Down stairs her father read the paper and her mother sat near the big table, hem-stitching. For them everything was settled, and settled satisfactorily. They knew whom they were going to marry, and whether love was to be a success, and where they were going to live, and what they were going to do. Henceforth, for them the game meant only pleasantly plodding onward along paths already marked out. Just a wholesome common marriage, planted with the seed of love and watered with small self-sacrifices. How could they possibly remember the restlessness of youth, to whom all these things are hidden in the mists of the future, and who is longing for everything and sure of nothing?
Madeline sat down at the piano and her hands fell inevitably into phrasing the “unfinished symphony.” She became aware that her mother laid down the stitching and Mr. Elton’s evening paper ceased to crackle. As she stopped her father stood behind her. He bent and kissed the little parting in her hair.
“Your music grows sweeter and richer day by day, little girl,” he said. “I suppose as more comes into your life you have more to give. I’m glad that you give it out to us old folks at home.”
Madeline wheeled about and sprang to her feet.
“Ah,” she exclaimed, “if you have finished with your stupid old paper, I’ll give you a real piece of news. It’s a ‘scoop’ too, for no reporter has got hold of it yet. Dick Percival is engaged to little Miss Quincy.”
Both father and mother stared at her in silence. She stood a little behind the chandelier, where the light shone full on her face, and in neither mouth nor eyes could they see the trace of shadow. On the contrary, there was a radiant loveliness about her that astonished those that loved her best.
Then Mr. Norris was announced.
Now when Miss Elton had her first peep into her soul, and so stirred up the possibilities in her nature, she also awoke to new insight into what was going on behind other people’s eyes. The day when she could look a young man squarely in the face and say to him whatever she thought had passed. The period of unconscious girlhood, much prolonged in her case, came to an end. Since, in this world, shadow goes with sunshine, so demons tag after angels; and with the dawn of her sweeter womanhood, Madeline developed a new spirit of contrariety and coquetry that astonished no one so much as herself.
When Mr. Norris came in, his apologetic glance told her at once that she had hardly spoken to him since she had turned up her straight little high-bred nose and informed him and Dick that she despised their underhand ways; told her, also, what had not dawned on her before, that here was an abject creature, and that it was the province of womanhood to batter and buffet him who is down, perhaps in secret fear of that day when outraged manhood will rise and claim a tyranny of its own.
So she put out her hand with that stiffness that holds at arm’s length and said: