iii
In the evening I went to the house. Natalie met me.
“He is in bed,” she said.
“Is he ill?”
“He looked very tired and ate no dinner. I was to tell you if you came that he had to get a big sleep on account of something that will happen tomorrow.”
I was holding my hat. Natalie looked at it.
“My beautiful sister is not at home,” she said.
“Tell her I was desolate.”
“And that you did not ask for her?” she suggested, slyly.
“Now, Natalie, you are teasing me.”
“Mamma is out. Gram’ma’s gone to bed. There’s nobody to entertain you,” she said, shaking her head.
“What a dreary state of things!” I said, laughing at her and putting down my hat.
She went ahead of me into the parlor, arranged a heap of pillows at one end of the sofa, saying, “There!” and sat herself in a small, straight chair some distance away.
Going on eighteen is an age between maidenhood and womanhood. Innocence and wisdom have the same naïve guise and change parts so fast that you cannot be sure which one is acting. The girl herself is not sure. She doesn’t stop to think. It is a charming masquerade of two mysterious forces. The part of innocence is to protect and conceal her; the part of wisdom is to betray and reveal her.
“I wish I were a man,” she sighed.
“Every girl says that once. Why do you wish it?” I asked.
“But it’s so,” she said. “They know so much ... they can do so many things.”
“What does a man know that a woman doesn’t?”
“If I were a man,” she said, “I’d be able to help father. I’d understand figures and charts and all those things he works with. They make my silly head ache. I’d study finance. What is it like?”
“What is finance like?”
“Yes. Do you think I might understand it a little?”
For an hour or more we talked finance,—that is, I talked and she listened, saying, “Yes,” and “Oh,” and bringing her chair closer. She made a very pretty picture of attention. I’m sure she didn’t understand a word of it. Then she began to ask me questions about her father,—what his office was like, how he dealt with Wall Street people, what he did on the Stock Exchange, and so on.
“Must you?” she asked, when I rose to go. “I’m afraid you haven’t been entertained at all. I love to listen.”
“I just now remember I haven’t had any dinner,” I said. “I stopped late at the office and came directly here. It’s past ten o’clock.”
“Dear me! Why didn’t you tell me? I’ll get you something. You didn’t know I could cook. Come on.”
Without waiting for yes or no she scurried off in the direction of the kitchen. I followed to call her back, but when I had reached the dining room she was out of sight, the pantry door swinging behind her. I returned to the parlor and waited, thinking she would report what there was to eat. Then I could make my excuses and depart.
She did not return. Presently I began to feel embarrassed, as much for her as for myself; also a little nettled. However, I couldn’t disappoint her now. It would be too late to stop whatever she was doing. She had said, “Come on.” Therefore she was expecting me in the kitchen and was probably by this time in a state of hysterical anxiety, wondering if I would come, or if perhaps I had gone; and no way out of the frolic she had started but to see it through.
I found her beating eggs in a yellow bowl. She had put on an apron and turned up her sleeves. Her face was flushed, her eyes were bright with a spirit of fun, and wisps of wavy black hair had fallen a little loose at her temples. I surrendered instantly.
“You won’t mind eating in the kitchen, will you? It’s cozy,” she said, almost too busy to give me a look.
A small table was already spread for one; chairs were placed for two.
“This is much more interesting than finance,” I said, watching her at close range.
“I can make a perfect omelette,” she said. “So light you don’t know you are eating it. You only taste it.”
“Not very filling,” I thought.
“There may be something else, too,” she said.
There was. She rifled the pantry. The imponderable omelette, accompanied by bacon, was followed by cold chicken, ham, sausage, asparagus, salad, cheese of two kinds, jams in fluttering uncertainty, cake and coffee.
When she was convinced at last that I couldn’t encompass another bite and rested upon her achievement she began to giggle.
“What’s that for?”
“I’m thinking,” she said, “what my sister would say if she saw us now.”
As I walked home I could not help contrasting her with Vera, who never, even at Natalie’s age, would have thought of doing a thing like that. Why? Yes, why? Well, because she had not that way with a man. Natalie was born to get what she wanted through men. She fed them. She fed their stomachs with food and their egoes with adoration. She liked doing it for she liked men. She already knew more about their simplicities than Vera would ever learn. She knew it all instinctively. And how lovely she was in that apron!