A MENTAL PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY.
After Helen left, Hermia went up to her room. There she did what she
never failed to do the moment she entered her bedroom—walked over to
the glass and looked at herself. She had not even yet got used to the
idea of her beauty, and sometimes approached the mirror with dread lest
her new self should prove a dream. She saw nothing to alarm her. A
year’s dissipation had not impaired her looks. Excitement and good
living agreed with her, and Miss Newton tyrannized over her like the
hygienic duenna that she was.
She sank down on the floor before the long glass, resting her elbow on a
cushion. Her crouching attitude reminded her of the women whose lines
had fallen in days of barbaric splendor. It is not to be supposed for a
moment that this effect was accidental. Hermia had determined, before
she burst upon New York, that her peculiar individuality should be the
suggestion of the untrammeled barbarian held in straining leash by the
requirements of civilization. Her green eyes and tawny hair were the
first requisites, and she managed her pliant body with a lithe grace
which completed the semblance.
She wore to-day a tea-gown of Louis XIV. brocade and lace, and she
watched herself with an amused smile. A year and a half ago her wardrobe
had consisted of coarse serges and gingham aprons.
She put her head on the cushion, nestled her body into the feather rug,
and in a vague, indolent way let her memory rove through the little
photograph gallery in her brain set apart for the accumulations of the
past twelve months. There were a great many photographs in that gallery,
and their shapes and dimensions were as diverse as their subjects. Some
were so large that they swept from floor to ceiling, although their
surface might reflect but one impression; others were too small to catch
the eye of the casual observer, and the imprint on them was like one
touch of a water-colorist’s brush. Many pasteboards of medium size were
there whose surfaces were crowded like an ant-hill at sundown; and
pushed into corners or lying under a dust-heap were negatives,
undeveloped and fading. At one end of the gallery was a great square
plate, and on it there was no impression of any sort, nor ever had been.
Hermia pushed up her loose sleeve and pressed her face into the warm
bend of her arm. On the whole, the past year had been almost
satisfactory. A clever brain, an iron will, and a million dollars can do
much, and that much Hermia’s combined gifts had accomplished.
She opened the windows of her photograph gallery and dusted out the
cobwebs, then, beginning at the top, sauntered slowly down. She looked
at her first appearance in the world of fashion. It is after the
completion of her winter’s wardrobe by a bevy of famous tailors, and she
wears a gown of light-gray cloth and a tiny bonnet of silvery birds. The
début is in St. Mark’s; and as she walks up the center aisle to the
Suydam pew, her form as straight as a young sapling, her head haughtily
yet nonchalantly poised, every curve of her glove-fitting gown
proclaiming the hand that cut it, Second Avenue catches its breath,
raises its eyebrows, and exchanges glances of well-bred, aristocratic
surprise. Late that week it calls, and this time is not repulsed, but
goes away enchanted. It does not take long for the unseen town crier to
flit from Second Avenue to Fifth, and one day his budget of news sends a
ripple over the central stream. John Suydam’s heiress, a beautiful girl
of twenty, with a style all her own, yet not violating a law of good
form! The old red-brick house transformed into an enchanted palace, with
a remarkably wide-awake princess, and a sacrifice to modern proprieties
in the shape of a New England aunt! How unusual and romantic! yet all as
it should be. We begin to remember poor Crosby Suydam and his charming
young wife. We recall the magnificence of their entertainments in the
house on lower Fifth Avenue—now resplendent with a milliner’s sign.
Both dead? How sad! And to think that John Suydam had a million all the
time! The old wretch! But how enchanting that he had the decency to
leave it to this beautiful girl! We will call.
They do call; and a distant relative of Hermia’s father, Mrs. Cotton
Dykman, comes forward with stately tread and gracious welcome and offers
her services as social sponsor. Hermia accepts the offer with gratitude,
and places her brougham at Mrs. Dykman’s disposal.
Mrs. Dykman is a widow approaching fifty, with lagging steps yet haughty
mien. Her husband omitted to leave her more than a competence; but she
lives in Washington Square in a house which was her husband’s
grandfather’s, and holds her head so high and wears so much old lace and
so many family diamonds (which she hid in the wall during the late
Cotton’s lifetime) that the Four Hundred have long since got into the
habit of forgetting her bank account. To her alone does Hermia confide
the secret of her past external self and the methods of reconstruction,
and Mrs. Dykman respects her ever after.
In a photograph near the head of the gallery Hermia and Mrs. Dykman are
seated by the library fire, and Hermia is discoursing upon a question
which has given her a good deal of thought.
“I want to be a New York society woman to my finger-tips,” she exclaims,
sitting forward in her chair; “that is, I want to be _au fait_ in every
particular. I would not for the world be looked upon as an alien; but at
the same time I want to be a distinctive figure in it. I want to be
aggressively _myself_. The New York girl is of so marked a type, Aunt
Frances, that you would know one if you met her in a Greek bandit’s
cave. She is unlike anything else on the face of the earth. You cross
the river to Brooklyn, you travel an hour and a half to Philadelphia,
you do not see a woman who faintly resembles her unless she has been
imported direct. The New York girl was never included in the scheme of
creation. When the combined forces of a new civilization and the
seven-leagued stride of democracy made her a necessity, Nature fashioned
a mold differing in shape and tint from all others in her storehouse,
and cast her in it. It is locked up in a chest and kept for her
exclusive use. The mold is made of ivory, and the shape is long and
straight and exceeding slim. There is a slight roundness about the bust,
and a general neatness and trimness which are independent of attire. And
each looks carefully fed and thoroughly groomed. Each has brightness in
her eye and elasticity in her step. And through the cheek of each the
blood flows in exactly the same red current about a little white island.
Now all this is very charming, but then she lacks—just a
little—individuality. And I _must_ have my distinctive personality.
There seems nothing left but to be eccentric. Tell me what line to
take.”
Mrs. Dykman, who has been listening with a slight frown on her brow and
a smile on her lips, replies in her low, measured accents, which a
cataclysm could not accelerate nor sharpen: “My dear, before I answer
your amusing tirade, let me once more endeavor to impress you with the
importance of repose. You may be as beautiful and as original as your
brains and will can make you, but without repose of manner you will be
like an unfinished impressionist daub. Few American women have it unless
they have lived in England; but I want you to take coals to Newcastle
when you make your début in London society.
“In regard to the other question,” she continues, “experience and
observation and thirty years of that treadmill we call society have
taught me a good many things. One of these things is that eccentricity
is the tacit acknowledgment of lack of individuality. A person with
native originality does not feel the necessity of forcing it down
people’s throats. The world finds it out soon enough, and likes it in
spite of its own even pace and sharply defined creeds. That is, always
provided the originality wears a certain conventional garb: if you would
conquer the world, you must blind and humor it by donning its own
portable envelope. Do you understand what I mean, my dear? You must not
startle people by doing eccentric things; you must not get the
reputation of being a _poseuse_—it is vulgar and tiresome. You must
simply be quietly different from everybody else. There is a fine but
decided line, my dear girl, between eccentricity and individuality, and
you must keep your lorgnette upon it. Otherwise, people will laugh at
you, just as they will be afraid of you if they discover that you are
clever. By the way, you must not forget that last point. The average
American woman is shallow, with an appearance of cleverness. You must be
clever, with an appearance of shallowness. To the ordinary observer the
effect is precisely the same.”
She rises to her feet and adjusts her bonnet. “It is growing late and I
must go. Think over what I have said. You have individuality enough; you
need not fear that people will fail to find it out; and you assuredly do
not look like any one else in New York.”
Hermia stands up and gives Mrs. Dykman’s tournure a little twist. “You
are a jewel, Aunt Frances. What should I do without you?”
Whereupon Mrs. Dykman looks pleased and goes home in Hermia’s brougham.
Hermia is fairly launched in society about the first of January, and
goes “everywhere” until the end of the season. It gets to be somewhat
monotonous toward the end, but, on the whole, she rather likes it. She
is what is called a success; that is to say, she becomes a professional
beauty, and is much written about in the society papers. She receives a
great many flowers, constant and assiduous attention at balls, and her
dancing is much admired. She gets plenty of compliments, and is much
stared upon at the opera and when driving in the park. Her reception
days and evenings are always crowded, and her entertainments—supervised
by Mrs. Dykman and a valuable young man named Richard Winston—are
pronounced without flaw, and receive special mention in the dailies.
And yet—Hermia rubbed her fingers thoughtfully up and down several of
the pictures as if to make their figures clearer—in her heart she did
not deem herself an unqualified success. Men ran after her—but because
she was the fashion, not because they loved her.
During that first winter and the ensuing season at Newport, she had a
great many proposals, but with two or three exceptions she believed them
to have been more or less interested. She did not seem to “take” with
men. This had angered her somewhat; she had expected to conquer the
world, and she did not like obstacles.
She had an odd and voluptuous beauty, she had brain and all the
advantages of unique and charming surroundings, and she flattered men
when she remembered that it was the thing to do. Was it because the men
felt rather than knew that they did not understand her? Or was it
because she did not understand them? She was keenly aware of her lack of
experience, and that her knowledge of men was chiefly derived from
books. And wherein she was right and wherein wrong she could not tell.
She shrugged her shoulders. “I suppose experience will come with time,”
she thought, “and I certainly have not much to wish for—if—only—”
She clasped her hands behind her head and turned her mental eyeglass
upon the unused plate at the head of the gallery.
When the news of her good fortune had come, her heart’s first leap had
been toward the lover who awaited her in the world thrown at her feet.
That lover, that hero of her dream-world, she had not found.
Occasionally she had detected a minor characteristic in some man, and by
it been momentarily attracted. In no case had the characteristic been
supplemented by others; and after a long and eager search she had
resigned herself to the painful probability that ideals belonged to the
realm of the immaterial.
But, if she had sighed farewell to the faithful and much-enduring hero
of her years of adversity, she had by no means relinquished the idea of
loving. Few women had ever tried more determinedly and more persistently
to love, and few had met with less success. She had imagined that in a
world of men a woman’s only problem must be whom to choose. It had not
taken her a year to discover that it is easier to scratch the earth from
its molten heart than to love.
She sprang to her feet and walked up and down the room with swift,
impatient steps. Was she never to be happy? never to know the delights
of love, the warmth of a man’s caress, the sudden, tumultuous bursting
from their underground fastness of the mighty forces within her? Was she
to go through life without living her romance, without knowing the
sweet, keen joy of hidden love? Would she end by marrying a club-room
epigram flavored with absinthe, and settle down to a light or lurid
variation on Bessie’s simple little theme? She laughed aloud. Perhaps it
need not be stated that a year of fashionable life had increased her
contempt for matrimony.
Was Ogden Cryder the man? An author, yet a man of the world; a man of
intellect, yet with fascination and experience of women. It sounded
like! It sounded like! Oh! if he were! He might have flaws. He might be
the polaric opposite of her ideal. Let him! If he had brain and passion,
skill and sympathy, she would love him with every fiber of her being,
and thank him on her knees for compelling her so to do.
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