“You’re to learn to play golf, perfect your game of tennis. By the way, I want you to go to as many house parties on your holidays as you can. Learn to flirt with the college youngsters you’ll meet; be gay, don’t be—”
“Institutional,” Sally interrupted in a low voice as she turned sharply away from her mother.
It was almost a relief to the girl when Enid was gone. Her mother’s exquisite, fragile beauty, her unconscious arrogance, her sophistication, her sometimes caustic wit, formed a barrier between them, in spite of the almost worshipful love that Sally felt for her.
Enid, when she was with her, somehow made the 17-year-old-girl feel gawky, underdone, awkward, shy. Those cornflower blue eyes, when they were not misted with tears of affection for this daughter whom she had so recently discovered, seemed to Sally to be a powerful microscope trained upon all her deficiencies, enlarging them to frightening proportions. She knew that in these moments of critical survey her mother was looking upon her, not as a beloved daughter miraculously restored to her, but as a future debutante, bearer of the proud name of Barr, and as a pawn in the marriage game as it is played in the most exclusive circles in New York Society.
And Sally squirmed miserably, pitifully afraid that she would never measure up to the standard which her mother and Courtney Barr had set for her, knowing, too, deep in her heart, that she did not want to. For her heart had been given to a golden young god of a man, whose kingdom was the soil, and whose wife needed none of the qualities which Enid Barr was bent upon cultivating in her daughter.
But twelve years of implicit obedience to the authorities at the orphanage had left their indelible mark upon Sally Ford, who was now Sally Barr. She would do her best to become the radiant, cultured, charming, beautiful young creature whom Enid Barr wanted as a daughter. And since she had Enid’s letters to help her, the task was not so impossible as it had seemed to her. For in the letters Enid was more real as a mother than she could yet be in actual contact. The fat weekly envelopes were crammed with love, maternal advice, encouragement, tenderness.
Sally sometimes had the feeling that through these letters of her mother’s she knew Enid Barr better than anyone had ever known her. And she loved her with a passionate devotion, which sometimes frightened her with its intensity. Gazing at David’s picture, clipped from the college newspaper, she wondered, with a cruel pain banding her heart, if this almost idolatrous love for her mother would ultimately force her to give up David. If it should ever come to a choice between those two well-beloved, what should she do?
Sometimes she agonized over the fear that David might have ceased to love her, might have found another girl, might even be married. Sometimes her hands shook so as they spread out the flat-folded sheets of the college newspaper and of the Capital City Press that she had to clasp them tightly until the spasm of fear subsided. And each time the relief was so great that she sang and laughed and danced like a joy-crazy person.
The other girls jeered at her good-naturedly because she was always singing, “I’ll be loving you—always!” But she did not care. It was her song—and David’s.
She followed, with that obedience so deeply implanted in her, every phase of the program which Enid and Courtney Barr had mapped out for her. She went to the girls’ camp in New Hampshire and returned to school in Virginia that fall strong and tanned and boyish-looking, and was able to report to Enid that she could swim beautifully if not swiftly, could ride gracefully, could hold her own decently in a hard game of tennis, could play golf well enough not to be conspicuous on the links.