During the greater part of her seventeenth year the dashing Mamie Ford had been in this unfortunate position without any obvious cause. The others were constantly busy “talking” about her, finding new faults or absurdities in her; snubbing her and playing derisive practical jokes upon her—for it is true that youth is cruel; self-interest takes up so much room. Elsie envied her, for at least Mamie was in the thick of things; and the centre of the stew. That was better than being a mere left-outer, Elsie thought; and Mamie fought, too, and had her own small faction, whereas a left-outer has nothing to fight except the vacancy in which she dwells—a dreary battling. Mamie’s unpopularity passed, for no better reason than it had arrived;—she was now, at nineteen, the very queen of the roost, and Elsie, wondering why, could only conclude that it was because Mamie made so much noise.
Elsie had long ago perceived that, of the girls she knew, those who made the loudest and most frequent noises signifying excitement and hilarity were the ones about whom the boys and, consequently, the other girls, most busily grouped themselves. Naturally, the simple males went where vivacious sound and gesture promised merriment; and of course, too, a crowd naturally gathers where something seems to be happening. So far as Elsie could see, the whole art of general social intercourse seemed to rest on an ability to make something appear to be happening where nothing really was happening.
What had always most perplexed her was that the proper method of doing this seemed to be the simplest thing in the world, and was, nevertheless, in her own hands an invariable failure. She had watched Mamie Ford at dances and at dinners where Mamie was the life of the party, and she observed that in addition to shouting over every nothing and laughing ecstatically without the necessity of being inspired by any detectable humour, Mamie always offered every possible evidence—flushed face, sparkling eyes, and unending gesticulations—that she was having a genuinely uproarious “good time” herself. Elsie had tried it; she had tried it until her face ached; but she remained only an echo outside the walls. Nobody paid any attention to her.
Therefore she had no resource but to infer what she had inferred to-day, when the merry impromptu party whirled away without a thought of including her, and when Paul Reamer had so carelessly evaded her urgency—her shameless urgency, as she thought, weeping upon her coverlet. This inference of hers could be only that she had some mysterious ugliness, some strange stupidity, and it was this she sought in her mirror, as she had sought it before. It evaded her as it always did; but she knew it must be there.
“What is wrong about me?” she murmured, tasting upon her lips the bitter salt of that inquiry. “They couldn’t always treat me like this unless there’s something wrong about me.”
She was sure that the wrong thing must be with herself. The Hemingways were one of the “old families”;—they had always taken a creditable part in the life of the town, and the last man of them, her father, owned and edited the principal newspaper of the place. Elsie had no prospect of riches, but she was not poor; and other girls with less than she were “popular.” Therefore the wrong thing about her could be identified in nothing exterior. Moreover, when she pursued her search for the vital defect she could not attribute it to tactlessness; for that has some weight, and she was weightless. She danced well, she dressed as well as any of the girls did, and her father told her that she “talked well,” too;—he said this to her often, during the long evenings she spent with him in his library. Yet he was the only one who would listen to her, and, though she adored him, he was not the audience she most wanted. She “talked well”; but even by pleading she could not get Paul Reamer to spend five minutes with her.
No wonder! Paul was the great beau of the town, and she the girl least of all like a belle. And, remembering his plain consciousness of this contrast, almost ludicrously expressed in his surprise that she should try to detain him with her for even a few minutes, she shivered as she wept. She hated herself for begging of him; she hated herself for having run out of the house to try for the thousandth time to be one of a “crowd” that didn’t want her; she hated herself for “hanging around them,” laughing and pretending that she was one of them, when anybody could see she wasn’t. She hated herself for having something wrong about her, and for not being able to find out what it was; she hated herself, and she hated everything and everybody—except her father.
. . . At dinner that evening he reproached her for being pale. “I don’t believe you take enough exercise,” he suggested.
“Yes, I do. I took a long walk this afternoon. I walked four or five miles.”
“Did you?” He smiled under his heavy old-fashioned, gray lambrequin of a moustache, and his eyeglasses showed a glint of humorous light. “That doesn’t sound as if you went with a girl companion, Elsie! Four or five miles, was it?”