The Blue Castle Read Online Free

have had—nothing but horrible colds every winter. Doss’ winter colds were a sort of tradition in the family. Nothing, it seemed, could prevent her from catching them. Mrs. Frederick and Cousin Stickles did their heroic best. One winter they kept Valancy housed up from November to May, in the warm sitting-room. She was not allowed to go to church. And Valancy took cold after cold and ended up with bronchitis in June.
    â€œNone of my family were ever like that,” said Mrs. Frederick, implying that it must be a Stirling tendency.
    â€œThe Stirlings seldom take cold,” said Cousin Stickles resentfully. She had been a Stirling.
    â€œI think,” said Mrs. Frederick, “that if a person makes up her mind not to have colds she will not have colds.”
    So that was the trouble. It was all Valancy’s own fault.
    But on this particular morning Valancy’s unbearable grievance was that she was called Doss. She had endured it for twenty-nine years, and all at once she felt she could not endure it any longer. Her full name was Valancy Jane. Valancy Jane was rather terrible, but she liked Valancy, with its odd, out-land tang. It was always a wonder to Valancy that the Stirlings had allowed her to be so christened. She had been told that her maternal grandfather, old Amos Wansbarra, had chosen the name for her. Her father had tacked on the Jane by way of civilizing it, and the whole connection got out of the difficulty by nicknaming her Doss. She never got Valancy from anyone but outsiders.
    â€œMother,” she said timidly, “would you mind calling me Valancy after this? Doss seems so—so—I don’t like it.”
    Mrs. Frederick looked at her daughter in astonishment. She wore glasses with enormously strong lenses that gave her eyes a peculiarly disagreeable appearance.
    â€œWhat is the matter with Doss?”
    â€œIt—seems so childish,” faltered Valancy.
    â€œOh!” Mrs. Frederick had been a Wansbarra and the Wansbarra smile was not an asset. “I see. Well, it should suit you then. You are childish enough in all conscience, my dear child.”
    â€œI am twenty-nine,” said the dear child desperately.
    â€œI wouldn’t proclaim it from the house-tops if I were you, dear,” said Mrs. Frederick. “Twenty-nine! I had been married nine years when I was twenty-nine.”
    â€œ I was married at seventeen,” said Cousin Stickles proudly.
    Valancy looked at them furtively. Mrs. Frederick, except for those terrible glasses and the hooked nose that made her look more like a parrot than a parrot itself could look, was not ill-looking. At twenty she might have been quite pretty. But Cousin Stickles! And yet Christine Stickles had once been desirable in some man’s eyes. Valancy felt that Cousin Stickles, with her broad, flat, wrinkled face, a mole right on the end of her dumpy nose, bristling hairs on her chin, wrinkled yellow neck, pale, protruding eyes, and thin, puckered mouth, had yet this advantage over her—this right to look down on her. And even yet Cousin Stickles was necessary to Mrs. Frederick. Valancy wondered pitifully what it would be like to be wanted by someone—needed by someone. No one in the whole world needed her, or would miss anything from life if she dropped suddenly out of it. She was a disappointment to her mother. No one loved her. She had never so much as had a girl friend.
    â€œI haven’t even a gift for friendship,” she had once admitted to herself pitifully.
    â€œDoss, you haven’t eaten your crusts,” said Mrs. Frederick rebukingly.
    It rained all the forenoon without cessation. Valancy pieced a quilt. Valancy hated piecing quilts. And there was no need of it. The house was full of quilts. There were three big chests, packed with quilts, in the attic. Mrs. Frederick had begun storing away quilts when Valancy was seventeen and she kept on storing them, though it did not seem likely