Janet Cardiff, running downstairs to the drawing-room
from the top story of the house in Kensington Square with
the knowledge that a new American girl, who wrote very
clever things about pictures, awaited her there, tried
to remember just what sort of description John Kendal
had given of her visitor. Her recollection was vague as
to detail; she could not anticipate a single point with
certainty, perhaps because she had not paid particular
attention at the time. She had been given a distinct
impression that she might expect to be interested, however,
which accounted for her running downstairs. Nothing
hastened Janet Cardiff's footsteps more than the prospect
of anybody interesting. She and her father declared that
it was their great misfortune to be thoroughly respectable,
it cut them off from so much. It was in particular the
girl's complaint against their life that humanity as they
knew it was rather a neutral-tinted, carefully woven
fabric too largely "machine-made," as she told herself,
with a discontent that the various Fellows of the Royal
Society and members of the Athenaeum Club, with whom the
Cardiffs were in the habit of dining, could hardly have
thought themselves capable of inspiring. It seemed to
Janet that nobody crossed their path until his or her
reputation was made, and that by the time people had made
their reputations they succumbed to them, and became
uninteresting.
She told herself at once that nothing Kendal could have
said would have prepared her for this American, and that
certainly nothing she had seen or read of other Americans
did. Elfrida was standing beside the open window looking
out. As Janet came in a breeze wavered through and lifted
the fluffy hair about her visitor's forehead, and the
scent of the growing things in the little square came
with it into the room. She turned slowly, with grave wide
eyes and a plaintive indrawing of her pretty underlip,
and held out three full-blown gracious Marechal Neil
roses on long slender stems. "I have brought you these,"
she said, with a charming effect of simplicity, "to make
me welcome. There was no reason, none whatever, why I
should be welcome, so I made one. You will not be
angry--perhaps?"
Janet banished her conventional "Very glad to see you"
instantly. She took the roses with a quick thrill of
pleasure. Afterward she told herself that she was not
touched, not in the least, she did not quite know why;
but she freely acknowledged that she was more than amused.
"How charming of you!" she said. "But I have to thank
you for coming as well. Now let us shake hands, or we
shan't feel properly acquainted." Janet detected a
half-tone of patronage in her voice, and fell into a rage
with herself because of it. She looked at Elfrida sharply
to note a possible resentment, but there was none. If
she had looked a trifle more sharply she might have
observed a subtler patronage in the little smile her
visitor received this commonplace with; but, like the
other, she was too much occupied in considering her
personal effect. She had become suddenly desirous that
it should be a good one.
Elfrida went on in the personal key. "I suppose you are
very tired of hearing such things," she said, "but I owe
you so much."
This was not quite justifiable, for Miss Cardiff was only
a successful writer in the magazines, whose name was very
familiar to other people who wrote in them, and had a
pleasant association for the reading public. It was by
no means fame; she would have been the first to laugh at
the magniloquence of the word in any personal connection.
For her father she would accept a measure of it, and only
deplored that the lack of public interest in Persian made
the measure small. She had never confessed to a soul how
largely she herself was unacquainted with his books, and
how considerably her knowledge of her father's specialty
was covered by the opinion that Persian was a very
decorative character. She could not let Elfrida suppose
that she thought this anything but a politeness.
"Oh, thanks--impossible!" she cried gaily. "Indeed, I
assure you it is months since I heard anything so
agreeable," which was also a departure from the strictest
verity.
"But truly! I'm afraid I am very clumsy," Elfrida added,
with a pretty dignity, "but I should like to assure you
of that."
"If you have allowed me to amuse you now and then for
half an hour it has been very good of you," Janet returned,
looking at Miss Bell with rather more curious interest
than she thought it polite to show. It began to seem to
her, however, that the conventional side of the occasion
was not obvious from any point of view. "You are an
American, aren't you?" she asked. "Mr. Kendal told me
so. I suppose one oughtn't to say that one would like
to be an American. But you have such a pull! I know I
should like living there."
Elfrida gave herself the effect of considering the matter
earnestly. It flitted, really, over the surface of her
mind, which was engaged in absorbing Janet and the room,
and the situation.
"Perhaps it is better to be born in America than in--most
places," she said, with a half glance at the prim square
outside. "It gives you a point of view that is--splendid."
In hesitating this way before her adjectives, she always
made her listeners doubly attentive to what she had to
say. "And having been deprived of so much that you have
over here, we like it better, of course, when we get it,
than you do. But nobody would live in constant deprivation.
No, you wouldn't like living there. Except in New York,
and, oh, I should say Santa Barbara, and New Orleans
perhaps, the life over there is--infernal."
"You are like a shower-bath," said Janet to herself; but
the shower-bath had no palpable effect upon her. "What
have we that is so important that you haven't got?" she
asked.
"Quantities of things." Elfrida hesitated, not absolutely
sure of the wisdom of her example. Then she ventured it.
"The picturesqueness of society--your duchesses and your
women in the green-grocers' shops." It was not wise, she
saw instantly.
"Really? It is so difficult to understand that duchesses
are interesting--out of novels; and the green-grocers'
wives are a good deal alike, too, aren't they?"
"It's the contrast; you see our duchesses were
green-grocers' wives the day before yesterday, and our
green-grocers' wives subscribe to the magazines. It's
all mixed up, and there are no high lights anywhere. You
move before us in a sort of panoramic pageant," Elfrida
went on, determined to redeem her point, "with your Queen
and Empress of India--she ought to be riding on an
elephant, oughtn't she?--in front, and all your princes
and nobles with their swords drawn to protect her. Then
your Upper Classes and your Upper Middle Classes walking
stiffly two and two; and then your Lower Middle Classes
with large families, dropping their h's; and then your
hideous people from the slums. And besides," she added,
with prettily repressed enthusiasm, "there is the shadowy
procession of all the people that have gone before, and
we can see that you are a good deal like them, though
they are more interesting still. It is very pictorial."
She stopped suddenly and consciously, as if she had said
too much, and Janet felt that she was suggestively
apologized to.
"Doesn't the phenomenal squash make up for all that?"
she asked. "It would to me. I'm dying to see the phenomenal
squash, and the prodigious water-melon, and--"
"And the falls of Niagara?" Elfrida put in, with the
faintest turning down of the corners of her mouth. "I'm
afraid our wonders are chiefly natural, and largely
vegetable, as you say."
"But they are wonders. Everything here has been measured
so many times. Besides, haven't you got the elevated
railway, and a statue of Liberty, and the 'Jeanne d'Arc,'
and W. D. Howells! To say nothing of a whole string of
poets--good gray poets that wear beards and laurels, and
fanciful young ones that dance in garlands on the back
pages of the _Century_. Oh, I know them all, the dear
things! And I'm quite sure their ideas are indigenous to
the soil."
Elfrida let her eyes tell her appreciation, and also the
fact that she would take courage now, she was gaining
confidence. "I'm glad you like them," she said. "Howells
would do if he would stop writing about virtuous
sewing-girls, and give us some real _romans psychologiques_.
But he is too much afraid of soiling his hands, that
monsieur; his _betes humaines_ are always conventionalized,
and generally come out at the end wearing the halo of
the redeemed. He always reminds me of Cruikshank's picture
of the ghost being put out by the extinguisher in the
'Christmas Carol.' His genius is the ghost, and
conventionality is the extinguisher. But it _is_ genius,
so it's a pity."
"It seems to me that Howells deals honestly with his
materials," Janet said, instinctively stilling the jar
of Elfrida's regardless note. She was so pretty, this
new creature, and she had such original ways. Janet must
let her talk about _romans psychologiques_, or worse
things, if she wanted to. "To me he has a tremendous
appearance of sincerity, psychological and other. But do
you know, I don't think the English or American people
are exactly calculated to reward the sort of vivisection
you mean. The _bete_ is too conscious of his moral fibre
when he's respectable, and when he isn't respectable he
doesn't commit picturesque crimes, he steals and boozes.
I dare say he's bestial enough, but pure unrelieved filth
can't be transmuted into literature, and as a people
we're perfectly devoid of that extraordinary artistic
nature that it makes such a foil for in the Latins. That
is really the only excuse the naturalists have."
"Excuse!" Elfrida repeated, with a bewildered look. "You
had Wainwright," she added hastily.
"_Nous nous en felicitons!_ We've got him still--in Madame
Tussaud's," cried Janet "He poisoned for money in cold
blood--not exactly an artistic vice! Oh, _he_ won't
do!"--she laughed triumphantly--"if he did write charming
things about the Renaissance! Besides, he illustrates my
case; among us he was a phenomenon, like the elephant-headed
man. Phenomena are for the scientists. You don't mean
to tell me that any literature that pretends to call
itself artistic has a right to touch them."
By this time they had absolutely forgotten that up to
twenty minutes ago they had never seen each other before.
Already they had mutely and unconsciously begun to rejoice
that they had come together; already each of them promised
herself the exploration of the other's nature, with the
preliminary idea that it would be a satisfying, at least
an interesting process. The impulse made Elfrida almost
natural, and Janet perceived this with quick
self-congratulation. Already she had made up her mind
that this manner was a pretty mask which it would be her
business to remove.
"But--but you're not in it!" Elfrida returned. "Pardon
me, but you're not _there_, you know. Art has no ideal
but truth, and to conventionalize truth is to damn it In
the most commonplace material there is always truth, but
here they conventionalize it out of all--"
"Oh," cried Janet, "we're a conventional people, I assure
you, Miss Bell, and so are you, for how could you change
your spots in a hundred years? The material here is
conventional. Daudet couldn't have written of us. Our
wicked women are too inglorious. Now Sapho--"
Miss Cardiff stopped at the ringing of the door-bell.
"Oh," she said, "here is my father. You will let me give
you a cup of tea now, won't you?" The maid was bringing
in the tray. "I should like you to meet my father."
Lawrence Cardiff's grasp was on the door-handle almost
as she spoke. Seeing Elfrida, he involuntarily put up
his hand to settle the back of his coat collar--these
little middle-aged ways were growing upon him--and shook
hands with her as Janet introduced them, with that courtly
impenetrable agreeableness that always provoked curiosity
about him in strangers, and often led to his being taken
for somebody more important than he was, usually somebody
in politics. Elfrida saw that he was quite different from
her conception of a university professor with a reputation
in Persian and a clever daughter of twenty-four. He was
straight and slender for one thing; he had gay inquiring
eyes, and fair hair just beginning to show gray where
the ends were brushed back; and Elfrida immediately became
aware that his features were as modern and as mobile as
possible. She had a moment of indecision and surprise
--indecision as to the most effective way of presenting
herself, and surprise that it should be necessary to
decide upon a way. It had never occurred to her that a
gentleman who had won scientific celebrity by digging
about Arabic roots, and who had contributed a daughter
like Janet to the popular magazines, could claim anything
of her beyond a highly respectful consideration. In
moments when she hoped to know the Cardiffs well she had
pictured herself doing little graceful acts of politeness
toward this paternal person--acts connected with his
spectacles, his _Athenian_, his foot-stool But apparently
she had to meet a knight and not a pawn.
She was hardly aware of taking counsel with herself; and
the way she abandoned her hesitations, and what Janet
was inwardly calling her Burne-Jonesisms, had all the
effect of an access of unconsciousness. Janet Cardiff
watched it with delight. "But why," she asked herself in
wonder, "should she have been so affected--if it was
affectation--with _me?_" She would decide whether it was
or was not afterward, she thought. Meanwhile she was glad
her father had thought of saying something nice about the
art criticism in the _Decade_; he was putting it so much
better than she could, and it would do for both of them.
"You paint yourself, I fancy?" Mr. Cardiff was saying
lightly. There was no answer for an instant, or perhaps
three. Elfrida was looking down. Presently she raised
her eyes, and they were larger than ever, and wet.
"No," she said, a little tensely. "I have tried"
--"trr-hied," she pronounced it--"but--but I cannot."
Lawrence Cardiff looked at his teaspoon in a considering
way, and Janet reflected, not without indignation, that
this was the manner in which people who cared for them
might be expected to speak of the dead. But Elfrida cut
short the reflection by turning to her brightly. "When
Mr. Cardiff came in," she said, "you were telling me why
a Daudet could not write about the English. It was
something about Sapho--"
Mr. Cardiff looked up curiously, and Janet, glancing in
her father's direction, reddened. Did this strange young
woman not realize that it was impossible to discuss beings
like "Sapho" with one's father in the room? Apparently
not, for she went on: "It seems to me it is the exception
in that class, as in all classes, that rewards interest--"
That rewards interest? What might she not say next!
"Yes," interrupted Janet desperately, "but then my father
came in and changed the subject of our conversation.
Where are you living, Miss Bell?"
"Near Fleet Street," said Elfrida, rising. "I find the
locality most interesting, when I can see it. I can
patronize the Roman baths, and lunch at Dr. Johnson's
pet tavern, and attend service in the church of the real
Templars if I like. It is delightful. I did go to the
Temple Church a fortnight ago," she added, "and I saw
such a horrible thing that I am not sure that I will go
again. There is a beautiful old Crusader lying there in
stone, and on his feet a man who sat near had hung his
silk hat. And nobody interfered. Why do you laugh?"
When she had fairly gone Lawrence and Janet Cardiff looked
at each other and smiled. "Well!" cried Janet, "it's a
find, isn't it, daddy?"
Her father shrugged his shoulders. His manner said that
he was not pleased, but Janet found a tone in his voice
that told her the impression of Elfrida had not been
altogether distasteful.
"_Fin de siecle_," he said.
"Perhaps," Janet answered, looking out of the window, "a
little _fin de siecle_."
"Did you notice," asked Lawrence Cardiff, "that she didn't
tell you where she was living?"
"Didn't she? Neither she did. But we can easily find out
from John Kendal."