"Well, ask away, my boy. I don't have to answer you or go to jail, now do I?"
Extraordinary the relief of falling back on studio badinage! It took her off the Collingham stilts, away from the high-wrought Collingham emotions. She began to see what the trouble was with Bob. His touch wasn't light enough. He was too purposeful. He seemed to think you must mean something all the time. Mrs. Collingham, too, seemed to think so. It was not in Bob's language so much as in his cast of mind; but it was in his mother's cast of mind, and in her language, too.
Jennie thought of this as she stood before the pier-glass in the little dressing-room, first taking off her jacket, and then unpinning her hat. She would have to do her hair on the top of her head like the girl in Hubert's sketch. "And that's all the clothes I shall need to put on," she tried to say flippantly. She tried to say it flippantly, because that, too, would be along the line that people took who weren't Collinghams.
People who weren't Collinghams! That meant all the people in Indiana Avenue, all the people in Pemberton Heights, the vast majority of the people in the United States, not to speak of any other country. Jennie had a good many acquaintances, and the family, taken as a whole, had more; but she couldn't think of anyone in their class who took life as more than a skimming on the surface. Outside the bounden duties which they couldn't avoid they chiefly liked being silly.
She thought of that, too, loosening her hair and letting it fall in amber wavelets over her shoulders and down her back. Mrs. Collingham had said that it was lovely hair, but she hadn't really seen it. There was so much of it that, when she piled it up like the girl in the sketch, it almost overweighted her delicate little face.
No; whatever you could say about people like the Collinghams, you couldn't say they were silly. They had motives, opinions, points of view. They had minds, and they used them. They might not use them well, but to use them at all was better than to let them grow atrophied.
Jennie, as has been said, had no words to express these thoughts, but, like Pansy, she could do without a vocabulary. She felt; she vibrated. She, too, had a mind, though she was afraid of putting it to work. Lingering over the piling of her hair, she wondered if the use or nonuse of the mind marked the real line between people like the Collinghams and people like the Folletts. Was that why the country was divided into highbrows and lowbrows—those who made the best of what they had, and those who disqualified themselves for all the stronger purposes? Since her peep at Marillo Park, she saw that something admitted one to such a haven, and something kept one out. There was money, of course, and position; but back of both position and money wasn't it the case that there was mind?
She threw off her blouse and lingered again to examine her arms and bust. She lingered on purpose, putting off the extraordinary thing she had to do to the latest possible minute.
At Collingham Lodge, she had caught glimpses of books, papers, and magazines. Even in the bird cage they were lying on the table and chairs. The Folletts hardly ever read a book. The only work of the kind she could remember the family ever to have bought was one called Ancient Rome Restored, which her mother had subscribed for in monthly parts when an agent brought a sample to the house. It was at a time when Lizzie was afraid that her children—they were children still—would grow up without cultivation. Ancient Rome Restored, being abundantly illustrated, called out in the young Folletts the almost extinct Scarborough tradition. Having no other important picture book to look at, they pored over the glories of the Forum, of Hadrian's Villa, of the Baths of Caracalla, till an odd, incipient love of classic beauty began to stir in them. But there their cultivation ended. In the papers they studied only the murders, burglaries, and comic cuts. In the way of general entertainment, the movies formed their sole relaxation, but unless the play was silly they complained. Anything that asked for thought they kicked against, and Pemberton Heights kicked with them. Was that why there was a Pemberton Heights and a Marillo Park? Did the power of thought control the difference between them? Was it that where there was little or no power of thought, there was little or nothing of anything else?
She unhooked her skirt and let it slip down to a circular heap about her feet. She wondered if the girl who would, in some ways, do better than herself were as lithely built as she. Mrs. Collingham had likened her to—oh, what was it? It was a spire. It sounded like a chapel. She had tossed it off as something that everybody knew about. So she had tossed off other names, taking it for granted that Jennie would have them at her fingers' ends.