Ellen Glasgow - The Sheltered Life

"Who on earth told you that?"

"Nobody told me. At least nobody meant to tell me," Jenny Blair answered, and she added proudly, "but you can't help having eyes."

"And ears too. Well, I know where you got that. It sounds exactly like your mother. The trouble with you, my dear, is that you try to be too much like older people. You'd better enjoy your childhood while you have it."

In the drawing-room, her grandfather looked stiff and ceremonious, with his grey hair shining as if it were polished, and his thick dark eyebrows overhanging the sunken fire of his eyes. Aunt Isabella, moulded into a princess robe of pink satin spangled with sequins, was handsome and light-hearted, though there was a subdued note of hostility in her laugh. Her hair was as lustrous as the wing of a blackbird, with a sheen of bluish light in its darkness, and the glow in her rounded cheeks was richer and more becoming than the stain of Aunt Etta's rose-leaf. She was much too splendid, Jenny Blair decided, to have so unattractive an escort as Aubrey Weare, a plain but facetious young man, who thought it amusing to be waggish with children.

"I suppose it is time for us to start," Aunt Isabella remarked with sullen animation, arranging her bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley.

For an instant Jenny Blair held her breath, and then sighed audibly with relief; for Aunt Etta also wore lilies-of-the-valley, and her waist was smaller by two inches than the severely pinched waist of Aunt Isabella. Mrs. Archbald, who was nothing if not farsighted, had attended to the flowers on her way to market that morning; and while Jenny Blair looked at the bouquet, and recognized the expert touch of the best florist in Queenborough, she thought how wonderful it was that her mother never forgot to give pleasure even to members of her own family. Though Aunt Etta lacked an escort (for Grandfather wasn't quite that), she was provided with all the outward signs of masculine admiration. "But I hope, all the same, that I shan't have to depend on Mamma for bouquets," the child said to herself, as she watched Aunt Isabella drive away in a hired landau, driven, not by a spirited young man, but by a coloured coachman who resembled Napoleon.

"I wish," Aunt Etta said a little peevishly, "that we could go in a landau. Our own victoria seems less like a party." Her face had changed, and she looked wasted and hungry, as she did when she prowled downstairs to the pantry in the dead of the night.

"Don't worry, my dear," the General replied cheerfully. "In a few years we may be going to parties in a motor car."

"Not to parties, Father." Mrs. Archbald was amiable but incredulous. "It is natural that young people should like the excitement of touring cars, but I cannot imagine, even if they are made safe, that motors will ever be used for church or for social occasions." As she kissed her hand to Jenny Blair, who sat folded in between Grandfather's broadcloth and Aunt Etta's mousseline de soie, she cried, with all the enthusiasm her voice could bear without breaking, "Take good care of my little girl!"

The General waved his hand. "And I trust you to look after William."

When the victoria had rolled away briskly, and the door was shut against the exhausting pleasures of life, Mrs. Archbald looked down on William with a benevolent but puzzled expression. Though she respected dogs, she was incapable of understanding them. Essentially matter of fact, even her realm of phantasy was a small, enclosed province, peopled by skeletons of tradition and governed by a wooden theology. Her heart was generous; but the native element of her mind was a drought, and she lacked the vein of mysticism that enabled the General and William to establish a communion superior to speech. So she patted the dog's head, and remarked, "Good fellow. You may come and lie on my rug," in a friendly but distant tone, as if she were addressing a distinguished member of the Mongolian race.

William, who understood her perfectly, wagged his tail politely but without enthusiasm before he turned away. He was a handsome English setter, black and white, with melancholy eyes and not a little of his master's noble bearing. His old distrust of human nature still lodged in his tail, which was black, lustrous, and well fringed, but deficient in spirit. Already, as soon as he had seen the General prepare for a party, William had made his plans for the evening, and these did not include a nap on the rug in a lady's chamber. Since he had to be alone, for Mrs. Archbald did not count as a companion, he preferred to be alone in the coolest spot in the house, which, he had discovered long ago, was the tiled floor of the big bathroom upstairs.

"Dogs are queer creatures," Mrs. Archbald said to herself a moment later when she heard the tap-tap of his nails ascending the polished staircase. "Anybody would have thought he'd rather lie out on the nice green grass," which was only another proof that she was incapable of understanding any species except her own.

"Anyhow," Jenny Blair said to herself, holding fast to her sash, which was in danger of crushing between her grandfather's natural shape and Aunt Etta's artificial one, "when I grow up, I shan't be going to parties with Aubrey Weare." For he had plucked at her hair-ribbon on his way to the landau, and, justly indignant, she had been obliged to tie one of the bows all over again.

Squeezing as far back as she could, she let the self she called her real self sink down, down, far down into the vagueness from which painted images, like the tropical fish in her geography, emerged and swam aimlessly on the surface. A party! Wasn't it wonderful to be going to a grown-up party at last? Only she wished her mother had let her have a new dress. She was sure Bena would be dressed very fine. But her mother said Bena was so short and pudgy that nobody ever saw what she wore. Well, no matter, she was going to see the Birdsongs waltz together. Perhaps, when she grew up, she might waltz as beautifully as Mrs. Birdsong! Oh, how she wished she might stay up all night! Weren't parties too lovely? She was wearing her prettiest blue sash and blue hair-ribbons; she was going to a real party for the first time in her life; and she was keeping a secret that nobody suspected. Immediately, the bright fish dived far below, and the current of life rippled and broke into waves and scattered a sparkling spray through her thoughts. "I'm alive, alive, alive, and I'm Jenny Blair Archbald!"

And beside her, the General was thinking, while this current of life paled and darkened and flowed on more quietly, "I hope Etta won't insist on staying too late. Why should she, poor girl, when she'll probably sit against the wall the whole evening? But parties aren't so gay as they used to be, and women, with the exception of Eva Birdsong, are not what they were in my youth. Or perhaps it is because my arteries are not all that they used to be. God knows how I shall be able to keep awake until midnight, especially if Bob Peyton insists on my drinking a glass of port. Keeping awake after ten o'clock is the hardest thing. Even when I go to bed as sleepy as William, I wake up at an unconscionable hour before daybreak. Getting old! That is the worst of life, getting old. Especially when you grow old without having had what you wanted. But it requires courage to take what you want in this world, and most people lack courage." Yet courage alone, he saw presently, was not sufficient. For courage, as well as cowardice, may trust in false values—even in evasive idealism. Great-aunt Sabina had had the rashness of infidelity—though he had always suspected that she had defied her Creator only in the days of her youth, and had returned to Divine mercy when age fastened upon her. Then poor Rodney had had the courage of despair at the end; and Margaret (the old pang still throbbed at the thought of her) had summoned up whatever spirit was required for her desperate adventure. These were ghosts. These were unquiet ghosts—but Isabella. Would Isabella have the courage not only to will but to act? They thought he had perceived nothing, that his old eyes were too dull to observe what went on under his nose. But he was sharper than they imagined. Almost from the first he had seen the way things were tending, and he had felt, in spite of his disapproval, an obscure satisfaction. "I'd like to see her pay back Thomas in his own coin. I'd like to see her pay back that cad. But it wouldn't do. It wouldn't do, though, God knows, the Archbalds have lived down many worse disgraces than overalls in the family." He chuckled under his breath. "After witchcraft, adultery, and murder (for Uncle Percival had killed his man in a duel), it seems an anticlimax to make a fuss about overalls." No, it wouldn't do in a woman, not even to pay back Thomas, who was beginning again, Cora said, to cast sheep's eyes at Isabella in church. A man with red blood in his veins would commit any folly for a girl as handsome as Joseph—but it wouldn't do in a woman. "Not that I shouldn't stand by her," he told himself, "not that I shouldn't help her to put a bold face on the matter."