O Genteel Lady!/Chapter 1
'I have nothing,' she thought, 'but myself. No parents that count; no longer a fiancé; no home. I'm not even young any more, actually twenty-four. Ladies in novels are never out of their teens. Well, at least I've myself.'
She straightened her long, slim body, straightened her bonnet, and looked about the railroad coach and the miserable cold companions of her journey.
'Myself...and a mink pelisse,' she added, and was sorry for the women in frayed shawls and shabby bonnets gathered close about the pot-bellied stove standing midway in the coach. A man, almost a gentleman but not quite, continually stooped to feed more wood to the fire.
'Disgraceful,' said the man. 'That brakeman ought to come around oftener, and we'll run short of wood before we reach Worcester.'
'Gimme,' said an old fellow with a muffler tied about his ears—'gimme the good old days and hosses. Nobody then tried to carry a stove around on wheels, but at least we had straw in the wagon bed right up to your calves, if the ladies will excuse my language.' He spat fluently and accurately against the belly of the red-hot stove.
'Ugh,' thought Lanice, and wrapped her costly furs about her. She was quite alone now in the cold, far end of the coach close to the ill-fitting door and empty ice-water tank. The seat upon which she sat had been designed for two, but her skirts of fine, pale wool and brown velvet filled this space and flowed out into the aisle. She looked down and saw the points of her bronze slippers resting side by side upon the dirty floor, exactly as a lady's shoes should rest, and smiled a lingering and secret smile. Exactly as a lady's shoes should rest...no one would guess that they were empty and that her feet were drawn up under her warm body. She herself was nestled inside her formidable shell of clothing as snug and compact as a worm at the heart of a chestnut. The hoops and crinoline hid how she really sat and what she really was.
No one would have guessed that this elegant and exotic creature had any legs, or, if she were so carnal as to possess such things, that they could bend so subtly beneath her. Long ago, when first out of pantalettes, she had learned this trick of taking her ease and preserving her dignity during the protracted dull sermons in the Congregational Church in Amherst. To the man who hoped that the cold would eventually drive her to share the fire he so laboriously tended, she seemed only a pale, oval face with tightly tied red mouth and black lacquer eyes. Occasionally two alabaster hands emerged delicately from the great sleeves of her pelisse and wandered upon the surface of the dark fur. Her eyes moved, glittered and drooped down. Her expression seemed to reflect the ideal of a fashion-plate artist rather than the heart which supposedly beat beneath the tight basque and tighter stays.
No one would have guessed that for two nights and a day she had cried almost without stopping, or that she had had the audacity to run away from home, or the intellectual conceit to believe herself a genius. In Amherst her talents had been recognized. In Boston she would at last receive the proper training and be launched upon a career.
She shut her eyes and savored a sensuous pleasure from the greatness that was to be hers. Yet at her heart she knew that if Augustus had been a different man, she would not now be planning her career but the furnishing of her house, and she was honest enough to realize that one occupation would have been as absorbing as the other. Augustus! what a white rabbit of a man, and so good, so uncarnal, so considerate of her purity. Not many men like that; one should appreciate them. She touched her sleek mouth with a finger tip. 'Dear God,' she returned thanks, 'we thank Thee that he has never kissed me on the mouth, only here,' and she smoothed her cold cheek. Her mind, with its extravagant bursts of day-dreaming, abandoned the career before she had even decided whether her genius lay in art or literature, and spread before her the thought of other men, not Augustuses, not 'young gentlemen from the college,' but strangers coming from far lands and fine adventure. She shuddered and shut her narrow jaw. 'Dear God, please help me to think only of Higher Things.' She hated the thought of marriage. She hated the thought of men. Most of all she hated Mamma.
It could not be that she herself inherited something of Mamma's wicked wantonness, Mamma who had disgraced them all and had made Amherst an impossible place for her daughter to live. 'You must not think of Mamma. You must never think of her again. She is a bad woman, and you must be twice as good because she is so bad.'
But memory of that sweet, beguiling face was upon her, lips, currant smooth and ripely red, and dimples eddying high upon her left cheek. She could see her in a dozen characteristic postures. Mamma! How, on a sunny day, she would come sparkling out of the fashionable villa in Amherst ruffled in grey, a bit of a grey bonnet perched like a bird on her chestnut curls, and look up at the sky and smile at the sunshine as though the June day were her lover nervously waiting her approval. Mamma...never again Mamma. How could she have run off to Italy with one of Papa's own students in natural philosophy, young Roger Cuncliffe! Cuncliffe—the pretty boy with the light walk and feverish color and black curls. The rich boy who had been brought up in Europe. The sick boy for whom people felt so sorry.
Her white hands clenched in the depths of the fur. Her heart thumped and she was swept with a sense of physical nausea. Strange how things went together. Because Mamma had run off with Mr. Cuncliffe, she had been violently sick all the time she wasn't actually crying during the next two nights and intervening day. If she thought enough of Mamma she would begin again, and she would much rather have died than begin again. It was sleep she needed. 'Oh, dear, I shall never sleep again; I shall never be happy again. Everything is gone, except myself.'
The train swayed upon its little rails. Outside was a white-wrapped world slipping back towards Amherst as the train forged forward to Boston; inside the group about the stove, the inelegant women, the men who were not quite gentlemen, and three bundles of cloth with children within.
'Toot toot to-to-o-o.' Another station. The train drew to a ponderous stop. She looked out and saw that it was Worcester. The lady with the green dolman was getting out, and the brakeman was coming in carrying a big basket of wood. Behind him two little girls, obviously orphans with black frocks and almost professionally pinched faces, held out in their little thin hands trays of gingerbread and cold cup custards. They did not say a word, but clung to each other like unfortunate orphans in moral tracts and gazed piteously at the passengers. Lanice motioned them to her. 'I'd like some gingerbread,' she said, and liberally opened her bead purse to pay them. The little creatures whispered their thanks, then sank into abysmal woe.
'Are you alone in the world?' asked Lanice gently.
'Not alone,' piped the littlest of the two. 'God cares for us. He loves us.'
'How selfish I am,' thought Lanice, and gave them all her silver.
When they were gone she heard one passenger tell the others that children often rigged up in black and boarded trains and made soft-hearted females give them money. The almost-gentleman laughed loudly and glanced at Lanice. She flushed with chagrin, but remembering their thin hands was glad she had been generous. She moved slightly lest her folded legs should go to sleep. Her head fell back, the pelisse slipped from her shoulders showing the seed pearl brooch at her throat. 'Asleep,' said the man in the muffler, pointing with his thumb.
She was back again in Amherst with Mamma, in the garden of the sumptuous 'villa.' Mamma was pulling up plants by the roots. The roots were hair. She jerked up out of the clotting earth a succession of writhing human bodies.
'Oh, Mamma, stop, please stop! I can't bear it, expecially those purplish ones without any legs!'
Mamma leered at her. Usually the heads were half out of the ground like turnips. Sometimes there was only a head. The most ghastly of all had but a leg and a splay foot.
'Mamma!' The pretty woman chirped and clapped her hands. She wore her fashionable cherry-red pelisse de voyage and whirled her tiny ermine muff. So it was Lanice had last seen her. In the nightmare Mamma pointed at her and the imps fixed her with hideous vegetable eyes and patted their chests and thighs. She struggled to run. Little fiends were upon her, pinching and pulling. Her feet stuck. She had taken root. The earth, which had so recently borne this strange crop, was sinking beneath her.
Lanice knew she slept and wanted to wake. She moaned piteously. Papa watched her fall and did not help, but his red mouth moved sarcastically in the midst of his black silk beard. 'Augustus!' she cried, and desperately resented the look of superior virtue he cast towards his erstwhile fiancée. 'I am purer than thou art,' he said, 'as high as the Heavens are above the earth...'
She woke, half falling to the floor, her bronze slippers several feet away from the edge of her skirt. She was corpse-cold, but drenched with sweat. Her icicle fingers were pressed to her pounding heart.
'Where am I, where am I? Oh, dear Lord, save me!'
Struggling inside her hoopskirt she got to her feet, and stared about her. Only the dirty train and the cold people by the fire. She wanted to laugh, almost cried, and suddenly felt a return of the sickly sense of nausea. Then she sat down, ashamed of her display. A passenger, who an hour before could not have imagined that this doll even had legs, noticed with amazement and intense interest that she seemed to be a quadruped. The points of four feet protruded from under the pale skirt flounced with velvet.
It was only five o'clock, but the February day was already darkening. The train on its little single track bored on towards Boston. 'Boston—Boston' sang the wheels upon the tracks, and Lanice, released from her bad dreams, had, as the train curved, a glimpse of foul shallow water criss-crossed with tracks and carelessly filled with ashes and the sordid débris of a city. The sight was not ugly, for the sunset reflected in the dirty Back Bay and beyond it, rising grandly in stages of staggered red-brick buildings vivified by the spires of churches, crowned by the bald dome of the State House, delicately veiled by smoke—loveliest of cities—beyond the pink waste of water was Boston!
The girl was frightened. She wished that she had stayed in Amherst with Papa, until she thought of Augustus and the pastor's lean she-wolf of a wife, and the social structure of Amherst tumbling about her ears. She knew she could not endure that. Better the unknown terrors of a strange city and strange relatives than the familiar, impossible situation at home. She had telegraphed her cousin Pauline that she was coming, and then, before she had had time to receive an answer, had set out. This Pauline she had never seen, but from a correspondence which had started two years before, when Pauline had tried to interest Lanice in writing a series of articles about women's rights for the 'Godey's Lady's Book,' she guessed that she was very purposeful, very high-minded, and probably the possessor of a beautiful soul. A beautiful face was undoubtedly too much to expect. She was wealthy, the only child of a retired merchant who had been widowed for years. Of course she would be elegantly costumed and prepared to sneer at her country cousin. She would not know that Mamma and Lanice always had their accoutrements from New York. 'Dear God, I am so alone in the world, I hope to like Pauline. I hope she really meant it last year when she wanted me to live with them on Beacon Street and study art.'
'Everybody out,' yelled the captain of the train. The interested passenger presented himself blushing and looking foolish.
'Madam,' he said, 'may I not help you with your boxes?'
She had four, and a folio of her paintings, a reticule, a small carpetbag, a muff, and an armful of skirts. Shyly, but with a certain sophistication in her shyness, she accepted his offer.
'That's unnecessary,' said a positive, well-bred voice. 'The man is here. He'll attend to your baggage.'
Lanice jumped about, flushing as though her intellectual cousin had caught her amorously smirking at the stranger.
'Cousin Pauline? How good of you to come to meet me. I was beginning to feel really quite alone and in need of being met.'
'I understand,' said Pauline very clearly, and withered the trembling semi-gentleman with a well-bred Boston look. He disappeared as if by magic.
'You poor girl! Has he been annoying you all the way from Springfield? You might have spoken to the captain of the train. He would have put him out.'
'Oh, no, Cousin Pauline. Every one was most respectful. He saw I needed help and...'
It was useless. Pauline evidently knew the Truth, whether or not it existed. She tactfully changed the conversation.
'Patrick will fetch your things; we will go to the carriage. You are very fatigued.'
Lanice found, on stepping out into the grey station, that the cold weather of the central part of the State had been left behind. She knew by the smell of the air as it blew in under the train sheds that it had thawed all day and only now at sunset had stopped dripping and begun to freeze again. The station was confusing, but not as large as she had expected in so vast a metropolis.
'But,' Pauline defended her city, 'we have eight stations, you know, and some are much more sumptuous than the Western Railway Depot. Come this way; take my arm. There, those white horses are ours.'
The two young women climbed into the swaying open barouche and drew the bear rug about them. It was lighter on the street than in the train or station. Patrick packed in the baggage, mounted the box, and the ugly fat white horses jogged off up Kneeland Street. Lanice, who had her mother's fondness for clothes, looked at the animals critically. 'If I had them,' she thought, 'I'd have them painted a dark color; or perhaps longitudinally striped, like a Parisian lady's mantua. It is a shame they must always wear such stuffy white and look like harnessed polar bears.' And her mind went back poignantly to the flashing and dainty horses her mother had owned. Black, they were usually, or bays, and when you rode them you were like a bird flying down the sky upon the wind. Papa would sell them, now Mamma was gone forever.
'I knew you,' Pauline said, 'the moment I put my eyes on you. I saw your profile as you...shrank away from that man, and I knew that you were my cousin. Not, of course, that we look alike, as I am light and at least ten years older.'
Lanice glanced sidewise at her companion and saw with dismay and distaste that there was between the two of them a fundamental resemblance, hidden deep down in the bony structure of the face. Her cousin had an eager, intelligent face and a waspish manner. Her skin was blotched, and the parentheses marks were beginning to close grimly about her mouth. It was humiliating to think that any one could see a likeness between them. She was glad her hair was not ash blond nor her skin broken. There was a mysterious contagion about Pauline's ugliness. Some plain girls made Lanice believe herself a beauty, but Pauline made her feel irritated with herself.
Pauline was speaking. 'You must get your black eyes from your father's side of the house; the Poggys are quite fair.'
'Yes, Papa is black as the ace of spades, but his skin is very light. Mamma was a chestnut blonde. I think that is the prettiest thing in the world. Mamma had, has, grey eyes and...' Her description trailed off. She was conscious of Pauline stiffening beside her and a piercing intensity in her blue eyes.
'Cousin Lanice, I wish to begin at the beginning—perfectly honestly with you. I want you to know that I have heard—all.'
'About—Mamma?'
'Yes.'
There was a long pause, and Lanice knew that Pauline was tactfully avoiding a direct question, waiting for Lanice to speak of her own volition. She could not. She drew her breath in with a trembling sigh and pressed her lace handkerchief against her mouth. The pause grew, and when at last Lanice flung her words into the hiatus they echoed and gained momentous weight.
'It is the most terrible thing in the world—, hideous.'
'What?'
'Our lower natures. Mamma's got the upper hand and—destroyed her. I almost wish it really had killed her. And I am determined to live always on the higher, the highest plane.'
'Yes, yes, Lanice. I can see, in spite of all these absurd fashionable clothes that you affect, that you are really a Mind. I can see...'
Already Lanice regretted her burst of confidence, and drew back somewhat sulkily into her corner of the barouche. She interrupted with a catch of heartbreak in her voice. 'How can I love her any more? To think of running off with one of Papa's own students. Every one in Amherst is astounded. Papa's the only one who doesn't seem to be surprised.'
'You mean, previously, other men, some other time...'
'No!' cried Lanice hotly, and her cheeks were suffused with color, as she lied desperately, remembering Mr. Alpheus Matthews of New York. She knew that for years this man, greatest of cotton brokers and managing director of Mamma's mills, had worshipped the pretty woman in his own arrogant way. It had been terrible, when she first had found out. Mamma had given her a red riding-habit she no longer fancied, and then had gone humming and smiling out of the house. The young girl, arrayed in her first adult finery, had slipped to the darkened best parlor where the Venetian blinds were always drawn, and the smell of moth preventatives was never relieved by an open window. She had been forbidden since childhood to enter this Blue Beard's chamber, yet confidently she pulled up a blind and became absorbed in her own newly found beauty reflected in the glass, mimicked Mamma's coquettish graces. That was the way Mamma felt all the time, light on her feet, giddy in the head, secret happiness springing up and up through her veins. Lanice shook the long scarlet plume on the beaver hat, threw back her head with shut eyes. Mr. Matthews, tiptoeing into the room, saw only the familiar red habit and the loved pretty gestures. A moment too late he discovered it was not the mill owner playfully protesting his caresses, but her 'brat,' in deadly earnest. They stood at last facing each other in the most ghastly of comedies. No explanation could explain. Later, at supper, Lanice watched her father, reading, as was his custom, from the classics as he ate, knew in some subtle and shamefully intimate way that he, too, knew about Mr. Matthews. Even the meek, pale servant seemed omniscient. Mamma alone was untouched by her own sin. She was in rust-colored silk, which matched her hair. She wore topaz in her ears, and little gold French slippers with delicately immoral heels upon her feet.
Pauline was speaking.
'Italy—or France—perhaps France even more than Italy is the place to go for sin. It never would be tolerated in this State.'
'How did you hear?'
'Our Springfield cousins have written. And I know that you have broken with the man whom you love.'
'Cousin Pauline, I don't love him any more. Perhaps I never did. I think I wanted to be married. There seemed to be nothing else to do there and I was getting too old for students, and...'
'There is plenty else to do here in Boston,' said Pauline energetically. 'Why, only three weeks ago a committee of dear, good women opened a philanthropic Boarding House for Industrious Females. It is work one could absolutely lose one's self in if one had the time. I personally am consecrated to other things. Abolition moves me intensely, when I think of God's Black Children sold as chattels. Children torn from their mothers and...' she glanced cautiously at Patrick's purple cloth back hunched upon the box—'and no chance for colored females to retain their virtue—none.' She whispered, out of respect for Patrick's delicate masculine ears. 'I am much engaged in Women's Rights and in Higher Education for Females. Oh, so many, many things! My days are full, I assure you. That is the secret of a happy life. But you, Cousin Lanice, you have your genius. You have only to choose between literature and painting. But you must be very serious in your chosen field.'
'Oh, I am. What pleasure I henceforth get out of life must be quite independent of my gender. From now on I am not a woman, merely a human being. I want to be an artist or an authoress, and,' she added naïvely, 'I've stopped curling my hair.'
'Oh,' cried Pauline, 'I wish all women would, but even Mrs. Stowe, that high-minded, noble woman, wears a perfect galaxy of these female adornments.'
So it was for principle that Pauline screwed back her dull hair and buttoned her eager, stooping figure into such plain black basques. Her searching nose seemed made for the smelling-out of new fancies or old truths. Lanice remembered hearing that in Boston ladies did not greet each other with a 'How do you do, my dear?' but, 'Have you heard the latest thought out, my love?' Cousin Poggy's blotched skin and nervous manner made her slightly repellent, but she had the undaunted interest of a born confidante and her willingness to set the world right showed her generous spirit.
'Women must conduct themselves in such a way as to win not the patronizing affection of men, but their respect. I protest...' (there seemed some danger that the jet buttons might leap off the tight basque) 'I protest...' Suddenly her keen, almost lovely eyes narrowed, 'Cousin Lanice, are you at heart an artist?'
'Oh, I hope I am, Cousin Pauline. I love to paint. That's all I have done for five years, except a few romances. I've never had proper lessons; Amherst is so small.'
'Lanice, you shall have everything, everything: masters and studios, and trips to Europe if you can only promise to paint one picture, I care not how small, but one picture that will rank high with the work of the great male brushes.'
So compelling were the strange, eager eyes, Lanice took fire. She felt a spiritual quickening that left her ecstatic and throbbing.
'Pauline, I think I could.'
'Not a mere picture such as other female artists could paint, but a real artistic triumph fit to hang in the Uffizi or the Louvre, I care not how small.' The size-clause reassured the young artist.
'I do feel as if I could, Cousin Pauline. I...To-day...I know I could.'
'You mean,' said Pauline with flat suspicion, 'you want to paint a masterpiece now, to-day, without sufficient learning?'
'Oh, no. I must be taught, but do you think I could ever learn?'
'Dear cousin, I've never doubted but you are a...Genius!'
Lanice, her face flushed to a precocious pinkness, her eyes flooded with light, her tight lips trembling, gazed with rapture at this dea ex machina who could, by some alchemy, make her a great artist.
Pauline hastily outlined a plan. Lanice was to live with the Poggys and study with any half-dozen artists of established reputations who conducted informal classes. Little by little she was to realize that in her artistic career she worked, not merely for Art, but for the Freedom of Women. She should serve Minerva, not Apollo. She would, during her training, attend many lectures, conversations, meetings, unions, and institutes with Pauline. Social life, except an occasional soirée at the home of a Harvard professor, was forbidden. For all these good things Lanice was not to pay a cent. The girl demurred. She had a generous monthly allowance. How strange Papa had looked when she had asked if it would be continued, his face white, his eyes like onyx. Not a word suggested pain at his wife's or daughter's desertion, but if you watched him very closely you saw that every so often his head moved slightly up and to the left. His lips were so dry they rustled as he pressed his handkerchief against them.
It was decided that Lanice, in her spare hours, should serve as amanuensis to Captain Poggy. The old merchant, senior member of Poggy, Banks & Poggy, had been, since he 'fell off Cape Horn,' very lame. First he gave up his sea life and, some five years before, all but a nominal interest in his great shipping firm. For years he had been engaged in writing an historical study of Salem witchcraft, 'not that the past really matters, only the future.' Lanice had never heard of this dark chapter in New England history. She urged her cousin to tell her of it in detail, but soon Pauline glanced at her with sly, questioning eyes as if trying to fathom this pretended interest in so unimportant a subject. Yet, for a moment, such was the power of Pauline's tongue, she had actually seen them—stubborn Giles Corey pressed to death for 'standing mute'; the flaunting witch who ran an inn and made her death-dealing poppets of hogs' bristles and human hair; and a poor, ancient gentleman who walked about on two 'staves.'
Lanice saw the gruesome bodies swing upon Gallows Hill against a fleecy spring sky.
'Father is so serious about this history, and only last week the young man who has been helping him left to teach school in Needham.'
Lanice would go with him to the Athenæum—whatever that was—and to Salem. She would copy records, write letters, take down his dictation, for the disaster off Cape Horn that had lamed him had also injured his hand. She could not believe her fabulous good fortune.
'I'll work to the bone, both at my Art and for your father,' she cried. 'It's wonderful. Oh, Cousin Polly,' she exclaimed, using this diminutive for the first and last time, 'I've never been so happy, not for years. Now I won't dream about Mamma ever again. You are an angel.'
She turned away her head again and sat with her profile turned towards Pauline, who was encouraged in her proselyting by a certain intellectuality she found in it. The nose especially, in spite of its neatness, might easily belong to a Great Mind.
'Now you are in Boston you shall have everything—why, to a girl of your genius the world lies open like a flower.'
Lanice turned towards her. Her face, seen from the front, was of a different calibre. It held a veiled suggestion of earthiness, perhaps more threatening to the owner's happiness than Mamma's frank paganism. Almost as if by an act of will, however, the expression changed, or, rather, wiped itself out. She looked, with her small pointed chin, open brow, and eyes like a maiden's prayer, rather like a fashion-plate drawing from a 'Godey's Book.'
Boston Common at last, and the still, small light of dusk lacing the naked trees. Cousin Poggy commanded her coachman to make a turn about the Common. Ranks of ordered brick houses, pleasing in proportion and fastidious in detail, were drawn up on three sides of the Common and slightly superciliously gazed at this tattered Eden from which the cows had been but recently banished. Lanice had not dreamed that in the whole country there were so many gleaming brass knockers and glass doorknobs, so many shallow bow windows, lacy iron balconies, and classic white porticoes. New York was not so chastely elegant.
A little, active creature in high stock, high hat, gaiters, and tightly buttoned overcoat see-sawed past her. His face was alive with benign intelligence. He must be famous—perhaps Dr. Holmes, who was so droll. The powerful Olympian with flowing cape and beard and majestic stride, why, he might be Professor Longfellow! Perhaps it is Harriet Beecher Stowe herself, this lady with the pointed face, draggled petticoats, and ancient straw hat. Even the children looked distinguished and well-grounded in Greek. Lanice remembered that Margaret Fuller had read the classics at seven, and gazed reverently at a little girl with bulging forehead and dangling legs and arms. She gaped at Boston coming and going over its criss-cross little board walks raised above the mundane slush. Boston, Boston, Boston! In her excitement she forgot the ideal expression for one of her sex, which should be chaste and sober and elegant, and something delightful flamed up and fled over her slim red mouth and glittered in her long black eyes. So with beauty she looked upon Boston. 'This,' she thought, 'is my oyster, as somebody—perhaps George Washington—once said of something else.' Boston, Boston! She saw its doorways, its Common, its chimney pots. She saw the sky. She saw herself suddenly as a part of all this and wondered why she had been frightened at the station.
They jogged up Park Street, turned left upon Beacon, and before a graceful Doric portico the fat white horses came to a willing stop. The ladies clambered out, and with secret admiration Lanice saw her emancipated cousin draw from her petticoat pocket a doorkey and quite like a man open the white door. With a certain pride in the fine house, Pauline pushed her in and through the hall into one of the two self-possessed living-rooms which ran the width of the mansion. The walls were papered with an exotic tropical landscape. Dark, flaunting trees shaded joyous revels of nymph and faun. Ruins twisted with faded roses. Goddesses in the unladylike costume of the First Empire disported themselves. When Lanice herself drew Venus, Calypso, or Ariadne, it was with difficulty that she kept the telltale hoop from under their skirts. She arranged their hair exactly as she did her own, nor might their freer spirits escape her tight stays. For this was beautiful and elegant. Skimpy draperies and snood-bound Psyches were wanton and ugly, and in the case of one nymph sporting by the fountain, actually indelicate.
Mahogany, sleek as the haunch of a polished horse, twinkling chandeliers, dripping their bright prisms, crimson curtains, fastidious woodwork. The more intimate of the two rooms was partly cut off by folding doors, and a massive screen of teak and fat jade.
Pauline's flea-like mind was leaping ahead in all sorts of wrong directions. She thought her young cousin still suffering from terror at the stranger's approach in the train. 'There, there,' she said, and saw the tears in Lanice's eyes before the girl knew that they had gathered. 'Men are such brutes. Do not think of that...unpleasant experience, think only of the great things that your brush shall do.'
She took her by her slender arms and shook her enthusiastically. Lanice felt the terrible nausea return with the tears that constricted her throat. The prodigious tropical trees upon the walls and her cousin's narrow ash blond face suddenly fogged with tears. Her own mouth squared childishly.
'Would you like some hot milk?'
She shook her head.
'Your room?'
'Yes,' she assented mournfully.
Pauline patted her hand, and chatted as she led her up two flights of stairs to a lovely yellow room whose walls were quaintly printed with emerald pagodas, red Chinese mandarins, and blue birds. Pauline whispered to her the tea hour in the tone of a conspirator, left her alone, and with elaborate tact tiptoed downstairs.