The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Happiest Time of Their Lives , by Alice
Duer Miller

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Title: The Happiest Time of Their Lives

Author: Alice Duer Miller

Release Date: February 26, 2004 [eBook #11325]
[Date last updated: October 6, 2004]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

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THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES

BY ALICE DUER MILLER

Author of "Come Out of the Kitchen," "Ladies Must Live," "Wings in the
Nights," etc.

1918

TO CLARENCE DAY, JR.

"... and then he added in a less satisfied tone: "But friendship is so
uncertain. You don't make any announcement to your friends or vows to
each other, unless you're at an age when you cut your initials in the
bark of a tree. That's what I'd like to do."

THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES

CHAPTER I

Little Miss Severance sat with her hands as cold as ice. The stage of her
coming adventure was beautifully set--the conventional stage for the
adventure of a young girl, her mother's drawing-room. Her mother had the
art of setting stages. The room was not large,--a New York brownstone
front in the upper Sixties even though altered as to entrance, and
allowed to sprawl backward over yards not originally intended for its
use, is not a palace,--but it was a room and not a corridor; you had the
comfortable sense of four walls about you when its one small door was
once shut. It was filled, perhaps a little too much filled, with objects
which seemed to have nothing in common except beauty; but propinquity,
propinquity of older date than the house in which they now were, had
given them harmony. Nothing in the room was modern except some uncommonly
comfortable sofas and chairs, and the pink and yellow roses that stood
about in Chinese bowls.

Miss Severance herself was hardly aware of the charm of the room. On the
third floor she had her own room, which she liked much better. There was
a great deal of bright chintz in it, and map