The Real Adventure
them. Portia's brusk disdain of rhetoric, her habit of reducing
questions to their least denominator of common sense, carried a constant
and perfectly involuntary criticism of her mother's ampler and more
emotional style--made her suspect that Portia regarded her as a
sentimentalist.
But Rose, with her first adorable smile, had captured her mother's heart
beyond the possibility of reservation or restraint. And, as the child
grew and her splendid, exuberant vitality and courage and wide-reaching,
though not facile, affection became marked characteristics, the hope
grew in her mother that here was a new leader born to the great Cause.
It would need new leaders. She herself was conscious of a side drift to
the great current, that threatened to leave her in a backwater. Or, as
she put it to herself, that threatened to sweep over the banks of
righteousness and decorum, and inundate, disastrously, the peaceful
fields.
She couldn't expect to have the strength to resist this drift herself,
but she had a vision of her daughter rising splendidly to the task. And
for that task she trained her--or thought she did; saw to it that the
girl understood the Eighteenth Century Liberalism, which, limited to the
fields of politics and education, and extended to include women equally
with men, was the gospel of the movement she had grown up in. With it
for a background, with a university education and a legal training, the
girl would have everything she needed.
She expected her to marry, of course. But in her day-dreams, it was to
be one of Rose's converts to the cause--won perhaps by her advocacy at
the bar, of some legal case involving the rights of woman--who was to
lay his new-born conviction, along with his personal adoration, at the
girl's feet.
Certainly Rodney Aldrich, who, as Rose outrageously had boasted, rolled
her in the dust and tramped all over her in the course of their
arguments, presented a violent contrast to the ideal husband she had
selected. Indeed, it should be hard to think of him as anything but the
rock on which her whole ambition for the girl would be shattered.
It was strange she hadn't thought of that during her talk with Rose!
Now that the idea had occurred to her she tried hard to look at the
event that way and to nurse into energetic life a tragic regret over the
miscarriage of a lifetime's hope. It was all so obviously what she
ought to feel. Yet the moment she relaxed the effort, her mind flew back
to a vibration between a hope and a fear: the hope, that the man Rose
was about to marry would shelter and protect her always, as tenderly as
she herself had sheltered her; the terror--and this was stronger--that
he might not.
That night, during the process of getting ready for bed, Rose put on a
bath-robe, picked up her hair brush and went into Portia's room. Portia,
much quicker always about such matters, was already on the point of
turning out the light, but guessing what her sister wanted, she stacked
her pillows, lighted a cigarette, climbed into bed and settled back
comfortably for a chat.
"I hope," Rose began, "that you're really pleased about it. Because
mother isn't. She's terribly unhappy. Do you suppose it's because she
thinks I've--well, sort of deserted her, in not going on and being a
lawyer--and all that?"
"Oh, perhaps," said Portia indifferently. "I wouldn't worry about that,
though. Because really, child, you had no more chance of growing up to
be a lawyer and a leader of the 'Cause' than I have of getting to be a
brigadier-general."
Rose stopped brushing her hair and demanded to be told why not. She had
been getting on all right up to now, hadn't she?
"Why, just think," said Portia, "what mother herself had gone through
when she was your age; put herself through college because her father
didn't believe in 'higher education'--practically disowned her. She'd
taught six months in that awful school--remember?--she was used to being
abused and ridiculed. And she was working hard enough to have killed a
camel. But you!... Why, Lamb, you've never really _had_ to do anything
in your life. If you felt like it, all right--and equally all right if
you didn't. You've never been hurt--never even been frightened. You
wouldn't know what they felt like. And the result is ..."
Portia drew in a long puff, then eyed her cigarette thoughtfully through
the slowly expelled smoke. "The result is," she concluded, "that you
have grown up into a big, splendid, fearless, confiding creature that
it's perfectly inevitable some man like Rodney Aldrich would go straight
out of his head about. And there you are."
A troubled questioning look came into the younger sister's eyes. "I've
been lazy and selfish, I know," she said. "Perhaps more than I thought.
I haven't meant to be. But ... Do you think I'm any good at all?"
"That's the real injustice of it," said Portia; "that you are. You've
stayed big and simple. It couldn't possibly occur to you now to say to
yourself, 'Poor old Portia! She's always been jealous because mother
liked me best, and now she's just green with envy because I'm going to
marry Rodney Aldrich.'"
She wouldn't stop to hear Rose's protest. "I know it couldn't," she went
on. "That's what I say. And yet there's more than a little truth in it,
I suppose. Oh, I don't mean I'm sorry you're going to be happy--I
believe you are, you know. I'm just a little sorry for myself. Curious,
anyway, to see where I've missed all the big important things you've
kept. I've been afraid of my instincts, I suppose. Never able to take a
leap because I've always stopped to look, first. I'm too narrow between
the cheek-bones, perhaps. Anyhow, here I stay, grinding along, wondering
what it's all about and what after all's the use.... While you, you
baby! are going to find out."
What Rose wanted to do was to gather her sister up in her arms and kiss
her. But the faint ironic smile on Portia's fine lips, the twist of her
eyebrows, the poise of her body as she sat up in bed watching the
blue-brown smoke rising in a straight thin line from her diminishing
cigarette, combined to make such a demonstration altogether impossible.
"Mother thinks, I guess," she said, to break the silence, "that I ought
to have looked a little longer. She thinks Rodney would have 'wanted' me
more, if I hadn't thrown myself at him like that."
Portia extinguished her cigarette in a little ash-tray, and began
unpacking her pillows before she spoke. "I don't know," she said at
last. "It's been said for a long time that the only way to make a man
want anything very wildly, is to make him think it's desperately hard to
get. But I suspect there are other ways. I don't believe you'll ever
have any trouble making him 'want' you as much as you like."
The color kept mounting higher and higher in the girl's face during the
moment of silence while she pondered this remark. "Why should I--make
him want me?--Any more than ... I think that's rather--horrid, Portia."
Portia gave a little shiver and huddled down into her blankets. "You
don't put things out of existence by deciding they're horrid, child,"
she said. "Open my window, will you? And throw out that cigarette.
There. Now, kiss me and run along to bye-bye. And forget my nonsense."
CHAPTER VIII
RODNEY'S EXPERIMENT
The wedding was set for the first week in June. And the decision,
instantly acquiesced in by everybody, was that it was to be as quiet--as
strictly a family affair--as possible. The recentness of the death of
Rodney's mother gave an adequate excuse for such an arrangement, but the
comparative narrowness of the Stantons' domestic resources enforced it.
Indeed, the notion of even a simple wedding into the Aldrich family left
Portia rather aghast.
But this feeling was largely allayed by Frederica's first call. Being a
celebrated beauty and a person of great social consequence didn't, it
appeared, prevent one from being human and simple mannered and
altogether delightful to have about. She was so competent, too, and
intelligent (Rose didn't see why Portia should find anything
extraordinary in all this. Wasn't she Rodney's sister?) that her
conquest of the Stanton family was instantaneous. They didn't suspect
that it was deliberate.
Rodney had made his great announcement to her, characteristically, over
the telephone, from his office. "Do you remember asking me, Freddy, two
or three weeks ago, who Rosalind Stanton was? Well, she's the girl I'm
going to marry."
She refused to hear a word more in those circumstances. "I'm coming
straight down," she said, "and we'll go somewhere for lunch. Don't you
realize that we can't talk about it like this? Of course you wouldn't,
but it's so."
Over the lunch table she got as detailed an account of the affair as
Rodney, in his somnambulistic condition, was able to give her, and she
passed it on to Martin that evening as they drove across to the north
side for dinner.
"Well, that all sounds exactly like Rodney," he commented. "I hope
you'll like the girl."
"That isn't what I hope," said Frederica. "At least it isn't what I'm
most concerned about. I hope I can make her like me. Roddy's the only
brother I've got in the world, and I'm not going to lose him if I can
help it. That's what will happen if she doesn't like me."
Frederica was perfectly clear about this, though she admitted it had
taken her fifteen minutes or so to see it.
"All the way down-town to talk to Rodney," she said, "I sat there
deciding what she ought to be like--as if she were going to be brought
up to me to see if she'd do. And then all at once I thought, what good
would it do me to decide that she wouldn't? I couldn't change his
relation to her one bit. But, if she decides I won't do, she can change
his relation to me pretty completely. It's about the easiest thing a
wife can do.
"Well, I'm going to see her, and her mother and sister--that's the
family--to-morrow. And if they don't like me before I come away and
think of me as a nice sort of person to be related by marriage to, it
won't be because I haven't tried. It will be because I'm just a
naturally repulsive person and can't help it."
As it happened though, she forgot all about her resolution almost with
her first look at Rose. Rodney's attempts at description of her had been
well meaning; but what he had prepared his sister for, unconsciously of
course, in his emphasis on one or two phases of their first
acquaintance, had been a sort of slatternly Amazon. But the effect of
this was, really, very happy; because when a perfectly presentably clad,
well-bred, admirably poised young girl came into the room and greeted
her neither shyly nor eagerly, nor with any affectation of ease, a girl
who didn't try to pretend it wasn't a critical moment for her but was
game enough to meet it without any evidences of panic--when Frederica
realized that this was the Rose whom Rodney had been telling her about,
she fell in love with her on the spot.
Amazingly, as she watched the girl and heard her talk, she found she was
considering, not Rose's availability as a wife for Rodney, but Rodney's
as a husband for her. It was this, perhaps, that led her to say, at the
end of her leave-taking, just as Rose, who had come out into the hall
with her, was opening the door:
"Roddy has been such a wonderful brother, always, to me, that I suspect
you'll find him, sometimes, being a brother to you. Don't let it hurt
you if that happens."
The most vivid of all the memories that Frederica took away with her
from that memorable visit was the smile with which Rose had answered
that remark. She had her chauffeur stop at the first drug store they
came to and called up Rodney on the telephone, just because she was too
impatient to wait any longer for a talk with him.