Too Old for Dolls: A Novel

by Anthony M. Ludovici

After a year of this novel experience, during which Mrs. Delarayne had discovered new haunts and new households in which she could behave, even if she were not accepted, as a person who was not of "mediæval antiquity," her taste for this kind of life had developed. Enamoured as this sprightly quinquagenarian had always been of the other sex, and resolute as she was to show that an old war-horse could prance as bravely as a colt to the stirring trumpet call of youth, she had entered heart and soul into an existence which her late husband would have deprecated as strongly as he had once admired the spirit which led her to do it.

Now the sudden intrusion of a full-grown, wilful and extraordinarily vigorous girl of fifteen and a half years upon these newly acquired habits, proved a source of some vexation to the widow; and, love Leonetta as she might, she very quickly discovered that the peace of mind and freedom of action that Cleopatra had allowed her unstintingly were to be despotically withheld by her younger and more exacting offspring.

Cleopatra watched and understood all this. It seemed that Mrs. Delarayne and Leonetta were inevitably heading towards a catastrophe; nor did the elder girl take any steps, either by word or deed, to guide either of them to a peaceable adjustment of their differences.

Gradually Leonetta grew to be deliberately rude with her parent, would refuse to fetch and carry for her, was quickly bored over any little personal service performed for her, and did her best in every way to cramp the widow's ever freshly sprouting affection.

At last Cleopatra felt she must put in a word. Her mother was very highly strung, in any case too much so to be exposed constantly to irritation and sorrow. Could she help? Could she speak to Baby?

It was then that Mrs. Delarayne had opened her heart to Cleopatra. No, she had made up her mind. Reluctantly she had been forced to the conclusion that Leonetta must go away,—to a school of domesticity, or of gardening or something,—where she could acquire not only information, but also the discipline which would save her from growing up an impossible woman.

Cleopatra had given vent to a sigh of relief, and with decent slowness and hesitation had ultimately agreed.

A somewhat acrimonious quarrel between Mrs. Delarayne and Leonetta, a day or two after this conversation had taken place, proved to be the determining factor. In her passion Leonetta had declared that she would be as glad as anything to go, if only for company, as it seemed to her that her mother was eternally "gadding about"; and it was only when she was alone in a first-class carriage travelling northward that she regretted this hasty and ill-considered speech.

Another year had passed in this way; Leonetta had by now become, according to the domesticity school reports, an accomplished housekeeper, and, as a girl of seventeen, was on her way home. Coming home!—Cleopatra had dwelt on this homecoming every wakeful hour of the last thirty days, and again she felt that pang, or pain, or strange convulsion of the heart, which she loathed because it humiliated her, and which she combated because it threatened to master her.

Thus did Cleopatra meditate over her lot as she examined her fine, strong, disengaged hand, as she sat in the study on that afternoon in June; and Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility had little to offer her either in comfort or enlightenment.