On Saturday Eileen had her first glimpse of the Hudson. That evening
the Ramsays called, and then ... Aladdin’s lamp was relegated to the
attic along with the other wonders that had survived their day of
glory. New York was the real fairy land. From the hippopotamus in
the Bronx to the hippocampus in Battery Park, the girl saw it all.
Sometimes with Judith, more often with Laura Ramsay or her mother,
she went from elevated to subway, from the amusing little cross-town
horse-cars that were more primitive even than Springdale, to the
thrilling taxicab and the Fifth Avenue bus, with a zest that whetted
the jaded appetites of the women for whom the city had long since lost
its novelty.
After two weeks she decided that she had taken in all the impressions
she could hold, and settled down to her music in earnest. There were
daily letters from her father, empty because of that fullness he dared
not express. Twice a week Theodora wrote--exhaustive discourses on the
city, which her imagination rendered more real than reality itself.
There were letters, long or brief, to Lary from Lavinia, with never a
mention of Eileen. The girl wrote four times to her mother, and then
her spirit revolted.
“She can go to grass before I’ll ever know she’s on earth. I suppose
she’s afraid of contaminating herself. I’d like to tell her there are
some thinking people--people whose opinions count--who don’t consider
it half as immoral to go to the devil with the man you believe you
love--as it is to bear six children for the man you know you hate.”
“Dearest, don’t do it,” Judith pleaded. “You must not stir up all
that rancour in your soul. Remember what you are stamping on the mind
and character of the child I am going to call my own. You owe it to
me--not to make my burden too hard. And, Eileen, your mother is no more
responsible for her limitations than you are for yours. She was brought
up to a belief that there is something supernatural in a marriage
certificate. Morality is wholly a matter of external forms. And she has
the clear advantage of standing with the majority.”
“Yes, she always grabs a front seat in the bandwagon. If it ever gets
popular to run off with some other woman’s husband--you’ll find her in
the procession. No! you won’t find her. She’s too set in her ideas for
that. But after the way she cottoned to Mrs. Nims--when it suited her
purpose--and other swells in Springdale--” She choked, her face growing
scarlet. “I hope I’ll never be intolerant.”
Judith sensed the thought that had flared up in the girl’s mind, from
which she had retrieved herself in a swift change of subject. Ignoring
Mrs. Trench’s reason for that first neighbourly call on Adelaide
Nims, after her return from Bromfield, she fell back on the nature of
toleration.
“My dear, don’t you know that you are just as intolerant of your
mother as she is of you--that you are like her, when you justify to
yourself the thing you want to do--and spare your lacerated feelings,
when things go wrong, by finding flaws to pick in some other person’s
conduct?”
Eileen hung her head. From infancy she had been branded as a Trench.
And now it shamed her to be told that she resembled her mother, her
mother in whom she could see nothing but bourgeois complacence. After a
moment she said:
“You always get the nub of it, Judith. How can you see the inside of
things so quick? I can work a thing out, when once I get a good grip on
an idea. I guess I’m like mamma there, too. Only--Lary says you have
to be careful what ideas you give her--because she’s like as not to
apply them upside down. I suppose there’s only one thing for me to do.
I’ll have to take myself apart and see what my inner works are like.
You shan’t have any such vixen as I was, to take care of. I clawed Dr.
Schubert in the eye before I was an hour old. It wasn’t an accident,
either. I was just naturally vicious. It was because mamma had put in
a whole winter hating me and papa and the fool Creator who put all the
burden of bearing children on the wife. At least I haven’t any such
feeling as that. I don’t even blame--” Her cheeks crimsoned again. “I
don’t blame any one but myself.”
There were other serious talks, touching the deep hidden things of
life; but as the autumn passed these became more and more impersonal.
Once a week Eileen went to visit the Ramsays at Rye, usually on
Saturday when she could spend the night, and Laura’s mother saw to it
that the violin was never left at home. In the suburban town, young
Mrs. Winthrop was an immediate social success.