Infatuation
venture to say this was cruel--though it always came as a shock to the
newly-wedded pair--it was just the sparrow way, that's all.
Phyllis was soon flying with the rest of them, and her ready
adaptability caused her to be accepted in their midst without more than
a passing hesitation. Hiding her riper and more womanly nature, and
absorbing herself in this animated triviality, she pretended to be as
much a sparrow as any of the flock, and no less lively and empty-headed.
She was lonely, heart-tired, and very much adrift on the sea of life;
and in the engaging childishness of these girls and boys, who, though of
her own age, were mentally only up to her elbow, she found a sort of
solace, a sort of peace. They kept her from thinking; their chatter and
good spirits were exhilarating; the naive admiration of the young men
warmed, and yet did not disturb her.--Before her long flight to other
skies, the little bird might well be thankful for the sparrows.
Spring came--summer. Her twenty-first birthday passed in the
Adirondacks, where her father had a cottage in that wilderness of woods
and lakes. She was in her twenty-second year now, and knew what it was
to feel old--oh, so old! That she was able, by the laws of the land, to
buy and hold real-estate seemed but a poor set-off to this encroachment
of time--though her father repeatedly pointed out this new privilege the
years had brought. She could marry, too, without his consent--another
empty concession to maturity, considering there was no one to marry with
or without it. Of course, there were a few silly babies running after
her as though she were a woolly sheep--but no one that the wildest
stretch of imagination could consider a man. Some of their fathers ran,
too--stout widowers panting with the unaccustomed exertion,--but that
was grotesque and disgusting. Far or wide, high or low, there wasn't a
pin feather of the Golden Young Man. His noble race was extinct. He
lived in books, but you never met him. Never, never. He had died out a
million years ago, leaving nothing save a tradition for poets and
novelists to paw over.
Quite convinced that it was a wretched world, Phyllis danced and rode,
picnicked and camped out after deer in a bewitching Wild West costume,
and was always the first to a party, and the last to leave it--all very
much like one who found it tolerable enough. Some would have called her
an insatiable little pleasure-seeker, and been wholly misled. "What are
any of us doing except waiting for a man?" she once announced with
shocking candor. "It's the fashion to talk of 'other interests' and we
girls are all graduating, and slumming, and teaching little foreign Jews
to sing '_My Country 'Tis of Thee_, and _Columbia_, _Gem of the Ocean_,
and learning to be trained nurses and bacteriologists--just in the
effort to save our poor little self-respect. We ruin our complexions,
dim our eyes, and spoil our nice hands--all the property of some future
lord and master, whom we really are pilfering--and who's deceived? Who
takes it seriously? We don't, who do it. Poof, what a pretense it
is!--If you have to wait, why not two-step through it as I do, and be as
happy as you can, like people snowed up in a train. That's what a young
girl is--snowed up--and I only wish some one would come with a spade and
dig me out!"
These racy confidences entertained and delighted her father, but on
other people they often had a contrary effect. The truth from the lips
of babes and sucklings, however phenomenal, is also disconcerting. Old
women, who in private taught their daughters a revolting cynicism, and
called it "putting them on their guard," were much overcome by Phyllis'
frankness. It was "bold"; it was "unladylike"; it was "dreadful." They
tore Phyllis to pieces, and prophesied the most awful things. It may be
that they were right. Selfishness is a fine ballast, and an anxious
regard for number one keeps many a little ship on an undeviating course.
Phyllis was made to smart for her unconventional sayings, and they often
came back to her, so distorted and coarsened by their travels, that her
cheeks flushed with anger.
"There's one thing I am learning fast," she said, "and that is, all my
friends seem to be men, and all my enemies, women--and I may as well get
used to it now. I know there are a few exceptions either way, but it's
substantially that, anyhow, and one might as well face up to it, and
save trouble."
"I'm afraid you are what they call a man's woman, my dear," said Mr.
Ladd.
"I'm glad of it," exclaimed Phyllis saucily. "I don't want to be any
other kind of a woman, least of all one of those sneaking, cowardly,
backbiting, hypocritical things. I don't wonder they used to whip them
in the good old days. If men hadn't degenerated so terribly, they'd be
whipping them now!"
Autumn saw her back in Carthage again. Aunt Sarah was begging to have
her for another Washington winter, and was in a beautifully forgiving
humor. The breaches in her social position had been repaired, and the
Demon Want, confound him, was knocking loudly at the door of her elegant
establishment--so that the hope of another visit, with its accompanying
shower of Brother Bob's gold, loomed very attractively before these
cold, blue eyes. But Phyllis could not be beguiled; she had no wish to
repeat that mad winter; her mood was all the other way--for her big
tranquil house, her books, her dogs, her horses, and long dreaming hours
to herself, undisturbed. She had loved Washington, and had exhausted
it. The strain of its business-like gaiety was not to be endured again.
It was a factory of pleasure, and the hours over-long, the tasks
over-hard. Aunt Sarah might ring the bell all she wished, but the
factory that winter would be one toiler short. When a person has
entered her twenty-second year, that advanced age brings with it a
certain serenity unknown to wilder twenty. You are glad to lie back
with a dog's head in your lap, and lazily watch the procession. Silly
young men, choking in immense collars, no longer can keep you out of bed
till three A.M. Let the new debutantes have that doubtful joy.
Twenty-two preferred her book, and her silent rooms.--Not that Carthage
was without its simple relaxations, but they were well spaced out, with
long intervals between.
"Miss Daisy wants you on the 'phone, Miss."
"Oh, all right--I'm coming.--Hello, hello, hello--What a dear you are to
ask me--A--matinee Wednesday? Love to!--What's it to be?"
"Oh, Phyllis, you won't be offended, will you, but I'm so poor, and
their boxes are only five dollars, and will hold six, and they've
promised to squeeze in three more chairs--and so I've invited nine--and
it's in that cheap, horrid Thalia Theater, but nobody can hurt us in a
box, and everybody says the play's wonderful, and you can eat peanuts,
which you can't do in a real theater; and it's _Moths_, by Ouida, and
Cyril Adair is the star, and he is so wonderfully handsome--oh, you must
have seen his pictures in the barber-shop windows--and anyway, even if
he isn't, the play is delightfully wicked--because I had such a fight
with mama about it, and then Howard has been twice, which he wouldn't
have done if it wasn't; and even if it isn't, how am I to give a
theater-party on no more than five dollars? The Columbia boxes are
fifteen, and so are the Lyceum's, and when they say six, it's six, and
you simply couldn't dare to ask nine girls because they wouldn't let
them in. But the Thalia man was so pleased and impressed that I believe
he would have included ice-cream if I had asked him--and Phyllis?"
"Yes, darling."
"It would give such a lot of ginger to it, if you would lend me your
carriage and the dog-cart--! Oh, I knew you would! What a comfort you
are, Phyllis. I don't know how I'd get along without you, you are
always so generous and obliging. Nettie Havens has volunteered tea at
her house--just insisted on it when I told her. I guess that poor little
five never went so far in all its little history! I can't think it ever
ran a whole theater-party before, with carriages and teas. It's an awful
tacky way of doing things, I admit, but what does it matter if we have a
good time?--Yes, that's the only way to look at it, and you're a
darling. Do you know I think Harry Thayre is sweet on--! Oh, bother,
she says I've to ring off, or pay another nickel. If it was a man she'd
let him have fifteen cents' worth! Well, good-by, good-by--!"
It was a pretty sight they presented in their box, a veritable
flower-bed of young American womanhood. The bright, girlish faces, the
laughter, the animation, the sparkling eyes, the ripples of merriment,
the air of innocent bravado--all were in such contrast to the usual
patrons of the Thalia that the house could not take its eyes off them.
It was essentially a shop-girl-and-best-young-man theater, with a
hoodlum gallery, and a general appearance of extreme youth. Those who
did not chew gum were almost conspicuous, and a formidable young man
with a voice of brass, perambulated the aisles with a large tray, and
terrorized nickels and dimes from the pockets of swains. He had a
humorous directness that made the price of immunity seem cheap at the
money. It was worth a dime any time to escape him.
And the play?
It was a rousing love-story, crude, stilted, old-fashioned, but
developed with a force and earnestness that Ouida has always possessed.
The brutal Prince, the ill-used Princess, Correze, the idol of the
public, the tenor whose voice has taken the world by storm, heart-broken
and noble in his hopeless love--here were full-blooded situations to
make the heart beat. And how nine of them _did_ beat in that crowded
box. And what scalding tears rolled down those youthful cheeks! And
what little fists clenched as the Prince, passing all bounds, and
incensed to frenzy, struck--positively struck--the adorable being who
was clinging so desperately to honor and duty! Who could blame Correze
for what was to follow? Assuredly not our nine rosebuds, who, if
anything, found the splendid creature almost too backward, too
self-sacrificing. But--!
And Cyril Adair, who played Correze with a fervid pathos that tore the
heart out of your breast! Of course, you knew he had taken the world by
storm. Of course you knew the public idolized him. Wasn't he the
handsomest, manliest, most chivalrous fellow alive? Hadn't he a voice
to melt a stone, or drive, as cutting as a rapier, through even a
Prince? His firm chin, his faultless teeth, his strange, smoldering,
compelling eyes, his vigorous yet graceful frame--small wonder that the
Princess threw everything to the winds for such a man. Under the
circumstances none of the nine would have waited half so long. The
Princess' devotion to honor and duty seemed hardly less than morbid.
Her patience under insults was positively exasperating. She clung to
respectability with both hands--screamed, raged, but stuck to it as
tight as a limpet--until a blow in the face, and the vilest of epithets
from her brutal husband, toppled her finally to perdition--that is, if
it were perdition to link the remainder of her life with that glorious
being, and abandon everything for love.
The box applauded wildly, and led off the whole house. The curtain was
made to rise again and again. Correze, advancing to the footlights, was
left in no doubt as to where he had scored his heaviest hit, and
rewarded those eager, girlish faces with a glance of his fine eyes, and
a bow intended for them alone. Phyllis was the least enthusiastic of
the party, and her silence during the first intermission was noisily
commented on. She ate caramels slowly, and added nothing but
monosyllables and an enigmatic smile to the rapturous demonstrations of