"Leslie." said Mrs. Bell, making the unnecessary feminine
twist to get a view of her back hair from the mirror with
a hand-glass, "aren't you _delighted?_ Try to be candid
with yourself now, and own that she's tremendously
improved."
It would not have occurred to anybody but Mrs. Bell to
ask Mr. Leslie Bell to be candid with himself. Candor
was written in large letters all over Mr. Leslie Bell's
plain, broad countenance. So was a certain obstinacy,
not of will, but of adherence to prescribed principles,
which might very well have been the result of living for
twenty years with Mrs. Leslie Bell. Otherwise he was a
thick-set man with an intelligent bald head, a fresh-colored
complexion, and a well-trimmed gray beard. Mr. Leslie
Bell looked at life with logic, or thought he did, and
took it with ease, in a plain way. He was known to be a
good man of business, with a leaning toward generosity,
and much independence of opinion. It was not a custom
among election candidates to ask Leslie Bell for his
vote. It was pretty well understood that nothing would
influence it except his "views," and that none of the
ordinary considerations in use with refractory electors
would influence his views. He was a man of large,
undemonstrative affections, and it was a matter of private
regret with him that there should have been only one
child, and that a daughter, to bestow them upon. His
simplicity of nature was utterly beyond the understanding
of his wife, who had been building one elaborate theory
after another about him ever since they had been married,
conducting herself in mysterious accordance, but had
arrived accurately only at the fact that he preferred
two lumps of sugar in his tea.
Mr. Bell did not allow his attention to be taken from
the intricacies of his toilet by his wife's question
until she repeated it.
"Aren't you charmed with Elfrida, Leslie? Hasn't
Philadelphia improved her beyond your wildest dreams?"
Mr. Bell reflected. "You know I don't think Elfrida has
ever been as pretty as she was when she was five years
old, Maggie."
"_Do_ say Margaret," interposed Mrs. Bell plaintively.
She had been suffering from this for twenty years.
"It's of no use, my dear; I never remember unless there's
company present. I was going to say Elfrida had certainly
grown. She's got to her full size now, I should think,
and she dwarfs you, moth--Margaret."
Mrs. Bell looked at him with tragic eyes. "Do you see no
more in her than _that?_" she exclaimed.
"She looks well, I admit she looks well. She seems to
have got a kind of style in Philadelphia."
"_Style!_"
"I don't mean fashionable style--a style of her own; and
according to the professors, neither the time nor the
money has been wasted. But she's been a long year away,
Maggie. It's been considerably dull without her for you
and me. I hope she won't take it into her head to want
to leave home again."
"If it should be necessary to her plan of life--"
"It won't be necessary. She's nineteen now, and I'd like
to see her settle down here in Sparta, and the sooner
the better. Her painting will be an interest for her all
her life, and if ever she should be badly off she can
teach. That was my idea in giving her the training."
"Settle down in _Sparta!_" Mrs. Bell repeated, with a
significant curve of her superior lip. "Why, who is
there--"
"Lots of people, though it isn't for me to name them,
nor for you either, my dear. But speaking generally,
there isn't a town of its size in the Union with a finer
crop of go-ahead young men in it than Sparta."
Mrs. Bell was leaning against the inside shutter of their
bedroom window, looking out, while she waited for her
husband. As she looked, one of Sparta's go-ahead young
men, glancing up as he passed in the street below and
seeing her there behind the panes, raised his hat.
"Heavens, _no!_" said Mrs. Bell. "You don't understand,
Leslie."
"Perhaps not," Mr. Bell returned. "We must get that
packing-case opened after dinner. I'm anxious to see the
pictures." Mr. Bell put the finishing touches to his
little finger-nail and briskly pocketed his penknife.
"Shall we go downstairs now?" he suggested. "Fix your
brooch, mother; it's just on the drop."
Elfrida Bell had been a long year away--a year that seemed
longer to her than it possibly could to anybody in Sparta,
as she privately reflected when her father made this
observation for the second and the third time. Sparta
accounted for its days chiefly in ledgers, the girl
thought; there was a rising and a going down of the sun,
a little eating and drinking and speedy sleeping, a little
discussion of the newspapers. Sparta got over its days
by strides and stretches, and the strides and stretches
seemed afterward to have been made over gaps and gulfs
full of emptiness. The year divided itself and got its
painted leaves, its white silences, its rounding buds,
and its warm fragrances from the winds of heaven, and so
there were four seasons in Sparta, and people talked of
an early spring or a late fall; but Elfrida told herself
that time had no other division, and the days no other
color. Elfrida seemed to be unaware of the opening of
the new South Ward Episcopal Methodist Church. She
overlooked the municipal elections too, the plan for
overhauling the town waterworks, and the reorganization
of the public library. She even forgot the Browning Club.
Whereas--though Elfrida would never have said "whereas"
--the days in Philadelphia had been long and full. She
had often lived a week in one of them, and there had been
hours that stretched themselves over an infinity of life
and feeling, as Elfrida saw it, looking back. In reality,
her experience had been usual enough and poor enough;
but it had fed her in a way, and she enriched it with
her imagination, and thought, with keen and sincere pity,
that she had been starved till then. The question that
preoccupied her when she moved out of the Philadelphia
station in the Chicago train was that of future sustenance.
It was under the surface of her thoughts when she kissed
her father and mother and was made welcome home; it raised
a mute remonstrance against Mr. Bell's cheerful prophecy
that she would be content to stay in Sparta for a while
now, and get to know the young society; it neutralized
the pleasure of the triumphs in the packing-box. Besides,
their real delight had all been exhaled at the students'
exhibition in Philadelphia, when Philadelphia looked at
them. The opinion of Sparta, Elfrida thought, was not a
matter for anxiety. Sparta would be pleased in advance.
Elfrida allowed one extenuating point in her indictment
of Sparta: the place had produced her as she was at
eighteen, when they sent her to Philadelphia. This was
only half conscious--she was able to formulate it later
--but it influenced her sincere and vigorous disdain of
the town correctively, and we may believe that it operated
to except her father and mother from the general wreck
of her opinion to a greater extent than any more ordinary
feeling did. It was not in the least a sentiment of
affection for her birthplace; if she could have chosen
she would very much have preferred to be born somewhere
else. It was simply an important qualifying circumstance.
Her actual and her ideal self, her most mysterious and
interesting self, had originated in the air and the
opportunities of Sparta. Sparta had even done her the
service of showing her that she was unusual, by contrast,
and Elfrida felt that she ought to be thankful to somebody
or something for being as unusual as she was. She had
had a comfortable, spoiled feeling of gratitude for it
before she went to Philadelphia, which had developed in
the meantime into a shudder at the mere thought of what
it meant to be an ordinary person. "I could bear not to
be charming," said she sometimes to her Philadelphia
looking-glass, "but I could _not_ bear not to be clever."
She said "clever," but she meant more than that. Elfrida
Bell believed that something other than cleverness entered
into her personal equation. She looked sometimes into
her very soul to see what, but the writing there was in
strange characters that faded under her eyes, leaving
her uncomprehending but tranced. Meanwhile art spoke to
her from all sides, finding her responsive and more
responsive. Some books, some pictures, some music brought
her a curious exalted sense of double life. She could
not talk about it at all, but she could slip out into
the wet streets on a gusty October evening, and walk
miles exulting in it, and in the light on the puddles
and in the rain on her face, coming back, it must be
admitted, with red cheeks and an excellent appetite. It
led her into strange absent silences and ways of liking
to be alone, which gratified her mother and worried her
father. When Elfrida burned the gas of Sparta late in
her own room, it was always her father who saw the light
under the door, and who came and knocked and told her
that it was after eleven, and high time she was in bed.
Mrs. Bell usually protested. "How can the child reach
any true development," she asked, "if you interfere with
her like this?" to which Mr. Bell usually replied that
whatever she developed, he didn't want it to be headaches
and hysteria. Elfrida invariably answered, "Yes, papa,"
with complete docility; but it must be said that Mr. Bell
generally knocked in vain, and the more perfect the
submission of the daughterly reply the later the gas
would be apt to burn. Elfrida was always agreeable to
her father. So far as she thought of it she was
appreciatively fond of him, but the relation pleased her,
it was one that could be so charmingly sustained. For
already out of the other world she walked in--the world
of strange kinships and insights and recognitions, where
she saw truth afar off and worshipped, and as often met
falsehood in the way and turned raptly to follow--the
girl had drawn a vague and many-shaped idea of artistic
living which embraced the filial attitude among others
less explicable. It gave her pleasure to do certain things
in certain ways. She stood and sat and spoke, and even
thought, at times, with a subtle approval and enjoyment
of her manner of doing it. It was not actual artistic
achievement, but it was the sort of thing that entered
her imagination, as such achievement's natural corollary.
Her self-consciousness was a supreme fact of her
personality; it began earlier than any date she could
remember, and it was a channel of the most unfailing and
intense satisfaction to her from many sources. One was
her beauty, for she had developed an elusive beauty that
served her moods. When she was dull she called herself
ugly--unfairly, though her face lost tremendously in
value then--and her general dislike of dullness and
ugliness became particular and acute in connection with
herself. It is not too much to say that she took a keen
enjoying pleasure in the flush upon her own cheek and
the light in her own eyes no less than in the inward
sparkle that provoked it--an honest delight, she would
not have minded confessing it. Her height, her symmetry,
her perfect abounding health were separate joys to her;
she found absorbing and critical interest in the very
figment of her being. It was entirely preposterous that
a young woman should kneel at an attic window in a flood
of spring moonlight, with, her hair about the shoulders
of her nightgown, repeating Rossetti to the wakeful
budding garden, especially as it was for herself she did
it--nobody else saw her. She knelt there partly because
of a vague desire to taste the essence of the spring and
the garden and Rossetti at once, and partly because she
felt the romance of the foolish situation. She knew of
the shadow her hair made around her throat, and that her
eyes were glorious in the moonlight. Going back to bed,
she paused before the looking-glass and wafted a kiss,
as she blew the candle out, to the face she saw there.
It was such a pretty face, and so full of tire spirit
of. Rossetti and the moonlight, that she couldn't help
it. Then she slept, dreamlessly, comfortably, and late;
and in the morning she had never taken cold.
Philadelphia had pointed and sharpened all this. The
girl's training there had vitalized her brooding dreams
of producing what she worshipped, had given shape and
direction to her informal efforts, had concentrated them
upon charcoal and canvas. There was an enthusiasm for
work in the Institute, a canonization of names, a blazing
desire to imitate that tried hard to fan itself into
originality. Elfrida kindled at once, and felt that her
soul had lodged forever In her fingers, that art had
found for her, once for all, a sacred embodiment. She
spoke with subdued feeling of its other shapes; she was
at all points sympathetic; but she was no longer at all
points desirous. Her aim was taken. She would not write
novels or compose operas; she would paint. There was some
renunciation in it and some humility. The day she came
home, looking over a dainty sandalwood box full of early
verses, twice locked against her mother's eye, "The desire
of the moth for the star," she said to herself; but she
did not tear them up. That would have been brutal.
Elfrida wanted to put off opening the case that held her
year's work until next day. She quailed somewhat in
anticipation of her parents' criticisms as a matter of
fact; she would have preferred to postpone parrying them.
She acknowledged this to herself with a little irritation
that it should be so, but when her father insisted, chisel
in hand, she went down on her knees with charming
willingness to help him. Mrs. Bell took a seat on the
sofa and clasped her hands with the expression of one
who prepares for prayer.
One by one Mr. Leslie Bell drew out his daughter's studies
and copies, cutting their strings, clearing them of their
paper wrappings, and standing each separately against
the wall in his crisp, business-like way. They were all
mounted and framed; they stood very well against the
wall; but Mr. Bell, who began hopefully, was presently
obliged to try to hide his disappointment, the row was
so persistently black and white. Mrs. Bell, on the sofa,
had the look of postponing her devotions.
"You seem to have done a great many of these--etchings,"
said Mr. Bell.
"Oh, papa! They're not etchings, they're subjects in
charcoal--from casts and things."
"They do you credit--I've no doubt they do you credit.
They're very nicely drawn," returned her father, "but
they're a good deal alike. We wont be able to hang more
than two of them in the same room. Was _that_ what they
gave you the medal for?"
Mr. Bell indicated a drawing of Psyche. The lines were
delicate, expressive, and false; the relief was imperfect,
yet the feeling was undeniably caught. As a drawing it
was incorrect enough, but its charm lay in a subtle
spiritual something that bad worked into it from the
girl's own fingers, and made the beautiful empty classic
face modernly interesting. In view of its inaccuracy the
committee had been guilty of a most irregular proceeding
in recognizing it with a medal; but in a very young art
school this might be condoned.
"It's a perfectly lovely thing," interposed Mrs. Bell
from the sofa. "I'm sure it deserves one."
Elfrida said nothing. The study was ticketed, it had
obviously won a medal.
Mr. Bell looked at it critically. "Yes, it's certainly
well done. In spite of the frame--I wouldn't give ten
cents for the frame--the effect is fine. We most find a
good light for that. Oh, now we come to the oil-paintings.
We both presumed you would do well at the oil-paintings;
and for my part," continued Mr. Bell definitely, "I like
them best. There's more variety in them." He was holding
at arm's-length, as he spoke, an oblong scrap of filmy
blue sky and marshy green fields in a preposterously
wide, flat, dull gold frame, and looking at it in a
puzzled way. Presently he reversed it and looked again.
"No, papa," Elfrida said, "you had it right side up
before." She was biting her lip, and struggling with a
desire to pile them all back into the box and shut the
lid and stamp on it.
"That's exquisite!" murmured Mrs. Bell, when Mr. Bell
had righted it again.
"It's one of the worst," said Elfrida briefly. Mr. Bell
looked relieved. "Since that's your own opinion, Elfrida,"
he said, "I don't mind saying that I don't care much
about it either. It looks as if you'd got tired of it
before you finished it."
"Does it?" Elfrida said.
"Now this is a much better thing, in my opinion," her
father went on, standing the picture of an old woman
behind an apple-stall along the wall with the rest "I
don't pretend to be a judge, but I know what I like, and
I like that. It explains itself."
"It's a lovely bit of color," remarked Mrs. Bell.
Elfrida smiled. "Thank you, mamma," she said, and kissed
her.
When the box was exhausted, Mr. Bell walked up and down
for a few minutes in front of the row against the wall,
with his hands in his pockets, reflecting, while Mrs.
Bell discovered new beauties to the author of them.
"We'll hang this lot in the dining-room," he said at
length, "and those black-and-whites with the oak mountings
in the parlor. They'll go best with the wall-paper there."
"Yes, papa."
"And I hope you won't mind, Elfrida," he added, "but I've
promised that they shall have one of your paintings to
raffle off in the bazar for the alterations in the
Sunday-school next week."
"Oh no, papa. I shall be delighted."
Elfrida was sitting beside her mother on the sofa, and
at the dose of this proposition Mr. Bell came and sat
there too. There was a silence for a moment while they
all three confronted the line of pictures leaning against
the wall Then Elfrida began to laugh, and she went on
laughing, to the astonishment of her parents, until the
tears came into her eyes. She stopped as suddenly, kissed
her mother and father, and went upstairs. "I'm afraid
you've hurt Her feelings, Leslie," said Mrs. Bell, when
she had well gone.
But Elfrida's feelings had not been hurt, though one
might say that the evening left her sense of humor rather
sore. At that moment she was dallying with the temptation
to describe the whole scene in a letter to a valued friend
in Philadelphia, who would have appreciated it with mirth.
In the end she did not write. It would have been too
humiliating.