A Daughter of To-Day by Sara Jeannette Duncan (best affordable ebook reader .TXT) 📖

the millionaires who are not too sensitive."

"Well now, you've got as sensitive a nature as I know, Miss Bell, and you don't appear to be miserable over here."

"I!" Elfrida frowned just perceptibly. This little creature who once corrected the punctuation of her essays, and gave her bad marks for spelling, was too intolerably personal. "We won't consider my case, if you please. Perhaps I'm not a good American."

"Mrs. Bell seems to think she would enjoy the atmosphere of the past so much in London."

"It's a fatal atmosphere for asthma. Please impress that upon my people, Miss Kimpsey. There would be no justification in letting my mother believe she could be comfortable here. She must come and experience the, atmosphere of the past, as you are doing, on a visit. As soon as it can be afforded I hope they will do that."

Since the day of her engagement with the _Illustrated Age_ Elfrida had been writing long, affectionate, and prettily worded letters to her mother by every American mail. They were models of sweet elegance, those letters; they abounded in dainty bits of description and gay comment, and they reflected as little of the real life of the girl who wrote them as it is possible to conceive. In this way they were quite remarkable, and in their charming discrimination of topics. It was as if Elfrida dictated that a certain relation should exist between herself and her parents. It should acknowledge all the traditions, but it should not be too intimate. They had no such claim upon her, no such closeness to her, as Nadie Palicsky, for instance, had.

When Miss Kimpsey went away that afternoon, trying to realize the intrinsic reward of virtue--she had been obliged to give up the National Gallery to make this visit--Elfrida remembered that the American mail went out next day, and spent a longer time than usual over her weekly letter. In its course she mentioned with some amusement the absurd idea Miss Kimpsey had managed to absorb of their coming to London to live, and touched in the lightest possible way upon the considerations that made such a project impossible. But the greater part of the letter was taken up with a pleased forecast of the time--could it possibly be next summer?--when Mr. and Mrs. Bell would cross the Atlantic on a holiday trip. "I will be quite an affluent person by then," Elfrida wrote, "and I will be able to devote the whole of my magnificent leisure to entertaining you."

She turned from the sealing of this to answer a, note from Lawrence Cardiff. He wrote to her, on odds and ends of matters, almost as often as Janet did now. He wrote as often, indeed, as he could, and always with an amused, uncertain expectancy of what the consciously directed little square envelopes which brought back the reply would contain. It was becoming obvious to him that they brought something a little different, in expression or feeling or suggestion, from the notes that came for Janet, which Janet often read out for their common benefit. He was unable to define the difference, but he was aware that it gave him pleasure, especially as he could not find that it was in any way connected with the respectful consideration that Elfrida might have thought due to his forty-seven years. If Mr. Cardiff had gone so far as to soliloquize upon the subject he would have said to himself, "In my trade a man gets too much of that." I do not know that he did, but the subtle gratification this difference gave him was quite strong enough, at all events, to lead to the reflection. The perception of it was growing so vivid that he instinctively read his notes in silence, paraphrasing them for Janet if she happened to be there. They had, as it were, a bloom and a freshness, a mere perfume of personality that would infallibly vanish in the communicating, but that left him, as often as not, when he slipped the note back into the envelope with a half smile on his lips.

Janet was conscious of the smile and of the paraphrasing. In reprisal--though she would not have admitted it was that--she kept her own missives from Elfrida to herself whenever it occurred to her to check the generous impulse of sharing the pleasure they gave her, which was not often, after all. It was the seldomer because she could not help feeling that her father was thoroughly aware of her action, and fancying that he speculated upon the reason of it. It was unendurable that daddy should speculate about the reason of anything she did in connection with Frida, or with any other young lady. Her conduct was perfectly simple; there was no reason whatever why it should not be perfectly simple.

When Miss Kimpsey arrived at Euston Station next day, with all her company, to take the train For Scotland; she found Elfrida waiting for her, a picturesque figure in the hurrying crowd with her hair blown about her face with the gusts of wind and rain, and her wide dark eyes looking quietly about her. She had a bunch of azaleas in her hand, and as Miss Kimpsey was saying with gratification that Elfrida's coming down to see her off was a thing she did _not_ expect, Miss Bell offered her these.

"They will be pleasant in the train perhaps," said she. "And do you think you could find room for this in one of your boxes? It isn't very bulky--a trifle I should like so much to send to my mother, Miss Kimpsey. It might go by post, I know, but the pleasure will be much greater to her if you could take it."

In due course Mrs. Bell received the packet. It contained a delicate lace head-dress, which cost Elfrida the full pay and emoluments of a fortnight. Mrs. Bell wore it at all social gatherings of any importance in Sparta the following winter, and often reflected with considerable pleasure upon the taste and unselfishness that so obviously accompanied the gift.


CHAPTER XVIII.

If John Kendal had been an on-looker at the little episode of Lady Halifax's drawing-room in Paris six months earlier it would have filled him with the purest, amusement. He would have added the circumstance to his conception of the type of young woman who enacted it, and turned away without stopping to consider whether it flattered her or not. His comprehension of human nature was too catholic very readily to permit him impressions either of wonder or contempt--it would have been a matter of registration and a smile. Realizing this, Kendal was the more at a loss to explain to himself the feeling of irritation which the recollection of the scene persistently aroused in him, in spite of a pronounced disposition, of which he could not help being aware, not to register it but to ignore it. His memory refused to be a party to his intention, and the tableau recurred to him with a persistence which he found distinctly disagreeable. Upon every social occasion which brought young ladies of beauty and middle-aged gentlemen of impressive eminence into conversational contact he saw the thing in imagination done again. In the end it suggested itself to him as paintable--the astonished drawing-room, the graceful half-kneeling girl with the bent head, the other dismayed and uncomprehending figure yielding a doubtful hand, his discomfort indicated in the very lines of his waistcoat. "_A Fin de Siecle Tribute_," Kendal named it. He dismissed the idea as absurd, and then reconsidered it as a means of disposing of the incident finally. He knew it could be very effectually put away in canvas. He assured himself again that he could not entertain the idea of painting it seriously, and that this was because of the inevitable tendency which the subject would have toward caricature. Kendal had an indignant contempt for such a tendency, and the liberty which men who used it took with their art. He had never descended to the flouting of his own aims which it implied. He threw himself into his pictures without reserve; it was the best of him that he painted, the strongest he could do, and all he could do; he was sincere enough to take it always seriously. The possibility of caricature seemed to him to account admirably for his reluctance to paint "_A Fin de Siecle Tribute_,"--it was a matter of conscience. He found that the desire to paint it would not go, however; it took daily more complete possession of him, and fought his scruples with a strong hand. It was a fortnight after, and he had not seen Elfrida in the meantime, when they were finally defeated by the argument that a sketch would show whether caricature were necessarily inherent or not. He would make a sketch purely for his own satisfaction. Under the circumstances Kendal realized perfectly that it could never be for exhibition, and indeed he felt a singular shrinking from the idea that any one should see it. Finally, he gave a whole day to the thing, and made an admirable sketch.

After that Kendal felt free to make the most of his opportunities of seeing Elfrida--his irritation with her subsided, her blunder had been settled to his satisfaction. He had an obscure idea of having inflicted discipline upon her in giving the incident form and color upon canvas, in arresting its grotesqueness and sounding its true _motif_ with a pictorial tongue. It was his conception of the girl that he punished, and he let his fascinated speculation go out to her afterward at a redoubled rate. She brought him sometimes to the verge of approval, to the edge of liking; arid when he found that he could not take the further step he told himself impatiently that it was not a case for anything so ordinary as approval, or anything so personal as liking; it was a matter of observation, enjoyment, stimulus. He availed himself of these abstractions with a candor that was the more open for not being complicated with any less hardy motive. He had long ago decided that relations of sentiment with Elfrida would require a temperament quite different from that of any man he knew. It was entirely otherwise with Janet Cardiff, and Kendal smiled as he thought of the feminine variation the two girls illustrated. He had a distinct recollection of one crisp October afternoon before he went to Paris, as they walked home together under the brown curling leaves and passed the Serpentine, when he had found that the old charm of Janet's gray eyes was changing to a new one. He remembered the pleasure he had felt in dallying with the thought of making them lustrous, one day, with tenderness for himself. It had paled since then, there had been so many other things; but still they were dear, honest eyes--and Kendal never brought his reverie to a conclusion under any circumstances whatever.


CHAPTER XIX.

I have mentioned that Miss Bell had looked considerations of sentiment very full in the face at an age when she might have been expected to be blushing and quivering before them, with downcast countenance. She had arrived at conclusions about them--conclusions of philosophic contumely, indifference, and some contempt. She had since frequently talked about them to Janet Cardiff with curious disregard of time, and circumstance, mentioning her opinion in a Strand omnibus, for instance, that the only dignity attaching to love as between a man and a woman was that of an artistic idea. Janet had found Elfrida possessed of so savage a literalism in this regard that it was only in the most hardily adventurous of the moods of investigation her friend inspired that she cared to combat her here. It was not, Janet