Page 27 - 1922 Hartridge

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“And I’ll tell you someone you’d never recognize—Betty Walbridge. She married soon after graduating, a funny little shrimp of a man with an
artistic temperament. All was quite peaceful till Betty was seized with a sudden passion for athletics. It seems that this yearning for action was
retarded till late in life. All would have gone well, though, if she hadn’t insisted that her husband share her pleasure with her. She used to make the poor little thing get up at hve every morning and from then till evening he
was forced to partake in such a frenzy of golf, tennis, track, and hurdling, that his poor under-developed little body couldn’t stand it. He simply wore out and passed away., still telling Betty how he adored her. She has never
been the same since, and as a sign of deep atonement she gave all her money to help Muff in her settlement work. No,—I shouldn’t have thought that Muff would do that sort of thing either. They say that every morning she
goes over to the East Side and scrul)s floors in the tenement houses and washes
the children’s dirty faces. She looks like a typical welfare worker, too—man’s shirtwaist, severe hair-dress, and she has gotten terrifyingly stern-looking. Quite a contrast to Anne Gaillard. She married, you know, almost as soon as she left school. No, I don’t know anything about her husband, except that he died soon after their marriage, leaving her with oodles of money, and, incidentally, a large candy factory. She supplies the Hartridge boarders
with their monthly ounce of candy. Oh, no,—I don’t think his death broke her up very much; there was never much love lost between them. Besides she is having too gay a time as it is, with five or ten men frantically courting her. Lately she has acquired a hobby of rescuing obscure poets and artists
from the poor-house and bringing them to the limelight. Every time you go to her house you find three or four new ones sitting around the drawing-room, startling one with their wildly dishevelled hair, their dreamily inspired eyes,
and their generally eccentric appearance.
“Have you been into Eleanor Cooper’s psychic den,—she’s become so famous that I suppose you know about her! Yes, great powers of divination ! It’s really uncanny the things she can tell you. I was there the other day,
and whom do you suppose she told me about? Why Beebe and Peggy! Miss Wells’s vivid talks on Ghandi interested them so much that they decided to go
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