Ivy Gilbert had a far happier lot than a nursery governess can count on.
But even so she was not quite as happy as it’s good for a girl to be,
and not nearly as happy as she’d have wished to be. There were two
things she greatly craved: personal happiness and travel—travel actual
and social, to go far off the beaten paths, to see new, out-of-the-way
places, to have new, uncommon experiences. She longed for both all the
more and the more persistently because she thought there was very little
chance that either ever would come to her.
She was actively unhappy, when she was, because she had so little to
spend on clothes—it sounds raw and rough put so, but it is put
truly—because she had fewer “good times” than most of the girls she
knew, and (perhaps most of all) because she loathed the, in itself easy,
work she had to do. No work is easy that we both dislike and must do.
Ivy Gilbert was a very inefficient and a very discontented nursery
governess.
In that good-natured society neither her comparative poverty nor her
wage-earning in any way debarred her from such social place and power as
a girl may have. And in America a girl may have much of both.
Washington is an _omnium gatherum_. All conditions of men and women, of
all ages and of most sorts and most races circle about the White House.
But it has its select set—the word “select” is its own, and need not be
analyzed too closely. Ivy had its _entrée_. To the superficial few in
it, who cared for and gaged such things in the wrong way, her undoubted
relation to the British peerage “cut far more ice” than did the fact
that she worked—or was assumed to—for her living; and that she lived
with Sir Charles and Lady Snow and called them “Charlie” and “Emma”
threw a very becoming garniture of ermine over her simple and not always
very new gowns.
To do the girl’s own common sense and practical intelligence but scant
justice, it was not the fact that she worked for a wage that was, she
thought, her cramping detriment, but the shabby fact that she could not
dress on anything approaching a parity with the girls who were her
companions and friends. It was that that galled her. And she did feel
that there was some ignominy in the small drudgery-way in which she
earned her living. A people who boasted Emma Eames and cringed to Hetty
Green could not consistently look too coldly on a girl who earned her
living in a superior, if small, way; especially when every one knew that
Lady Snow’s cousin, Miss Gilbert, could be presented at the Court of St.
James any time she liked, if she were in England and had the price (of
credit) of the train and feathers. And Ivy knew it. But she despised her
own line of thrift—if others did not—perhaps a little because she
followed it so lamely and sourly. Discontent often breeds shame. The
English girl had been kindly treated by kindly Washington—handsomely
treated, even, but she always had felt an outsider.
At home—in London—her own birth and environment had perched her more
or less on a social fence. And in Washington her dress-skimp kept her
so—at least in her own opinion.
Ivy’s maternal grandmother had been the daughter of an earl’s younger
son. Ivy’s father had been a not too successful tutor at one of the
great public schools. An uncle of hers was a bishop—Canterbury itself
not too remote a possibility—another uncle was a wealthy cheesemonger;
a third a briefless barrister. A cousin of her father’s was a bank
manager in Surrey, a cousin of her mother’s owned and ran a rural inn,
and his son a fashionable seaside hotel. She had a score of aristocratic
living kindred, and others that belonged to the lowest middle-class, a
few that were frankly “trade”—and retail trade at that. Her childhood
had been radiant, her girlhood anxious. Mrs. Gilbert had been a woman of
extraordinary ability, as had her elder sister, Mrs. Snow. While Ivy’s
mother lived the wolf that yapped now and then not far from their door
never got nose or paw in. Cora Gilbert could make a delectable _entrée_
out of a bone and a bunch of herbs, a chic hat out of a yard or two of
re-dyed ribbon and a card of safety pins; and she ruled her husband and
ruled him well—and always she had a laugh, a smile and a gay, tender
word for her man and child, and a handsome serviceable umbrella ready
and waiting for the rainy day. But the mother died when the only child
was scarcely fourteen; and then slowly but surely the wolf pushed in.
George Gilbert was devoted and industrious, a rarely delightful
companion—but he lacked the sense of proportion, was devoid of
executive ability, had no mastery of detail, and he had one crass
selfishness, one incurable vice. He lusted for books as its victim lusts
for dope. There was not a second-hand bookshop in Westminster or
Bloomsbury that did not know and welcome him. And before Ivy was sixteen
more than one pawnbroker knew him well. He never borrowed, he never
begged, above all he never grumbled or cringed. But he would buy books,
new books and old books, big books and little, cheap and dear. And not
with one would he ever part. They crowded the little home from
half-basement to attic—and at his death, when Ivy was twenty, their
sale at a shilling-a-volume average brought her more than nine-tenths of
her heritage and the first really good gown she’d bought in six years.
And though she had loved her father both tenderly and ardently, so
aggrievedly had the girl resented the absence of joints and frocks for
which their cost might have paid, that she grudged the sale of none of
them and had kept for remembrance only three or four that he had prized
most; and she had kept even them altogether out of a sense of filial
duty and not in the least because she had cared to keep them.
In England she had never lacked for invitations and cordial welcome. But
what’s the pleasure in that to a dress-fond girl who has next to nothing
to wear? And Ivy Gilbert found more rasp than joy in favors and
entertainment she could in no way return. Her rich and aristocratic
relatives one and all liked her, courted her even. Her charming, dainty
ways; her quick, if not deep wit; her radiant face; her exquisite voice,
more than paid her way—if only she could have realized it—but she did
not. Several of her richer kinswomen banded together to give the girl a
good time—two of them offered her gifts of gowns and ornaments—and one
of them, her godmother, and a spinster, gladly would have “dressed” and
“presented” her. The good times she accepted now and then, but the gifts
she would not have. Riding lessons, a very good saddle-horse and its
keep, she could not resist when her godmother presented them on her
fifteenth birthday; but that was the only breach that generous,
affectionate Lady Kate ever was able to make in the girl’s pride. Pin
money and chiffons, old or new, Ivy would have none. She had inherited
her father’s adamant honesty. She loathed going without, but she would
not sponge.
Friends and relatives of lesser purse and rank reached out towards her
kindness and welcome as ready and cordial. But their simpler lives and
homes attracted her weakly. From some old-time ancestor—perhaps one
whose name she had never heard—Ivy had inherited an inordinate pride of
race, an affinity with luxury and ease. Mayfair seemed to her home;
Balham and West Kensington did not. Her own equivocal social place, the
mixture of gentle and nobody in her veins, tried her sadly. She thought
of herself bitterly as a sort of social mongrel. And she blamed and
despised the grandmother who had refused a duke and married an architect
of minor ability, less success and humble birth. The little leasehold
home in which her father had died—safely settled on his wife at his
wife’s own provident suggestion—became Ivy’s absolute property. She
sold it at once. It little more than sufficed to pay outstanding and
funeral accounts. Fifty odd pounds, a handful of trinkets, a shabby
assortment of clothes she disliked, and her father’s absurd assortment
of books, were all that she had in the world.
But she had no lack of friends—sincere and eager-to-prove-it friends.
Several homes were offered her, and, incidentally, two not quite
desperately ineligible husbands. She refused them all, and set her wits
to work as to how they and she were to earn their living and hers. And
Charles Snow—her mother’s sister’s son—and Emma his wife put their
heads together to outwit Ivy’s. And where others, as ready but less
skilful to befriend, failed the Snows succeeded—measurably.
They offered her a three years’ (and probably more) engagement in
Washington and two hundred pounds a year. Ivy mocked and accepted. But
she insisted upon naming her own wage—and from that determination
nothing would budge her. “You shall pay me one hundred a year,” she told
her cousin Charles, “and that is about three hundred more than I’ll be
worth. I can’t dress, as a member of Emma’s family must be dressed, on a
penny less; so you shall give me five fivers four times a year. I shan’t
teach the children anything, of course—but they’ll be none the worse
for that for a year or two. But I can mend and make for them—all but
their smartest things, see that their faces are washed, keep them from
falling into the fire or out of the windows, and, just perhaps, be
useful to Emma now and then, and give you the pleasure of keeping me out
of the wind and the rain. It’s good of you, Charles, and it’s more than
good of Emma. And I won’t slap them—though I shall want to every day of
my life. When do we start?”
They sailed in less than a month. The three years were more than half
gone now, but none of them considered it a possibility that she ever
would leave them except to go to a home of her own. Lady Snow hoped and
planned that Ivy would marry, and Ivy herself frankly hoped so also. But
as yet it had not been indicated to whom. She did her best to earn her
hundred a year, and she had succeeded better than she knew: for both
husband and wife had found her presence a help and a pleasure. She did
indeed teach Blanche and Dick very little, and good-natured Emma rarely
would let her do any needlework for them; but she kept them English, and
she did both her cousins the hundred services that a younger sister
might have done. She loved them both and she earned the love they both
gave her. She shared Lady Snow’s pleasures, as far as a dress allowance
of a hundred pounds a year enabled her to do without too stinging a
flaunt of poverty. But five hundred dollars and an inherited deftness of
eyes, fingers and taste did not go far towards adequate dressing in
Washington’s smartest set. And she felt herself a godmotherless,
pumpkinless Cinderella; and she loathed it by day—and dreamed by night
of—glass slippers.
Lady Snow would have “loved” to dress her young cousin; but did not dare
even suggest it.
Miss Townsend’s warm friendship had been both a personal boon and a
social asset to the not-too-contented English girl. It stood for a great
deal in Washington. The half-aristocrat in the girl thrilled and was
grateful to the entire aristocrat of the old Southern woman.
But it was not enough. She envied other girls—not what they were, but
what they had—and, because of what they had, where they might
untrammeled go, what they might untrammeled do. She realized how
generously and gladly good her cousins were to her. But she felt that a
degrading smirch of “service” clung to her, as the smirch of restricted
means clung to her garments. “I Serve” was not Ivy Gilbert’s motto,
and—because of the plebeian strain in her veins—she had no sense that
of all mottoes it is the highest and proudest. She felt her life dull.
She was ripe for adventure.
Sên King-lo’s violets had done more to reëstablish her in her own raw
esteem than all Miss Julia Townsend’s warm friendship. From resenting
those innocent violets, she abruptly came to value them _because_ two
feather-headed girls with great purses at their service had so envied
her them. Sên King-lo—a _Chinese_—had put her on her feet. Her
attitude to him was not altered, not modified. But she was girlishly, if
cheaply, elated to have what other girls wished for and schemed for and
couldn’t get. She did not place the violets more conspicuously in her
room when she went down to it, it never occurred to her to tuck a few of
them in her belt when she changed for dinner. But she threw them a
kindlier glance as she tidied her hair. Perhaps she ought to say some
sort of “thank you.” And the next day, after church, she did. She wrote
Mr. Sên a note. She wrote merely:
Dear Mr. Sên King-lo:
How kind of you to remember—with such violets—our meeting at
Miss Townsend’s. Thank you for them.
Yours sincerely,
I. R. Gilbert.
It looked wrong, she thought, as she scanned it. And after a little
consideration she rewrote it—leaving out the word “Yours,” and writing
her Christian names in full. The initials had looked curt. One didn’t
say “Thank you” curtly—if one said it at all.
She posted the note herself when she took Blanche and Dick for their
Sunday afternoon stroll.
She wondered if he’d reply to her note, and ask if he might call. She
hoped not. But she’d not mind Lucille and Molly knowing it—if he did.
Sên King-lo did neither. She met him again at the Ludlows’. He did not
ask her to dance—though he danced several times. She was sincerely
grateful that he did not. But he sought her out, thanked her for her
kindness in writing—and in accepting—his posy, and chatted on until a
partner claimed her.
She noticed that Mr. Sên danced exceedingly well and that his evening
clothes suited him.