“No,” Elsie said. “I mean they’d be the same as these are here.”
“Well, at least you might give ’em a try. They might prove to be more——”
“No,” Elsie said again. “They’d be just the same.”
This was the cause of the obstinacy that puzzled and even provoked him during a week of intermittent arguing upon the matter. Elsie was sure that one thing he said was only too true: “Young people are pretty much the same the world over nowadays”; and in her imagination she could conjure up no picture of herself occupying among her cousin Cornelia Cromwell’s friends a position different from that she held among her own. They would be polite to her for the first hour or so, she knew, and then they would do to her what had always been done to her. They would treat her as a weightless presence, invisible and inaudible, a left-outer.
Her aunt and Cornelia would expect much of her; and they would be kind in their disappointment; but they would have her on their hands and secretly look forward to the relief of her departure. Elsie could predict it all, and in sorry imaginings foresee the weariness of her aunt and cousin as they would daily renew the task of privately goading reluctant young men and preoccupied girls to appear conscious that she was a human being, not air. The visit would mean only a new failure, a new one on a grander scale than the old failure at home. The old one was enough for her; she was used to it, and the surroundings at least were familiar. The more her father urged her, the more she was terrified by what he urged.
“I’ve made up my mind to compel you,” he told her one evening in the library. “I’m serious, Elsie.”
She did not look up from her book, but responded quietly: “I’m twenty. Women are of age in this state at eighteen, Papa.”
“Are they? I wrote your aunt yesterday that you’re coming.”
“I wrote her yesterday, too. I told her I couldn’t.”
“No other explanation?”