When she got home from the Synthesis the first Saturday afternoon,
Cornelia climbed up the four flights of stairs that led to her little
room, and lay down to rest, as she promised Mrs. Burton she would do
every day; some days she did not. She had to lie on her bed, which
filled two-thirds of the room. There was a bureau with a glass, which
she could not see the bottom of her skirt in without jumping up; and a
wash-stand with a shut-down lid, where she wrote her letters and drew;
a chair stood between that and her trunk, which was next the door, and
let the door open part way.
It seemed very cramped at first, but she soon got used to it, and then
she did not think about it; but accepted it as she did everything else
in the life that was all so strange to her. She had never been in a
boarding-house before, and she did not know whether it was New York
usage or not, that her trunk, which the expressman had managed to leave
in the lower hall, should be left standing there for twenty-four hours
after his escape, and that then she should be asked to take some things
out of it so that it should not be too heavy for the serving-maids to
carry up to her room. There was no man-servant in the place; but the
landlady said that they expected to have a furnace-man as soon as it
came cold weather.
The landlady was such an indistinct quality, that it could seldom be
known whether she was at home or not, and when she was identifiably
present, whether she had promised or had not promised to do this or
that. People were always trying to see her for some reason or no
reason, and it was said that the best time to find her was at table.
This was not so easy; the meals had a certain range in time, and the
landlady was nominally at the head of the table; but those who came
early to find her made the mistake of not having come late, and if you
came late you just missed her. Yet she was sometimes actually to be
encountered at the head of the stairs from the kitchen, or evanescing
from the parlor; and somehow the house was operated; the meals came and
went, and the smell of their coming and going filled the hall-way from
the ground floor to the attic. Some people complained of the meals, but
Cornelia's traditions were so simple that she thought them a constant
succession of prodigies, with never less than steak, fish and hash for
breakfast, and always turkey and cranberry sauce for dinner, and often
ice-cream; sometimes the things were rather burnt, but she did not see
that there was much to find fault with. She celebrated the luxury in
her letters home, and she said that she liked the landlady, too, and
that they had got to be great friends; in fact the landlady reminded
the girl of her own mother in the sort of springless effectiveness with
which she brought things to pass, when you would never have expected
any result whatever; and she was gentle like her mother, and
simple-hearted, with all her elusiveness. But she was not neat, like
Mrs. Saunders; the house went at loose ends. Cornelia found fluff under
her bed that must have been there a long time. The parlor and the
dining-room were kept darkened, and no one could have told what
mysteries their corners and set pieces of furniture harbored. The
carpets, where the subdued light struck them, betrayed places worn down
to the warp. Mrs. Montgomery herself had a like effect of unsparing
use; her personal upholstery showed frayed edges and broken woofs,
which did not seriously discord with her nerveless gentility.
The parlor was very long and rather narrow, and it was crossed at the
rear by the dining-room which showed the table in stages of preparation
or dismantling through sliding-doors never quite shut. At intervals
along the parlor walls were set sofas in linen brocade and yellow jute;
and various easy and uneasy chairs in green plush stood about in no
definite relation to the black-walnut, marble-topped centre-table. A
scarf, knotted and held by a spelter vase to one of the marble mantles,
for there were two, recorded a moment of the aesthetic craze which had
ceased before it got farther amidst the earlier and honester ugliness
of the room. The gas-fixtures were of the vine-leaf and grape-cluster
bronze-age; some of the garlands which ought to have been attached to
the burners, hung loose from the parent stem, without the effort on the
part of any witness to complete the artistic intention. In the evening,
the lady-boarders received their gentlemen-callers in the parlor; their
lady-callers were liable at all times to be asked if they would not
like to go to the boarders' rooms, and whether they expressed this
preference or not, they were directed where to find them by the maid,
who then rapidly disappeared down the kitchen stairs.
In fact, the door-service at Mrs. Montgomery's was something she would
probably have deprecated if any one had asked her to do so. It was the
charge of a large, raw-boned Irish girl, who made up by her athletic
physique and her bass voice for the want of a man-servant on the
premises. She brow-beat visitors into acceptance of the theory that the
persons they came to see were not at home, especially if they showed
signs of intending to wait in the parlor while she went upstairs to
find out. Those who suffered from her were of the sex least fitted to
combat her. The gentlemen boarders seldom had callers; when they had,
their callers did not ask whether their friends were in or not; they
went and saw for themselves.
The gentlemen at Mrs. Montgomery's were fewer than the ladies, and they
were for several reasons in greater favor. For one thing they gave less
trouble: they had a less lively fear of mice, and they were not so apt
to be out of health and to want their meals sent up; they ate more, but
they did not waste so much, and they never did any sort of washing in
their rooms. Cornelia did not know who or what some of them were; but
she made sure of a theatrical manager; two or three gentlemen in
different branches of commerce; a newspaper writer of some sort, and an
oldish gentleman who had been with Mrs. Montgomery a great while, and
did not seem to be anything but a gentleman boarder, pure and simple.
They were all very civil and quiet, and they bore with the amiable
American fortitude the hardships of the common lot at Mrs.
Montgomery's, which Cornelia underwent ignorantly as necessary
incidents of life in New York.
She now fell asleep where she lay, and she was startled from her nap,
but hardly surprised, to hear her name spoken in the hall far below, as
if it were a theme of contention between the bass-voiced Irish girl and
some one at the street door, who supported the other side of the
question in low, indistinct, lady-like murmurs.
"No, she don't be in," said the Irish girl bluntly. The polite murmur
insisted, and the Irish girl said, with finality, "Well, then, yous can
go up yourselves and see; the room is right over the dure, four flights
up."
Cornelia jumped up and tried to pull her hair into a knot before the
glass. There came a tap at her door and the voice of Charmian Maybough
asked, "May I come in, Miss Saunders,--Cornelia?"
"Yes," said Cornelia, and she opened the door as far as her trunk would
let her.
Charmian pushed impetuously in. She took Cornelia in her arms and
kissed her, as if they had not met for a long time.
"Oh," she said, whirling about, so as to sweep the whole room with her
glance, before sinking down on Cornelia's trunk, "why can't _I_ have
something like this? Well, I shall have, I hope, before I die, yet.
What made her say you weren't in? I knew you were." She rose and flew
about the room, and examined it in detail. She was very beautifully
dressed, in a street costume of immediate fashion, without a suggestion
of the aestheticism of the picturesque gown she wore at the Synthesis;
that had originality, but Cornelia perceived with the eye trained to
see such differences, that this had authority. Charmian could not help
holding and carrying herself differently in it, too. She was
exquisitely gloved, and Cornelia instinctively felt that her hat was
from Paris, though till then she had never seen a Paris hat to know it.
She might have been a little overawed by it, if the wearer had not
abruptly asked her what she thought of it.
"Well," said Cornelia, with her country directness, which was so
different from the other's abruptness, "I think it's about the most
perfect thing I ever saw."
Charmian sighed. "I saw you looking at it. Yes, it _is_ a dream. But
it's a badge of slavery. So's the whole costume. Look how I'm laced!"
She flung open the jacket and revealed a waist certainly much smaller
than she had earlier in the day. "That's the way it goes through my
whole life. Mamma is dead set against the artistic, and I'm dead set
against the fashionable. As long as I'm at the Synthesis, I do as the
Synthetics do. I dress like the Synthesis, and I think like it, and I
act like it. As soon as I get home in the afternoon, I have to be of
the world worldly. I put on a Worth frock, and mamma would make me put
on a Worth spirit, if she could. I do my best to conform, because it's
the bargain, and I'll keep my word if it kills me. _Now_ you see what a
double life I lead! If I could only be steeped in hopeless poverty to
the lips! If I could have a room like this, even! Sometimes I'm so
bewildered by the twofold existence I'm leading, I don't really know
what I'm saying. Those your things, of course?" She sprang from
Cornelia's trunk, which she had sank down upon again, and swiftly
traversed the sketches Cornelia had pinned about the wall. "What touch!
Yes, you merely have to live on, to be anything you like. It'll do
itself for _you_. Well, I suppose you'll have to see her." She turned
about to Cornelia with an air of deprecation. "Mamma, you know. She's
down stairs waiting for us. She thinks it right to come with me always.
I dare say it is. She isn't so very bad, you know. Only she insists
upon knowing all the girls I take a fancy to, herself. You needn't be
afraid of her."
"I don't know why I should be afraid of anybody," said Cornelia.
The darker corner of the long parlor was occupied by a young couple in
the earnest inquiry into each other's psychological peculiarities which
marks a stage of the passion of love. It obliged them to get very close
together, where they sat, she on a lounge and he in the chair, which he
kept pulling nearer and nearer; they fulfilled these conditions and
exchanged their observations with a freedom that ignored the presence
of the lady sitting somewhat severely upright between the two long,
front windows, exactly midway of the dingy lace curtains, trained
fan-wise on the carpet. They were not disturbed when Cornelia and
Charmian appeared; the young lady continued to dangle the tassel of a
cushion through her fingers, and the young man leaned toward her with
his face in his hand, and his elbow sunk in the arm of the lounge; but
the other lady rose at once and came quickly forward, as if escaping
from them. Beside the tall girls she looked rather little, and she was
decidedly blonde against their brunette color. She wore a veil that
came just between her upper and her lower lip, and that stirred lightly
when she spoke. She was dressed with the same authoritative fashion as
Charmian, but not so simply.
She did not wait for her daughter to speak, but took Cornelia's hand,
and said in a soft voice, "Miss Saunders? I am very glad we found you
at home. My daughter has been speaking to me about you, and we hoped to
have come sooner, but we couldn't manage together before."
"Won't you sit down?" asked Cornelia.
"No, I thank you," Mrs. Maybough returned, with a velvety tenderness of
tone that seemed to convey assent. "We shall be rather late, as it is.
I hope you're comfortably situated here."
"Oh, very," said Cornelia. "I've never been away from home before, and
of course it isn't like home."
"Yes," said Mrs. Maybough, "one misses the refinements of home in such
places." She turned and swept the appointments of the room, including
the students of psychology, with a critical eye.
"I wish _I_ could come here," sighed the daughter. "If I could have a
room like Cornelia's, mamma! I _wish_ you could see it."
"I'm glad you're pleasantly placed, Miss Saunders. I hope you're not
working too hard at the Synthesis. I understand the young ladies there
are so enthusiastic."
"Oh, no," Cornelia protested.
"Of course she is!" said Charmian. "Everybody works too hard at the
Synthesis. It's the ideal of the place. We woke her out of a nap, and I
know she was tired to death."
Cornelia could not deny it, and so she said nothing.
"Oh!" said Mrs. Maybough, non-committally; "that won't do." She paused,
without intermitting the scrutiny which Cornelia felt she had been
subjecting her to from the first moment through her veil. "You mustn't
wear yourself out." She paused again, and then while Charmian turned
away with an effect of impatience, she asked, "Do you ever go out on
Sundays?"
"Why, I don't know," Cornelia began, not certain whether Mrs. Maybough
meant walking out or driving out; young people did both in Pymantoning.
Mrs. Maybough pursued: "We receive on Thursdays, but we have a few
friends coming in to-morrow afternoon, and we should be very glad to
see you, if you have nothing better."
The invitation was so tentatively, so gingerly offered in manner, if
not in words, that Cornelia was not quite sure it had been given. She
involuntarily searched her memory for something better before she
spoke; for the first time in her life she was about to invent a
previous engagement, when Charmian suddenly turned and laid her arms
about her neck.
"You'll come, of course!"
"Charmian!" said Mrs. Maybough. It would have been hard to tell whether
she was reproving the action or the urgence. "Then we shall hope to see
you?"
"Yes, thank you," said Cornelia.
"Do come!" said Charmian, as if she had not yet accepted. "I can't let
it be a whole day and two nights before I see you again!" She put her
arm round Cornelia's waist, as the girl went with them to the outer
door, to open it for them, in her village fashion. In the hall,
Charmian whispered passionately, "Don't you _envy_ them? _Oh_, if I
could live in such a house with you, and with people like that just to
look at!"
"My dear!" said Mrs. Maybough.
"They seem to be engaged," said Cornelia placidly, without sense of
anything wrong in the appearance of the fact.
"Evidently," said Mrs. Maybough.
"I shouldn't care for the engagement," said Charmian. "That would be
rather horrid. But if you were in love, to feel that you needn't hide
it or pretend not to be! That is life! I'm coming here, mamma!"