Why, he had been watching me! He stood so straight and still, his shoulders drawn back, his head high. As I turned back to my book, I realized all I could know of love and life would be from books. It seemed God was deaf to my hopes and prayers for love.

How I wished I could someday walk with a man like that-a man like Malcolm. I watched them until they disappeared around the corner. It was the way the husband and wife in my glass-encased doll world would walk if they could escape their imprisonment, I thought. It was very quiet on our street that time of evening, but I looked up to see a couple walking arm in arm.

But I decided instead to bring the book down to the sitting room and read by the Tiffany lamp, happy to see Malcolm just to say good-bye. I might as well retire to my room to read that new novel that was attracting attention, Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence. They would be in there for the rest of the evening. Of course Malcolm wasn’t interested in me-he was interested in business with my father. With them my hopes, so briefly flowered, so quickly withered. Just for tonight! Tomorrow I’d let it gray again.Īfter dinner Malcolm and my father adjourned to the den to smoke their cigars and talk more about the investments Malcolm wanted to make. Perhaps, just for a few hours I could allow my slight bud of hope to blossom.

Why should he be interested in a Plain Jane such as I? But oh how I wanted to believe I wasn’t imagining all those side glances, those times he asked me to pass him things he could have easily gotten himself, the way he tried to bring me into the conversation. The handsomest man ever to come to our house was interested in me? But he could have a hundred beautiful girls to adore him forever. Malcolm was polite to my father, but it was clear to me that he wanted to talk more to me. Never had I felt as welcome at the table. Never had I sat with one of my father’s guests and been so enraptured.

Vc andrews garden of shadows