Ethel M. Kelley

“ Nancy looked fixedly at the small side-table where the stranger had just placed himself as if he were etched upon the whiteness of the wall behind him. He sat erect and brooding,—his dark, rather melancholy eyes staring straight ahead, and a slight frown wrinkling his really fine forehead. He wore an Inverness cape slung over one shoulder.
“Looks like one of Rembrandt’s portraits of himself,” Caroline suggested.
“He looks like a brigand,” Betty said. “Nancy’s struck dumb with the privilege of adding fuel to a flame of genius like that. Wake up and eat your peach Melba, Nancy.” ”

“ Gertrude cried. “The boys are going to be married—married—married! Marriage is the one thing that indestructible friendships don’t survive—except as ghosts.”
“It should be Peter who is going to marry Eleanor,” Margaret said. “It’s Peter who has always loved her best. It’s Peter she cares for.”
“As a friend,” Beulah said, “as her dearest friend.”
“Not as a friend,” Margaret answered softly, “she loves him. She has always loved him. It comes early sometimes.” ”

“ Sheila and Nancy were doing their Christmas shopping. The weather, which had been like mid-May—even to betraying a bewildered Jersey apple tree into unseasonable bloom that gave it considerable newspaper notoriety,—had suddenly turned sharp and frosty. Sheila, all in gray fur to the beginning of her gray gaiters, and Nancy in blue, a smart blue tailor suit with black furs and a big black satin hat—she was dressing better than she had ever dressed in her life—were in that state of physical exhilaration that follows the spur of the frost. ”

“ Stevie stuck up for Carlo as if he was really something to be proud of. Perhaps my uncles and aunts feel that way about me, I don’t know. I don’t even know if I feel that way about them. I certainly criticize them in my soul at times, and feel tired of being dragged around from pillar to post. I don’t feel that way about Uncle Peter, but there is nobody else that I am certain, positive sure that I love better than life itself. If there is only one in the world that you feel that way about, I might not be Uncle Peter’s one. ”

“ Nancy dreamed that night that she was married to Dick, and that Hitty made and served them pâté de foies gras dumplings, while Collier Pratt in freckles and overalls sat in a high 150 chair, and had his dinner with the family. Later it was discovered that Betty had poisoned his bread and milk, and he died in Nancy’s arms in dreadful agony, swearing in a beautiful Irish brogue that in all his life he had never looked at another woman,—which even in her dream seemed to Nancy a somewhat irreconcilable statement. ”

“ He brings me flowers, and gets me taxi-cabs as if I were really a grown up young lady, and he pinches my nose and teases me as if I were still the little girl that kept house in a studio for him. I never realized before what a good-looking man he is. I used to think that Uncle Peter was the only handsome man of the three, but now I realize that they are all exceptionally good-looking. Uncle David has a great deal of distinction, of course, but Uncle Jimmie is merry and radiant and vital, and tall and athletic looking into the bargain. ”

“ Nancy craftily spurred him on to his most ambitious achievements under pretense of wishing her own appetite stimulated, and the big cook, who adored her, produced triumph after triumph of his art for her delectation, whereupon the biggest part of it was cunningly smuggled out to the artist. From behind her screen of vines Nancy watched the fine features of her quondam friend light with the rapture of the gourmet as be sampled Gaspard’s sauce verte or Hollandaise or lifted the glass cover from the mushrooms sous cloche and inhaled their delicate aroma. ”

“ Both Peter and David had the unconscious feeling that their obligation to their race was met by their communal interest in Eleanor. Beulah, of course, sincerely believed that the filling in of an intellectual concept of life was all that was required of her. Only Jimmie groped blindly and bewilderedly for his own. Gertrude and Margaret both understood that they were unnaturally alone in a world where lovers met and mated, but they, too, hugged to their souls the flattering unction that they were parents of a sort. ”

“ At eight o’clock Hitty came in to her, and roused her from the light drowse into which she had fallen at last.
“You was crying in your sleep again,” she said, “your cheeks is all wet. I heard you the minute I put my key into the latch. You’re as bad as Sheila, only I expect she suffers from something laying hard on her stummick. It’s always something on your mind that starts you in.”
“There’s nothing on my mind, Hitty,” Nancy said, sitting up in bed, “nothing but happiness, I mean. In some ways, Hitty dear, this is the happiest day that I’ve ever waked up to.” ”

“ Eleanor was a very vital interest in his life. It had seemed to him for a few minutes at the Christmas party that she was no longer the little girl he had known, that a lovelier, more illusive creature—a woman—had come to displace her, but when she had flung her arms around him he had realized that it was still the heart of a child beating so fondly against his own.
The real trouble with arrogating to ourselves the privileges of parenthood is that our native instincts are likely to become deflected by the substitution of the artificial for the natural responsibility. ”

“ With the serving of the first course of dinner—Gaspard’s wonderful Purée Mongol—an artist’s 265 dream of all the most delicate vegetables in the world mingled together as the clouds are mingled, the tensity in the air seemed to break and shatter about them in showers of brilliant, artificial mirth, which presently, because they were all young and fond of one another and their group had the habit of intimacy, became less and less strained and unreal. ”

“ Eleanor wrote, “and I have had the kind of experience that makes me feel as if I never wanted to be any older. I know life is full of disillusionment and pain, but I did not know that any one with whom you have broken bread, and slept in the same room with, and told everything to for four long years, could turn out to be an absolute traitor and villainess. Let me begin at the beginning. For nearly a year now I have noticed that Bertha Stephens avoided me, and presented the appearance of disliking me. ”

“ Collier Pratt said, “little American girl, don’t you understand that there is only one way for a woman to think or feel about a man like me? I have had my life, and I haven’t liked it much. I’m to be loved warmly and lightly till the flesh and blood prince comes along, but I’m never to be mistaken for him.”
“I don’t believe you’re sincere,” Nancy cried; “women must have loved you deeply, tragically, and have suffered all the torture there is, at losing you.” ”

“ The pink silk coverlet and the elegance of the silver coated steampipes at Beulah’s; the implacable British stuffiness at the Winchester which had had its own stolid charm for the lineal descendant of the Pilgrim fathers; the impressively casual atmosphere over which the “hired butler” presided distributing after-dinner gold spoons, these impressions all dwindled and diminished and took their insignificant place in the background of the romance she was living and breathing in Peter’s jewel box of an apartment on Thirtieth Street. ”

“ The pungent, acrid odor of hot tomatoes affronted her nostrils. She had a vision now of the pale tired faces of the little stenographers turning in disgust from the contemplation of the flamboyant and sticky purée on their plates, annoyed by the color scheme in combination with the soft wild-rose pink of the table bouquets, if not actually sickened by the fluid itself. For the first time since his abrupt seizure that morning she began to 126 hope in her heart that Gaspard’s illness might be a matter of days instead of weeks. ”

“ Eleanor played with the rabbit doll only at night after this. In the daytime she looked rather battered and ugly to eyes accustomed to the delicate finish of creatures like the French manikins, but after she was tucked away in her cot in the passion flower dressing-room—all of Margaret’s belongings and decorations were a faint, pinky lavender,—her dear daughter Gwendolyn, who impersonated Albertina at increasingly rare intervals as time advanced, lay in the hollow of her arm and received her sacred confidences and ministrations as usual. ”

“ Billy and Dick, by virtue of their respective occupations, were never away from New York for longer than the customary two weeks’ vacation.
“My soul smoothed itself out, a long cramped scroll,”—her conscience placated on the score of her deserted guests, Nancy was quoting Browning to herself, as she widened the distance between herself and them. “I wonder why I have this irresistible tendency to shake the people I love best in the world at intervals. I am such a really well-balanced and rational individual, I don’t understand it in myself. ”

“ Framed in the high doorway, complete, cap and curls, softly rounding bodice, and the long, straight lines of the Renaissance, stood Juliet—Juliet, immemorial, immortal, young—austerely innocent and delicately shy, already beautiful, and yet potential of all the beauty and the wisdom of the world.
“I’ve never worn these clothes before anybody but the girls before,” Eleanor said, “but I thought”—she looked about her appealingly—“you might like it—for a surprise.” ”

“ The most conscientious objector to New York’s traffic regulations can not claim that they fail to regulate. The progress of their cab down the avenue was so scrupulously regulated by the benignant guardians of the semaphores that twilight was deepening into early December evening before they reached their objective point,—the ramshackle studio building on the south side of Washington Square where the man she loved lived, moved and had his being, with the gallant ease and grace which made him so romantic a figure to Nancy’s imagination. ”

“ I know every girl always thinks there is something different about her, but I think there are ways in which I truly am different. When I want anything I know more clearly what it is, and why I want it than most other girls do, and not only that, but I know now, that I want to keep myself, and everything I think and feel and am,—sacred. There is an inner shrine in a woman’s soul that she must keep inviolate. ”

“ Nancy asked.
“California fruit nut bread, or something like that, and call the custards crême renversé, and the ice-cream, French ice-cream.”
“Oh, dear!” Nancy said, “that isn’t the way I want to do things at all.”
“We can slip the ones that needs them a few things from time to time, can’t we, Molly?” Dolly said.
“We’ll do it,” Nancy said. “I hate the way that the most uninspired ways of doing things turn out to be the best policy after all. I don’t believe in stereotyped philanthropy, but I did think I had found a way around this problem of feeding up people who needed it.” ”

“ How much of us lives when we are entirely shut out of the consciousness of those whom we love? If there is no one to realize us day by day,—if all that love has made of us is taken away, what is left? Is there anything? I don’t know. I look in the glass, and see the same face,—Eleanor Hamlin, almost nineteen, with the same bow shaped eyebrows, and the same double ridge leading up from her nose to her mouth, making her look still very babyish. ”

“ In Nancy’s world there was no abstract sentimentality—if this man indulged himself in emotional regret for her frustrated womanhood—she called it that to herself—it must in some way concern him. She had never in her life been troubled by a condition that she was not eager to ameliorate, and she could not conceive of an emotional interest in an individual disassociated from a certain responsibility for that individual’s welfare. She took Collier Pratt’s growing tenderness for her for granted, and dreamed exultant dreams of their romantic association. ”