I
MRS. RANSOM, when the front door had closed on her visitor, passed with
a spring from the drawing-room to the narrow hall, and thence up the
narrow stairs to her bedroom.
Though slender, and still light of foot, she did not always move so
quickly: hitherto, in her life, there had not been much to hurry for,
save the recurring domestic tasks that compel haste without fostering
elasticity; but some impetus of youth revived, communicated to her by
her talk with Guy Dawnish, now found expression in her girlish flight
upstairs, her girlish impatience to bolt herself into her room with her
throbs and her blushes.
Her blushes? Was she really blushing?
She approached the cramped eagle-topped mirror above her plain prim
dressing-table: just such a meagre concession to the weakness of the
flesh as every old-fashioned house in Wentworth counted among its
relics. The face reflected in this unflattering surface--for even the
mirrors of Wentworth erred on the side of depreciation--did not seem,
at first sight, a suitable theatre for the display of the tenderer
emotions, and its owner blushed more deeply as the fact was forced upon
her.
Her fair hair had grown too thin--it no longer quite hid the blue veins
in her candid forehead--a forehead that one seemed to see turned toward
professorial desks, in large bare halls where a snowy winter light fell
uncompromisingly on rows of "thoughtful women." Her mouth was thin,
too, and a little strained; her lips were too pale; and there were
lines in the corners of her eyes. It was a face which had grown
middle-aged while it waited for the joys of youth.
Well--but if she could still blush? Instinctively she drew back a
little, so that her scrutiny became less microscopic, and the pretty
lingering pink threw a veil over her pallor, the hollows in her
temples, the faint wrinkles of inexperience about her lips and eyes.
How a little colour helped! It made her eyes so deep and shining. She
saw now why bad women rouged.... Her redness deepened at the thought.
But suddenly she noticed for the first time that the collar of her
dress was cut too low. It showed the shrunken lines of the throat. She
rummaged feverishly in a tidy scentless drawer, and snatching out a bit
of black velvet, bound it about her neck. Yes--that was better. It gave
her the relief she needed. Relief--contrast--that was it! She had never
had any, either in her appearance or in her setting. She was as flat as
the pattern of the wall-paper--and so was her life. And all the people
about her had the same look. Wentworth was the kind of place where
husbands and wives gradually grew to resemble each other--one or two of
her friends, she remembered, had told her lately that she and Ransom
were beginning to look alike....
But why had she always, so tamely, allowed her aspect to conform to her
situation? Perhaps a gayer exterior would have provoked a brighter
fate. Even now--she turned back to the glass, loosened the tight
strands of hair above her brow, ran the fine end of the comb under them
with a rapid frizzing motion, and then disposed them, more lightly and
amply, above her eager face. Yes--it was really better; it made a
difference. She smiled at herself with a timid coquetry, and her lips
seemed rosier as she smiled. Then she laid down the comb and the smile
faded. It made a difference, certainly--but was it right to try to make
one's hair look thicker and wavier than it really was? Between that and
rouging the ethical line seemed almost impalpable, and the spectre of
her rigid New England ancestry rose reprovingly before her. She was
sure that none of her grandmothers had ever simulated a curl or
encouraged a blush. A blush, indeed! What had any of them ever had to
blush for in all their frozen lives? And what, in Heaven's name, had
she? She sat down in the stiff mahogany rocking-chair beside her
work-table and tried to collect herself. From childhood she had been
taught to "collect herself"--but never before had her small sensations
and aspirations been so widely scattered, diffused over so vague and
uncharted an expanse. Hitherto they had lain in neatly sorted and
easily accessible bundles on the high shelves of a perfectly ordered
moral consciousness. And now--now that for the first time they _needed_
collecting--now that the little winged and scattered bits of self were
dancing madly down the vagrant winds of fancy, she knew no spell to
call them to the fold again. The best way, no doubt--if only her
bewilderment permitted--was to go back to the beginning--the beginning,
at least, of to-day's visit--to recapitulate, word for word and look
for look....
She clasped her hands on the arms of the chair, checked its swaying
with a firm thrust of her foot, and fixed her eyes upon the inward
vision....
To begin with, what had made to-day's visit so different from the
others? It became suddenly vivid to her that there had been many,
almost daily, others, since Guy Dawnish's coming to Wentworth. Even the
previous winter--the winter of his arrival from England--his visits had
been numerous enough to make Wentworth aware that--very naturally--Mrs.
Ransom was "looking after" the stray young Englishman committed to her
husband's care by an eminent Q. C. whom the Ransoms had known on one of
their brief London visits, and with whom Ransom had since maintained
professional relations. All this was in the natural order of things, as
sanctioned by the social code of Wentworth. Every one was kind to Guy
Dawnish--some rather importunately so, as Margaret Ransom had smiled to
observe--but it was recognized as fitting that she should be kindest,
since he was in a sense her property, since his people in England, by
profusely acknowledging her kindness, had given it the domestic
sanction without which, to Wentworth, any social relation between the
sexes remained unhallowed and to be viewed askance. Yes! And even this
second winter, when the visits had become so much more frequent, so
admitted a part of the day's routine, there had not been, from any one,
a hint of surprise or of conjecture....
Mrs. Ransom smiled with a faint bitterness. She was protected by her
age, no doubt--her age and her past, and the image her mirror gave back
to her....
Her door-handle turned suddenly, and the bolt's resistance was met by
an impatient knock.
"Margaret!"
She started up, her brightness fading, and unbolted the door to admit
her husband.
"Why are you locked in? Why, you're not dressed yet!" he exclaimed.
It was possible for Ransom to reach his dressing-room by a slight
circuit through the passage; but it was characteristic of the
relentless domesticity of their relation that he chose, as a matter of
course, the directer way through his wife's bedroom. She had never
before been disturbed by this practice, which she accepted as
inevitable, but had merely adapted her own habits to it, delaying her
hasty toilet till he was safely in his room, or completing it before
she heard his step on the stair; since a scrupulous traditional prudery
had miraculously survived this massacre of all the privacies.
"Oh, I shan't dress this evening--I shall just have some tea in the
library after you've gone," she answered absently. "Your things are
laid out," she added, rousing herself.
He looked surprised. "The dinner's at seven. I suppose the speeches
will begin at nine. I thought you were coming to hear them."
She wavered. "I don't know. I think not. Mrs. Sperry's ill, and I've no
one else to go with."
He glanced at his watch. "Why not get hold of Dawnish? Wasn't he here
just now? Why didn't you ask him?"
She turned toward her dressing-table, and straightened the comb and
brush with a nervous hand. Her husband had given her, that morning, two
tickets for the ladies' gallery in Hamblin Hall, where the great public
dinner of the evening was to take place--a banquet offered by the
faculty of Wentworth to visitors of academic eminence--and she had
meant to ask Dawnish to go with her: it had seemed the most natural
thing to do, till the end of his visit came, and then, after all, she
had not spoken....
"It's too late now," she murmured, bending over her pin cushion.
"Too late? Not if you telephone him."
Her husband came toward her, and she turned quickly to face him, lest
he should suspect her of trying to avoid his eye. To what duplicity was
she already committed!
Ransom laid a friendly hand on her arm: "Come along, Margaret. You know
I speak for the bar." She was aware, in his voice, of a little note of
surprise at his having to remind her of this.
"Oh, yes. I meant to go, of course--"
"Well, then--" He opened his dressing-room door, and caught a glimpse
of the retreating house-maid's skirt. "Here's Maria now. Maria! Call up
Mr. Dawnish--at Mrs. Creswell's, you know. Tell him Mrs. Ransom wants
him to go with her to hear the speeches this evening--the _speeches_,
you understand?--and he's to call for her at a quarter before nine."
Margaret heard the Irish "Yessir" on the stairs, and stood motionless,
while her husband added loudly: "And bring me some towels when you come
up." Then he turned back into his wife's room.
"Why, it would be a thousand pities for Guy to miss this. He's so
interested in the way we do things over here--and I don't know that
he's ever heard me speak in public." Again the slight note of fatuity!
Was it possible that Ransom was a fatuous man?
He paused in front of her, his short-sighted unobservant glance
concentrating itself unexpectedly on her face.
"You're not going like that, are you?" he asked, with glaring
eye-glasses.
"Like what?" she faltered, lifting a conscious hand to the velvet at
her throat.
"With your hair in such a fearful mess. Have you been shampooing it?
You look like the Brant girl at the end of a tennis-match."
The Brant girl was their horror--the horror of all right-thinking
Wentworth; a laced, whale-boned, frizzle-headed, high-heeled daughter
of iniquity, who came--from New York, of course--on long, disturbing,
tumultuous visits to a Wentworth aunt, working havoc among the
freshmen, and leaving, when she departed, an angry wake of criticism
that ruffled the social waters for weeks. _She_, too, had tried her
hand at Guy--with ludicrous unsuccess. And now, to be compared to
her--to be accused of looking "New Yorky!" Ah, there are times when
husbands are obtuse; and Ransom, as he stood there, thick and yet
juiceless, in his dry legal middle age, with his wiry dust-coloured
beard, and his perpetual _pince-nez_, seemed to his wife a sudden
embodiment of this traditional attribute. Not that she had ever fancied
herself, poor soul, a "_femme incomprise_." She had, on the contrary,
prided herself on being understood by her husband, almost as much as on
her own complete comprehension of him. Wentworth laid a good deal of
stress on "motives"; and Margaret Ransom and her husband had dwelt in a
complete community of motive. It had been the proudest day of her life
when, without consulting her, he had refused an offer of partnership in
an eminent New York firm because he preferred the distinction of
practising in Wentworth, of being known as the legal representative of
the University. Wentworth, in fact, had always been the bond between
the two; they were united in their veneration for that estimable seat
of learning, and in their modest yet vivid consciousness of possessing
its tone. The Wentworth "tone" is unmistakable: it permeates every part
of the social economy, from the _coiffure_ of the ladies to the
preparation of the food. It has its sumptuary laws as well as its
curriculum of learning. It sits in judgment not only on its own
townsmen but on the rest of the world--enlightening, criticising,
ostracizing a heedless universe--and non-conformity to Wentworth
standards involves obliteration from Wentworth's consciousness.
In a world without traditions, without reverence, without stability,
such little expiring centres of prejudice and precedent make an
irresistible appeal to those instincts for which a democracy has
neglected to provide. Wentworth, with its "tone," its backward
references, its inflexible aversions and condemnations, its hard moral
outline preserved intact against a whirling background of experiment,
had been all the poetry and history of Margaret Ransom's life. Yes,
what she had really esteemed in her husband was the fact of his being
so intense an embodiment of Wentworth; so long and closely identified,
for instance, with its legal affairs, that he was almost a part of its
university existence, that of course, at a college banquet, he would
inevitably speak for the bar!
It was wonderful of how much consequence all this had seemed till
now....