How she reached the train and Philadelphia she hardly remembered. She
was miserably sick at soul, miserably mortified. Her foolish air-castles
vanished, and in their stead she saw the brutal reality. She had
deserted a young genius for a fashionable dilettante. In time she might
have learned to care for Arthur--but how was she to know this? He was
so backward, such a colorless companion!... She almost disliked the man
who had taken her away from him; yet six months ago Ellenora would have
resented the notion that a mere man could have led her. Besides there
was another woman in the muddle now!... In her disgust she longed for
her own zone of silence. In her heart she called Ibsen and Nora Helmer
delusive guides; her chief intellectual staff had failed her and she
began to see Torvald Helmer's troubles in a different light. Perhaps
when Nora reached the street that terrible night, she thought of her
children--perhaps Helmer was watching her from the Doll's House
window--perhaps--perhaps Arthur--then she remembered the young singer
and bitterness filled her mouth....
When Paul came back, twenty-four hours later, she turned a disagreeable
regard upon him.
"Why didn't you stay away longer?" she demanded inconsistently.
"My dear girl, I searched for you at Carnegie Hall that night, but I
suppose I must have come too late; so yesterday I went yachting and had
a jolly time."
Ellenora fell to reproaching Paul violently for his cruel neglect.
Didn't he know that she was ailing and needed him? He answered
maliciously: "I fancied that your trip might upset your nerves. I am
really beginning to believe you care more for your young composer than
you do for me. Ellenora Vibert, sentimentalist!--what a joke."
He smiled at his wit....
"Leave me, leave me, and don't come here again!... I have a right to
care for any man I please."
"Ah! Ibsen encore," said Paul, tauntingly.
"No, not Ibsen," she replied in a weak voice, "only a free woman--free
even to admire the man whose name I bear," she added, her temper sinking
to a sheer monotone.
"Free?" he sarcastically echoed. The shock of their voices filled the
room. Paul angrily stared out of the window at the thin trees in dusty
Rittenhouse Square, wondering when the woman would stop her tiresome
reproaches. Ellenora's violent agitation affected her; and the man, his
selfish sensibilities aroused by the most unheroic sight in the world,
slowly descended the staircase, grumbling as he put on his hat....
* * * * *
Too cerebral to endure the philandering Paul, Ellenora Vibert is still
in Philadelphia. She has little hope that her husband will ever make any
sign.... After a time her restless mind and need of money drove her into
journalism. To-day she successfully edits the Woman's Page of a Sunday
newspaper, and her reading of an essay on Ibsen's Heroines before the
Twenty-first Century Club was declared a positive achievement. Ellenora,
who dislikes Nietzsche more than ever, calls herself Mrs. Bishop. Her
pen name is now Nora Helmer.