Linda admitted, definitely, the loss of her youth; and yet a stubborn
inner conviction remained that she was unchanged. In this she had for
support her appearance; practically she was as freshly and gracefully
pale as the girl who had married Arnaud Hallet. Even Vigné, with
indelible traces of her motherhood, had faint lines absent from Linda's
flawless countenance. Her children, and Arnaud, were immensely proud of
her beauty; it had become a part--in the form of her ridiculously young
air--of the family conversational resources. She was increasingly aware
of its supreme significance to her.
One of her few certainties had been the discovery that, while small
truths might be had from others, all that intimately and deeply
concerned her was beyond questioning and advice. The importance of her
attractiveness, for example, which seemed the base of her entire being,
was completely out of accord with the accepted standard of values
for middle-aged women. Other things, called moral and spiritual, she
inferred, should take up her days and thoughts. There was a course of
discipline--exactly like exercises in the morning--for the preparation
of the willingness to die.
But such an attitude was eternally beyond her; she repudiated it with
a revolt stringing every nerve indignantly tense. She had had, on the
whole, singularly little from life but her fine body; it had always been
the temple and altar of her service, and no mere wordy reassurance could
now repay her for its swift or gradual destruction. The latter, except
for accident, would be her fate; she was remarkably sound. In her social
adventures, the balls to which, without Arnaud, she occasionally went,
she was morbid in her sensitive dread of discovering, through a waning
admiration, that she was faded.
It would be impossible to spend more care on her person than she had in
the past; but that was unrelenting. Linda was inexorable in her demands
on the establishments that made her suits and dresses. The slightest
imperfection of fit exasperated her; and she regarded the endless change
of fashions with contempt. This same shifting, she observed, occurred
not only in women's clothes but in the women themselves.
Linda remembered her mother, eternal in gaiety, but very obviously
different from her in states of mind affecting her appearance. She was
unable to define the change; but it was unmistakable--Stella Condon
seemed a little old-fashioned. When now, to Lowrie's wife, Linda was
unmistakably out-of-date. Lowrie, fast accomplishing all that had been
predicted for him, had married a girl incomprehensible to his mother.
Observing this later feminine development she had the baffled feeling of
inspecting a creature of a new order.
To Linda, Jean Tynedale, now a Hallet, seemed harder than ever her own
famous coldness had succeeded in being. This came mostly from Jean's
imposing education; there had been, in addition to the politest of
finishing schools, college--a woman's concern, Bryn Mawr--and then
post-graduate honors in a noteworthy university. She was entirely
addressed, in a concrete way, to the abstract problems of social
progress and hygiene; and, under thirty, the animating spirit, as well
as financial support, of an incredible number of Settlements and allied
undertakings. She spoke crisply before civic and other clubs; even, in
the interest of suffrage, addressing nondescript audiences from a box on
the street.
But it was her unperturbed dissection of the motives of sex, the
denouncement of a criminal mysterious ignorance, that most daunted
Linda. She listened to Jean with a series of distinct shocks to her
sense of propriety. What she had agreed to consider a nameless attribute
of women, or, if anything more exact, the power of their charm over men,
the other defined in unequivocal scientific terms. She understood
every impulse veiled for Linda in a reticence absolutely needful to its
appeal.
This, of course, the elder distrusted; just as she had no approval for
Jean's public activities. Linda didn't like public women; her every
instinct cried for a fine seclusion, fine in the meaning of an
appropriate setting for feminine distinction, the magic of dress and cut
roses. Her private inelegant word for Lowrie's wife was “bold;” indeed,
describing to herself the younger woman's patronage of her bearing, she
descended to her mother's colloquialism “brass.”
She thought this sitting at a dinner-table which held Vigné and her
husband and Lowrie and Jean Hallet. Arnaud, drawing life from the
vitality of an atmosphere charged with youth, was unflagging in splendid
spirits and his valorous wit. Jean would never inspire the affection
Arnaud had given her; nor the passion that, in Pleydon, had burned unfed
even by hope.
Her thoughts slipped away from the present to the sculptor. Three years
had vanished since she had gone with an intention of finality to his
apartment, and in that time he had neither been in their house nor
written. Linda had expected this; she was without the desire to see
or hear from him. Dodge Pleydon was finished for her; as a man, a
potentiality, he had departed from her life. He was a piece with her
memories, the triumphs of her young days. Without an actual knowledge of
the moment of its accomplishment she had passed over the border of that
land, leaving it complete and fair and radiant for her lingering view.
Whether or not she had been happy was now of no importance; the magic
of its light showed only a garden and a girl in white with a black bang
against her blue eyes.
The bang, the blueness of gaze, were still hers; but, only this
morning, brush in hand, the former had offered less resistance in its
arrangement; it was thinner, and the color perceptibly not so dense. At
this, with a chill edge of fear, she had determined to go at once to
her hairdresser; no one, neither Arnaud, who loved its luster, nor an
unsympathetic bold scrutiny, a scrutiny of brass, should see that she
was getting gray. There was no fault about her figure; she had that for
her satisfaction; she was more graceful than Jean's square thinness,
more slim than Vigné's maternal presence.
Linda had the feeling that she was engaged in a struggle with time, a
ruthless antagonist whom she viewed with a personal enmity. Time must,
would, of course, triumph in the end; but there would be no sign of her
surrender in the meanwhile; she wouldn't bend an inch, relinquish by a
fraction the pride and delicacy of her person. The skilful dyeing of
her hair to its old absolute blackness, as natural and becoming in
appearance as ever, was a symbol of her determination to cheat an
intolerable tyranny.
The process, dismaying her soul, she bore with a rigid fortitude; as she
endured the coldness of a morning bath from which, often, she was slow
to react. This, to her, was widely different from the futile efforts
of her mother, those women of the past, to preserve for practical ends
their flushes of youth and exhilaration. She felt obscurely that she was
serving a deeper reality created by the hands of Pleydon, Arnaud's
faith and pure pleasure, all that countless men had seen in her for
admiration, solace and power.
But it was inevitable, she told herself bitterly, that she should
hear the first intimation of her decline from Jean Hallet. Rather, she
overheard it, the discussion of her, from the loiterers at breakfast
as she moved about the communicating library. Jean's emphatic slightly
rough-textured voice arrested her in the arrangement of a bowl of
zinnias:
“You can't say just where she has failed, but it's evident. Perhaps a
general dryness. Perfectly natural. Thoroughly silly to fight against
it--” Vigné interrupted her. “I think mother's wonderful. I can't
remember any other woman nearly her age who looks so enchanting in the
evening.”
Linda quietly left the flowers as they were and went up to the room that
had been her father's. It was now used as a spare bedroom; and she had
turned into it, in place of her own chamber, instinctively, without
reason. She had kept it exactly as it had been when Amelia Lowrie first
conducted her there, as it was when her father, a boy, slept under the
white canopy.
Linda advanced to the mirror; and, her hands so tightly clenched that
the finger-nails dug into the palms, forced herself to gaze steadily
at the wavering reflection. It seemed to her that there had been a
malicious magic in Jean's detraction; for immediately, as though the
harm had been wrought by the girl's voice, she saw that her clear
freshness had gone. Her face had a wax-like quality, the violet shadows
under her eyes were brown. Who had once called her a gardenia? Now she
was wilting--how many gardenias had she seen droop, turn brown. Her
heart beat with a disturbing echo in her ears, and, with a slight gasp
that resembled a sob, she sank on one of the uncomfortable painted
chairs.
What, above every other sensation, oppressed her was a feeling of
terrific loneliness--the familiar isolation magnified until it was past
bearing. Yet, there was Arnaud, infallible in his tender comprehension,
she ought to go to him at once and find support. But it was impossible;
all that he could give her was, to her special necessity, useless. She
had never been able to establish herself in his sympathy; the reason for
that lay in the fact that she could bring nothing similar in return.
The room--except for the timed clangor of the electric cars, like the
measure of lost minutes--was quiet. The photograph of Bartram Hallet in
cricketing clothes had faded until it was almost indistinguishable. Soon
the faint figure would disappear entirely, as though the picture were
amenable to the relentless principle operating in her.
The peace about her finally lessened her acute suffering, stilled her
heart. She told herself with a show of vigor that she was a coward, a
charge that roused an unexpected activity of denial. She discovered that
cowardice was intolerable to her. What had happened, too, was so far out
of her hands that a trace of philosophical acceptance, recognition, came
to her support. The loveliest woman alive must do the same, meet in a
looking-glass--that eternal accompanying sibyl--her disaster. She rose,
her lips firmly set, composed and pale, and returned to the neglected
flowers in the library.
Vigné entered and put an affectionate arm about her shoulders,
repeating--unconscious that Linda had heard the discussion which had
given it being--the conviction that her mother was wonderful, specially
in the black dinner dress with the girdle of jet. With no facility of
expression she gave her daughter's arm a quick light pressure.
From then she watched the slow progress of age with a new realization,
but an unabated distaste and, wherever it was possible, a determined
artifice. Arnaud had failed swiftly in the past months; and, while she
was inspecting the impaired supports of an arbor in the garden, he came
to her with an unopened telegram. “I abhor these things,” he declared
fretfully; “they are so sudden. Why don't people write decent letters
any more! It's like the telephone.... Good manners have been ruined.”
She tore open the envelope, read the brief line within, and, a hand
suddenly put out to the arbor, sank on its bench. There had been rain,
but a late sun was again pouring over the sparkling grass, and robins
were singing with a lyrical clearness. “What is it?” Arnaud demanded
anxiously, tremulous in the unsparing sunlight. She replied:
“Dodge died this morning.”
His concern was as much for her as for Pleydon's death. “I'm sorry,
Linda,” his hand was on her shoulder. “It is a shock to you. A fine man,
a genius--none stronger in our day. When you were young and for so
long after.... I was lucky, Linda, to get you; have you all this while.
Nothing in Pleydon's life, not even his success, could have made up for
your loss.”
She wondered dully if Dodge had missed her, if Arnaud Hallet had ever
had her in his possession. The robins filled the immaculate air
with song. It was impossible that Dodge, who was so imperious in his
certainty that he would never say good-by to her, was dead.