But when her mother, now Mrs. Moses Feldt, did return, Linda was
conscious of a keen disappointment. Somehow she never actually came
back. It wasn't only that, after so many years together, she occupied
a room with another than Linda, but her manner was changed; it had lost
all freedom of heart and speech. The new Mrs. Feldt was heavily polite
to her husband's daughters; Linda saw that she liked Pansy, but Judith
made her uncomfortable. She expressed this in an isolated return of the
old confidences:
“That girl,” she said sharply, “likes petting. She can talk all night
about her soul and beauty, and play the piano till her fingers drop
off, but I--I--know. You can't fool me where they are concerned. I can
recognize an unhealthy sign. I never believed in going to all those
concerts and kidding yourself into a fever. I may have shown myself a
time, but you mark my word--I was honest compared to Judith Feldt. Don't
you be impressed with all her art talk and the books she reads. I was
looking into one yesterday, and it made me blush; you can believe it or
not, it takes some book for that!”
At the same time she treated Judith with a studious sweetness. Mr. Moses
Feldt--Linda always thought of him as that--was a miracle of kindly
cheerfulness. He made his wife and her daughter, and his own girls, an
unbroken succession of elaborate and costly presents. “What's it for
if not to spend on those you love?” he would remark, bringing a small
jeweler's box wrapped in creamy-pink paper from his pocket. “You can't
take it with you. I wasn't born with it--mama and I were as poor as
any--you'll forgive me, Stella, I know, for speaking of her. I got
enough heart to love you both. 'Oh, mama!' I said, and she dying, 'if
you only won't go, I'll give you gold to eat.'”
Curiously, as Linda grew older, the consciousness of her stepfather
as an absurd fat little man dwindled; she lost all sense of his actual
person; and, as the influence of her mother slipped from her life, the
mental conception of Mr. Moses Feldt deepened. She thought about him a
great deal and very seriously; the things he said, the warm impact of
his being, vibrated in her memory. He had the effect on her of the music
of Christopher Gluck--the effect of a pure fine chord.
Pansy she now thought of with a faint contempt: she was rapidly growing
thick-waisted and heavy, and she was engaged to a dull young man not
rich enough to be interesting. They sat about in frank embraces and
indulged in a sentimental speech that united Judith and Linda in common
oppression.
There were, not infrequently, gatherings of the Feldts at dinner, a
noisy good-tempered uproar of a great many voices speaking at once;
extraordinary quantities of superlative jewels and dresses of superfine
textures; but the latter, Linda thought, were too vivid in pattern or
color for the short full maternal figures they often adorned. But no
one, it seemed, considered himself ageing or even, in spite of the most
positive indications, aged. The wives with faded but fashionable hair
and animated eyes in spent faces talked with vigorous raillery about
the “boys,” who, it might have happened, had gone in a small masculine
company to a fervid musical show the evening before. While they, in
their turn, thick like their brother or cousin Moses, with time-wasted
hair and countenances marked with the shrewdness in the service of which
the greater part of their lives had vanished, had their little jokes
about the “girls” and the younger and handsomer beaux who threatened
their happiness.
At times the topic of business crept into the lighter discussion, and,
in an instant, the gaiety evaporated and left expressionless men
and quick sharp sentences steely with decision, or indirect and
imperturbably blank. A memorandum book and a gold pencil would appear
for an enigmatic note, after which the cheerfulness slowly revived.
The daughters resembled Judith or the slower placidity of Pansy; while
there was still another sort, more vigorous in being, who consciously
discussed riding academies, the bridle-paths of Central Park, and the
international tennis. Their dress held a greater restraint than the
elders; though Linda recognized that it was no less lavish; and their
feminine trifles, the morocco beauty-cases and powder-boxes, the
shoulder-pins, their slipper and garter buckles were extravagant in
exquisite metals and workings.
They arrived in limousines with dove-colored upholstery and crystal
vases of maidenhair fern and moss-roses; and often, in such a car, Linda
went to the theatre with Judith or Pansy and some cousins. Usually it
was a matinee, where their seats were the best procurable, directly at
the stage; and they sat in a sleek expensive row eating black chocolates
from painted boxes ruffled in rose silk. The audience, composed mostly
of their own world, followed the exotic fortunes of the plays with a
complete discrimination in every possible emotional display and crisis.
Lithe actresses in a revealing severity of attire, like spoiled nuns
with carmine lips, suffering in ingenuous problems of the passions,
agonized in shuddering tones; or else they went to concerts to hear
young violinists, slender, with intense faces and dramatic hair, play
concertos that irritated Linda with little shivers of delight.
Sometimes they had lunch in a restaurant of Circassian walnut and velvet
carpets, with cocktails, and eggs elaborate with truffles and French
pastry. Then, afterward, they would stop at a confectioner's, or at a
cafe where there was dancing, for tea. They all danced in a perfection
of slow graceful abandon, with youths who, it seemed to Linda, did
nothing else.
She accepted her part in this existence as inevitable, yet she was
persistently aware of a feeling of strangeness, of essential difference
from it. She was unable to lose a sense of looking on, as if morning,
noon and night she were at another long play. Linda regarded it--as she
did so much else--with neither enthusiasm nor marked annoyance. Probably
it would continue without change through her entire life. All that was
necessary, and easily obtained, was a sufficient amount of money.
Her manner, Pansy specially complained, was not intimate and inviting;
in her room Linda usually closed the door; the frank community of the
sisters was distasteful to her. She demanded an extraordinary amount
of personal privacy. Linda never consulted Judith's opinion about her
clothes, nor exchanged the more significant aspects of feeling. Alone in
a bed-chamber furnished in silvery Hungarian ash, her bed a pale quilted
luxury with Madeira linen crusted in monograms, without head or foot
boards, and a dressing-table noticeably bare, she would deliberately and
delicately prepare for the night.
While Judith's morning bath steamed with the softness and odor of
lavender crystals, Linda slipped into water almost cold. This, with her
clear muslins and heavy black silk stockings, her narrow unornamented
slippers, represented the perfection of niceness.
There were others than Pansy, however, who commented on what they called
her superiority--the young men who appeared in the evening. A number
of them, cousins of the Feldt dinner parties or more casual, tried to
engage her sympathies in their persons and prospects. It was a society
of early maturity. But, without apparent effort, she discouraged them,
principally by her serene lack of interest. It was a fundamental part
of her understanding of things that younger men were unprofitable; she
liked far better the contemporaries of Moses Feldt.
Reynold Chase had ceased his visits, but his place had been taken by
another and still another emotionally gifted man. The present one was
dark and imperturbable: they knew little of him beyond the facts that
he had been a long while in the Orient, that his manner and French were
unsurpassed, and that practically every considerable creative talent in
New York was entertained in his rooms.
Judith had been to one of his parties; and, the following morning in
bed, she told Pansy and Linda the most remarkable things.
“It would never do for Pansy,” she concluded; “but I must get Markue to
ask you sometime, Linda. How old are you now? Well, that's practically
sixteen, and you are very grown up. You would be quite sensational, in
one of your plain white frocks, in his apartment. You'd have to promise
not to tell your mother, though. She thinks I'm leading you astray
now--the old dear. Does she think I am blind? I met a man last week,
a friend of father's, who used to know her. Of course he wouldn't say
anything, men are such idiots about that--like ostriches with their
pasts buried and all the feathers sticking out--but there was a
champagne expression in his smile.”
Linda wondered, later, if she'd care to go to a party of Markue's. There
was a great deal of drinking at such affairs; and though she rather
liked cordials, crême de thé and Grand Marnier, even stronger
things flavored with limes and an occasional frigid cocktail, she
disliked--from a slight experience--men affected by drink. Judith had
called her a constitutional prude; this, she understood, was a term of
reproach; and she wondered if, applied to her, it were just.
Usually it meant a religious person or one fussy about the edge of her
skirt; neither of which she ever considered. She didn't like to sit in
a corner and be hugged--even that she could now assert with a degree
of knowledge--but it wasn't because she was shocked. Nothing, she told
herself gravely, shocked her; only certain acts and moments annoyed her
excessively. It was as if her mind were a crisp dress with ribbons which
she hated to have mussed or disarranged.
Linda didn't take the trouble to explain this. Now that her mother had
withdrawn from her into a perpetual and uncomfortable politeness she
confided in no one. She would have been at a loss to put her complicated
sensations and thoughts into words. Mr. Moses Feldt, the only one to
whom she could possibly talk intimately, would be upset by her feelings.
He would give her a hug and the next day bring up a new present from his
pocket.
Her clothes, with the entire support of Lorice, were all delicate
in fabric, mostly white with black sashes, and plainly ruffled. She
detested the gray crepe de Chine from which Judith's undergarments were
made and the colored embroidery of Pansy's; while she ignored scented
toilet-waters and extracts. Markue, in finally asking her to a party at
his rooms, said that there she would resemble an Athenian marble, of the
un-painted epoch, in the ballet of Scheherazade.