Part 14

She was sure that the wrong thing must be with herself. The Hemingways were one of the “old families”;—they had always taken a creditable part in the life of the town, and the last man of them, her father, owned and edited the principal newspaper of the place. Elsie had no prospect of riches, but she was not poor; and other girls with less than she were “popular.” Therefore the wrong thing about her could be identified in nothing exterior. Moreover, when she pursued her search for the vital defect she could not attribute it to tactlessness; for that has some weight, and she was weightless. She danced well, she dressed as well as any of the girls did, and her father told her that she “talked well,” too;—he said this to her often, during the long evenings she spent with him in his library. Yet he was the only one who would listen to her, and, though she adored him, he was not the audience she most wanted. She “talked well”; but even by pleading she could not get Paul Reamer to spend five minutes with her.

No wonder! Paul was the great beau of the town, and she the girl least of all like a belle. And, remembering his plain consciousness of this contrast, almost ludicrously expressed in his surprise that she should try to detain him with her for even a few minutes, she shivered as she wept. She hated herself for begging of him; she hated herself for having run out of the house to try for the thousandth time to be one of a “crowd” that didn’t want her; she hated herself for “hanging around them,” laughing and pretending that she was one of them, when anybody could see she wasn’t. She hated herself for having something wrong about her, and for not being able to find out what it was; she hated herself, and she hated everything and everybody—except her father.

. . . At dinner that evening he reproached her for being pale. “I don’t believe you take enough exercise,” he suggested.

“Yes, I do. I took a long walk this afternoon. I walked four or five miles.”

“Did you?” He smiled under his heavy old-fashioned, gray lambrequin of a moustache, and his eyeglasses showed a glint of humorous light. “That doesn’t sound as if you went with a _girl_ companion, Elsie! Four or five miles, was it?”

“I went alone,” she said, occupied with her plate.

His humorous manifestations vanished and he looked somewhat concerned. “Is that so? It might have been jollier the other way, perhaps. I sometimes think I monopolize you too much, young woman. For instance, you oughtn’t to spend all your evenings with me. You ought to keep up your contemporary friendships more than you do, I’m afraid. Why don’t you ask the girls and boys here to play with you sometimes?”

“I don’t want them.”

“Would you like to give a dance—or anything?”

“No, Papa.”

He sighed. “I’m afraid your young friends bore you, Elsie.”

“No,” she said. “It isn’t that exactly. I just——” She left the sentence unfinished.

“You just don’t take much interest in ’em,” he laughed.

“Well—maybe.” Still occupied with the food before her, though her being occupied with it meant no hearty consumption of it, she seemed to admit the charge. “Something like that.”

“It shouldn’t be so,” he said. “From the little I see of ’em I shouldn’t spot any of ’em for a lofty intellect precisely, but young people of that sort in a moderate-sized city like this usually do seem to older people just a pack of incomprehensible gigglers and gabblers. I suppose you never hear much from ’em except personalities and pretty slim jokes, and it may get tiresome for a girl as solid on the Napoleonic Period as you are.” He paused to chuckle. “I don’t suppose you hear much discussion of Madame de Rémusat among ’em, do you?”

“No.”

“What I’m getting at,” he went on;—“you oughtn’t to think too much about intellectual fodder or be bored with people your own age because they can’t offer it.”

At that she glanced wanly at him across the table. “I’m not, Papa. They don’t bore me.”

“Then I can’t understand your not seeing more of ’em. It isn’t normal, and you’re missing a lot of the rightful pleasures of youth. It’s natural for youth to seek youth, and not to devote all its time to an old codger like me. I believe you need a change.” He looked at her severely and nodded. “I’m serious.”

“What change?”

“Your aunt Mildred’s written me again about your visiting there,” he said. “Your cousin Cornelia finished her school last year. Now she’s home from eight months abroad and they really want you.”

“Oh, no,” Elsie said, quietly, and looked again at her plate.

“Why not?”

“I don’t care to go, Papa.”

“Why don’t you?”

Her lip quivered a little, but she controlled it, and he saw no sign of emotion. “Because I wouldn’t have a good time.”

“I’d like to know why you wouldn’t,” he returned a little testily. “Your aunt Mildred is the best sister I had. She’s a pretty fine person, Elsie, and she’s always wanted to know you better. She says Cornelia’s turned out to be a lovely young woman, and they both want you to come. She’s sure you’ll like Cornelia.”

“Maybe I would,” Elsie said, moodily. “That isn’t saying Cornelia’d like me.”

“Of all the nonsense!” he cried, and he laughed impatiently. “How could she help liking you? Everybody likes you, of course. Mildred says Cornelia has a mighty nice circle of young people about her; they have such jolly times, it’s fun just watching ’em, Mildred says; and she enjoys entertaining a lot. They have that big house of theirs, and they’re near enough the city to go in for the theatre when they want to and——”

“I know,” Elsie interrupted. “They’re great people, and it’s a big, fashionable suburb and everything’s grand! I’m not dreaming of going, Papa.”

“Aren’t you? Well, I’m dreaming of making you,” he retorted. “You haven’t been there since you were a little girl, and your aunt says it’s shameful to treat her as if she lived in China, when it’s really only a night or day’s run on a Pullman. They want you to come, and they expect to give you a real splurge, Elsie.”

“No, no,” she said, quickly; and if he could have seen her downcast eyes he might have perceived that they were terrified. “Let’s don’t talk of it, Papa.”

“Let’s do,” he returned, genially. “I suppose you think that because you’re bored by this little set of young people of yours, here, you’ll be bored by Cornelia’s friends. I don’t know, but I’d at least guess that they might be a little more metropolitan, though of course young people are pretty much the same the world over nowadays.”

“Yes,” Elsie said in a low voice. “I’m sure they would be.”

“More metropolitan, you mean?”

“No,” Elsie said. “I mean they’d be the same as these are here.”

“Well, at least you might give ’em a try. They might prove to be more——”

“No,” Elsie said again. “They’d be just the same.”

This was the cause of the obstinacy that puzzled and even provoked him during a week of intermittent arguing upon the matter. Elsie was sure that one thing he said was only too true: “Young people are pretty much the same the world over nowadays”; and in her imagination she could conjure up no picture of herself occupying among her cousin Cornelia Cromwell’s friends a position different from that she held among her own. They would be polite to her for the first hour or so, she knew, and then they would do to her what had always been done to her. They would treat her as a weightless presence, invisible and inaudible, a left-outer.

Her aunt and Cornelia would expect much of her; and they would be kind in their disappointment; but they would have her on their hands and secretly look forward to the relief of her departure. Elsie could predict it all, and in sorry imaginings foresee the weariness of her aunt and cousin as they would daily renew the task of privately goading reluctant young men and preoccupied girls to appear conscious that she was a human being, not air. The visit would mean only a new failure, a new one on a grander scale than the old failure at home. The old one was enough for her; she was used to it, and the surroundings at least were familiar. The more her father urged her, the more she was terrified by what he urged.

“I’ve made up my mind to compel you,” he told her one evening in the library. “I’m serious, Elsie.”

She did not look up from her book, but responded quietly: “I’m twenty. Women are of age in this state at eighteen, Papa.”

“Are they? I wrote your aunt yesterday that you’re coming.”

“I wrote her yesterday, too. I told her I couldn’t.”

“No other explanation?”

“Of course I said you needed me to run the house, Papa.”

“I didn’t bring you up to tell untruths,” he said. “You’ve learned, it seems; but this one won’t do you any good. You’re going, Elsie, and if you want some new dresses or hats or things you’d better be ordering ’em. You don’t seem to understand I really mean it.”

She dropped her book in her lap and sighed profoundly. “What for?” she asked. “Why do you make such a point of it?”

“Because I’ve been watching you and thinking about you, and I don’t believe I’m doing my duty by you. Not as”—his voice showed feeling—“not as your mother would have me do it. Sometimes you cheer up and joke with me, but I don’t believe you’re happy.”

“But I _am_.”

“You’re not,” he returned with conviction. “And the reason is, you lead too monotonous a life. A monotonous life suits elderliness, but it isn’t normal for youth. Really, you’re getting to lead the life of a recluse, and I won’t have it. If these provincial young people here bore you so that you won’t run about and play with them as the other girls do, why then you’ve got to try a different kind of young people.”

“But you said young people were all the same, Papa, the world over; and it’s true.”

“At least,” he insisted, “your cousin Cornelia’s will have different faces, and you’re going to go and look at ’em. Elsie, you’re _not_ having a good time, and one way or another I’ve got to make you. You need a new view of some kind; you’ve got to be shaken out of this hermit habit you’ve fallen into.”

“Papa, please,” she said, appealingly. “I don’t want to go. Don’t make me. Please!”

At this he rose from his chair and came to her and took one of her hands in his. The room was warm, and she sat near the fire; but the slender hand he held was cold. “Elsie, I want you to,” he said. “I don’t want to think your mother might reproach me for not making you do what seems best for you. Let me wire your aunt to-morrow you’ll come next week.”

Her lower lip moved pathetically, and along her eyelids a liquid tremulousness twinkled too brightly. “I couldn’t——” she began.

“Don’t tell me that any more, Elsie.”

“No,” she said, meekly. “I meant I couldn’t get ready until week after next, Papa—or the week after that. I couldn’t go before December. Not before then, please, Papa.”

He patted her hand and laughed; pleased that she would be obedient; touched that she was so reluctant to leave him. “That’s the girl! You’ll have a glorious time, Elsie; see if you don’t!” he said, and, looking down tenderly upon her shining eyes, never suspected the true anguish that was there.

XXIII THE STRANGE MIRROR

IT WAS still there, and all the keener, when Elsie dressed before the French mirror in the big and luxurious bedchamber to which she had been shown on her arrival at her aunt’s house.

“Mrs. Cromwell and Miss Cornelia had an engagement they couldn’t break. They said for me to say they’re sorry they couldn’t be here when you came,” a maid told her. “Mrs. Cromwell said tell you she’s giving a dinner for you and Miss Cornelia this evening. It’s set for early because they’re going to theatricals and dancing somewheres else afterward, so she thought p’raps you better begin dressing soon as your trunk gets here. They’ll have to dress in a hurry, theirselves, so you may not see ’em till dinner.”

But Elsie did not have to wait that long. Half an hour later, when she had begun to dress, Cornelia rushed in, all fur and cold rosy cheeks. She embraced the visitor impetuously. “D’you mind bein’ hugged by a bear?” she asked. “I couldn’t wait even to take off my coat, because I remembered what an awf’ly nice _little_ thing you were! Do you know we haven’t seen each other for nine years?” She stepped back with her hands upon Elsie’s shoulders. “I’ve got to fly and dress,” she said. “_My_ but you’re lovely!”

With that, she turned and scurried out of the room, leaving behind her a mingled faint scent of fur and violets, and the impression upon Elsie that this cousin of hers was the prettiest girl she had ever seen.

Cornelia’s good looks terrified her the more. Probably there were other girls as pretty as that among Cornelia’s friends, the people she was to meet to-night. And Cornelia’s rush into the room, her flashing greeting, so impulsive, and her quick flight away were all flavoured with that dashingness with which Elsie felt she could never compete. “_My_, but you’re lovely!” was sweet of Cornelia, Elsie thought. But girls usually said things like that to their girl visitors—especially when the visitors had just arrived. Besides, anybody could see that Cornelia was as kind as she was pretty.

“_My_, but you’re lovely!” was pleasant to hear, even from an impulsive cousin, yet it was of no great help to Elsie. She went on with her dressing, looking unhappily into the glass and thinking of what irony there had been in her father’s persistence. “To _make_ me have a ‘good time’!” she thought. “As if I wouldn’t have had one at home, if I could! But of course he didn’t know that.”

She was so afraid of what was before her, and so certain she was foredoomed, that during this troubled hour she learned the meaning of an old phrase describing fear; for she was indeed “sick with apprehension.” She took some spirits of ammonia in a glass of water as a remedy for that sickness. “Oh, Papa!” she moaned. “What have you done to me?”

The maid who had brought her to her room reappeared with a bouquet of rosebuds and lilies of the valley, to be worn. “It’s from one of the gentlemen that’s coming to dinner, Miss Cornelia said. He sent two. Pr’aps I could pin it on for you.”

Elsie let her render this service, and when it was done the woman smiled admiringly. “It certainly becomes you,” she said. “I might say it looks like you.”

Elsie regarded her with a stare so wide and blank that the maid thought her probably haughty. “Excuse me, ma’am. Could I be of any more assistance?”

“No, thank you,” Elsie said, still staring, and turned again to the mirror as the flatterer left the room.

The bouquet was beautiful, and, before the evening was over, the unknown gentleman who had sent it would be of a mind that the joke was on him, Elsie thought. The misplaced blarney of an Irishwoman had amazed but not cheered her; and the clock on the mantel-shelf warned her that the time was ten minutes before seven. She took some more ammonia.

The next moment into the room came her aunt, large, decorously glittering, fundamentally important. She was also warm-hearted, and she took her niece in her arms and kissed her as if she wanted to kiss her. Then she did as Cornelia had done—held her at arm’s length and looked at her. “You dear child!” she said. “I’ve wanted so long to get hold of you. A man never knows how to bring up a girl; she has to do it all herself. You’ve done it excellently, I can see, Elsie. You have lovely taste; that’s just the dress I’d have picked out for you myself. And to think I haven’t seen you since your dear mother left us! Cornelia hasn’t seen you for much longer than that—you and she haven’t had a glimpse of each other since you were ten or eleven years old.”

“Yes,” Elsie said. “I saw her a little while ago.” She gulped feebly, and by a great effort kept her voice steady. “Aunt Mildred, how proud of her you must be! I want to tell you something: I think Cornelia is the very prettiest girl I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”

Mrs. Cromwell took her hands from her niece’s shoulders, and, smiling, stepped backward a pace and shook her head. “No,” she said. “Cornelia’s very pretty, but she isn’t _that_ pretty.”

“I think she is.”

“No.” Mrs. Cromwell laughed; then became serious. She swept a look over her niece from head to foot—the accurately estimating scrutiny of an intelligent and experienced woman who is careful to be an honest mother. “Of course Cornelia isn’t in your class,” she said, quietly.

Then she turned to the door. “Come down to the drawing-room a minute or so before seven,” she said, and was gone.

Elsie stood, cataleptic.

The words seemed to linger upon the stirred air of the spacious room. “Of course Cornelia isn’t in your class.” Cornelia’s mother had not intended to be satirical; she had been perfectly serious and direct, and she had really meant that Cornelia, not Elsie, was of the lower class of prettiness. Here were three dumfounding things in a row: “_My_, but you’re lovely!” “It certainly becomes you—I might say it looks like you.” “Of course Cornelia isn’t in your class.” The third was the astounding climax that now made the first two almost—almost convincing!

Elsie rushed to the long mirror and in a turmoil of bewilderment gazed and gazed at what she saw there. And as she looked, there slowly came a little light that grew to be a sparkling in those startled eyes of hers; her lips parted; breathlessly she smiled a little;—then, all in a flash, radiantly. For what she saw in the mirror was charming. No fear of hers, no long experience of neglect, could deny it; and at last she was sure that whatever the wrong thing about her was, it could be nothing she would ever see in a mirror. She was actually what at home she had sometimes suspected and then believed impossible.

She was beautiful—and knew it!

Marvelling, trembling with timid and formless premonitions of rapture, she stood aglow in the revelation. She leaned closer to the mirror and spoke to it in a low voice, almost brokenly: “_My_, but you’re lovely—I might say it looks like you—of course she isn’t in your class!”

Then, with new and strange stars in her eyes, this sudden Cinderella went out of her room and down the wide stairway, dazed but not afraid. The miracle had already touched her.

Her uncle met her at the doorway of the drawing-room. “This is not little Elsie!” he said. “Why, good heavens, your father didn’t write us his Elsie had grown up into anything like _you_!”

Immediately he took her upon his arm and turned to cross the room with her, going toward the dozen young people clustered about Cornelia.

But Cornelia came running to her cousin. “You’re dazzling!” she whispered, and it was obvious that Cornelia’s friends had the same impression. They stopped talking abruptly as Elsie entered the room, and they remained in an eloquent state of silence until Cornelia began to make their names known to the visitor. Even after that, they talked in lowered voices until they went out to the dining-room.

XXIV TRANSFIGURATION

THEY were livelier at the table, but not nearly so noisy as Mamie Ford and Paul Reamer and their intimates would have been at a dinner party at home, Elsie thought; though this was but a hasty and vague comparison flitting through her mind. She was not able to think definitely about anything for a time: she was too dazzled by being dazzling. Her clearest thought was an inquiry: Was this she, herself, and, if she was indeed Elsie Hemingway, were these queer, kind, new people now about her quite sane?

The tall young man with the long face who sat at her left talked to her as much as he could, being hampered by the circumstance that the fair-haired short young man on her right did his best to talk to her all the time, except when she spoke. Then both of them listened with deference; and so did a third young man directly across the table from her. More than that, she could not look about her without encountering the withdrawing glances of other guests of both sexes, though some of these glances, not from feminine orbs, were in no polite flurry to withdraw, but remained thoughtfully upon her as long as she looked their way. _Could_ it be Elsie Hemingway upon whom fond eyes of youth thus so sweetly lingered?

Too centred upon the strange experience to think much about these amazing people except as adjuncts to her transfiguration, she nevertheless decided that she liked best the tall gentleman at her left. He was not so young as the others, appearing to be as far advanced toward middle-age as twenty-seven—or possibly even twenty-nine—and she decided that his long, irregular face was “interesting.” She asked him to “straighten out the names” of the others for her, hoping that he would straighten out his own before he finished.

He began with Lily Dodge. “_Our_ prettiest girl,” he explained, honestly unconscious of what his emphasis implied. “That is, she’s been generally considered so since your cousin Anne was married. The young man on Miss Dodge’s right and in such a plain state of devotion is named Henry Burnett just now.”

“Just now? Does his name change from time to time?”

“Poor Henry’s doesn’t, no; nor the condition in which Miss Dodge keeps him—probably because she likes to win golf tournament cups with him. I mean, the next time you see her at a dinner the man beside her in that state may have another name. _She_ changes ’em.”

“I see,” Elsie said. She looked absently at Miss Dodge, not aware that there could be anything in common between them, much less that in a manner they had shared a day of agony, no great while past. “She seems very lovely.”

“In her own way, yes,” her neighbour returned without enthusiasm. “The man on her left——”

Elsie laughed and interrupted. “What I meant to get at—if you don’t mind—was the name of the man on _my_ left!”

“Of course you wouldn’t have caught it,” he said. “You naturally wouldn’t remember, hearing it spoken with the others.”

“No,” she said. “Yet I think I do remember that Cornelia spoke it a little more impressively than she did any of theirs.”

“That’s only because I’m in her father’s firm. The most junior member, of course. They use me as a waste-basket.”

“As what?”

“A waste-basket. When Mr. Cromwell and the really important partners discover some bits of worthless business cluttering up the office they fill me up with it. Every good office has a young waste-basket, Miss Hemingway.”

“But you haven’t yet told me this one’s name.”

“Harley.”

He laughed ruefully, and she asked why. “Harley doesn’t seem a funny name to me,” she said. “I don’t understand your laughing.”

“It’s to keep from crying,” he explained. “My father was dead before I was born and my mother died just after. I was taken over by my grandfather, and he named me for three of Napoleon’s marshals—Berthier Ney Junot Harley. It takes a grandfather to do things like that to you!”

“But Junot wasn’t a marshal,” Elsie said. “He hoped to be, but the Emperor never made him one; Junot was too flighty.”

Mr. Harley stared. “I remember that’s true;—I spoke of three marshals hastily. I should have said two and a general. My grandfather brought me up on ’em, and I still collect First Empire books. But imagine your knowing!”

“You mean you think I don’t look——”

He interrupted earnestly. “I’m afraid it’s too soon for you to let me tell you how I think you look. But you do laugh at my names, don’t you?”

“No; they don’t seem funny to me.”

“Don’t you ever laugh except when things are funny?” he asked.

“Yes, I do,” she said. “I’ve laughed thousands of times when everything was horribly unfunny.”

“Then why did you laugh?”

For an instant she looked at him gravely. “To try to be ‘popular,’” she said.

Plainly he thought this funny enough for laughter. “That _is_ a joke!” he said. “But if laughing makes you any more ‘popular’ than you would be without it, I hope for this one evening at least you’ll be as solemn as an obelisk.”

Of course Elsie said, “Why?”