's
horror slapped her quite roundly across the cheek so that for an hour
the sting, the shape of the red print of fingers, lay on her face.
One night in what had become the horrible sanctity of that
bedchamber--But let this sum it up. When Alma was nineteen years old a
little colony of gray hairs was creeping in on each temple.
And then one day, after a long period of quiet, when Carrie had lavished
her really great wealth of contrite love upon her daughter and husband,
spending on Alma and loading her with gifts of jewelry and finery,
somehow to express her grateful adoration of her, paying her husband the
secret penance of twofold fidelity to his well-being and every whim,
Alma, returning from a trip taken reluctantly and at her mother's
bidding down to the basement trunk room, found her gone, a modish
black-lace hat and the sable coat missing from the closet.
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