Thatwas Gita’s last talk with her grandmother. The next day Mr. Donald called, and on the following the old lady had what the nurse alluded to vaguely as one of her attacks. Two nights later she died quietly in her sleep. At the earliest moment consistent with cherished proprieties, Topper telephoned to Mrs. Pleyden, and she came to the manor an hour later.
“Polly had a telegram from Bar Harbor yesterday asking her to a house-party,” she said sympathetically to Gita, looking as if she would kiss her if she dared, “and she went off last night. But she’ll be home in a few days and I know she’d want you to come to us for a bit. You will, won’t you, my dear? You’ve hardly had time to get accustomed to this gloomy old house. Do run up and pack a bag.”
But Gita shook her head. She felt uncommonly bereft. Her grandmother was a person to be missed, whether she had unconsciously grown fond of her or not. At all events she felt a desire to stand by until the last of the ceremonies. And the old house, in which so many of her blood had lived and died, mysteriously held her.
“You are very kind,” she said. “And I’ll be glad to see Polly when she comes back. But I’d better stay here. I’m sure grandmother would have wished it. If—if—you’ll attend to things, though, I’d be grateful.”
“I will indeed.” Mrs. Pleyden was a tall slender woman, admirably dressed and poised, but although her life for the most part was spent in a round of bridge, she was by nature executive and always willing to exercise her talent. Her house in Chelsea and her apartment in New York were models of bland extravagance and housewifely skill. In an earlier day she would have been a “leader,” and, as it was, her large and exclusive circle deferred to her and regarded her as a personage. Between herself and Polly there was an unspoken compact. Mrs. Pleyden moved with the times, and life had taught her philosophy.
“Better go out of doors,” she continued. “Perhaps you will change your mind later, but meanwhile don’t stay in the house any more than you can help. I’ll do the telephoning, and Topper always knows what to do. He’s seen many a funeral in this house.”
Gita shuddered and went out into the garden.
The more intimate of her grandmother’s friends were in and out constantly during the next three days. Flowers arrived by the motor-load. The heavy perfume in the unaired rooms was unendurable. It seemed to Gita as if all the dead Carterets had fertilized the roots of those flowers and contributed their odor of decay.
The old lady lay in state, not in the drawing-room but in the great central hall. Her face looked like an ancient wax mask. It was devoid of expression, and it had had so much in life! Gita did not give it a second glance. She preferred to remember that wise sarcastic old face on the pillows, lit by the indomitable dark brilliancy of the eyes.
Mrs. Pleyden had telephoned to a New York house for Gita’s mourning and it arrived early on the day of the funeral. It was merely a straight little frock of crêpe de Chine and a black straw hat like an inverted bowl, from which a short veil of chiffon depended. Gita wondered what her grandmother would have thought of it. Her crêpe veils no doubt had trailed the ground like those of the afflicted in French provincial towns.
She rummaged in the drawers of a chest in the old lady’s room and found a long necklace of jet and oxidized silver and put it on. The act made her feel less modern than usual, but she thought, somewhat humorously, that her grandmother would approve of this subtle, if momentary, linking of her unruly descendant with the past.
She had heard the rolling of many motors, and as she descended the broad stair she saw that the hall as well as the large and smaller drawing-rooms were crowded with ladies and gentlemen, who, as she learned later, had come not only from Atlantic City, but from Philadelphia and many of the country estates in New Jersey. It was a last tribute from friends and acquaintances that would have pleased Mrs. Carteret, although she would have regarded it as a matter of course. The Carteret funerals had always been affairs of state, a signal for all affiliated clans.
There were even reporters on the lawn.
Topper, in a rusty dress suit, once in the wardrobe of Mr. Carteret, and black gloves, was master of ceremonies, and Andrew, the old gardener, bent nearly double with rheumatism, had been given a chair near the casket. The other servants, housemaid and cook, were more recent acquisitions, but sniffled audibly. Topper’s eyes were red, but no Carteret could have presented a more immobile front to the world.
Mr. Donald, the family lawyer, met Gita at the foot of the stair and offered his arm. She was conscious of a ripple of decorous interest and several hundred examining eyes as they made their way to the upper end of the hall and took the seats reserved for them. There were no young people present. Polly, who had returned the night before, had telephoned that she would be over after the funeral; she would pass out if she found herself at one of those hang-overs of barbarism.
Gita privately made up her own mind that it was the last funeral she would ever attend. In an effort to look grave the company was as if suddenly bereft of individuality, and all the women who possessed black gowns wore them whether they were cut in the latest fashion or not. The pall-bearers, most of them keen business or professional men, looked like expressionless mutes. Mr. Donald, who was one of them, wore a band of black cloth on his sleeve and flourished a handkerchief with a black border. Polly would have said he looked like a walking monument to conservatism, but he was an urbane and pleasant person, inclined to be fatherly in manner to his younger clients and had been sincerely attached to Mrs. Carteret.
The atmosphere was sickening. The day was hot and close. Several of the women surreptitiously inhaled smelling-salts. The clergyman in his Episcopal robes droned on interminably. Not a phrase of the long funeral service could be omitted on so august an occasion. Gita felt as if she were on the verge of hysterics. At her mother’s simple funeral on the desert, where Millicent had asked to be buried—she was “tired of traveling”—Gita had felt only numbness and desolation, and had passively permitted herself, when it was over, to be carried off to San Francisco by Mrs. Melrose to await a possible letter from Carteret Manor. The numbness had not passed until she found herself alone in the train, free of solicitudes and plans for her future, should Mrs. Carteret ignore her. But today she felt a wild desire to laugh and shock some sort of expression into these portentously solemn faces. What a comedy! They were swooning with boredom and tuberoses, and what one of them had really cared for her grandmother? More than once they must have writhed under her merciless tongue. But it was an inherited ritual to attend a Carteret funeral and they were stern devotees of the passing conventions.
The sonorous voice rounded its final period. There was a sigh, a rustle. Mr. Donald left her to join the pall-bearers. Mrs. Pleyden took her firmly by the arm and led her past many staring eyes to her own motor.
“You are going with me to the cemetery,” she said kindly, “and then I’ll turn you over to Mr. Donald, who’ll bring you home and read the will to you in the library. . . . Abominable!” She had heard the click of a camera. “But your features will hardly be distinguishable through that veil. I only hope the paper is one that decent people take in.” She looked askance at the necklace but concluded to ignore it. Tact never failed her.
Thecasket had been placed on its shelf in the Carteret vault and wreaths and crosses piled to the roof. Mr. Donald conducted Gita to his motor and they returned in silence to the manor. Gita drew a long breath. Her grandmother had made her final exit. She might regret, but she had mourned too deeply for her mother to confuse regret with grief. And she was conscious of a thrill of expectation. She had seen plays where wills were read by a solemn lawyer to a solemn family and thought them highly dramatic. Now she was to be the central figure in such a scene and that old library would be a proper setting.
Topper was standing in the hall. She gave him her first order.
“Please send all these flowers that are left to some hospital—at once. And open every window in the house.”
Topper, who distrusted fresh air even by day, shook his head in protest, but his eyes fell before the dark imperious gaze that had mastered his will for seventy-odd years. He had never expected to have a young mistress in his old age, and he and Andrew retired to the pantry and wept into two generous glasses of old port.
Gita followed Mr. Donald into the library and opened its windows herself. It was a very large room with books to the ceiling, galleries, alcoves, flights of steps. Over the paneled oak mantel was a half-length portrait of her grandfather, at which she had scowled more than once; it bore a fatal resemblance to her father. The room, when closed, had that subtle odor of death that comes from rotting calf, and, possibly, from those silent emanations of brains long still. But when the sunlight poured in and the salt winds from the Atlantic purified the air, it looked less like a tomb of dead thought, merely a dignified old library in a stately old manor house.
Gita took a chair close to one of the windows and Mr. Donald settled himself with a sigh of relief in a large leather chair by the central table.
“This has been a trying day,” he said, “and I am not as young as I was. I shall miss my old friend, who was a remarkable woman, Miss Carteret, a remarkable woman.”
“Yes,” said Gita sincerely, “she was. I wish I could have known her longer—and that she could have been sixty instead of eighty.”
Mr. Donald looked at her approvingly. Proper sentiments, certainly. Hardly to have been expected perhaps, brought up as she had been, and with her boyish hardness. He had never before seen a Carteret who did not look feminine, however imperious. He had met her twice before and had anticipated impatience, slang, and a total lack of respect. But Gita looked rather meek sitting there by the window and quite properly subdued. She had laid aside her hat, and her rough cropped head, which had excited her grandmother’s ire, and no less his own, was bent over a honeysuckle bush, inhaling its delicate fragrance.
It was a beautiful head. Mr. Donald studied it against the light, and with approval. Lines of face and head perfectly balanced. Set on a long throat. Small high ears. A spirited profile and the magnificent black eyes of the Carterets. It was something, at least, that this girl was a Carteret in looks. But what was she inside that almost blasphemous exterior? Had she any regard for tradition, or would she take the bit in her teeth, laugh at his advice, sell the manor in spite of her promise to her grandmother, and behave like a young colt generally? She looked as if her next step would be to wear trousers, and Mr. Donald, who gave the present generation of young people his unqualified disapproval, wished she were more like them and less like an absent-minded compound of Old Dame Nature. He was a mere sixty, but he had inherited the Carterets from his father and known many of them, although none that gave him a clew to this last of the line. However, he was used to trouble and generally knew how to deal with it.
He cleared his throat, adjusted his spectacles, and opening his bag, drew out a document.
“This is the last will and testament of your grandmother,” he said solemnly, “and, as is customary, it is my duty to read it to the family immediately after the final ceremonies.”
“Yes,” said Gita, smiling, “I always wanted to hear a will read. I know what is in it, but it will be fu—interesting, all the same.”
Mr. Donald frowned. “This is not an occasion for levity, my dear Miss Carteret.”
“Of course. Sorry. But I really do want to hear a will read.”
“Are you romantic?” asked Mr. Donald hopefully.
“Good lord, no! But I have a sense of drama.”
“Well, I shall not argue the point. But I think—first—may I ring for Topper and order a glass of sherry? This really has been a very trying day.”
“Indeed, yes!” There was no lack of Carteret hospitality at least.
Topper brought the sherry and retired. Mr. Donald filled two glasses, handed one to Gita, and lifted his own gallantly. “Here’s to your very good health, Miss Carteret, and a long and useful life.”
“Thanks,” said Gita dryly, but drinking the sherry, of which she suddenly felt the need. “Same to you. But please call me Gita. Miss Carteret doesn’t suit me at all.”
“Ah!—well, yes—I’ll call you Gita with pleasure. And now I shall read this last testament of my dear old friend.”
He began to read in a dry legal voice. Gita, warmed by the sherry, smiled at the lines beginning: “Being of sound mind,” etc. Nothing more aptly could have described her grandmother.
Mrs. Carteret, after generous bequests to Topper and Andrew, left her entire fortune to Gita, with instructions that she give her late grandfather’s studs, cuff-links and scarf-pins to Mr. Donald, who was named sole executor of the estate.
“It consists of this house and grounds, two farms, a house on States Avenue, Atlantic City, and good securities,” Mr. Donald informed his client. “There are no mortgages. The value of the estate after the inheritance tax has been paid will be something under two hundred thousand dollars. The rent of the house in Atlantic City just about pays for itself these days, what with taxes and repairs. When the present lease expires I should advise you to sell it. It was built for your grand-uncle, Byllynge Carteret, who left it to your grandfather in payment for moneys borrowed at various times. Most of those old homes have been turned into boarding-houses, since fashion moved out to Chelsea, and summer visitors come to Atlantic City in increasing hordes—the great majority of whom cannot afford the hotels on the Boardwalk. But——” He paused, coughed, and polished his spectacles. “I hope, my dear Gita, that you do not contemplate selling or even renting the manor.”
“I shall not sell it, but I certainly shall rent it if I should at any time want a larger income.”
“That would be almost as bad,” grumbled Mr. Donald, who, however, was relieved. “Of course it is rather a dismal home for a young girl, and I can imagine you would prefer to live for a time in a large city; but I feel sure that later in life you will be glad to know that you still possess this historic old manor of your ancestors.”
“My ancestors are not worrying me. I’m glad I’ve no relations to ding-dong about them. But I like the old place and I intend to hang on to it.”
“Ah—yes—well, I’m glad to hear that. May I ask if you have any immediate plans?”
“I intend to stay here for the present.”
“Couldn’t do better. Finest climate in the world.”
“Better say that to a Californian! Must you go?”
Mr. Donald had disposed of his spectacles and risen. “I am very grateful to you,” added his young hostess with unexpected graciousness. “And to my grandmother. If she hadn’t left me all this I’d have had to go to work. I hate work, and all the insincere jargon about it. Nobody works who doesn’t have to, even those who have great gifts that demand expression. They merely go on mental jags and enjoy themselves. Otherwise there’s no joy in work well done. The only joy is not having to do it.”
Mr. Donald was returning to his office to prepare a case to be argued in court next morning and felt no inclination to exhaust himself in debate with a young woman who would probably fling one defiance after another at his head under the impression that she was modern. He answered suavely:
“Very creditable of you to think for yourself. And it certainly would be unbecoming for one of the Carteret ladies to work for her living.”
“That isn’t worrying me, either. My objections to looking for a job and holding it down are purely personal.”
“You are very modern.” Mr. Donald sighed.
“Oh, that’s rather old-fashioned.”
“I mean in your complete indifference to tradition. But that seems to be one of the many phases of the present unrest. The war no doubt. Now, is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Of course you will continue to take care of the estate? I am hopelessly ignorant.”
“With the greatest pleasure!” Another apprehension was laid. In money matters at least this young rebel did not purpose to take the bit between her teeth. “And remember, if you need advice of any kind my services are at your immediate disposal.”
“I’d like to sell the house in Atlantic City at once and renovate this. I’ll keep the best of the furniture, of course, but the rest will go to the stables. My grandmother’s room I shall keep intact—as a memorial to the Carterets!”
“Well, I can’t blame you. But the lease of the house on States Avenue has a year to run. After the inheritance tax has been disposed of I’ll see what can be done.”
“Thanks. Sooner the better. Perhaps I could persuade the Pelhams to get out. Topper says they left cards and that gives me an excuse to call on them.”
Mr. Donald gave his smallest and tightest smile. “Try, by all means,” he said. “And your luck seems to have changed. Now, I must really bid you good-day. I shall be over again shortly with papers to sign.”
Itwas Easter Sunday and Gita was strolling along the Boardwalk. Mr. Donald had considerately sent her a check and she had bought a small black sailor hat, which she wore on the back of her head that her cropped hair should further demonstrate her complete indifference to feminine allure. She had also invested in a black sport skirt that she might be able to keep one hand in a pocket, and in the other she carried a swagger-stick. A stiff white shirtwaist and black tie completed her toilette. She flattered herself that she looked like a boy masquerading as a girl and was somewhat disconcerted when no less than two passing men murmured, “Cutie.” Then she was abruptly a haughty young woman—and a Carteret—freezing impertinent libertines.
“But if I onlywerea boy,” she sighed. “I don’t believe I’d even mind work. And girls are ten thousand times nicer than men. Then I could fall in love with one of them, and now that is forever denied me.”
But she did not really feel sad. The warm gold sun rode in an unflecked sky. The sea rolled in to the white sands in long sparkling indolent waves. Over the hard beach young people were riding horseback and children were driving little carts, or building in the sand. A great liner drifted on the horizon.
The Boardwalk was so crowded that Gita was forced to move at a far more leisurely pace than her habit, and it seemed to her that in all that vast throng there was but one expression: a composite expression of vacant contentment. If they were subject to the common misfortunes and cares of humanity, for the present they were unable to recall them.
Here and there she saw a woman fashionably dressed, but to what world she belonged Gita did not hazard a guess. There were perhaps a hundred tailor-made girls, as slim as laths, very trim, very conscious that they were turned out by one of the autocrats of fashion. But the mass were frankly tourists with no money to spend on anything but cheap imitations of the prevailing styles. There were college boys arm in arm and walking four abreast, and large carefully dressed males with roving predatory eyes.
In the close monotonous procession of rolling chairs propelled up and down the middle of the broad promenade by colored men or white derelicts, were couples too fat and overfed to walk or too old and tired. A few elderly ladies and gentlemen looked as if they may have sauntered on the Walk in its heyday and still came for the ozone which no change in fashion could alter.
Gita wondered what the façade of Atlantic City had looked like when these devitalized relics were in their prime. Today hotels of varying magnificence, with at least one triumph of modern architecture, were connected by a flimsy chain of low-browed buildings: Japanese or Chinese curio-shops; shops for linen, lingerie, sweaters and blouses; candy-stores; shops devoted exclusively to salt-water taffy, “cut to fit the mouth”; restaurants, motion-picture theaters, bookstores, shoe-stores, milliners; displays of costumes unapproachable in elegance and price; cigar stands, cheap rooming-houses, toy-stores, drug-stores, auction-rooms, art-shops of highest and lowest quality; booths where silhouettes were taken while you wait, stands for post-cards, newspapers, magazines; jewelers; five-and-ten-cent stores. Interrupted at set intervals by flights of steps or “inclines” leading down to the avenues of Atlantic City. Opposite, reaching far out into the water, six monstrous piers offering concerts, soft drinks, moving pictures, tearooms, ballrooms, and long decks for chairs.
It was a scene both vulgar and splendid, extravagant and tawdry, mean and aspiring. If a tidal wave washed away all but the hotels it would have a certain stark magnificence, but the miles of pigmy shops gave it the appearance of a chain of village Main Streets that made the great hotels, not themselves, look alien.
Nevertheless the ensemble was gay and exhilarating. Above the mass-murmur of voices rose the cry of the barkers and the deep surge of the Atlantic. These slowly moving smiling crowds gave to the scene an air of careless and unqualified leisure to be found nowhere else in the world.
Behind and below the Boardwalk, between the Inlet and Iowa Avenue, Atlantic City proper, a dignified town of a prevailing gray tone, rambled back to the Thoroughfares and the salt marshes, and on the south merged into the faubourg of Chelsea. It was a town with a life of its own and regarded its façade as almost if not wholly negligible. Its social life, like that of other small towns, revolved about its churches, Episcopalianism representing the flake of the crust, and its women’s clubs were often storm-centers of politics. The men had their professional and business clubs, and some sixty leading citizens met for a weekly luncheon at one of the city hotels either to talk business or forget it, and to sing, with the abandon of boys, the sentimental songs of their youth. Atlantic Avenue, a broad if unpicturesque thoroughfare, had its enormous trolleys that went from the Inlet to Longport, at the southern tip of the island; but Pacific Avenue, with its fine Public Library, its churches and reserved private houses, relied on the humble jitney.
It was not a bustling city but it had a constant surge of life, and there was no apparent poverty except in the negro quarter, whose denizens found compensation in a conscious political power. And it was a proud city, for all its streets were avenues, its shops were serenely independent of the extortionists on the Boardwalk, the best of its private houses looked like dignified old folks, well preserved but with no pretensions to youth, and its air was tonic. Visitors in the great frontal hotels, looking down on the quiet little gray city, assumed that oyster-dredging was still its main industry, and the humbler patrons of the hundreds of hotels and boarding-houses of the town accepted it as an annex to the Boardwalk and knew as little of its life as of its history.
Gita had often wandered about the town, which attracted her more than Chelsea or Ventnor, for although far from contemporary with the manor it represented the vision and enterprise of that group of men, including her great-grandfather, who had founded it in the early fifties, and now it had an elderly dignity and beauty of its own.
Her slow progress had brought her to the incline that led down into States Avenue and she edged her way to the rail and looked over at a large gray wooden house with a round pointed tower. It was on the north side of the avenue—once but a footpath leading from the old United States Hotel to the beach—and, like its neighbors, belonged to a definite and debased period of American architecture. Many of her enterprising great-grandfather’s friends had left Philadelphia to become permanent residents of the new city, either for business reasons or for fashion, and this street demonstrated their theories of comfort and grandeur. A few of their descendants had magnificent houses out on the avenues of Chelsea or Ventnor, others had succumbed to adverse fortune and quietly disappeared. A very few perhaps still lived where their fathers or grandfathers had built. Several of these old houses, once the pride of Atlantic City, were boarding-houses for the better class of vacationists who could not afford the palaces on the Boardwalk.
Gita had spent two hours on that famous promenade and not seen a familiar face. Nor was she likely to see one if she spent the day there. Polly and the girls she had brought to the manor during the past week scorned it wholeheartedly. They might exercise there in the early morning and swim off their secluded beach when the ocean recovered from the chill of winter, but to show themselves in “that crowd” had no part in their program of aristocratic democracy.
Gita, who had entertained her new friends in aired and sunny rooms from which at least a third of the furniture had been removed to the stables (by two stalwart sons of her farmers, the while Topper and Andrew muttered a continuous protest) had lost her desire for solitude, and wondered if the Pelhams were at home. Easter Sunday was no time for a formal call, but Gita, whether fundamentally a Carteret or not, ignored the conventions when it suited her purpose.
She descended the incline and strolled up the avenue to the least remunerative of her possessions. The blinds were raised and several of the windows were open. It was after twelve and if the Pelhams had attended church, as no doubt they had—the church, if not religion, playing so dominant a part in the lives of their kind—they would have returned. The midday dinner and Easter Sunday! Gita shrugged her shoulders and ran up the long flight of steps: the house, following the rule, was built above a high cellar as a precaution against the rare but always possible furies of the sea.
But the Pelhams had a late breakfast on Sunday and an early supper. When the colored maid brought up Miss Carteret’s name they were in their respective bedrooms enjoying the somnolent ease that followed a morning well spent. Chelsea had no more contempt for the Boardwalk than States Avenue.
Mrs. Pelham was the first to descend. She was offended at the informality but as curious as her daughter to see this heir of the Carterets, who had been the subject of much rumor and several newspaper paragraphs.
She was a very tall woman, thin and austere, with iron-gray hair dressed high and flat, and wore a gray dress over corsets as rigid as herself. Even the gold-framed spectacles did not soften her expression. She was a member of the church most active in local politics and all reforms, and the president of a very important club.
Gita felt like making a face but advanced and held out her hand in Millicent’s prettiest manner. “Mrs. Pelham? I am Gita Carteret and I do hope you won’t mind the informality of this call.”
“Oh, not at all,” said Mrs. Pelham stiffly. “Won’t you sit down? It is very polite of you to call so soon. I hardly expected to see you for several weeks.”
An ambiguous remark, but Gita replied sweetly:
“I was feeling lonesome after two hours on the Boardwalk and had a sudden desire to meet old friends of my grandmother.”
Mrs. Pelham looked as if about to thaw, then darted a suspicious glance at her visitor. “Hardly that. I used to meet Mrs. Carteret occasionally when we sat on the same charitable boards, and she was once very kind when I was ill. But I did not feel that I had known her well enough to attend the funeral. Of course I left cards.”
Is this class-consciousness? thought Gita. Do self-respecting Americans really recognize county?
“You were lucky not to feel you had to,” she replied warmly. “It was ghastly. Public funerals—and weddings—should be abolished; don’t you think so? Both are indecent.”
“I certainly do not agree with you. I rank both among thedecenciesof life.” She looked at Gita as if she approved of nothing about her, but it was a look to which Gita was inured and she merely smiled and crossed her knees, swinging a foot conspicuous in an Oxford bought in the boys’ department of a shoe-store.
She broke a silence that threatened to induce hysteria, recalling the gossip of Topper, who knew the lineage and habits of every family from Egg Harbor to Cape May. “I hear you go in tremendously for good works. That must get away with a lot of time.”
“My time is fully occupied and I certainly do my duty as I see it.”
“Oh—ah—yes. I’ve heard that Atlantic City is particularly fortunate in its women citizens. . . .” And then she sprang into the arena. “I suppose you always intend to live here?”
“Most certainly. I was born in Atlantic City—we once had our own house but it burned down—and I expect to die here. I hope you will renew the lease of this house when it expires—but of course you leave business details to Mr. Donald?”
There was a hint of anxiety in her rasping voice.
“Not altogether. I——You wouldn’t like to buy the house, would you?”
“I should like nothing better, but unfortunately I am unable to afford it.” There was a gleam of real apprehension in her hard gray eyes as she stared at Gita.
“I am afraid I must sell it, then.” Gita was now completely indifferent to the impression she was making on this disagreeable person as well as to the fact of Easter Sunday. “You see, it brings me in no income whatever and I really need more money.”
“I cannot give up this house!” Gita almost jumped. There was a note of fighting passion in the woman’s voice. “I have lived in it for thirty years. My children were born in it.”
“Oh—I’m sorry.” She felt curiously disconcerted, almost sympathetic, but after all she was not turning paupers into the street. “Perhaps—I hardly know what to say. Mr. Donald advised me——”
“I could take in paying guests. We have several spare rooms. I never expected to come to that but I’d do it and pay you more rent.”
“It isn’t so much a matter of income——” And then she rose with a sigh of relief. A girl was coming down the stairs, and she looked as unlike her presumable mother as possible.
Mrs. Pelham stood up. “My daughter, Mrs. Brewster—Miss Carteret,” she said in her stiff precise manner. “I hope you will excuse me for a few moments.” And she hastily left the room.
“ ‘Mrs.!’ ” said Gita, smiling once more as she resumed her seat on a chair as hard as any at Carteret Manor. “I was sure you were a girl like myself.”
“I am only twenty-six, and I’m a widow. My husband died a few months after our marriage. But that seems a long time ago—I was just twenty. I hear this is your first visit East. I hope you like it.”
And they exchanged easy commonplaces on the fertile subject of the Boardwalk and Atlantic City.
Mrs. Brewster was as slim as Gita and hardly as tall. She, also, held herself erectly, but without stiffness; her dark blue frock was of excellent material fashionably cut; and, observed Gita, who had an eye for clothes, singular in one who disdained them, as well “put on” as Polly’s. Her brown hair was cut short and brushed back from a brow of unfashionable nobility, and her large light eyes were both intelligent and humorous. Gita thought she had never seen a more emphatic little nose nor a more determined chin. If she had ever suffered she bore no trace and looked as if her vision would always be set toward the future in confidence and hope.
As the conversation became more personal Gita learned that Mrs. Brewster was buyer for one of the department stores on Atlantic Avenue, a position that took her frequently to Philadelphia and New York. She felt slightly bewildered. It was her first acquaintance with a girl of the business class, and she had assumed vaguely that all members of that order were hard and common. She had once dreaded a similar fate, and although, she told herself, she could not be harder, she had wondered if she would wholly forget the anxious training and admonitions of her mother. But Millicent might have had the bringing-up of Elsie Brewster. Gita wondered if she were a snob and felt secretly humiliated.
“But you don’t like work?” she asked, determined to get to the root of the matter. “You—you look, rather, as if you were both a student and fond of a good time like other girls. Once I thought I should have to go to work, and, frankly, I hated the bare idea.”
Mrs. Brewster smiled. “If you have to do a thing it is better to like it than hate it, don’t you think? But you are rather shrewd, you know. As a matter of fact I am fond of reading and study, and my job leaves me a good many hours of leisure. I also love good times, of course, but when you have a certain object in life——” Her voice faltered and she blushed and glanced hesitatingly at this odd visitor who looked like a boy with an eager girl’s face, and whom she had thought at first she should find detestable. But Miss Carteret was not in the least like other masculine women she had met, and when she forgot to be hard and crisp her voice had deep warm notes that were as attractive an anomaly as those long black eyelashes under that awful sailor hat.
“Yes?” asked Gita, who was now neither the polite Miss Carteret nor the aggressive lad but merely one girl interested in another. “Do tell me what is the object.”
Elsie Brewster smiled as warmly in response and succumbed to the revulsion of feeling. “You see—I lead a double life.”
“What!” Gita’s eyes sparkled. There was no mystery whatever about Polly and her group. “What on earth do you mean? You’re not secretly married again——Oh! No! That would be too commonplace.”
“I should think so. No—but this is quite a secret—my ambition is to be a writer—a novelist, if possible. I’ve had a few things accepted by the magazines: two or three by the best, others just anywhere my agent could place them. Of course it will be a long time before I can make a real income out of writing and give up my job—my mother’s income hardly covers the rent of this house and her subscriptions to charities, and club dues—what I make supports us very comfortably. Reputation—the kind that is remunerative, at least—takes time; but I know I shall succeed in the end!”
“You look as if you would.” Gita glowed with enthusiasm. “I’m frightfully interested. I do wish I had a gift. But I should think that after a hard day’s work you’d be too tired to write.”
“Sometimes I am, but as a rule I manage to put in three or four hours at night.”
“I think you are wonderful! Where do you write your stories?” She glanced around the stiff inhospitable room, furnished in the reps of the seventies. “In your bedroom?”
“Oh, no, I have a real study. Should you like to see it?”
“Shouldn’t I! Lead me to it.”
She followed Mrs. Brewster down the long hall and into a small room fitted up with a large flat desk to which a typewriter was firmly attached, a swivel chair, revolving bookcases, stands for dictionary and atlas, and a filing cabinet.
“Businesslike, isn’t it?” asked the young author. “I’m afraid system has become a part of my nature, and am always wondering if it will cramp my imagination.”
“Why should it? I’m horribly disorderly myself and can’t do a thing. . . . Is—is this a story?”
She was standing by the desk and she passed her hand with a lingering touch over a pile of manuscript, much as she had fingered her grandmother’s jewels.
“Yes. I finished it last night, and it will start off tomorrow on what may be a long and adventurous journey. But if it were rejected by every editor in the country nothing could take away my pleasure in writing it!” she exclaimed with sudden passion.
“I’ll bet it couldn’t.” Gita’s eyes roved over the little room; it seemed to her the most personal room she had ever entered. “Do you write all your stories here?” she asked.
“Yes. I don’t believe I could write anywhere else. If I used the word ‘atmosphere’ I suppose you would think I was talking cant.”
“No, I shouldn’t.” But her heart sank. And then she sighed. The manor would have to wait. She would not turn Elsie out of this room if Mr. Donald talked his head off, although it would have given her acute pleasure to annoy that disagreeable old woman. “I—I really came today to give a gentle hint to Mrs. Pelham that I intended to sell the house when the lease expired, but you may tell her I’ve changed my mind. You see, it tickles my vanity to think that great books may be written in a house belonging to me.”
“Oh!” Elsie Brewster had turned white. “You——Oh, you wouldn’t! It’s an ugly old shell but I love it, and I couldn’t write anywhere else. I’d feel as if my roots had been torn up.”
“Needn’t give it another thought,” said Gita briskly. “Cut it out. Don’t you want to come over and see my old tomb?”
“I should like it very much. I have always longed to see the inside of that old manor. To tell you the truth I once made it the scene of a story, although I had to make up the inside.”
“I am sure it was an improvement on the original. It couldn’t be worse. Do get your hat and come along. I told my old butler not to have luncheon until half-past one. Do you mind walking?”
“I’d love a walk. Just a moment.”
Gita, now that she was in command, had her meals served in the breakfast-room, as nothing could make cheerful, in the daytime at least, a long high room paneled to the ceiling, whose windows looked directly into somber pine woods. This little room, facing the garden, was bright and cheerful as the girls sat at lunch. It was a meal to satisfy the appetite rather than caress the palate, for Mrs. Carteret, during the last year of her life, had lived on broths, gruels, eggs, and milk, and the cook had “got her hand out,” as she informed her new mistress somewhat apprehensively: it had been an easy place and to the grumbling of nurses she had been haughtily indifferent. Gita, who had a European palate for flavors, had no intention of keeping her and asked Mrs. Brewster if she knew of a good cook.
“I can’t afford a chef, of course,” she said, “and I don’t know enough to train anyone, although I cooked for my mother and myself for a time in San Francisco. But I hate the sight of a kitchen and my accomplishments in that line were limited to meat and vegetables, generally overdone. But I should be able to get a fairly decent cook for what I pay this moron.”
“I know just the thing.” Elsie Brewster was delighted to be of service to this girl whom she liked more every moment and was anxious to study. “That is to say if your Topper would stand for it. The woman is colored.”
“Topper’s opinion will not be asked,” said Gita coolly. “He will suit his tastes to mine or leave. I have no sentiment about old servants, and I am sure he must have saved a lot, to say nothing of my grandmother’s legacy. I’ll make him a present of the discarded furniture and he can set up another boarding-house in Atlantic City! Send your darky along. I’m enormously obliged.”
“Oh, do keep Topper!” cried Elsie. “What would an old manor be without an aged butler? He’s an indispensable part of the tradition.”
“Well, he can’t live forever,” said Gita practically. “And I think the less you bother about traditions the better you get along. Old servants think they own you, anyhow, and there’ll be only one master in this house.”
“I don’t fancy he owned your grandmother. I used to see her sometimes when I went to the Episcopal church with a friend, and thought her quite the most imperious person I had ever seen. You looked just like her when you said that.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s only because I can have things my own way for the first time in my life.”
Elsie looked at her speculatively, wondering how she could get this odd girl to talk about herself. Gita Carteret was a new type in her somewhat limited experience, and it was a confirmed habit to edge everyone she met under an avid and microscopic eye.
“You have met Miss Pleyden,” she began tentatively. “I wonder what you think of her?”
“She’s a good sort. So are several of the other girls she has brought here. Not unlike the San Francisco girls, only more so. But I never could live their life. I fancy I’m old before my time.”
Mrs. Brewster laughed outright. “I never saw anyone look younger! It is difficult to believe you are twenty-two.”
“Well,” said Gita gloomily, “I ought to look forty.”
“But you wouldn’t like to look forty. Come, now, own up.”
“You’re right, I wouldn’t.” Gita was forced to smile. “I suppose that sounded like a grand little pose.”
“I can’t imagine you in a conscious pose of any sort. But, you know, youth can go through a lot without being hopelessly scarred. Otherwise—I have heard vaguely that you had a hard time for a few years, if you’ll pardon me—you wouldn’t look a bare eighteen when you are four years older. I felt very old myself at your age, for I had loved my young husband devotedly; and now I feel, and look, younger, and, I am willing to confide in you, I have almost forgotten the poor man.”
She hoped, by throwing open a window in her own soul, to hear a quick rattling of the shutters opposite, but Gita replied with a frown: “Underground is the best place for husbands as far as my observation goes. I think you were in luck.”
“Perhaps. Although he really was a delightful chap. Still, if he had lived there is no doubt I should be doing the plain domestic act today: several children, repetitional cares of a small house, teas and bridge-parties for diversion. I doubt if I ever should have found myself. The life of a business woman seems to me infinitely preferable, and if I didn’t have this writing kink I’d be quite happy in it. Still, I think every woman should marry, even if it cannot last, one way or another. No woman can be thoroughly poised, able to look at life on all sides, and with a clear analytical eye, unless she has lived with a man in matrimony. Other thing is too one-sided.”
“Some women, perhaps. And as you’re a writer no doubt you have to know it all. But there is no necessity for the masculine woman to marry.”
Elsie bent over her pudding. “Do you really think yourself masculine?” she asked indistinctly.
“Of course I am!” Gita’s voice flew to its upper register. Her grandmother’s and Polly’s gibes had made little impression on her conscious mind. She ascribed them to personal interest and the conventional viewpoint.
“Then—I must ask it—I can’t help it!—why don’t you cut off your eyelashes?”
“Cut off my eyelashes!” Gita raised one narrow sunburnt hand and stroked them tenderly. “If you want the truth I love my eyelashes.”
“Of course you do. And your lovely head and magnificent eyes and all the rest of your beauty, badly as you treat it. But, my dear, I am going to say it if you never speak to me again: you don’t look the least like a boy and you never can.”
She expected to witness a full and final exhibition of the Carteret temper, but to her surprise Gita answered gloomily: “I’ve begun to be afraid I don’t. Two of those horrid men on the Boardwalk this morning tried to flirt with me.”
“What did they say?” asked Elsie eagerly.
“I wouldn’t repeat it.” And her eyebrows were an unbroken black line above flaming eyes at the memory of being called “Cutie.” She, Gita Carteret!
“It might be one thing and it might be another,” observed Mrs. Brewster cryptically. “A girl trying to look like a boy would only amuse some men, but it might lead you into excessively disagreeable experiences with others. To say nothing of—well——”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I fancy you have seen too much of one side of life and very little of another. If you’ll take my advice you will go up to New York—I’d love to go with you!—and buy a lot of feminine frocks and hats. Of course you are in mourning but there are adorable black things.”
“I hate feminine frocks. Besides, if I’m good-looking I never would be able to keep men off.”
“You never will, anyway, but you might have a—well, more satisfactory measure of success if you cast yourself for the part of the cold and indifferent beauty. That’s rather out of date, but as men today are averse from effort of any sort in their relations with women, accustomed to be met half-way, in short, I fancy you’d be able to manage. But do you really never intend to marry?”
“I really do not! If you knew what I know of men your books wouldn’t be fit for publication. What sort of stories do you write, anyway? Realistic or romantic? Are those the terms?”
Once more Gita had eluded her, but she replied with every appearance of eager response: “Terms are out of date but principle remains the same. I write both. When I’m sad and tired I write romance, and when I’m feeling particularly buoyant, I write small-town stuff, with husbands going about the bedrooms in suspenders and forgetting to brush their teeth; and revolting wives (both ways) scraping out the kitchen sink. I always give particular prominence to grease. When the sink is clean, if it ever is, she turns her attention to the fly-specks and marks of heads on the wall-paper.”
Gita’s eyebrows were in their proper place and she was grinning delightedly. “I think you’re a whacker!” she exclaimed. “Do you ever write of New York? That is the one city I long to see—I’ve barely had a glimpse of it. I’m going up to all the theaters and concerts and just walk the streets. Will you come along? I’d love to have you.”
Mrs. Brewster’s eyes glowed, but she answered firmly: “I don’t know anything I’d like better, but I simply won’t walk the streets with you if you insist upon wearing those clothes—and that hat. In the first place it’s a crime and in the second I dislike being conspicuous.”
Gita looked sulkily at her plate. “I’ve dressed like this since I was sixteen. My mother didn’t like it, and she was the only person I cared enough about to mind whether anyone liked it or not. But I’m used to it. I should feel awkward and intolerably strange any other way.”
“Only for a time, and in mourning you wouldn’t notice it so much. You’d be quite accustomed to it by the time you went into colors.”
“I should feel as if a part of my personality had been lopped off.”
“On the contrary, you’d give your personality its first chance to develop itself. If you really had a hard masculine face—the kind that goes with authentic masculoid characteristics—I wouldn’t say a word. I’d not be interested enough. But your type of beauty—real beauty—is the sort to express itself through clothes. Do you really hate beautiful and expressive gowns?” she demanded. “Hate the sight of them on other women?”
“Oh, I like to look at them well enough. And I see at once if details are not right. I fancy I have what an old Frenchman I once knew called ‘le sentiment de la toilette.’ But all that is merely the same thing as knowing a good picture from a bad. I was dragged through all the picture galleries in Europe, and I lived in Paris off and on, where the women are the best dressed in the world. I appreciated them the more because I lived so much in French provincial towns, where the women are certainly the worst dressed in the world. And my mother had lovely things when I was little, and always managed to look better in old rags made over than many that spent thousands a year. But I never longed for things myself—never gave it a thought.”
“Because you had censored your mind so thoroughly. Don’t you really think that if you hadn’t—for reasons best known to yourself—adopted the rôle of pseudo-boy so young, you’d have been as feminine in all ways as other girls?”
Gita, quite unconscious of Elsie’s delicate probing into her past, answered obstinately: “Never thought about it. Or if I had I’d have been glad of another excuse to spend as little as possible on myself. We were frightfully poor, and even in San Francisco, where, for a time, we thought the worst of our troubles were over, we just about made both ends meet. At least we couldn’t save. If I’d been keen to dress like the other girls we’d have been in debt up to our necks.”
Topper, who had received instructions to keep out of the room except when he was serving, had made his final exit some time since, but the girls lingered on with their coffee and cigarettes. Elsie made a curious zigzagging movement along the table with a spoon, denting the cloth; here and there she made an upward curve or straight mark as irregular in height as the crooked line; then, suddenly, she broke off, skipped an inch, and drew a high firm object that looked not unlike a barred gate.
“What on earth are you doing?” asked Gita curiously.
“Outlining your life as I imagine it—in a hazy sort of way. It has never followed the even course of other girls of your class or you wouldn’t be what you are. These upward curves and straight marks represent abrupt changes and milestones. But that”—she pointed to the last figure—“is more than a milestone. It represents a barrier that shuts you off completely from your old life. It opened wide enough to let you through but it is closed and sealed forever. You could not go back if you wished, and I know that you wish nothing less. Behind that barrier is a life you hate to remember. Before it, where you find yourself now, are the pleasant places and all the most romantic girl could have wished for, who was not too extravagant. Position, freedom, an independent income, powerful and admiring friends, and the chance to be stared at as an authentic beauty. Don’t you think you should change with it? If you don’t you’re not as original as you look. Why! You’d be merely commonplace, obstinate, content to go on being one thing all your life. Don’t you know that the really intelligent woman these days crowds as much variety into her life as life will permit? And adds as many sides to her personality?”
“Ah!” Gita had turned pale. Her mouth was open and her nostrils dilating, as if her heart were beating irregularly. “That is something I never thought of. I do like change, and maybe I am obstinate—but I’m not commonplace! . . . Perhaps the timehascome . . . anyhow I promised my grandmother I’d let Mrs. Pleyden bring me out, and dress like other girls. She was dying and had been very generous with me, and I couldn’t help promising her. But she died a day or two later and I hadn’t thought of it since. But of course I’ll have to keep my promise—and I might as well begin now of my own free will,” she added characteristically. “And if I really can’t look like a boy, what’s the use? I suppose I’m too old for such nonsense anyhow. I used to feel a lot older than I do now—and looked it, I imagine.” She shot an almost apologetic glance at Elsie, who was beaming: she knew she had succeeded where others had failed. “Reaction, I suppose, and I really never wore such an ugly hat before. . . . But I won’t—and this is positive!—ever marry, or even dance with men.”
“Oh, let the future take care of itself. I can think of nothing now but of helping you buy frocks and hats in the New York shops. I know them all—just where to go. Luckily the hat of the moment comes almost to the bridge of the nose, and by the time fashion changes, your front and side hair will have grown out. I’ll ask for my vacation now if you’ll really start in right away to fit yourself out.”
“I will. And send the bills to Mr. Donald! Although he’s rather a dear and sent me a check for two-fifty the other day. I’ve spent hardly any of it. Come upstairs and see the jewels my grandmother gave me. I suppose I’ll have to be forty before I can wear most of them, but it’s jolly to have inherited lovely things to look at—although I’d forgotten them till this minute!”
Gita, for the first time since her childhood, possessed a completely feminine wardrobe. Mrs. Brewster had set her face against even the most girlish and apotheosized of tailored suits, and persuaded Gita to buy a soft black frock of unbroken lines, to which were attached white linen cuffs above the half-sleeves, and a long white collar about the sloping neck; the opening, after furious controversy, displayed the lace of a camisole. Little frocks for the morning, suitably if austerely embellished. A soft silk hat pulled down over the ears, but with an ascending brim that revealed sleek sweeping eyebrows, and a tri-cornered one of straw. Two dinner-gowns, one of satin and one of georgette. Peach-bloom underwear, silk stockings, slippers, uncompromisingly feminine shoes. Mr. Donald paid the bills with a sigh of relief. What had brought his difficult client to her senses he knew not but drew the natural inference. He hoped the man was the right sort and would hasten to relieve him of an onerous responsibility. If he were not he would do his duty and remonstrate, but the girl was over age; and no one could blame him if she showed as poor judgment in husbands as she did in other things. She was the only young woman of his acquaintance who inspired in him no fatherly sentiments whatever. She reminded him of a prancing colt with a vicious pull on the bit, and he had been moved to wish that she were one and he could give her a taste of the whip.
He made subtle inquiries and learned that she lunched in Chelsea or Ventnor occasionally, and that she was more frequently in the society of Elsie Brewster, at which he frowned. Still, Mrs. Brewster was a steady-going young woman, as feminine as Polly Pleyden, and a good deal more respectable. And of course she was a lady—according to middle-class American standards—although the family had never aspired to social eminence and were not even Episcopalians. But the mother came of respectable Atlantic City stock (out of New England), and although Mr. Pelham had been in trade (hardware), like his father before him, he had been an educated man, a fine citizen, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce. Elsie had graduated with honors from the High School, and was now considered one of the rising young business women of Atlantic City. She had the respect and admiration of everyone. Still, Mr. Donald knew that Mrs. Carteret would not have permitted the intimacy, and he frowned in sympathy. He knew better than to remonstrate with Gita, however. All he longed for in that quarter was peace and quiet. Democracy was the rage among the young fools anyway.
Elsie, who prided herself justly upon being a psychologist, had insisted that Gita abandon pajamas and buy at least six nightgowns of fine cambric, delicately embroidered and trimmed with lace. Gita had protested, as she had done steadily throughout the entire program—although, being honest, she wondered if it were not for the pleasure of yielding, not merely the angry mutterings of outraged habit—but had jerked her shoulders finally and growled: “Have your own way, but I’ll feel like a fool. Lots of the girls wear pajamas.” “Yes, but they offend my artistic sense. I’d as soon arrange roses in my best bowl with weeds instead of maidenhair.”
She had also wrung from Gita a promise to give her old clothes “from the skin out” to one of Mrs. Pelham’s charities, and shuddered when she found in the trunk Gita fetched in a taxi a plentiful supply of B.V.D’s.
“Youarethorough!” she exclaimed. “I only hope you’ll keep it up. Mind, you are to dress every night for dinner, as your grandmother wished, and you are to look at yourself approvingly in the glass later when you’ve on one of those nightgowns.”
But Gita felt bewildered and at times almost unhappy. She opened the doors of the mahogany wardrobe, which had sheltered so many changes of fashion, and fingered the soft texture of her gowns, and felt a thrill of pleasure in their flowing lovely lines. She folded and refolded the dainty contents of the drawers of the oaken carved highboy, as old as the manor, which still smelled faintly of lavender. She put on one of her white linen frocks in the morning and adjusted the black accessories with conscientious precision, or looked admiringly at her reflection in the “psyche mirror,” clad in white skirt and black silk sweater. She dressed for dinner in the black georgette, and shot a fleeting glance at herself when robed more simply but more elaborately for the night. Her hair, encouraged by violent brushing and a tonic, was springing out all over her head with an exultant life of its own.
But she was suffering from spiritual growing-pains, and felt as if she were learning to use a new and unclassified set of muscles and nerve arcs. There was a more superficial readjustment as well, for she found silk “queer” after B.V.D’s. and fancied it scratched her. The high-heeled slippers hurt her feet, and she was trying to limber her spine and cultivate the careless grace of other girls, although she had no intention of looking as if she were too weak to stand up straight. Elsie was erect without rigidity, and of course she could get the hang of the thing if she tried hard enough.
She also felt considerable resentment at the approving glances and mutters of Topper (who knew when he was beaten; moreover, had succumbed to the culinary graces of the new cook), and the staccato applause of Polly Pleyden. But this, she ruthlessly informed herself, was egoistical resentment at the intimation that she had been sadly in need of improvement.
But for six years she had thought herself into the rôle of a boy, even pecked her mother on the cheek like a boy, and, in their worst moments, reassured Millicent with bluff crisp phrases instead of the usual feminine endearments; to the end she had scorned sentiment and demonstrations, and, to the amazement and disapproval of Mrs. Melrose, had not shed a tear at the sad little funeral on the desert. “Boys do cry, you know,” the kind but exasperated lady had observed, while indulging freely in tears for the friend of her youth. “If you will play a part why not be consistent about it?” But Gita, who was wishing herself in the grave with her mother, had merely looked straight ahead, with the expression, Mrs. Melrose told Ann later, of a wooden Indian.
She had been furious with herself more than once for her secret pride in her eyelashes and had considered mutilation, but after various specious excuses: the breaking of her mother’s heart, their value as a sun-screen, etc., she had finally admitted she would as readily cut off her nose. Once, when she caught herself examining her fine Carteret profile with the aid of a hand-mirror, she had thrown the glass out of the window and filched from her father’s vocabulary.
It had been a matter of will induced by a special neurosis, but the accomplishment had stopped just short of perfection, and the effort to make herself over into a girl with a girl’s easy grace of carriage and mental lineaments, made her feel bruised all over. It would have been almost as easy for a cripple to stand erect and run a race. She was not only disoriented but apprehensive. Her semi-masculine garb and mental posturing had been like a protective armor, absurd, perhaps, but inspiring her with security and confidence.
Now she felt, she grumbled to herself, like a knight whose armor had been ripped off by the enemy, a turtle that had lost its shell, a bandit who had gone out to hold up a train and discovered he had left his “guns” at home.
But—there was no denying it!—having deliberately let down the bars and made a bonfire of them, her vanity was acting like a hungry bear after a long winter’s sleep. It surged over her in singing waves as she regarded herself in the long mirror when arrayed for dinner in one of the soft clinging frocks that revealed arms and the upper part of a neck (Elsie scowled at models high in front and bare to the waist behind) that, however thin, were round and smooth and of the tint of old ivory. She smiled with lips very red and sharply curved, that had been reclaimed (under Elsie’s orders) from their perverse hard line; at her bright black eyes with their curved lids and lashes that under artificial light were reflected in the clear light olive and red of her cheeks; at the sweep of her eyebrows and the slender firmness of her throat.
And then she would fall into a panic and feel an impulse to crawl under the bed.
The morning following her first surrender to sheer femininity at the psyche mirror and its almost terrified reaction she hired a horse on the beach and spent two hours galloping over the sands. Here, at least, she could wear a manlike coat, and breeches, and ride astride.
Of all this she never spoke to Elsie Brewster, and if the agile mind of her mentor darted close to the truth, that wise young woman was content with her large measure of success and, if only out of delicacy and loyalty, probed no further.
She gave Gita all the time she could spare, dined with her frequently, encouraged her to come to the office on Atlantic Avenue, and took her on several buying expeditions to Philadelphia and New York. She sometimes felt like a sculptor with a promising but singularly uncertain piece of clay in his hands: clay with unmalleable lumps and responsive but slippery surfaces.
Gita was kicking off a slipper from an aching foot one night, when her leg was arrested in mid-air. Something had been tapping at her conscious plane for several weeks, an elusive something, gone before she could rake it to the light. Now it darted forward of its own accord, and it seemed to her that an actual entity took form in her brain, smiling significantly.
For years she had had the same dream, and nearly every night. She had stood alone on a solitary mountain-peak, with barely a glimpse of the world below. The figure had been as aloof, as isolated, as the mountain itself. And it was always staring up at another peak, higher still.
She realized that she had not had that dream for a month.
“Well, much good may it do me,” she thought, as she kicked off the other slipper. “Coming down to brass tacks and liking them is all very well, but I still wish I had been a man.”
And then, standing before the mirror arrayed in the daintiest of her nightgowns, she wondered if she did.
She shrugged her shoulders, climbed into her ancestral four-poster and turned off the light by the bed. “Anyhow, I was born a philosopher,” she thought sincerely if erroneously, “and perhaps when I can afford a human bed I’ll feel more like the real thing. I might put bows on the corners.”