CHAPTER XI

124CHAPTER XIGertrude Has Trouble with Her Behavior

“Dear Uncle Peter,” Eleanor wrote from Colhassett when she had been established there under the new régime for a week or more. “I slapped Albertina’s face. I am very awfully sorry, but I could not help it. Don’t tell Aunt Margaret because it is so contrary to her teachings and also the golden rule, but she was more contrary to the golden rule that I was. I mean Albertina. What do you think she said? She said Aunt Gertrude was homely and an old maid, and the hired girl was homely too. Well, I think she is, but I am not going to have Albertina think so. Aunt Gertrude is pretty with those big eyes and ink like hair and lovely teeth and one dimple. Albertina likes hair fuzzed all over faces and blonds. Then she said she guessed I wasn’t your favorite, and that the gold spoons were most likely tin gilded over. I don’t know what you think about slapping. Will you please write and say what you think? You know I am anxsuch to do well. But125I think I know as much as Albertina about some things. She uster treat me like a dog, but it is most a year now since I saw her before.

“Well, here we are, Aunt Gertrude and me, too. Grandpa did not like her at first. She looked so much like summer folks, and acted that way, too. He does not agree with summer folks, but she got him talking about foreign parts and that Spanish girl that made eyes at him, and nearly got him away from Grandma, and the time they were wrecked going around the horn, and showing her dishes and carvings from China. Now he likes her first rate. She laughs all the time. Grandma likes her too, but not when Grandpa tells her about that girl in Spain.

“We eat in the dining-room, and have lovely food, only Grandpa does not like it, but we have him a pie now for breakfast,—his own pie that he can eat from all the time and he feels better. Aunt Gertrude is happy seeing him eat it for breakfast and claps her hands when he does it, only he doesn’t see her.

“She is teaching me more manners, and to swim, and some French. It is vacation and I don’t have126regular lessons, the way I did while we were on Long Island.

“Didn’t we have a good time in that hotel? Do you remember the night I stayed up till ten o’clock and we sat on the beach and talked? I do. I love you very much. I think it is nice to love anybody. Only I miss you. I would miss you more if I believed what Albertina said about my not being your favorite. I am.

“I wish you could come down here. Uncle Jimmie is coming and then I don’t know what Albertina will say.

“About teaching me. Aunt Gertrude’s idea of getting me cultivated is to read to me from the great Masters of literature and funny books too, like Mark Twain and the Nonsense Thology. Then I say what I think of them, and she just lets me develop along those lines, which is pretty good for summer.

“Here is a poem I wrote. I love you best.

“The sun and wind are on the sea,The waves are clear and blue,This is the place I like to be,If I could just have you.127“The insects chirrup in the grass,The birds sing in the tree,And oh! how quick the time would passIf you were here with me.”

“What do you think of slapping, Aunt Gertrude?” Eleanor asked one evening when they were walking along the hard beach that the receding tide had left cool and firm for their pathway, and the early moon had illumined for them. “Do you think it’s awfully bad to slap any one?”

“I wouldn’t slap you, if that’s what you mean, Eleanor.”

“Would you slap somebody your own size and a little bigger?”

“I might under extreme provocation.”

“I thought perhaps you would,” Eleanor sighed with a gasp of relieved satisfaction.

“I don’t believe in moral suasion entirely, Eleanor,” Gertrude tried to follow Eleanor’s leads, until she had in some way satisfied the child’s need for enlightenment on the subject under discussion. It was not always simple to discover just what Eleanor wanted to know, but Gertrude had come to believe that there was always some excellent128reason for her wanting to know it. “I think there are some quarrels that have to be settled by physical violence.”

Eleanor nodded. Then,

“What about refinement?” she asked unexpectedly. “I want to bring myself up good when—when all of my aunts and uncles are too busy, or don’t know. I want to grow up, and be ladylike and a credit, and I’m getting such good culture that I think I ought to, but—I get worried about my refinement. City refinement is different from country refinement.”

“Refinement isn’t a thing that you can worry about,” Gertrude began slowly. She realized perhaps better than any of the others, being a better balanced, healthier creature than either Beulah or Margaret, that there were serious defects in the scheme of cooperative parentage. Eleanor, thanks to the overconscientious digging about her roots, was acquiring a New England self-consciousness about her processes. A child, Gertrude felt, should be handed a code ready made and should be guided by it without question until his maturer experience led him to modify it. The trouble with trying to explain this to Eleanor was that she had already129had too many things explained to her, and the doctrine of unselfconsciousness can not be inculcated by an exploitation of it. “If you are naturally a fine person your instinct will be to do the fine thing. You must follow it when you feel the instinct and not think about it between times.”

“That’s Uncle Peter’s idea,” Eleanor said, “that not thinking. Well, I’ll try—but you and Uncle Peter didn’t have six different parents and a Grandpa and Grandma and Albertina all criticizing your refinement in different ways. Don’t you ever have any trouble with your behavior, Aunt Gertrude?”

Gertrude laughed. The truth was that she was having considerable trouble with her behavior since Jimmie’s arrival two days before. She had thought to spend her two months with Eleanor on Cape Cod helping the child to relate her new environment to her old, while she had the benefit of her native air and the freedom of a rural summer. She also felt that one of their number ought to have a working knowledge of Eleanor’s early surroundings and habits. She had meant to put herself and her own concerns entirely aside. If she had a thought for any one but Eleanor she meant it to be for the two130old people whose guest she had constituted herself. She explained all this to Jimmie a day or two before her departure, and to her surprise he had suggested that he spend his own two vacation weeks watching the progress of her experiment. Before she was quite sure of the wisdom of allowing him to do so she had given him permission to come. Jimmie was part of her trouble. Her craving for isolation and undiscovered country; her eagerness to escape with her charge to some spot where she would not be subjected to any sort of familiar surveillance, were all a part of an instinct to segregate herself long enough to work out the problem of Jimmie and decide what to do about it. This she realized as soon as he arrived on the spot. She realized further that she had made practically no progress in the matter, for this curly headed young man, bearing no relation to anything that Gertrude had decided a young man should be, was rapidly becoming a serious menace to her peace of mind, and her ideal of a future lived for art alone. She had definitely begun to realize this on the night when Jimmie, in his exuberance at securing his new job, had seized her about the waist and kissed her on the lips. She had thought a good deal about that kiss,131which came dangerously near being her first one. She was too clever, too cool and aloof, to have had many tentative love-affairs. Later, as she softened and warmed and gathered grace with the years she was likely to seem more alluring and approachable to the gregarious male. Now she answered her small interlocutor truthfully.

“Yes, Eleanor, I do have a whole lot of trouble with my behavior. I’m having trouble with it today, and this evening,” she glanced up at the moon, which was seemingly throwing out conscious waves of effulgence, “I expect to have more,” she confessed.

“Oh! do you?” asked Eleanor, “I’m sorry I can’t sit up with you then and help you. You—you don’t expect to be—provocated toslapanybody, do you?”

“No, I don’t, but as things are going I almost wish I did,” Gertrude answered, not realizing that before the evening was over there would be one person whom she would be ruefully willing to slap several times over.

As they turned into the village street from the beach road they met Jimmie, who had been having his after-dinner pipe with Grandfather Amos, with whom he had become a prime favorite. With him132was Albertina, toeing out more than ever and conversing more than blandly.

“This virtuous child has been urging me to come after Eleanor and remind her that it is bedtime,” Jimmie said, indicating the pink gingham clad figure at his side. “She argues that Eleanor is some six months younger than she and ought to be in bed first, and personally she has got to go in the next fifteen minutes.”

“It’s pretty hot weather to go to bed in,” Albertina said. “Miss Sturgis, if I can get my mother to let me stay up half an hour more, will you let Eleanor stay up?”

Just beyond her friend, in the shadow of her ample back, Eleanor was making gestures intended to convey the fact that sitting up any longer was abhorrent to her.

“Eleanor needs her sleep to-night, I think,” Gertrude answered, professionally maternal.

“I brought Albertina so that our child might go home under convoy, while you and I were walking on the beach,” Jimmie suggested.

As the two little girls fell into step, the beginning of their conversation drifted back to the other two, who stood watching them for a moment.133

“I thought I’d come over to see if you was willing to say you were sorry,” Albertina began. “My face stayed red in one spot for two hours that day after you slapped me.”

“I’m not sorry,” Eleanor said ungraciously, “but I’ll say that I am, if you’ve come to make up.”

“Well, we won’t say any more about it then,” Albertina conceded. “Are Miss Sturgis and Mr. Sears going together, or are they just friends?”

“Isn’t that Albertina one the limit?” Jimmie inquired, with a piloting hand under Gertrude’s elbow. “She told me that she and Eleanor were mad, but she didn’t want to stay mad because there was more going on over here than there was at her house and she liked to come over.”

“I’m glad Eleanor slapped her,” Gertrude said; “still I’m sorry our little girl has uncovered the clay feet of her idol. She’s through with Albertina for good.”

“Do you know, Gertrude,” Jimmy said, as they set foot on the glimmering beach, “you don’t seem a bit natural lately. You used to be so full of the everlasting mischief. Every time you opened your mouth I dodged for fear of being spiked. Yet here you are just as docile as other folks.”134

“Don’t you like me—as well?” Gertrude tried her best to make her voice sound as usual.

“Better,” Jimmie swore promptly; then he added a qualifying—“I guess.”

“Don’t you know?” But she didn’t allow him the opportunity to answer. “I’m in a transition period, Jimmie,” she said. “I meant to be such a good parent to Eleanor and correct all the evil ways into which she has fallen as a result of all her other injudicious training, and, instead of that, I’m doing nothing but think of myself and my own hankerings and yearnings and such. I thought I could do so much for the child.”

“That’s the way we all think till we tackle her and then we find it quite otherwise and even more so. Tell me about your hankerings and yearnings.”

“Tell me about your job, Jimmie.”

And for a little while they found themselves on safe and familiar ground again. Jimmie’s new position was a very satisfactory one. He found himself associated with men of solidity and discernment, and for the first time in his business career he felt himself appreciated and stimulated by that appreciation to do his not inconsiderable best. Gertrude was the one woman—Eleanor had135not yet attained the inches for that classification—to whom he ever talked business.

“Now, at last, I feel that I’ve got my feet on the earth, Gertrude; as if the stuff that was in me had a chance to show itself, and you don’t know what a good feeling that is after you’ve been marked trash by your family and thrown into the dust heap.”

“I’m awfully glad, Jimmie.”

“I know you are, ’Trude. You’re an awfully good pal. It isn’t everybody I’d talk to like this. Let’s sit down.”

The moonlight beat down upon them in floods of sentient palpitating glory. Little breathy waves sought the shore and whispered to it. The pines on the breast of the bank stirred softly and tenderly.

“Lord, what a night,” Jimmie said, and began burying her little white hand in the beach sand. His breath was not coming quite evenly. “Now tell me about your job,” he said.

“I don’t think I want to talk about my job tonight.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“I don’t know.” There was no question about her voice sounding as usual this time.136

Jimmie brushed the sand slowly away from the buried hand and covered it with his own. He drew nearer, his face close, and closer to hers. Gertrude closed her eyes. It was coming, it was coming and she was glad. That silly old vow of celibacy, her silly old thoughts about art. What was art? What was anything with the arms of the man you loved closing about you. His lips were on hers.

Jimmie drew a sharp breath, and let her go.

“Gertrude,” he said, “I’m incorrigible. I ought to be spanked. I’d make love to—Eleanor’s grandmother if I had her down here on a night like this. Will you forgive me?”

Gertrude got to her feet a little unsteadily, but she managed a smile.

“It’s only the moon,” she said, “and—and young blood. I think Grandfather Amos would probably affect me the same way.”

Jimmie’s momentary expression of blankness passed and Gertrude did not press her advantage. They walked home in silence.

“It’s awfully companionable to realize that you also are human, ’Trude,” he hazarded on the doorstep.137

Gertrude put a still hand into his, which is a way of saying “Good night,” that may be more formal than any other.

“The Colonel’s lady, and July O’Grady,” she quoted lightly. “Good night, Jimmie.”

Up-stairs in her great chamber under the eaves, Eleanor was composing a poem which she copied carefully on a light blue page of her private diary. It read as follows:

“To love, it is the saddest thing,When friendship proves unfit,For lots of sadness it will bring,When e’er you think of it.Alas! that friends should prove untrueAnd disappoint you so.Because you don’t know what to do,And hardly where to go.”

138CHAPTER XIIMadam Bolling

“Is this the child, David?”

“Yes, mother.”

Eleanor stared impassively into the lenses of Mrs. Bolling’s lorgnette.

“This is my mother, Eleanor.”

Eleanor courtesied as her Uncle Jimmie had taught her, but she did not take her eyes from Mrs. Bolling’s face.

“Not a bad-looking child. I hate this American fashion of dressing children like French dolls, in bright colors and smart lines. The English are so much more sensible. An English country child would have cheeks as red as apples. How old are you?”

“Eleven years old my next birthday.”

“I should have thought her younger, David. Have her call me madam. It sounds better.”

“Very well, mother. I’ll teach her the ropes when the strangeness begins to wear off. This kind of thing is all new to her, you know.”

“She looks it. Give her the blue chamber and139tell Mademoiselle to take charge of her. You say you want her to have lessons for so many hours a day. Has she brains?”

“She’s quite clever. She writes verses, she models pretty well, Gertrude says. It’s too soon to expect any special aptitude to develop.”

“Well, I’m glad to discover your philanthropic tendencies, David. I never knew you had any before, but this seems to me a very doubtful undertaking. You take a child like this from very plain surroundings and give her a year or two of life among cultivated and well-to-do people, just enough for her to acquire a taste for extravagant living and associations. Then what becomes of her? You get tired of your bargain. Something else comes on the docket. You marry—and then what becomes of your protégée? She goes back to the country, a thoroughly unsatisfied little rustic, quite unfitted to be the wife of the farmer for whom fate intended her.”

“I wish you wouldn’t, mother,” David said, with an uneasy glance at Eleanor’s pale face, set in the stoic lines he remembered so well from the afternoon of his first impression of her. “She’s a sensitive little creature.”140

“Nonsense. It never hurts anybody to have a plain understanding of his position in the world. I don’t know what foolishness you romantic young people may have filled her head with. It’s just as well she should hear common sense from me and I intend that she shall.”

“I’ve explained to you, mother, that this child is my legal and moral responsibility and will be partly at least under my care until she becomes of age. I want her to be treated as you’d treat a child of mine if I had one. If you don’t, I can’t have her visit us again. I shall take her away with me somewhere. Bringing her home to you this time is only an experiment.”

“She’ll have a much more healthful and normal experience with us than she’s had with any of the rest of your violent young set, I’ll be bound. She’ll probably be useful, too. She can look out for Zaidee—I never say that name without irritation—but it’s the only name the little beast will answer to. Do you like dogs, child?”

Eleanor started at the suddenness of the question, but did not reply to it. Mrs. Bolling waited and David looked at her expectantly.141

“My mother asked you if you liked dogs, Eleanor; didn’t you understand?”

Eleanor opened her lips as if to speak and then shut them again firmly.

“Your protégée is slightly deaf, David,” his mother assured him.

“You can tell her ‘yes,’” Eleanor said unexpectedly to David. “I like dogs, if they ain’t treacherous.”

“She asked you the question,” David said gravely; “this is her house, you know. It is she who deserves consideration in it.”

“Why can’t I talk to you about her, the way she does about me?” Eleanor demanded. “She can have consideration if she wants it, but she doesn’t think I’m any account. Let her ask you what she wants and I’ll tell you.”

“Eleanor,” David remonstrated, “Eleanor, you never behaved like this before. I don’t know what’s got into her, mother.”

“She merely hasn’t any manners. Why should she have?”

Eleanor fixed her big blue eyes on the lorgnette again.142

“If it’s manners to talk the way you do to your own children and strange little girls, why, then I don’t want any,” she said. “I guess I’ll be going,” she added abruptly and turned toward the door.

David took her by the shoulders and brought her right about face.

“Say good-by to mother,” he said sternly.

“Good-by, ma’am—madam,” Eleanor said and courtesied primly.

“Tell Mademoiselle to teach her a few things before the next audience, David, and come back to me in fifteen minutes. I have something important to talk over with you.”

David stood by the open door of the blue chamber half an hour later and watched Eleanor on her knees, repacking her suit-case. Her face was set in pale determined lines, and she looked older and a little sick. Outside it was blowing a September gale, and the trees were waving desperate branches in the wind. David had thought that the estate on the Hudson would appeal to the little girl. It had always appealed to him so much, even though his mother’s habits of migration with the others of her flock at the different seasons had left143him so comparatively few associations with it. He had thought she would like the broad sweeping lawns and the cherubim fountain, the apple orchard and the kitchen garden, and the funny old bronze dog at the end of the box hedge. When he saw how she was occupied, he understood that it was not her intention to stay and explore these things.

“Eleanor,” he said, stepping into the room suddenly, “what are you doing with your suit-case? Didn’t Mademoiselle unpack it for you?” He was close enough now to see the signs of tears she had shed.

“Yes, Uncle David.”

“Why are you packing it again?”

Her eyes fell and she tried desperately to control a quivering lip.

“Because I am—I want to go back.”

“Back where?”

“To Cape Cod.”

“Why, Eleanor?”

“I ain’t wanted,” she said, her head low. “I made up my mind to go back to my own folks. I’m not going to be adopted any more.”144

David led her to the deep window-seat and made her sit facing him. He was too wise to attempt a caress with this issue between them.

“Do you think that’s altogether fair to me?” he asked presently.

“I guess it won’t make much difference to you. Something else will come along.”

“Do you think it will be fair to your other aunts and uncles who have given so much care and thought to your welfare?”

“They’ll get tired of their bargain.”

“If they do get tired of their bargain it will be because they’ve turned out to be very poor sports. I’ve known every one of them a long time, and I’ve never known them to show any signs of poor sportsmanship yet. If you run away without giving them their chance to make good, it will be you who are the poor sport.”

“She said you would marry and get tired of me, and I would have to go back to the country. If you marry and Uncle Jimmie marries—then Uncle Peter will marry, and—”

“You’d still have your Aunts Beulah and Margaret and Gertrude,” David could not resist making the suggestion.145

“They could do it, too. If one person broke up the vow, I guess they all would. Misfortunes never come singly.”

“But even if we did, Eleanor, even if we all married, we’d still regard you as our own, our child, our charge.”

“Shesaid you wouldn’t.” The tears came now, and David gathered the little shaking figure to his breast. “I don’t want to be the wife of the farmer for whom fate intended me,” she sobbed. “I want to marry somebody refined with extravagant living and associations.”

“That’s one of the things we are bringing you up for, my dear.” This aspect of the case occurred to David for the first time, but he realized its potency. “You mustn’t take mother too seriously. Just jolly her along a little and you’ll soon get to be famous friends. She’s never had any little girls of her own, only my brother and me, and she doesn’t know quite how to talk to them.”

“The Hutchinsons had a hired butler and gold spoons, and they didn’t think I was the dust beneath their feet. I don’t know what to say to her. I said ain’t, and I wasn’t refined, and I’ll only just be a disgrace to you. I’d rather go back146to Cape Cod, and go out to work, and stand Albertina and everything.”

“If you think it’s the square thing to do,” David said slowly, “you may go, Eleanor. I’ll take you to New York to-morrow and get one of the girls to take you to Colhassett. Of course, if you do that it will put me in rather an awkward position. The others have all had you for two months and made good on the proposition. I shall have to admit that I couldn’t even keep you with me twenty-four hours. Peter and Jimmie got along all right, but I couldn’t handle you at all. As a cooperative parent, I’m such a failure that the whole experiment goes to pieces through me.”

“Not you—her.”

“Well, it’s the same thing,—you couldn’t stand the surroundings I brought you to. You couldn’t even be polite to my mother for my sake.”

“I—never thought of that, Uncle David.”

“Think of it now for a few minutes, won’t you, Eleanor?”

The rain was beginning to lash the windows, and to sweep the lawn in long slant strokes. The little girl held up her face as if it could beat through the panes on it.147

“I thought,” she said slowly, “that after Albertina I wouldn’ttakeanything from anybody. Uncle Peter says that I’m just as good as anybody, even if I have been out to work. He said that all I had to do was just to stand up to people.”

“There are a good many different ways of standing up to people, Eleanor. Be sure you’ve got the right way and then go ahead.”

“I guess I ought to have been politer,” Eleanor said slowly. “I ought to have thought that she was your own mother. You couldn’t help the way she acted, o’ course.”

“The way you acted is the point, Eleanor.”

Eleanor reflected.

“I’ll act different if you want me to, Uncle David,” she said, “and I won’t go and leave you.”

“That’s my brave girl. I don’t think that I altogether cover myself with glory in an interview with my mother,” he added. “It isn’t the thing that I’m best at, I admit.”

“You did pretty good,” Eleanor consoled him. “I guess she makes you kind of bashful the way she does me,” from which David gathered with an odd sense of shock that Eleanor felt there was148something to criticize in his conduct, if she had permitted herself to look for it.

“I know what I’ll do,” Eleanor decided dreamily with her nose against the pane. “I’ll just pretend that she’s Mrs. O’Farrel’s aunt, and then whatever she does, I shan’t care. I’ll know that I’m the strongest and could hit her if I had a mind to, and then I shan’t want to.”

David contemplated her gravely for several seconds.

“By the time you grow up, Eleanor,” he said finally, “you will have developed all your cooperative parents into fine strong characters. Your educational methods are wonderful.”

“The dog got nearly drownded today in the founting,” Eleanor wrote. “It is a very little dog about the size of Gwendolyn. It was out with Mademoiselle, and so was I, learning French on a garden seat. It teetered around on the edge of the big wash basin—the founting looks like a wash basin, and suddenly it fell in. I waded right in and got it, but it slipped around so I couldn’t get it right away. It looked almost too dead to come to again, but I gave it first aid to the149drownded the way Uncle Jimmie taught me to practicing on Gwendolyn. When I got it fixed I looked up and saw Uncle David’s mother coming. I took the dog and gave it to her. I said, ‘Madam, here’s your dog.’ Mademoiselle ran around ringing her hands and talking about it. Then I went up to Mrs. Bolling’s room, and we talked. I told her how to make mustard pickles, and how my mother’s grandpa’s relation came over in the Mayflower, and about our single white lilac bush, and she’s going to get one and make the pickles. Then I played double Canfield with her for a while. I’m glad I didn’t go home before I knew her better. When she acts like Mrs. O’Farrel’s aunt I pretend she is her, and we don’t quarrel. She says does Uncle David go much to see Aunt Beulah, and I say, not so often as Uncle Jimmie does. Then she says does he go to see Aunt Margaret, and I say that he goes to see Uncle Peter the most. Well, if he doesn’t he almost does. You can’t tell Mrs. Madam Bolling that you won’t tattle, because she would think the worst.”

Eleanor grew to like Mademoiselle. She was150the aging, rather wry faced Frenchwoman who had been David’s young brother’s governess and had made herself so useful to Mrs. Bolling that she was kept always on the place, half companion and half resident housekeeper. She was glad to have a child in charge again, and Eleanor soon found that her crooked features and severe high-shouldered back that had somewhat intimidated her at first, actually belonged to one of the kindest hearted creatures in the world.

Paris and Colhassett bore very little resemblance to each other, the two discovered. To be sure there were red geraniums every alternating year in the gardens of the Louvre, and every year in front of the Sunshine Library in Colhassett. The residents of both places did a great deal of driving in fine weather. In Colhassett they drove on the state highway, recently macadamized to the dismay of the taxpayers who did not own horses or automobiles. In Paris they drove out to the Bois by way of the Champs Elysees. In Colhassett they had only one ice-cream saloon, but in Paris they had a good many of them out-of-doors in the parks and even on the sidewalk, and there you could buy all kinds of sirups and ‘what you151call cordials’ andaperitifs; but the two places on the whole were quite different. The people were different, too. The people of Colhassett were all religious and thought it was sinful to play cards on Sundays. Mademoiselle said she always felt wicked when she played them on a week day.

“I think of my mother,” she said; “she would say ‘Juliette, what will you say to the Lord when he knows that you have been playing cards on a working day. Playing cards is for Sunday.’”

“The Lord that they have in Colhassett is not like that,” Eleanor stated without conscious irreverence.

“She is a vary fonny child, madam,” Mademoiselle answered Mrs. Bolling’s inquiry. “She has taste, but no—experience even of the most ordinary. She cooks, but she does no embroidery. She knits and knows no games to play. She has a good brain, but Mon Dieu, no one has taught her to ask questions with it.”

“She has had lessons this year from some young Rogers graduates, very intelligent girls. I should think a year of that kind of training would have had its effect.” Mrs. Bolling’s finger went into every pie in her vicinity with unfailing direction.152

“Lessons, yes, but no teaching. If she were not vary intelligent I think she would have suffered for it. The public schools they did somesing, but so little to elevate—to encourage.”

Thus in a breath were Beulah’s efforts as an educator disposed of.

“Would you like to undertake the teaching of that child for a year?” Mrs. Bolling asked thoughtfully.

“Oh! but yes, madam.”

“I think I’ll make the offer to David.”

Mrs. Bolling was unsympathetic but she was thorough. She liked to see things properly done. Since David and his young friends had undertaken a venture so absurd, she decided to lend them a helping hand with it. Besides, now that she had no children of her own in the house, Mademoiselle was practically eating her head off. Also it had developed that David was fond of the child, so fond of her that to oppose that affection would have been bad policy, and Mrs. Bolling was politic when she chose to be. She chose to be politic now, for sometime during the season she was going to ask a very great favor of David, and she hoped, that by first being extraordinarily153complaisant and kind and then by bringing considerable pressure to bear upon him, he would finally do what he was asked. The favor was to provide himself with a father-in-law, and that father-in-law the multi-millionaire parent of the raven-haired, crafty-eyed ingénue, who had begun angling for him that June night at the country club.

She made the suggestion to David on the eve of the arrival of all of Eleanor’s guardians for the week-end. Mrs. Bolling had invited a house-party comprised of the associated parents as a part of her policy of kindness before the actual summoning of her forces for the campaign she was about to inaugurate.

David was really touched by his mother’s generosity concerning Eleanor. He had been agreeably surprised at the development of the situation between the child and his mother. He had been obliged to go into town the day after Eleanor’s first unfortunate encounter with her hostess, and had hurried home in fear and trembling to try to smooth out any tangles in the skein of their relationship that might have resulted from a day in each other’s vicinity. After hurrying over the154house and through the grounds in search of her he finally discovered the child companionably currying a damp and afflicted Pekinese in his mother’s sitting-room, and engaged in a grave discussion of the relative merits of molasses and sugar as a sweetening for Boston baked beans.

It was while they were having their after-dinner coffee in the library, for which Eleanor had been allowed to come down, though nursery supper was the order of the day in the Bolling establishment, that David told his friends of his mother’s offer.

“Of course, we decided to send her to school when she was twelve anyway,” he said. “The idea was to keep her among ourselves for two years to establish the parental tie, or ties I should say. If she is quartered here with Mademoiselle we could still keep in touch with her and she would be having the advantage of a year’s steady tuition under one person, and we’d be relieved—” a warning glance from Margaret, with an almost imperceptible inclination of her head in the direction of Beulah, caused him to modify the end of his sentence—“of the responsibility—for her physical welfare.”155

“Mentally and morally,” Gertrude cut in, “the bunch would still supervise her entirely.”

Jimmie, who was sitting beside her, ran his arm along the back of her chair affectionately, and then thought better of it and drew it away. He was, for some unaccountable reason, feeling awkward and not like himself. There was a girl in New York, with whom he was not in the least in love, who had recently taken it upon herself to demonstrate unmistakably that she was not in love with him. There was another girl who insisted on his writing her every day. Here was Gertrude, who never had any time for him any more, absolutely without enthusiasm at his proximity. He thought it would be a good idea to allow Eleanor to remain where she was and said so.

“Not that I won’t miss the jolly times we had together, Babe,” he said. “I was planning some real rackets this year,—to make up for what I put you through,” he added in her ear, as she came and stood beside him for a minute.

Gertrude wanted to go abroad for a year, “and lick her wounds,” as she told herself. She would have come back for her two months with Eleanor, but she was glad to be relieved of that necessity.156Margaret had the secret feeling that the ordeal of the Hutchinsons was one that she would like to spare her foster child, and incidentally herself in relation to the adjustment of conditions necessary to Eleanor’s visit. Peter wanted her with him, but he believed the new arrangement would be better for the child. Beulah alone held out for her rights and her parental privileges. The decision was finally left to Eleanor.

She stood in the center of the group a little forlornly while they awaited her word. A wave of her old shyness overtook her and she blushed hot and crimson.

“It’s all in your own hands, dear,” Beulah said briskly.

“Poor kiddie,” Gertrude thought, “it’s all wrong somehow.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Eleanor said piteously and sped to the haven of Peter’s breast.

“We’ll manage a month together anyway,” Peter whispered.

“Then I guess I’ll stay here,” she whispered back, “because next I would have to go to Aunt Beulah’s.”157

Peter, turning involuntarily in Beulah’s direction, saw the look of chagrin and disappointment on her face, and realized how much she minded playing a losing part in the game and yet how well she was doing it. “She’s only a straight-laced kid after all,” he thought. “She’s put her whole heart and soul into this thing. There’s a look about the top part of her face when it’s softened that’s a little like Ellen’s.” Ellen was his dead fiancée—the girl in the photograph at home in his desk.

“I guess I’ll stay here,” Eleanor said aloud, “all in one place, and study with Mademoiselle.”

It was a decision that, on the whole, she never regretted.

158CHAPTER XIIIBrook and River

“Standing with reluctant feet,Where the brook and river meet.”

“I think it’s a good plan to put a quotation like Kipling at the top of the page whenever I write anything in this diary,” Eleanor began in the smart leather bound book with her initials stamped in black on the red cover—the new private diary that had been Peter’s gift to her on the occasion of her fifteenth birthday some months before. “I think it is a very expressive thing to do. The quotation above is one that expresses me, and I think it is beautiful too. Miss Hadley—that’s my English teacher—the girls call her Haddock because she does look rather like a fish—says that it’s undoubtedly one of the most poignant descriptions of adolescent womanhood ever made. I made a note to look up adolescent, but didn’t. Bertha Stephens has my dictionary, and won’t159bring it back because the leaves are all stuck together with fudge, and she thinks she ought to buy me a new one. It is very honorable of her to feel that way, but she never will. Good old Stevie, she’s a great borrower.

“‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be,For borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.’

“Shakespeare.

“Well, I hardly know where to begin. I thought I would make a resumé of some of the events of the last year. I was only fourteen then, but still I did a great many things that might be of interest to me in my declining years when I look back into the annals of this book. To begin with I was only a freshie at Harmon. It is very different to be a sophomore. I can hardly believe that I was once a shivering looking little thing like all the freshmen that came in this year. I was very frightened, but did not think I showed it.

“‘Oh! wad some power the giftie gie us,To see ourselves as others see us.’

160

“Robert Burns had twins and a rather bad character, but after he met his bonnie Jean he wrote very beautiful poetry. A poet’s life is usually sad anyhow—full of disappointment and pain—but I digress.

“I had two years with Mademoiselle at the Bollings’ instead of one the way we planned. I haven’t written in my Private Diary since the night of that momentous decision that I was to stay in one place instead of taking turns visiting my cooperative parents. I went to another school one year before I came to Harmon, and that brings me to the threshold of my fourteenth year. If I try to go back any farther, I’ll never catch up. I spent that vacation with Aunt Margaret in a cottage on Long Island with her sister, and her sister’s boy, who has grown up to be the silly kind that wants to kiss you and pull your hair, and those things. Aunt Margaret is so lovely I can’t think of words to express it. ‘Oh! rare pale Margaret,’ as Tennyson says. She wears her hair in a coronet braid around the top of her head, and all her clothes are the color of violets or a soft dovey gray or white, though baby blue looks nice on her especially when she wears a fishyou.161

“I went down to Cape Cod for a week before I came to Harmon, and while I was there my grandmother died. I can’t write about that in this diary. I loved my grandmother and my grandmother loved me. Uncle Peter came, and took charge of everything. He has great strength that holds you up in trouble.

“The first day I came to Harmon I saw the girl I wanted for my best friend, and so we roomed together, and have done so ever since. Her name is Margaret Louise Hodges, but she is called Maggie Lou by every one. She has dark curly hair, and deep brown eyes, and a very silvery voice. I have found out that she lies some, but she says it is because she had such an unhappy childhood, and has promised to overcome it for my sake.

“That Christmas vacation the ‘We Are Sevens’ went up the Hudson to the Bollings’ again, but that was the last time they ever went there. Uncle David and his mother had a terrible fight over them. I was sorry for Madam Bolling in a way. There was a girl she wanted Uncle David to marry, a rich girl who looked something like Cleopatra, very dark complexioned with burning162eyes. She had a sweet little Pekinese something like Zaidee.

“Uncle David said that gold could never buy him, and to take her away, but Madam Bolling was very angry, of course. She accused him of wanting to marry Aunt Margaret, and called her a characterless, faded blonde. Then it was Uncle David’s turn to get angry, and I have never seen any one get any angrier, and he told about the vow of celibacy, and how instead of having designs on him the whole crowd would back him up in his struggle to stay single. It was an awful row. I told Madam Bolling that I would help her to get Uncle David back, and I did, but she never forgave the other aunts and uncles. I suppose the feelings of a mother would prompt her to want Uncle David settled down with a rich and fashionable girl who would soon be the mother of a lot of lovely children. I can’t imagine a Cleopatra looking baby, but she might have boys that looked like Uncle David.

“Vacations are really about all there is to school. Freshman year is mostly grinding and stuffing. Having six parents to send you boxes163of ‘grub’ is better than having only two. Some of the girls are rather selfish about the eats, and come in and help themselves boldly when you are out of the room. Maggie Lou puts up signs over the candy box: ‘Closed for Repairs,’ or ‘No Trespassing by Order of the Board of Health,’ but they don’t pay much attention. Well, last summer vacation I spent with Uncle Jimmie. I wouldn’t tell this, but I reformed him. I made him sign the pledge. I don’t know what pledge it was because I didn’t read it, but he said he was addicted to something worse than anything I could think of, and if somebody didn’t pull him up, he wouldn’t answer for the consequences. I asked him why he didn’t choose Aunt Gertrude to do it, and he groaned only. So I said to write out a pledge, and sign it and I would be the witness. We were at a hotel with his brother’s family. It isn’t proper any more for me to go around with my uncles unless I have a chaperon. Mademoiselle says that I oughtn’t even to go down-town alone with them but, of course, that is French etiquette, and not American. Well, there were lots of pretty girls at this hotel, all wearing white164and pink dresses, and carrying big bell shaped parasols of bright colors. They looked sweet, like so many flowers, but Uncle Jimmie just about hated the sight of them. He said they were not girls at all, but just pink and white devices of the devil. On the whole he didn’t act much like my merry uncle, but we had good times together playing tennis and golf, and going on parties with his brother’s family, all mere children but the mother and father. Uncle Jimmie was afraid to go and get his mail all summer, although he had a great many letters on blue and lavender note paper scented with Roger et Gallet’s violet, and Hudnut’s carnation. We used to go down to the beach and make bonfires and burn them unread, and then toast marshmallows in their ashes. He said that they were communications from the spirits of the dead. I should have thought that they were from different girls, but he seemed to hate the sight of girls so much. Once I asked him if he had ever had an unhappy love-affair, just to see what he would say, but he replied ‘no, they had all been happy ones,’ and groaned and groaned.

“Aunt Beulah has changed too. She has become165a suffragette and thinks only of getting women their rights and their privileges.

“Maggie Lou is an anti, and we have long arguments about the cause. She says that woman’s place is in the home, but I say look at me, who have no home, how can I wash and bake and brew like the women of my grandfather’s day, visiting around the way I do? And she says that it is the principle of the thing that is involved, and I ought to take a stand for or against. Everybody has so many different arguments that I don’t know what I think yet, but some day I shall make up my mind for good.

“Well, that about brings me up to the present. I meant to describe a few things in detail, but I guess I will not begin on the past in that way. I don’t get so awfully much time to write in this diary because of the many interruptions of school life, and the way the monitors snoop in study hours. I don’t know who I am going to spend my Christmas holidays with. I sent Uncle Peter a poem three days ago, but he has not answered it yet. I’m afraid he thought it was very silly. I don’t hardly know what it means myself. It goes as follows:166

“A Song

“The moon is very pale to-night,The summer wind swings high,I seek the temple of delight,And feel my love draw nigh.“I seem to feel his fragrant breathUpon my glowing cheek.Between us blows the wind of death,—I shall not hear him speak.

“I don’t know why I like to write love poems, but most of the women poets did. This one made me cry.”

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