Shortly afterward Elfrida read Mr. Pater's "Marius," with
what she herself called, somewhat extravagantly, a "hungry
and hopeless" delight. I cannot say that this Oxonian's
tender classical recreation had any critical effect upon
her; she probably found it much too limpid and untroubled
to move her in the least. I mention it by way of saying
that Lawrence Cardiff lent it to her, with a smile of
half-indulgent, half-contemptuous assent to some of her
ideas, which was altered, when she returned the volumes,
by the active necessity of defending his own. Elfrida
had been accepted at the Cardiffs, with the ready tolerance
which they had for types that were remarkable to them,
and not entirely disagreeable; though Janet was always
telling her father that it was impossible that Elfrida
should be a type--she was an exception of the most
exceptionable sort. "I'll admit her to be abnormal, if
you like," Cardiff would return, "but only from an insular
point of view. I dare say they grow that way in Illinois."
But that was in the early stages of their acquaintance
with Miss Bell, which ripened with unprecedented rapidity
for an acquaintance in Kensington Square. It was before
Janet had taken to walking across the gardens with Elfrida
in the half-hour between tea-time and dressing for dinner,
when the two young women, sometimes under dripping
umbrellas, would let the right omnibus follow the wrong
one toward Fleet Street twice and thrice in their
disinclination to postpone what they had to say to each
other. It was also before Elfrida's invasion of the
library and fee-simple of the books, and before she had
said there many things that were original, some that were
impertinent, and a few that were true. The Cardiffs
discussed her less freely as the weeks went on--a sure
sign that she was becoming better liked, accepted less
as a phenomenon, and more as a friend. There grew up in
Janet the beginnings of the strong affection which she
felt for a very few people, an affection which invariably
mingled itself with a lively desire to bestir herself on
their account, to be fully informed as to their
circumstances, and above all to possess relations of
absolute directness with them. She had an imperious
successful strain which insisted upon all this. She was
a capable creature of much perception for twenty-four,
and she had a sense of injury when for any reason she
was not allowed to use her faculties for the benefit of
any one she liked in a way which excited the desire to
do it. Janet had to reproach herself, when she thought
of it, that this sort of liking seldom came by entirely
approved channels, and hardly ever found an object in
her visiting-list. Its first and almost its only essential,
to speak boldly, was an artistic susceptibility with some
sort of relation to her own, which her visiting-list did
not often supply, though it might have been said to
overflow with more widely recognized virtues. For that
Miss Cardiff was known to be willing to sacrifice the
Thirty-nine Articles, respectable antecedents, the
possession of a dress-coat. Her willingness was the more
widely known because in the circle which fate had drawn
around her--ironically, she sometimes thought--it was
not usual to sacrifice these things. As for Janet's own
artistic susceptibility, it was a very private atmosphere
of her soul. She breathed it, one might say, only
occasionally, and with a kind of delicious shame. She
was incapable of sharing her caught-up felicity there
with any one, but it was indispensable that she should
see it sometimes in the eyes of others less contained,
less conscious, whose sense of humor might be more slender
perhaps. Her own nature was practical and managing in
its ordinary aspect, and she had a degree of tact that
was always interfering with her love of honesty. Having
established a friendship by the arbitrary law of sympathy,
it must be admitted that she had an instinctive way of
trying to strengthen it by voluntary benefits, for
affection was a great need with her.
It was only about this time and very gradually that she
began to realize how much more she cared for John Kendal
than for other people. Since it seemed to be obvious
that Kendal gave her only a share of the affectionate
interest he had for humanity at large, the realization
was not wholly agreeable, and Janet doubtless found
Elfrida, on this account, even a more valuable distraction
than she otherwise would. One of the matters Miss Bell
was in the habit of discussing with some vivacity was
the sexlessness of artistic sympathy. Upon this subject
Janet found her quite inspired. She made a valiant effort
to illumine her thoughts of Kendal by the light Elfrida
threw upon such matters, and although she had to confess
that the future was still hid in embarrassed darkness,
she did manage to construct a theory by which it was
possible to grope along for the present. She also cherished
a hope that this trouble would leave her, as a fever
abates in the night, that she would awake some morning,
if she only had patience, strong and well. In other things
Miss Cardiff, was sometimes jarred rather than shocked
by the American girl's mental attitudes, which, she began
to find, were not so posed as her physical ones. Elfrida
often left her repelled and dissenting. The dissent she
showed vigorously; the repulsion she concealed, sore with
herself because of the concealment. But she could not
lose Elfrida, she told herself; and besides, it was only
a matter of a little tolerance--time and life would change
her, tone her inner self down into the something altogether
exquisite and perfect that she was, to look at, now.
Elfrida called the Cardiffs' house the oasis of Kensington,
and valued her privileges there more than she valued
anything else in the circumstances about her, except,
perhaps, the privilege she had enjoyed in making the
single contribution, to the _Decade_ of which we know.
That was an event lustrous in her memory, the more lustrous
because it remained solitary and when the editor's check
made its tardy appearance she longed to keep it as a
glorious archive--glorious that is to say, in suggestion,
if not particularly impressive intrinsically. In the end
she fought the temptation of giving herself a dinner a
day for a fortnight out of it, and bought a slender gold
bangle with the money, which she slipped upon her wrist
with a resolution to keep it there always. It must be
believed that her personal decoration did not enter
materially into this design; the bangle was an emblem of
one success and an earnest of others. She wore it as she
might have worn a medal, except that a medal was a public
voice, and the little gold hoop spoke only to her.
After the triumph that the bangle signified Elfrida felt
most satisfaction in what was constantly present to her
mind as her conquest of the Cardiffs. She measured its
importance by their value. Her admiration for Janet's
work in the beginning had been as sincere as her emulation
of its degree of excellence had been passionate, and
neither feeling had diminished with their intimacy. In
Lawrence Cardiff she felt vaguely the qualities that made
him a marked man among his fellows, his intellectual
breadth and keenness, his poise of brain, if one might
call it so, and the _habilete_ with which, without
permitting it to be part of his character, he sometimes
allowed himself to charm even people of whom he disapproved.
These things were indeterminately present to her, and
led her often to speculate as to how it was that Mr.
Cardiff's work expressed him so little. It seemed to her
that the one purpose of a personality like his was its
expression--otherwise one might as well be of the ruck.
"You write with your intellectual faculties," she said to
him once; "your soul is curiously dumb." But that was later.
The plane of Elfrida's relations with Janet altered
gradually, one might say, from the inclined, with Elfrida
on her knees at the lower end, to the horizontal. It
changed insensibly enough, through the freemasonry of
confessed and unconfessed ideals, through growing
attraction, through the feeling they shared, though only
Janet voiced it, that there was nothing but the
opportunities and the experience of four years between
them, that in the end Elfrida would do better, stronger,
more original work than she. Elfrida was so much more
original a person, Janet declared to herself, so--and
when she hesitated for this word she usually said
"enigmatical." The answer to the enigma, Janet was sure,
would be written large in publishers' advertisements one
day. In the meantime, it was a vast satisfaction to Janet
to be, as it were, behind the enigma, to consider it with
the privileges of intimacy. These young women felt their
friendship deeply, in their several ways. It held for
them all sacredness and honor and obligation. For Elfrida
it had an intrinsic beauty and interest, like a curio
--she had half a dozen such curios in the museum of her
friends--and for Janet it added something to existence
that was not there before, more delightful and important
than a mere opportunity of expansion. The time came
speedily when it would have been a positive pain to either
of them to hear the other discussed, however favorably.