Robert Chambers - The Restless Sex

"You always said it was God's judgment on Jessie and her descendants, Chiltern. But I kind of wish you'd been a little mite more forgiving."

"Who am I?" demanded Grismer, sullenly, "to thwart God's wrath … m-m-m'yes, the anger of the Lord Almighty! And I never thought of that imbecile aunt… It was divine will that punished my erring sister and her children, and her children's chil – "

"Rot!" remarked Oswald. "Cleland caught you napping and put one over. That's all that worries you. And now you are properly and piously sore!"

"That is an impious and wickedly outrageous way to talk to your father!" said Grismer, glaring at him. "You have come back from college lacking reverence and respect for everything you have been taught to consider sacred! – m-m-m'yes – everything! You have returned to us utterly demoralized, defiant, rebellious, changed! Every worldly abomination seems to attract you: you smoke openly in your mother's presence; your careless and loose conversation betrays your contempt for the simple, homely, and frugal atmosphere in which you have been reared by Christian parents. Doubtless we are not sufficiently stylish for you any longer!" he added sarcastically.

"I'm sorry I was disrespectful, governor – "

" No ! You are not sorry!" retorted Grismer tartly. "You rejoice secretly in your defiance of your parents! You have been demoralized by the license permitted you by absence from home. You live irresponsibly; you fling away your money on theatres! You yourself admit that you have learned to dance. Nothing that your pastor has taught you, nothing that our church holds sacred seems capable of restraining you from wickedness. That is the truth, Oswald. And your mother and I despair of your future, here and – " he lifted his eyes solemnly – "above."

There was an awkward silence. Finally Oswald said with sullen frankness:

"You see I'm a man, now, and I've got to do my own thinking. Things I used to believe seem tommyrot to me now – "

"Oswald!" sighed his mother.

"I'm sorry to pain you, Mother, but they do! And about everything you object to I find agreeable. I'm not very bad, Mother. But this sort of talk inclines me to raise the devil. What's the harm in going to a show? In dancing? In smoking a cigar? For heaven's sake, let a fellow alone. The line of talk the governor hands me makes a cynic of a man who's got any brains."

There was another silence; then Oswald continued:

"And, while we are trying to be frank with each other this pleasant Sunday morning, what about my career? Let's settle it now!"

"I'm opposed to any such frivolous profession!" snapped Grismer angrily. "That's your answer. And that settles it."

"You mean that you still oppose my studying sculpture?"

"Emphatically."

"Why?" demanded the youth, rather white, but smiling.

"Because it is no business career for a Christian!" retorted his father, furious. "It is a loose, irregular, eccentric profession, beset with pitfalls and temptations. It leads to immorality and unbelief – m-m-m'yes, to hell itself! And that is why I oppose it!"

Oswald shrugged:

"I'm sorry you feel that way but I can't help it, of course."

"Do you mean," inquired his mother, "that you intend to disregard our solemn wishes?"

"I don't know," said the young fellow, "I really don't know, Mother. I can't seem to breathe and expand at home. You've never made things very cheerful for me."

"Oswald! You are utterly heartless!"

"I've been fed up on the governor's kind of religion, on narrow views and gloom; and that's no good for a modern boy. It's a wonder I have any heart at all, and sometimes I think it's dried up – "

"That will do!" shouted Grismer, losing all self-control. "If your home, your parents, and your Creator can not make a Christian of you, there is nothing to hope from you! … I'll hear no more from you. Go and get ready for church!"

"I sha'n't go," said the young fellow calmly.

When he went back to Cambridge at the end of the week, it was with the desire never to see his home again, and with a vague and burning intention to get even, somehow, by breaking every law of the imbecile religion on which he had been "fed up."

When Stephanie was fifteen years old, John Cleland took her to Cambridge.

The girl had been attending a celebrated New York school during the last two years. She had developed the bearing and manners which characterized the carefully trained products of that institution, but the régime seemed to have subdued her, and made her retiring and diffident.

She could have formed friendships there had she desired to do so; she formed none; yet any girl there would have been happy and flattered to call Stephanie Quest her friend. But Stephanie cared little for those confidential and intimate relations so popular among school girls of her age.

She made no enemies, however. An engaging reticence and reserve characterized her – the shy and wistful charm of that indeterminate age when a girl is midway in the delicate process of transformation.

If she cared nothing about girls, she lacked self-confidence with boys, though vastly preferring their society; but she got little of it except when Jim's school friends came to the house during holidays. Then she had a heavenly time just watching and listening.

So when John Cleland took her to Cambridge, she had, in the vernacular of the moment, a "wonderful" experience – everything during that period of her career being "wonderful" or "topping."

Jim, as always, was "wonderful;" and the attitude of his friends alternately delighted and awed her, so gaily devoted they instantly became to Jim's "little sister."

But what now secretly thrilled the girl was that Jim, for the first time, seemed to be proud of her, not tolerating her as an immature member of the family, but welcoming her as an equal, on an equal footing. And, with inexpressible delight, she remembered her determination, long ago, to overtake him; and realized that she was doing it very rapidly.

So she went to a football game at the stadium; she took tea in the quarters of these god-like young men; she motored about Cambridge and Boston; she saw all that a girl of fifteen ought to see, heard all that she ought to hear, and went back to New York with John Cleland in the seventh paradise of happiness fulfilled, madly enamoured of Jim and every youthful superman he had introduced to her.

Every year while Jim was at college there was a repetition of this programme, and she and John Cleland departed regularly for Cambridge amid excitement indescribable.

And when, in due time, Jim prepared to emerge from that great university, swaddled in sheepskin, and reeking with Cambridge culture, Stephanie went again to Cambridge with her adopted father – a girl, then, of seventeen, still growing, still in the wondering maze of her own adolescence, exquisitely involved in its magic, conscious already of its spell, of its witchcraft, which lore she was shyly venturing to investigate.

She had a "wonderful" week in Cambridge – more and more excited by the discovery that young men found her as agreeable as she found them, and that they sought her now on perfectly even terms of years and experience; regarded her as of them, not merely with them. And this enchanted her.

Two of her school friends, the Hildreth girls, were there with their mother, and the latter very gladly extended her wing to cover Stephanie for the dance, John Cleland not feeling very well and remaining in Boston.

And it chanced that Stephanie met there Oswald Grismer; and knew him instantly when he was presented to her. Even after all those years, the girl clearly recollected seeing him in the railroad station, and remembered the odd emotions of curiosity and disapproval she experienced when he stared at her so persistently – disapproval slightly mitigated by consciousness of the boyish flattery his manner toward her implied.