Ellen Glasgow - The Sheltered Life

He was watching her attentively while he mopped his face. Why did men always look so hot? "You don't care about anything but yourself," he burst out angrily at last, for, like other fine characters, he imagined that people could be made over by scolding. "Oh, I know you better than you think! You are like every other young girl who has grown up without coming in touch with the world. You are so bottled up inside that your imagination has turned into a hothouse for sensation. I can look into your mind—I can look into any young girl's mind—and see every one of you busy faking emotion. Good God!" (What did he mean? Was he really beside himself?) "As if passion didn't do harm enough in its natural state, without trying to fake it!"

"I don't see," her tone was airy with insolence, "why it should matter to you what we do. It isn't your affair anyway."

"I'm not so sure of that. Everything seems to be my affair sooner or later."

"Well, I'm not." Why couldn't they be together ten minutes without plunging into a quarrel? Why did he feel that he was inspired to improve her? "And I'm never going to be that, so you may make your mind easy."

Her words were emphatic, but they had barely left her lips before they dissolved into vapour. Again she floated up into the shimmering haze of her illusion, beyond sight, beyond sound, beyond touch of reality. When at last he spoke, she was obliged to sink down from the clouds to his flat and prosaic medium.

"There's one thing certain," he said abruptly. "If there's a real war, I am not going to be left out of it. But for Cousin Eva, I'd sail to-morrow."

"Do you think England will fight?"

"Who knows? Your grandfather says human nature has never turned its back on a war that comes this near."

"Well, I hope they won't fight; but if they do, I hope they will stay in Europe. It's bad enough hearing all the old men tell about the Civil War over and over."

They had stopped before her gate, and he was looking down on her with a troubled expression. "You will be careful, won't you, Jenny Blair?"

"Careful?"

"I mean about everything, now that Cousin Eva is ill." Then he frowned. "It may be just my imagination, but—oh, well, you know why I am speaking."

"No, I don't, and I don't want to! I don't care what you say about anybody."

Rushing ahead of him, without glancing back or heeding his voice, she opened the gate and hurried up the walk to the porch. Her heart choked her, and she felt as if she were smothering. Then, as she looked round and saw that John had not followed her, that he was already returning to the Birdsongs' house, the tumult died down, and she waited there in the twilight, with her eyes on the thinning red of the afterglow. Gradually the storm passed and was followed by the exultant joy of her earlier mood. Nothing had happened. Everything was still as perfect as it had been before John cast his shadow of ugliness. "In six weeks I shall be back again," she thought. "In six weeks I shall be back again, and I shall see him." And it seemed to her that these weeks of absence stretched in a dark hollow between the illuminated peaks of the past and the future.

"Well, the summer went by quickly," General Archbald said, leaning back, with the head of William clasped between his knees, as the car turned the corner.

"Oh, Grandfather, it was an eternity," Jenny Blair responded, with one of the broken sighs of youth which come and go without reason. "And we stayed so much longer than we expected to. Why, to-day is the first of October."

"But you had a beautiful time," Mrs. Archbald remonstrated; for it seemed ungrateful to Providence not to acknowledge occasional blessings. Then she also sighed, but her sigh was drawn out to its fullest dimension, since all the effort and burden of moving had been hers, and her mind and muscles ached with fatigue. "It was a very successful summer," she added. "The change has done your grandfather and Aunt Etta a great deal of good. But I am glad to be home again. It is always a relief when a pleasure is over." While she lost control of her thoughts for a moment the sanguine expression of her mouth might have been etched on blank parchment.

"I feel much stronger," Etta admitted, "and I'm glad I learned to play cards. This winter, if I can keep free from that sinus infection, I'm going to have some card parties."

"And we'll all be very busy over Jenny Blair's coming out." Mrs. Archbald recovered her sprightliness. "Old Mrs. Montgomery thinks we're bringing her out too soon; but the child has such a dread of a finishing school. Nobody knows, anyway, what may happen next year, and this war in Europe will keep us from going abroad."

"If Mother hadn't made me wait two years because Uncle Powhatan died, I might have had some pleasure before I lost my health," Etta murmured, forgetting, after a fortunate habit, that she had been a failure before she was born. As the car passed into the lower end of Washington Street, she poked her long thin nose out of the window and sniffed the dusty air of the town. "There is that smell again, Father. It seems too bad to come back to it."

The General, who was pulling William's ear, looked more annoyed than sympathetic. In the last few months, ever since Mrs. Birdsong's illness, even Jenny Blair, wrapped up in the impenetrable egoism of youth, had noticed that he flushed easily and was irritated by trifles. Once she had called her mother's attention to the old man's altered disposition. "What is it that makes his features twitch like that, Mamma? He never used to lose his temper, but now the slightest thing seems to upset him."

"He is showing his age, my child. You must remember that he was eighty-four this summer. Try to have patience. He has had a hard life, and that always tells at the end. After the war it was uphill work for a man in his thirties to take up a new profession and begin all over again. Never forget that old age is more trying to him than to any one else."

Now the old man was saying testily to Etta, "If you'd had to stay at home, perhaps you would not have noticed the smell so much. Suppose you were one of that throng streaming down to the tobacco factories."

"I was just watching them," Etta replied tartly. With less cause, since she was only thirty-three, she also was easily irritated. "The faces are all exactly like insects. Anyway, nobody minds the smell of tobacco."

"The smell will be gone in a minute," Mrs. Archbald said briskly. "It never lasts. There! You don't notice it any longer. And Father is perfectly right. We ought to remember our blessings and be thankful that we aren't working in a factory."

"No, Cora, I didn't put it that way." General Archbald's face was beginning to twitch. Then breaking off with a gesture of hopeless impatience, he turned his head and looked out on the other side of the street.

"How many of those girls, do you suppose," Etta inquired moodily, "are as unhappy as I am?" As nobody answered her question, she leaned back in her corner and very furtively (since the General and his daughter-in-law both retained the prejudices of good breeding) used a bit of powdered chamois-skin she had concealed in her handkerchief.

Watching her, Jenny Blair thought lightly that ideas must skim over Aunt Etta's mind without touching the surface. Poor Aunt Etta, it must be dreadful to be like that, for she also, though she wasn't aware of it, had a face like an insect. It would be better to be young and pretty and work in a factory than to be old and ugly and tormented by a sinus infection. "I'm glad I'm pretty," she continued, flitting back to herself. "I'm glad people love me because I'm pretty."

Mamma, she felt, had spoken no more than the truth; they had had a beautiful summer. White Sulphur had been so gay and so wonderful that she had very nearly, but never quite, forgotten George for a whole evening. Very nearly, but not quite, she had fallen in love with somebody else—with somebody years and years younger. There was a love letter, her first real love letter, hidden now inside her chemise, next her skin. If she had stayed longer (she had met him only three days before she left), she might have fallen in love all over again in an entirely new way, which was even more exciting because it was vocal and unafraid.