“Yes, and aren’t they usually stout, or inclined to be?” asked Bigelow, abstractedly. He was looking through some music books at the piano.
“Oh dear yes; no thin woman need aspire to superiority, nor no unmarried one either. They are essentially wives and mothers, but not vulgarly so necessarily.” It was what he considered accuracy rather than any latent charity that had induced Tommy to add this detail.
“A woman whose efficiency transcends every emergency, known or unknown, is in a fair way toward becoming superior,” he continued. “She’s the abnormally normal—the hope of the race—the oatmeal of humanity—Philistia felix—wow!”
Charlie Bolo had a habit, not uncommon among college men in college rooms, of carrying on most of his conversation with his back turned, and at the same time examining minutely every picture in the apartment, vaguely opening most of the books and putting them down again, critically peering at a “shingle” here, and striking a meaningless chord or two on the piano there, and from time to time asking questions about one’s various belongings, answers to which—if ever rashly undertaken—involved the short but intricate history of one’s life. Charlie Bolo, who from an extended practice in doing all these depressing things had reduced his method of inspecting a room to a sort of erratic system, was just finishing the third wall and passing on to the mantelpiece of Dickey Dawson’s study. Here he stopped to admire, for the hundredth time or more, a picture of Dawson’s mother. Simultaneously Tommy came to the end of his wordy little diatribe, and glanced up with what was known to the others as his most “receptive smile.” He, too, seemed to suspend animation before Mrs. Dawson’s likeness, and during the second or two of silence that followed, both Bigelow and Dickey found their attentions fixed on the picture that Charlie Bolo had taken in his hand.
Mrs. Dawson, a remarkably young-looking woman in evening dress, was leaning slightly back in one of the massive, richly carved chairs peculiar to ancient Italy and modern photography.
From the point of view of mere line Mrs. Dawson seemed to be a handsome woman. However, it was not the manner in which her somewhat haughty head stood out from the soft, dull grey of its tapestry background, nor yet the white slope of her shoulders against the dark wood, that most impressed one. The charm of the picture—for it unquestionably had great charm—came rather from the perfection of the lady’s equipment, and the regal ease with which she seemed to ignore it. Charlie Bolo, who had the wisdom of a man with sisters, always found the photograph of Mrs. Dawson faultless—from the bit of white ribbon twisted through her hair, and the fan of ostrich plumes, and the long, limp glove lying lightly across her lap, to the non-committal exposure of shoe-tip.
There was the briefest possible pause in the talk; but coming at the exact time it did, it was more than long enough to enlighten every one as to what every one else was thinking. To Dickey Dawson, who seized the opportunity of giving all three men a hasty, apprehensive glance, it was as if some one had in so many words exclaimed, “At least this woman is not superior!” But, of course, no one could have exclaimed such a thing with Tommy sitting there, exerting the tacit admonition of inspired refinement.
This tribute, manifesting itself in spontaneous silence, was fraught with both pleasure and wretchedness for Dickey Dawson: pleasure, that these fellows whom he so admired and looked up to, should unquestioningly accept the splendid picture lady as his mother, together with all that the relationship implied; wretchedness, because he was much too intelligent a young person not to be thoroughly aware that the splendid picture lady was a glorified arrangement of upholstery and apparel, bearing about as much resemblance to his mother as, for purely decorative purposes, he chose to have it bear. He was proud of the portrait, because it was a success of his own conceiving; he loathed it, because it was forever rubbing in the fact that his relations, though doubtless admirable in the exercise of their respective domestic functions, were execrable as a social background. He detested it also, because it kept unpleasantly vivid in his mind the long diplomatic struggle that had preceded its taking.
“Other boys have family pictures in their rooms at college,” he had said to his mother in the vacation that followed his sophomore year; “I want one of you to take back with me.” Whereupon Mrs. Dawson, with considerable pleasure and some reminiscent vanity, had produced several from an album. Dickey had inspected them gravely, from the one in which his mother was picking shamelessly artificial pond-lilies over the side of an unseaworthy skiff, to the jauntily posed “cabinet size.”
“I should like to have one that looked more as you do now,” he had said, affectionately smoothing her hair and wondering if he could manage it.