of my ‘feelings’. I didn’t act then, much to my eternal regret, but I will not stand by and let my young friend make another mistake with dire ramifications. Given that I cannot express my concerns in writing as I would wish, I will make the trip to London and see her myself.
A trip she evidently took—and promptly—for the next journal entry was written two days later:
I have been to London and it was worse than I feared. It was obvious to me that my dear Vivien has fallen in love with the young man, Jimmy. She didn’t say as much, of course, she is too practised for that, but I have known her since she was a child and thus I could see it in every animation of her face; hear it in every unspoken phrase. Worse yet, it appears she has thrown all caution to the wind; she has been repeatedly to the young man’s home, where he lives with his poorly father. She insists that ‘all is innocent’, to which I replied that there was no such thing, and that such distinctions would do her no favours if she were called upon to answer to these visits. She told me she wouldn’t ‘give him up’—stubborn child—to which I summoned every bit of steel I possessed and said, ‘My dear, you are married.’ I reminded her further of the promise she’d made to her husband in the Nordstrom church, that she would love, honour and obey, till death did them part, etc., etc. Oh, but I won’t easily forget the way she looked at me then— the disappointment in her eyes as she told me that I didn’t understand.
I understand well enough what it is to love that which is forbidden, and I told her so, but she is young and the young are quick to presume themselves the exclusive possessors of all strong feelings. I am sorry to say that we parted on ill terms—I made one last attempt to convince her to give up her work at the hospital; she refused. I reminded her she had her health to consider; she waved my concerns aside. To disappoint a soul like hers—that face which reveals itself as if beneath a master painter’s brush—is to feel as guilty as if one had removed all goodness from the world. Still, I will not give up—I have one last card to play. It risks her eternal outrage, but I decided as my train left London, that I am going to write to this Jimmy Metcalfe and explain to him the damage he does her. Perhaps he will exercise proper caution where she will not.
The sun had started to set and the reading room was growing colder and darker by the minute; Laurel’s eyes were glazed from reading Katy Ellis’s neat but tiny script without pause for the last two hours. She leaned back and closed her eyes, Katy’s voice swirling in her head. Had she written the letter to Jimmy, Laurel wondered; was that what had upset her mother’s plan? Had whatever Katy included in the letter— something she obviously thought persuasive enough to make Jimmy give up the friendship when Vivien wouldn’t—been enough to cause ruptures between Ma and Jimmy, too? In a book, Laurel thought, that’s exactly what would happen. There was a narrative rightness to a pair of young lovers being torn apart by the very deed they’d contrived to commit in order to buy their shared happiness. Was that what her mother had been thinking about, that day in the hospital when she’d told Laurel she should marry for love, that she shouldn’t wait, that nothing else was as important? Had Dorothy waited too long, and wanted too much, and in the meantime lost her lover to the other woman?
Laurel had guessed that it was something particular to Vivien Jenkins made her the very worst person against whom Dorothy and Jimmy could make such a plan. Was it simply that Vivien was precisely the type of woman Jimmy might fall in love with? Or was it something else Laurel was intuiting? Katy Ellis—every bit the minister’s daughter— was obviously worried that Vivien wasn’t being careful of her marriage vows, but there was something else at work, too. Laurel wondered whether Vivien might have been ill. Katy was a worrywart, but her concern for Vivien’s health was of the type usually reserved for a friend with chronic illness, not a vital young woman of twenty. Vivien herself