I
A black bang was, but not ultimately, the most notable feature of her
uncommon personality--straight and severe and dense across her clear
pale brow and eyes. Her eyes were the last thing to remember and wonder
about; in shade blue, they had a velvet richness, a poignant intensity
of lovely color, that surprised the heart. Aside from that she was slim,
perhaps ten years old, and graver than gay.
Her mother was gay for them both, and, therefore, for the entire family.
No father was in evidence; he was dead and never spoken of, and Linda
was the only child. Linda's dresses, those significant trivialities,
plainly showed two tendencies--the gaiety of her mother and her own
always formal gravity. If Linda appeared at dinner, in the massive
Renaissance materialism of the hotel dining-room, with a preposterous
magenta hair-ribbon on her shapely head, her mother had succeeded in
expressing her sense of the appropriately decorative; while if Linda
wore an unornamented but equally “unsuitable” frock of dark velvet, she,
in her turn, had been vindicated.
Again, but far more rarely, the child's selection was evident on the
woman. As a rule Mrs. Condon garbed her flamboyant body in large and
expensive patterns or extremely tailored suits; and of the two, the
evening satins and powdered arms barely retaining an admissible line,
and the suits, the latter were the most, well--spectacular.
She was not dark in color but brightly golden; a gold, it must be said
in all honesty, her own, a metallic gold crisply and solidly marcelled;
with hazel-brown eyes, and a mouth which, set against her daughter's
deep-blue gaze, was her particular attraction. It was rouged to a
nicety, the under lip a little full and never quite against the upper.
If Linda's effect was cool and remote, Mrs. Condon, thanks to her
mouth, was reassuringly imminent. She was, too, friendly; she talked to
women--in her not overfrequent opportunities--in a rapid warm inaccurate
confession of almost everything they desired to hear. The women, of
course, were continually hampered by the unfortunate fact that
the questions nearest their hearts, or curiosity, were entirely
inadmissible.
Viewed objectively, they all, with the exception of Linda, seemed alike;
but that might have been due to their common impressive setting. The
Boscombe, in its way, was as lavish as Mrs. Condon's dresses. The main
place of congregation, for instance, was a great space of white marble
columns, Turkey-red carpet and growing palms. It was lighted at night
indirectly by alabaster bowls hanging on gilded chains--a soft bright
flood of radiance falling on the seated or slowly promenading women with
bare shoulders.
Usually they were going with a restrained sharp eagerness toward the
dining-room or leaving it in a more languid flushed repletion. There
were, among them, men; but somehow the men never seemed to be of the
least account. It was a women's paradise. The glow from above always
emphasized the gowns, the gowns like orchids and tea-roses and the
leaves of magnolias. It sparkled in the red and green and crystal
jewels like exotic dew scattered over the exotic human flowers. Very
occasionally there was a complacent or irritable masculine utterance,
and then it was immediately lost in the dominant feminine sibilance.
Other children than Linda sped in the manner of brilliant fretful tops
literally on the elaborate outskirts of the throng; but they were as
different from her as she was from the elders. Indeed Linda resembled
the latter, rather than her proper age, remarkably. She had an air of
responsibility, sometimes expressed in a troubled frown, and again by
the way she hurried sedately through drifting figures toward a definite
purpose and end.
Usually it was in the service of one of her mother's small innumerable
requests or necessities; if the latter were sitting with a gentleman on
the open hotel promenade that overlooked the sea and needed a heavier
wrap, Linda returned immediately with a furred cloak on her arm; if the
elder, going out after dinner, had brought down the wrong gloves, Linda
knew the exact wanted pair in the long perfumed box; while countless
trifles were needed from the convenient drug-store.
The latter was a place of white mosaic floor and glittering glass, with
a marble counter heaped with vivid fruit and silver-covered bowls of
sirups and creams with chopped nuts. Linda often found time to stop here
for a delectable glass of assorted sweet compounds. She was on terms of
intimacy with the colored man in a crisp linen coat who presided over
the refreshments, and he invariably gave her an extra spoonful of the
marron paste she preferred. When at lunch, it might be, she cared for
very little, her mother would complain absently:
“You must stop eating those sickening mixtures. They'd ruin any skin.”
At this she invariably found the diminutive mirror in the bag on her
lap and glanced at her own slightly improved color. The burden of the
feminine conversations in which Mrs. Condon was privileged to join,
Linda discovered, was directed toward these overwhelming considerations
of appearance. And their importance, communicated to her, resulted in
a struggle between the desire to preserve her skin from ruin and the
seductions of marron paste and maple chocolates.
Now, with an uncomfortable sense of impending disaster, she would
hastily consume one or the other; again, supported by a beginning
self-imposed inflexibility, she would turn steadily away from
temptation. In the end the latter triumphed; and her normal appetite,
always moderate, was unimpaired.
This spirit of resolution, it sometimes happened, was a cause of
humorous dismay to her mother. “I declare, Linda,” she would observe
with an air of helplessness, “you make me feel like the giddy one and
as if you were mama. It's the way you look, so disapproving. I have to
remind myself you're only--just how old are you? I keep forgetting.”
Linda would inform her exactly and the other sigh:
“The years slip around disgustingly. It seems only yesterday I was at
my first party.” Usually, in spite of Linda's eagerness to hear of that
time when her mother was a girl, the elder would stop abruptly. On rare
occasions solitary facts emerged from the recalled existence of a
small town in the country. There were such details as buggy-riding
and prayer-meetings and excursions to a Boiling Springs where the
dancing-floor, open among the trees, was splendid. At these memories
Mrs. Condon had been known to cry.
But she would recover shortly. Her emotions were like that--easily
roused, highly colored and soon forgotten. She forgot, Linda realized
leniently, a great deal. It wasn't safe to rely on her promises.
However, if she neglected a particular desire of Linda's, she
continually brought back unexpected gifts of candy, boxes of silk
stockings, or lovely half-wilted flowers.
The flowers, they discovered, although they stayed fresh for a long
while pinned to Linda's slim waist, died almost at once if worn by her
mother. “It's my warm nature, I am certain,” the latter proclaimed to
her daughter; “while you are a little refrigerator. I must say it's
wonderful how you keep your clothes the same. Neat as a pin.” Somehow,
with this commendation, she managed to include a slight uncomplimentary
impatience. Linda didn't specially want to resemble a pin, a
disagreeable object with a sharp point. She considered this in the long
periods when, partly by preference, she was alone.
Seated, perhaps, in the elaborate marble and deep red of the Boscombe's
reception-rooms, isolated in the brilliant expensive throng, she would
speculate over what passed in the light of her own special problems. But
nothing, really, came out to her satisfaction. There was, notably, no
one she might ask. Her mother, approached seriously, declared that Linda
gave her the creeps; while others made it plain that it was their duty
to repress the forwardness inevitable from the scandalous neglect of her
upbringing.
They, the women of the Boscombe, glancing at their finger-nails stained
and buffed to a shining pale vermilion, lightly rubbing their rings on
the dry palm of a hand, wondered pessimistically within Linda's hearing
what could come out of such an association. That term, she vaguely
gathered, referred to her mother. The latter evidently interested them
tremendously; because, she explained, they had no affairs of their
own to attend to. This was perfectly clear to Linda until Mrs. Condon
further characterized them as “busy.”
The women, stopped by conventions from really satisfactory investigation
at the source, drew her on occasion into a laboriously light
inquisition. How long would Linda and her mama stay at the Boscombe? Had
they closed their apartment? Where was it? Hadn't Mrs. Condon mentioned
Cleveland? Wasn't Linda lonely with her mama out so much--they even said
late--in rolling chairs? Had she ever seen Mr. Jasper before his arrival
last week?
No, of course she hadn't.
Here they exchanged skeptical glances beneath relentlessly pulled
eyebrows. He was really very nice, Mr. Jasper. Linda in a matter-of-fact
voice replied that he had given her a twenty-dollar gold piece. Mr.
Jasper was very generous. But perhaps he had rewarded her for being a
good little girl and not--not bothering or hanging about. “Why should
he?” was Linda's just perceptibly impatient response. Then they told her
to be quiet because they wanted to listen to the music.
This consisted in studying, through suspended glasses in chased
platinum, a discreet programme. At the end of a selection they either
applauded condescendingly or told each other that they hadn't cared for
that last--really too peculiar. Whichever happened, the leader of the
small orchestra, an extravagant Italian with a supple waist, turned and
bowed repeatedly with a grimacing smile. The music, usually Viennese,
was muted and emotional; its strains blended perfectly with the floating
scents of the women and the faintly perceptible pungent odors of dinner.
Every little while a specially insinuating melody became, apparently,
tangled in the women's breathing, and their breasts, cunningly traced
and caressed in tulle, would be disturbed.
Mrs. Condon applauded more vigorously than was sanctioned by the others'
necessity for elegance; the frank clapping of her pink palms never
failed to betray a battery of affected and significant surprise in eyes
like--polished cold agates. Linda, seated beside her parent, could be
seen to lay a hand, narrow and blanched and marked by an emerald, on
the elder's knee. Her pale fine lips moved rapidly with the shadow of
trouble beneath the intense black bang.
“I wish you wouldn't do it so loudly, mother,” was what she whispered.