Prisoner's Base

She sipped more coffee. "I was four years old. Pris was about two weeks. My father was in her father's business, and the families were friends. Of course, with children four years is a big difference, but we liked each other all along, and when Pris's mother died, and soon afterward her father, and Pris went to live with the Helmars, she and I got to be like sisters. We were apart a lot, since we went to different schools, and I graduated from college the year she started, but we wrote to each other-we must have written a thousand letters back and forth. Do you know about her leaving college and setting up a menage in the Village?"

I said I did.

"That was when we were closest. My father had died then, and my mother long before, and I practically lived with Pris, though I had a little place of my own. The trouble with Pris is she has too much money."

"Was and had," I corrected.

"Oh. Yes. Her income was enormous. After a few months of the Village all of a sudden she was off, and do you know what her excuse was? Her maid-that was Margaret-she had to take Margaret to New Orleans to see her sick mother! Did you ever hear anything to beat it? Off she went, leaving me to close up the place in the Village. We were still friends all right; she wrote me from New Orleans raving about it, and the first thing I knew, here came a letter saying that she had found her prince and married him, and they were off for Peru, where he had an option on the Andes Mountains, or approximately that."

Mrs. Jaffee finished the coffee, put the cup and saucer down on the tray, and wriggled back until she was against the cushions. "That," she said, "was the last letter I ever got from Pris. The very last. Maybe I still have it-I remember she enclosed a picture of him. I wondered why she didn't write, and then one day she phoned me-she was back in New York, and she was alone, except for Margaret, and she was calling herself Miss Priscilla Eads. I saw her a few times, and when she bought a place up in Westchester I went there once, but she was a completely different person, and she didn't invite me again, and I wouldn't have gone if she had. For nearly three years I didn't see her at all, until she had been to Reno and come back and joined the Salvation Army-do you know about that?"

I said yes.