Dina Drake was the Husacks’ official protégée, everyone in Seattle knew this. She’s like a daughter to them, they had said in the beginning, because this was Louise Husack’s repeated phrase. She’s like a daughter to us, she couldn’t be dearer if she was our own. Of course her mother and I were brought up almost like sisters in Kansas City, up to the very day I married Mr. Husack. She was my maid of honor. She married Ed Dracker and they stayed right there in Kansas City to the day they died in that awful crash. Dina was in Hollywood—of course her real name was Dorothy Dracker but she changed it to Dina Drake when she wanted to get into pictures. They didn’t appreciate her in pictures, I don’t know why, with her lovely looks and all, but I guess it’s all having pull, or worse. We kept in touch after the tragedy, she always called me Aunt Louise when she wrote. Then when she kept writing how tired she was, and lonely, I asked her to come here and pay us a visit and she did. And now I don’t know what we’d do without her. She stayed right here in the house, we loved it, but after six months or so she said she felt she was imposing, she’d get a job and she did, modeling for the big stores. I didn’t like that, and neither did Dave. I said she might be subjected to temptations but Bay said he thought it was all right. We fixed her up with a little apartment of her own and Dave got her to take a kind of secretarial course, and then after my little illness—it wasn’t really a stroke, it was just a kind of fatigue that settled in my right side for a while, I hardly notice it now but I have to be careful—Dina began to kind of help out—pinch-hitting, Dave calls it—for me as hostess here at the house and even for Dave when he has to entertain business friends. She’s like a social secretary and a business secretary and a daughter all rolled into one. She’s got what Dave calls know-how. She’s always there ready to pitch in and help. Dina’s closemouthed, too. Sometimes I think maybe too closemouthed. She never told me she’d been married in Hollywood, it only came out when the fellow was killed in a car crash just like her mother and father’s, it’s as if she was haunted by tragedy. I hope not. She doesn’t complain. Dina’s no relation, but I always say, she’s like a daughter to us.

In the past year Louise Husack had ceased to repeat this oft-told tale. In the past year or two Seattle’s eyebrows had gone higher and higher until they threatened the very hair-line. Bay Husack was the most eligible bachelor in Seattle, now that young Mort Caswell was married and had on his desk his own black-velvet-and-pearls silver-framed photograph, complete with child. Dina Drake may have been sweetness and light to the Husack household, but she rather antagonized the matrons and daughters and even the sons of the Husacks’ social set.