The Eddy: A Novel of To-day

by Clarence Louis Cullen

"I shall have to be trained for that," she said to the mollified Heloise. "I never had a maid. I doubt if I should know how to behave with a maid doing my hair. I think I should find myself tempted to do the maid's instead; especially if her hair were as pretty as yours."

Heloise was Louise's sworn, voluble, tooth-and-nail, right-or-wrong, everlasting friend from that moment. She 'phoned to the butler, demanding to know why Mademoiselle's coffee had not been sent, although she had only called for it three minutes before, and she buzzed about the tractable Louise, arranging her hair with expert fingers, cheerful and chirpful, nothing whatever like the austere, croaking Heloise who scowled so threateningly over the slightest unruliness of her actual mistress. Heloise was prepared to give an enthusiastic recommendation of Louise to the maid who should be engaged to attend her mistress's daughter. And she began already to be envious of Louise's unobtained maid.

When Heloise had finished with her Louise, inspecting herself in the glass with frank approval, decided that never before had she looked so astonishingly well at that hour of the morning. But, when the garrulous maid had gone, Louise, sipping her coffee, sat in the streaming sunlight of the bowed window, watching the sparkling ice floes drift down the bleak Hudson, and the trouble that had weighted her sleep returned upon her, slowly taking shape with her consciousness. She had been too tired the night before to engage in much reflection, before losing herself in sleep, upon the incidents—one incident particularly—of the previous night. Now she was face to face with the gravamen of her depression, with an alert morning mind to sift over its elements. It was characteristic of her that she did not seek to thrust aside her consciousness of conditions which she imperfectly understood. She understood them, however, sufficiently to grasp at least the essentials of the situation.

Louise, whose native shrewdness was tempered by an innate and unconquerable tendency to look upon the bright side of the world and of such of the world's people as she came into contact with, was far better acquainted with her mother than her mother was with her; which was natural enough, considering that she had the receptive mind of youth, and that her mother's major trait was a sort of all-inclusive indifference. Many things in connection with her mother's manner of life, her almost hysterical love of admiration, her restlessness and her habitual secretiveness with Louise during the girl's early girlhood years, had become all too plain to the daughter as she developed into womanhood at the finishing school. Perhaps it may be added that a twentieth century finishing school for young women commonly is an institution wherein all of the pupils' deductions are not made from their text books nor from the eminently safe premises laid down by their instructors. The young woman who has spent four years at such a school does not step through a nimbus of juvenile dreams when she enters into the world that is waiting for her. It is true that, when she takes her place in the uncloistered world, she has a great deal to unlearn; but this is balanced by the indubitable fact she has not very much to learn. Those who expect her to be utterly surprised over the departures that she sees from the rules of the social game are merely wasting their surprise. It is mere futility to suppose that several hundreds of young women of the highly intelligent and eager type who attend exclusive schools of the so-termed finishing kind, thrust constantly upon each other for companionship and the comparison of notes, are going to occupy all of their leisure in discussing the return of Halley's comet, or the profounder meaning of Wagner, or even the relative starchiness of their hair ribbons.

Louise, participating in the whispered precocities of the school, had often caught herself on the defensive in her mother's behalf. To seek to brush away imputations that seemed to fit her mother's personality and way of life had become almost a habit with her.

The habit, however, was availing her little on this her first morning after leaving school in her mother's sumptuous home—"that is, if it is mother's home." She flushed when she found herself saying that. But the doubt propelled itself through her consciousness, and she resolutely refused to expel it, once it had found lodgment in her mind, merely because it caused her cheeks to burn. Her mother's favorite word, in contemptuously denominating people who lived in accordance with convention, was "smug;" Mrs. Treharne considered that she had pilloried, for the world's derision, persons to whom she had adverted as "smug." Of the smugness of the kind Mrs. Treharne meant when she employed the word, there was not an atom in Louise's composition. Her nature, her upbringing, were opposed to the thought of a narrow, restrained, buckram social rule.

But here was a situation—the investiture of almost garish splendor in which she found her mother living, considered in connection with subconscious doubts as to certain quite visible flaws in her mother's character which had been forming themselves in the girl's mind for years—here, indeed, was a situation with respect to which Louise's unquietude had no need of being based upon mere smugness.

The girl knew quite well that, up to the time of her going away to school at any rate, her mother's income had been a limited one—some three thousand a year voluntarily contributed by the father for his daughter's support and education. It had not been, in fact, her mother's income at all, but Louise's; and it had been voluntarily contributed by the father because, as he had been the plaintiff in the divorce suit, the decree had not required him to aid his detached wife or his daughter at all; the court had given him the custody of the child, and he had surrendered that custody to the mother out of sheer pity for her.

How, then, had her mother provided herself, on an income which, with a daughter to educate, called for frugality, if not positive scrimping, with such a sheerly extravagant setting?

And Judd! Louise flushed again when she remembered Judd. She did not know his name. She had never seen or even heard of him before. She only remembered him—and the thought caused her to draw her negligée more closely about her, for she experienced a sudden chill—as the girthy, red-eyed individual who, with the proprietary arrogance of an intoxicated man who seemed perfectly to know his position under that roof, had lurched into her mother's apartments on the previous night without the least attempt at announcing himself.