(Mrs. Basil de Sélincourt)
Author of 'The Little French Girl,' 'Franklin Winslow Kane,' 'Tante,' etc.
I
Three people were sitting in a small drawing-room, the windows of which
looked out upon a wintry Boston street. It was a room rather empty and
undecorated, but the idea of austerity was banished by a temperature
so nearly tropical. There were rows of books on white shelves, a pale
Donatello cast on the wall, and two fine bronze vases filled with roses on
the mantelpiece. Over the roses hung a portrait in oils, very sleek and
very accurate, of a commanding old gentleman in uniform, painted by a
well-known German painter, and all about the room were photographs of young
women, most of them young mothers, with smooth heads and earnest faces,
holding babies. Outside, the snow was heaped high along the pavements
and thickly ridged the roofs and lintels. After the blizzard the sun was
shining and all the white glittered. The national colors, to a patriotic
imagination, were pleasingly represented by the red, white and blue of the
brick houses, the snow, and the vivid sky above.
The three people who talked, with many intimate pauses of silence, were all
Bostonians, though of widely different types. The hostess, sitting in an
easy chair and engaged with some sewing, was a girl of about twenty-six.
She wore a brown skirt of an ugly cut and shade and a white silk shirt,
adorned with a high linen collar, a brown tie and an old-fashioned gold
watch-chain. Her forehead was too large, her nose too short; but her lips
were full and pleasant and when she smiled she showed charming teeth. The
black-rimmed glasses she wore emphasized the clearness and candor of her
eyes. Her thick, fair hair was firmly fastened in a group of knobs down the
back of her head. There was an element of the grotesque in her appearance
and in her careful, clumsy movements, yet, with it, a quality almost
graceful, that suggested homely and wholesome analogies,--freshly-baked
bread; fair, sweet linen; the safety and content of evening firesides. This
was Mary Colton.
The girl who sat near the window, her furs thrown back from her shoulders,
a huge muff dangling from her hand, was a few years younger and exceedingly
pretty. Her skin was unusually white, her hair unusually black, her velvety
eyes unusually large and dark. In. her attitude, lounging, graceful,
indifferent, in her delicate face, the straight, sulky brows, the coldly
closed lips, the coldly observant eyes, a sort of permanent discontent was
expressed, as though she could find, neither in herself nor in the world,
any adequate satisfaction. This was Rose Packer.
The other guest, sitting sidewise on a stiff chair, his hand hanging over
the back, his long legs crossed, was a young man, graceful, lean and
shabby. He was clean-shaven, with brown skin and golden hair, an unruly
lock lying athwart his forehead. His face, intent, alert, was veiled in
an indolent nonchalance. He looked earnest, yet capricious, staunch, yet
sensitive, and one felt that, conscious of these weaknesses, he tried to
master or to hide them.
These three had known one another since childhood. Jack's family was old
and rich; Mary's old and poor; Rose Packer's new and of fantastic wealth.
Rose was a young woman of fashion and her whole aspect seemed to repudiate
any closeness of tie between herself and Mary, who passed her time in
caring for General Colton, her invalid father, attending committees, and,
as a diversion, going to "sewing-circles" and symphony concerts; but she
was fonder of Mary than of any one else in the world. Rose, who had, as
it were, been brought up all over the world, divided her time now between
two continents and quaintly diversified her dancing, hunting, yachting
existence by the arduous study of biology. Jack, in appearance more
ambiguous than either, looked neither useful nor ornamental; but, in point
of fact, he was a much occupied person. He painted very seriously, was
something of a scholar and devoted much of his time and most of his large
fortune to intricate benevolences. His shabby clothes were assumed, like
the air of indolence; his wealth irked him and, full of a democratic
transcendentalism, he longed to efface all the signs that separated him
from the average toiler. While Rose was quite ignorant of her own country
west of the Atlantic seaboard, Jack had wandered North, South, West. As
for Mary, she had hardly left Boston in her life, except to go to the
Massachusetts coast in summer and to pay a rare visit now and then to New
York. It was of such a visit that she had been talking to them and of the
friend who, since her own return home only a few days before, had suffered
a sudden bereavement in the death of her father. Jack Pennington, also a
near friend of Imogen Upton's, had just come from New York, where he had
been with her during the mournful ceremonies of death, and Mary Colton,
after a little pause, had said, "I suppose she was very wonderful through
it all."
"She bore up very well," said Jack Pennington. "There would never be
anything selfish in her grief."
"Never. And when one thinks what a grief it is. She is wonderful," said
Mary.
"You think every one wonderful, Molly," Rose Packer remarked, not at all
aggressively, but with her air of quiet ill-temper.
"Mary's enthusiasm has hit the mark this time," said Pennington, casting a
glance more scrutinizing than severe upon the girl.
"I really can't see it. Of course Imogen Upton is pretty--remarkably
pretty--though I've always thought her nose too small; and she is certainly
clever; but why should she be called wonderful?"
"I think it is her goodness, Rose," said Mary, with an air of gentle
willingness to explain. "It's her radiant goodness. I know that Imogen has
mastered philosophies, literatures, sciences--in so far as a young and very
busy girl can master them, and that very wise men are glad to talk to her;
but it's not of that one thinks--nor of her great beauty, either. Both seem
taken up, absorbed in that selflessness, that loving-kindness, that's like
a higher kind of cleverness--almost like a genius."
"She's not nearly so good as you are, Molly. And after all, what does she
do, anyway?"
Mary kept her look of leniency, as if over the half-playful naughtinesses
of a child. "She organizes and supports all sorts of charities, all sorts
of reforms; she is the wisest, sweetest of hostesses; she takes care of her
brother; she took care of her father;--she takes care of anybody who is in
need or unhappy."
"Was Mr. Upton so unhappy? He certainly looked gloomy;--I hardly knew him;
Eddy, however, I do know, very well; he isn't in the least unhappy. He
doesn't need help."
"I think we all need help, dear. As for Mr. Upton,--you know," Mary spoke
very gravely now, "you know about Mrs. Upton."
"Of course I do, and what's better, I know her herself a little. _Elle est
charmeuse_."
"I have never seen her," said Mary, "but I don't understand how you can
call a frivolous and heartless woman, who practically deserted her husband
and children, _charmeuse_;--but perhaps that is all that one can call her."
"I like frivolous people," said Rose, "and most women would have deserted
Mr. Upton, if what I've heard of him was true."
"What have you heard of him?"
"That he was a bombastic prig."
At this Mary's pale cheek colored. "Try to remember, Rose, that he died
only a week ago."
"Oh, he may be different now, of course."
"I can't bear to hear you speak so, Rose. I did know him. I saw a great
deal of him during this last year. He was a very big person indeed."
"Of course I'm a pig to talk like this, if you really liked him, Molly."
But Mary was not to be turned aside by such ambiguous apology. "You see,
you don't know, Rose. The pleasure-seeking, worldly people among whom you
live could hardly understand a man like Mr. Upton. Simply what he did for
civic reform,--worked himself to death over it. And his books on ethics,
politics. It isn't a question of my liking him. I don't know that I ever
thought of my feeling for him in those terms. It was reverence, rather, and
gratitude for his being what he was."
"Well, dear, I do remember hearing men, and not worldly men, as you call
them, either, say that his work for civic reform amounted to very little
and that his books were thin and unoriginal. As for that community place he
founded at, where was it?--Clackville? He meddled that out of life."
"He may have been Utopian, he may have been in some ways ineffectual; but
he was a good man, a wonderful, yes, Rose, a wonderful man,"
"And do you think that Molly has hit the mark in this, too?" Rose asked,
turning her eyes on Pennington. He had been listening with an air of light
inattention and now he answered tersely, as if conquering some inner
reluctance by over-emphasis, "Couldn't abide him."
Rose laughed out, though with some surprise in her triumph; and Mary,
redder than before, rejoined in a low voice, "I didn't expect you, Jack, to
let personal tastes interfere with fair judgment."
"Oh, I'm not judging him," said Jack.
"But do you feel with me," said Rose, "that it's no wonder that Mrs. Upton
left him."
"Not in the least," Pennington replied, glad, evidently, to make clear his
disagreement. "I don't know of any reason that Mrs. Upton had for deserting
not only her husband but her children."
"But have they been left? Isn't it merely that they prefer to stay?"
"Prefer to live in their own country? among their own people? Certainly."
"But she spends part of every year with them. There was never any open
breach."
"Everybody knew that she would not live with her husband and everybody knew
why," Mary said. "It has nearly broken Imogen's heart. She left him because
he wouldn't lead the kind of life she wanted to lead--the kind of life she
leads in England--one of mere pleasure and self-indulgent ease. She hasn't
the faintest conception of duty or of patriotism. She couldn't help her
husband in any way, and she wouldn't let him help her. All she cares for is
fashion, admiration and pretty clothes."
"Stuff and nonsense, my dear! She doesn't think one bit more about her
clothes than Imogen does. It requires more thought to look like a saint in
velvet than to go to the best dressmaker and order a trousseau. I wonder
how long it took Imogen to find out that way of doing her hair."
"Rose!--I must beg of you--I love her."
"But I'm saying nothing against her!"
"When I think of what she is suffering now, what you say sounds cruelly
irreverent. Jack, I know, feels as I do."
"Yes, he does," said the young man. He got up now and stood, very tall, in
the middle of the room looking down at Mary. "I must be off. I'll bring
you those books to-morrow afternoon--though I don't see much good in your
reading d'Annunzio."
"Why, if you do, Jack?" said Mary, with some wonder. And the degree of
intimate equality in the relations of these young people may be gaged by
the fact that he appeared to receive her rejoinder as conclusive.
"Well, he's interesting, of course, and if one wants to understand modern
decadence in an all-round way--"
"I want to understand everything," said Mary. "And please bring your best
Italian dictionary with them."
"Before you go, Jack," said Rose, "pray shut the register. It's quite
stifling in here."
"Far too hot," said Jack, showing his impartiality of spirit by his
seconding of Rose's complaint, for it was evident she had much displeased
him. "I've often told you, Mary, how bad it was for you. That's why you are
so pale."
"I'm so sorry. Have you been feeling it much? Leave the door into the hall
open."
"And do cast one glance, if only of disapprobation, upon me, Jack," Rose
pleaded in mock distress.
"You are a very amusing child, Rose, sometimes," was Pennington's only
answer.
"He's evidently very cross with me," said Rose, when he was gone. "While
you are not--you who have every right to be, angelic Molly."
"I hope you didn't realize, Rose, how you were hurting him."
"I?" Rose opened wide eyes. "How, pray?"
"Don't you know that he is devoted to Imogen Upton?"
"Why, who isn't devoted to her, except wicked me?"
"Devoted in particular--in love with her, I think," said Mary.
Rose's face took on a more acutely discontented look, after the pause in
which she seemed, though unrepentantly, to acquiesce in a conviction of
ineptitude. "Really in love with her?"
"I think so; I hope so."
"How foolish of him," said Rose. Mary, at this, rested a gaze so long and
so reproachful upon her that the discontent gave way to an affectionate
compunction. "The truth is, Mary, that I'm jealous; I'm petty; I'm horrid.
I don't like sharing you. I like you to like me most, and not to find other
people wonderful."
"If you own that you are naughty, Rose, dear, and that you try hard to be
naughtier than you really are, I can't be angry with you. But it does hurt
me, for your own sake, to see you--really malicious, dear."
"Oh, dear! Am I that?"
"Really you are."
"Because I called Imogen Upton a saint in velvet?--and like her mother so
much, much more?"
"Yes, because of that--and all the rest. As for jealousy, one doesn't love
people more because they are wonderful. One is glad of them and one longs
to share them. It's one of my dearest hopes that you may come to care for
Imogen as I do--and as Jack does."
Rose listened, her head bent forward, her eyes, ambiguous in their
half-ironic, half-tender, meaning, on her friend; but she only said, "_I_
shall remain in love with you, Mary." She didn't say again, though she was
thinking it, that Jack was very foolish.