His father and mother aren’t bad, I must say. They’re quite like him, good-looking and full of kindness; his mother is really sweet and I like them both, though I’ll never get used to hearing people talk with this terrible Western accent. To a sensitive ear, it’s actual pain. The brother looks rather like Dan, too; but he’s pompous in a dry way and affected. Reads heavy things and seems to me a cold-hearted sort of prig, though he’s always polite. The father and mother read, too. Their idea is Carlyle and Emerson and Thoreau—you know the type of mind—and Harlan (the brother) talks about that Englishman, Shaw, who writes the queer plays. They say they have two theatres open in winter, but of course there’s no music here except something they brag about called the “April Festival,” when there’s a week of imported orchestra and some singing. Pleasant for me!—one week in the year!—though I suppose you’ll think it’s all I should have.
They meant to be kind, but they gave me the most fearful “reception.” I never endured such a ghastly ordeal. The weather was over 100 in the shade—and in crowded rooms, well, imagine it! The people were dressed well enough—some of them were rather queer, but so are some at home—but I wish you could have seen the vehicles they drive in and their coachmen! Slouchy darkies in old straw hats with long-tailed horses that get the reins under their tails—and fringed surreys and family carryalls, something like what you’d see out in the country towns in Connecticut. They have phaetons and runabouts and a few respectable traps, but I’ve seen just one good-looking victoria since I came here. They don’t like smartness really. I believe they think it’s effeminate!
The real head of the Oliphant family is an outrageous old hag, Dan’s grandmother, who behaved terribly to me at my only meeting with her—it will remain our only meeting! They’re all afraid of her, and she has a lot of money. Queer—I understand he’s tried to raise money for his Eden all over the town, but never asked the terrible grandmother. She doesn’t believe in it, and I must say she’s right about that! Rather!
How strange that any girl should do what I’ve done—and with my eyes wide open! I did it, and yet I knew he didn’t understand me. I ought to have known that he can never understand me, that we don’t speak the same language and never will. I ought to have realized what it means to know that I must live days, weeks, months, years with a person who will never understand anything whatever of my real self!
Yet I still care for him, and he is good. He does a thousand little kind things for me that do not help me at all, and the truth is most of them only irritate me. How odd it is that I write to you about not being understood—you who are seldom kind to me and often most unjust! Yet in a way I have always felt that you do understand me a little—perhaps unsympathetically—but at least you give me the luxury of being partly understood.
Yes, I still care for him, but when I think of his awful Ornaby thing I sometimes believe I have married a madman. It is nothing as I said—hopeless—a devastated farm—and yet when he speaks of it his eye lights up and he begins to walk about and gesture and talk as if he actually saw houses and streets—and shops—and thousands of people living there! If this isn’t hallucination, I don’t know what hallucination means.
But since our excursion to the place I’ve almost cured him of talking about it to me! I just can’t stand it! And what is pleasant, I think he probably goes to talk about it to another woman. Already! A perfectly enormous girl seven or eight feet tall that he’d picked out to be my most intimate friend! Because she’s been his most intimate friend, of course. But I suppose all men are like that.
The heat did relax for a day or two—but it’s back again. Sometimes I can’t believe I am actually in this place—apparently for life—and I begin to hope that I’ll wake up. I think even you would pity me sometimes, George.
CHAPTER XII
IN THE minds of Mrs. Savage’s neighbours across the street and of the habitual passers-by, that broad plate-glass window where it was her custom to sit for the last hour of every afternoon had come to bear the significance of a glass over a portrait. All long thoroughfares and many of even the shortest have such windows; and the people who repeatedly pass that way will often find the portrait window becoming a part, however slight, of their own lives; but it will seldom be an enduring part, except as a fugitive, pathetic memory. For a time the silent old face is seen framed there every day, or it may be a pale and wistful child looking out gravely upon the noisy world. Then abruptly one day the window is only a window and no more a portrait; the passer-by has a moment of wonder whenever he goes by, but presently may have his faintly troubled question answered by a wreath on the door; and afterwards the window that was once a portrait will seem to him a little haunted.