Faith, Hope, and Charity

Her name was Hope. Fortunately, no one at that time saw the irony of her name. No one, that is, except her mother. The elder woman had a saying she used often: "Where there's strife, there's Hope -- right in the middle of it!" She'd begin with a despairing here-we-go-again note, but end with a motherly smile so that everybody got the joke. Her daughter, after all, was twenty-four, and it was too late now to do much about her proneness for catastrophic involvement. (Once again, Hope had become entangled in someone else's personal problems. This time it was Halcyon Somerset, a somewhat fluttery friend of twenty-two, whose stormy engagement to Buster Bragdon was nearing the breaking point.) In fact, it was likely to be atomized at any moment. The Gaines family was sweating out another of Hope's vicarious crises.

If Hope had a talent -- a theory no one seemed eager to defend -- it was her apparent knack of innocently precipitating a disaster while in the act of averting another, or of simply making a fouled-up situation worse by maladroitly rendering the assistance she was asked for. On occasions of relatively minor cheerlessness, Hope might be simply the bearer of dire report -- someone's house burglarized, auto stolen, or pet animal killed. But when trouble's gravitational pull was stronger, and if the fates were working in diabolical connivance with misfortune, Hope might find herself directly caught up in the event as a sort of secondary victim. How soon, and to what extent, Halcyon Somerset's troubles would become Hope Gaines's troubles, no one could at the moment predict.