Lee had no friends of her own age. The large private school she
attended was not patronised by the aristocracy of the city, and Mrs.
Tarleton had so thoroughly imbued her daughter with a sense of the vast
superiority of the gentle-born Southerner over the mere American, that
Lee found in the youthful patrons of the Chambers Institute little
likeness to her ideals. The children of her mother’s old friends were
educated at home or at small and very expensive schools, preparatory
to a grand finish in New York and Europe. Lee had continued to meet
several of these fortunate youngsters during the first two of the
five years which had followed her father’s death, but as she outgrew
her fine clothes, and was put into ginghams for the summers and stout
plaids for the winters, she was obliged to drop out of fashionable
society. Occasionally she saw her former playmates sitting in their
parents’ carriages before some shop in Kearney Street. They always
nodded gaily to her with the loyalty of their caste; the magic halo of
position survives poverty, scandal and exile.
“When you are grown I shall put my pride in my pocket, and ask Mrs.
Montgomery to bring you out, and Jack Belmont to give you a party
dress,” said Mrs. Tarleton one day. “I think you will be pretty, for
your features are exactly like your father’s, and you have so much
expression when you are right happy, poor child! You must remember
never to frown, nor wrinkle up your forehead, nor eat hot cakes, nor
too much candy, and always wear your camphor bag so you won’t catch
anything; and _do_ stand up straight, and you _must_ wear a veil when
these horrid trade winds blow. Beauty is the whole battle of life for
a woman, honey, and if you only do grow up pretty and are properly
_lancée_, you will be sure to marry well. That is all I am trying to
live for.”
Lee donned the veil to please her mother, although she loved to feel
the wind in her hair. But she was willing to be beautiful, as beauty
meant servants and the reverse of boarding-house diet. She hoped to
find a husband as handsome and devoted as her father, and was quite
positive that the kidney flourished within the charmed circle of
society. But she sometimes regarded her sallow little visage with deep
distrust. Her black hair hung in lank strands; no amount of coaxing
would make it curl, and her eyes, she decided, were altogether too
light a blue for beauty; her mother had saved Tarleton’s small library
of standard novels from the wreck, and Lee had dipped into them on
rainy days; the heroine’s eyes when not black “were a dark rich blue.”
Her eyes looked the lighter for the short thick lashes surrounding
them, and the heavy brows above. She was also very thin, and stooped
slightly; but the maternal eye was hopeful. Mrs. Tarleton’s delicate
beauty had vanished with her happiness, but while her husband lived she
had preserved and made the most of it with many little arts. These she
expounded at great length to her daughter, who privately thought beauty
a great bore, unless ready-made and warranted to wear, and frequently
permitted her mind to wander.
“At least remember this,” exclaimed Mrs. Tarleton impatiently one
day at the end of a homily, to which Lee had given scant heed, being
absorbed in the adventurous throng below, “if you are beautiful you
rule men; if you are plain, men rule you. If you are beautiful your
husband is your slave, if you are plain you are his upper servant. All
the brains the blue-stockings will ever pile up will not be worth one
complexion. (I do hope you are not going to be a blue, honey.) Why are
American women the most successful in the world? Because they know how
to be beautiful. I have seen many beautiful American women who had
no beauty at all. What they want they will have, and the will to be
beautiful is like yeast to dough. If women are flap-jacks it is their
own fault. Only cultivate a complexion, and learn how to dress and walk
as if you were used to the homage of princes, and the world will call
you beautiful. Above all, get a complexion.”
“I will! I will!” responded Lee fervently. She pinned her veil all
round her hat, squared her shoulders like a young grenadier, and went
forth for air.
Although debarred from the society of her equals, she had friends
of another sort. It was her private ambition at this period to keep
a little shop, one half of which should be gay and fragrant with
candies, the other sober and imposing with books. This ambition she
wisely secluded from her aristocratic parent, but she gratified it
vicariously. Some distance up Market Street she had discovered a book
shop, scarcely wider than its door and about eight feet deep. Its
presiding deity was a blonde young man, out-at-elbows, consumptive
and vague. Lee never knew his name; she always alluded to him as
“Soft-head.” He never asked hers; but he welcomed her with a slight
access of expression, and made a place for her on the counter. There
she sat and swung her legs for hours together, confiding her ambitions
and plans, and recapitulating her lessons for the intellectual benefit
of her host. In return he told her the histories of the queer people
who patronised him, and permitted her to “tend shop.” He thought her a
prodigy, and made her little presents of paper and coloured pencils.
Not to be under obligations, she crocheted him a huge woollen scarf,
which he assured her greatly improved his health.
She also had a warm friend in a girl who presided over a candy store,
but her bosom friend and confidante was a pale weary-looking young
woman who suddenly appeared in a secondhand book shop in lowly Fourth
Street, on the wrong side of Market. Lee was examining the dirty and
disease-haunted volumes on the stand in front of the shop one day,
when she glanced through the window and met the eager eyes and smile
of a stranger. She entered the shop at once, and, planting her elbows
on the counter, told the newcomer hospitably that she was delighted to
welcome her to that part of the city, and would call every afternoon
if she would be permitted to tend shop occasionally. If the stranger
was amused she did not betray herself; she accepted the overture with
every appearance of gratitude, and begged Lee to regard the premises
as her own. For six months the friendship flourished. The young woman,
whose name was Stainers, helped Lee with her sums, and had a keenly
sympathetic ear for the troubles of little girls. Of herself she never
spoke. Then she gave up her own battle, and was carried to the county
hospital to die. Lee visited her twice, and one afternoon her mother
told her that the notice of Miss Stainers’ death had been in the
newspaper that morning.
Lee wept long and heavily for the gentle friend who had carried her
secrets into a pauper’s grave.
“You are so young, and you have had so much trouble,” said Mrs.
Tarleton with a sigh, that night. “But perhaps it will give you more
character than I ever had. And nothing can break your spirits. They are
your grandmother’s all over; you even gesticulate like her sometimes
and then you look just like a little creole. She was a wonderful woman,
honey, and had forty-nine offers of marriage.”
“I hope men are nicer than boys,” remarked Lee, not unwilling to be
diverted. “The boys in this house are horrid. Bertie Reynolds pulls my
hair every time I pass him, and calls me ‘Squaw;’ and Tom Wilson throws
bread balls at me at the table and calls me ‘Broken-down-aristocracy.’
I’m sure _they’ll_ never kiss a girl’s slipper.”
“A few years from now some girl will be leading them round by the nose.
You never can tell how a boy will turn out; it all depends upon whether
girls take an interest in him or not. These are probably scrubs.”
“There’s a new one and he’s rather shy. They say he’s English. He and
his father came last night. The boy’s name is Cecil; I heard his father
speak to him at the table to-night. The father has a funny name; I
can’t remember it. Mrs. Hayne says he is very _distingué_, and she’s
sure he’s a lord in disguise, but I think he’s very thin and ugly. He
has the deepest lines on each side of his mouth, and a big thin nose,
and a droop at the corner of his eyes. He’s the stuck-uppest looking
thing I ever saw. The boy is about twelve, I reckon, and looks as if he
wasn’t afraid of anything but girls. He has the curliest hair and the
loveliest complexion, and his eyes laugh. They’re hazel, and his hair
is brown. He looks much nicer than any boy I ever saw.”
“He is the son of a gentleman--and English gentlemen are the only ones
that can compare with Southerners, honey. If you make friends with him
you may bring him up here.”
“Goodness gracious!” exclaimed Lee. Her mother had encouraged her to
ignore boys, and disliked visitors of any kind.
“I feel sure he is going to be your next friend, and you are so lonely,
honey, now that poor Miss Stainers is gone. So ask him up if you like.
It makes me very sad to think that you have no playmates.”
Lee climbed up on her mother’s lap. Once in a great while she laid
aside the dignity of her superior position in the family, and demanded
a petting. Mrs. Tarleton held her close and shut her eyes, and strove
to imagine that the child in her arms was five years younger, and that
both were listening for a step which so often smote her memory with
agonising distinctness.