Miss Balbian's house provided an appropriate setting for its pale,
aristocratic, chastely fervent owner. But its sedate, antiquated,
brick exterior--unaltered since the presidency of Andrew
Jackson--afforded hardly a hint of the conservative beauty that
pervaded it.
Here the glitter of old chandeliers fell upon the suave outlines of
colonial furniture upholstered with sage green and mulberry-colored
fabrics, chimney pieces of mellow marble carved into graceful
flourishes and bearing on their shelves quaint bric-a-brac, family
portraits in frames that it would have been a sacrilege to furbish
up--ladies dressed in the fashion of 1812, French and English gentlemen
in antique uniforms, a few of these likenesses doubly precious because
they were painted so naïvely. But this "early-American" effect was
adulterated by objects that Miss Balbian had acquired on her travels,
such as medieval chalices, coffers covered with vellum and encrusted
with jewels, and a few authenticated paintings from that period when
the men of Italy, at a breath of inspiration from the Athenian tomb,
perceived, instead of the glamour of a celestial paradise, the
gorgeousness of this world.
In this gracefully puritanical atmosphere, these latter treasures,
imbued with a disturbing alien richness, were like thoughts that a
woman, hedged round by innumerable obscure oppressions, might gather
from afar and store away in her heart.
Lilla, in this environment, became a juvenile epicurean, precocious in
aesthetic judgment, intolerant of everything that was not exquisite.
Her opinions amused and touched her aunt, who, for a while, derived
from that imitation a nearly maternal pride. Miss Althea Balbian
redoubled her efforts to form Lilla according to her most exalted
ideas; and, as a result, she implanted in that little charge still more
complexities of impulse--a greater sensitiveness to the lures of mortal
beauty, together with something of her own recoil from all the ultimate
consequences of that sensitiveness.
In fine, the devoted woman was preparing Lilla unwittingly for an
accentuation of the conflict that already had been prefigured in her
parents.
The child was so fragile-looking, there was about her so strange an air
of sensibility, that many persons who had known her father and mother
shook their heads in pity. Some suggested that she ought to be reared
in the country, to play hard all day "close to nature." But the play
of other children exhausted her, as if she, too, possessed "only a
limited amount of nervous energy." She had nervous headaches and
feverish spells from no apparent cause. When the weather was changing,
or when a thunder storm impended, the governess found it hard to manage
her. Then, suddenly, certain odors and sounds filled her with
indistinct visions of felicity. At night, when there was music in the
house, she crept from her bed to the staircase, and sat listening with
burning cheeks and icy hands.
Next day there came over her an immense, hazy discontent with
everything. And her tragic little face--her eyes, skin, and fluffy
hair all harmonized in the most delicate shade of brown--resembled the
face of some European _grande amoureuse_ seen through the small end of
an opera glass.
"Yes," said Miss Balbian at last to the charming, quiet ladies who sat
in her library drinking tea from old china cups. "Lilla is a strange,
I may say a startling, child." And allowing herself one of her rare
public failures of expression--a look of uneasiness--she added, half
swallowing her words, "I sometimes ask myself----"