“It did her a world of good—freshened her up—no, softened—no, I mean warmed.”
“She’s been visiting the Hollisters, down at Harrison.”
“A country town. I supposed she’d been to baths or springs or something. Really the change in her is quite miraculous. She has waked up.”
“Eleanor never was what one’d call sleepy,” said Mrs. Salfield, rather stiffly.
“Oh, she was always interested in things—books, serious subjects—too much so for my taste. But you know what I mean. She looks human—looks as if she had a human interest. It was the one thing lacking to make her entirely interesting and beautiful—to give her magnetism. You notice how the men flock about her. She’s having a triumph. Why, she looks round—looks at the men—in a positively flirtatious way. Really, Clara, it’s too wonderful. What has happened to her?”
“What could happen to a girl in Harrison? Nothing but Bart Hollister.”
“It couldn’t be Bart,” said Mrs. Ramon.
“It isn’t anybody,” said Mrs. Salfield. “It’s simply a case of coming-to a little late. So many young people take life too solemnly at first. They feel responsible for it.”
The phenomenon thus noted by Mrs. Ramon had escaped no one’s eyes. Even Eleanor’s father, the absorbed George Clearwater, United States Senator and “lumber king,” had seen it. Eleanor Clearwater had gone to Harrison, a reserved, cool, not to say cold young woman, with an air that made her seem years older than she was, and with an interest in men so faint that it discouraged all but two dauntless fortune hunters—who were promptly sent to look further. She had come back, a lively, coquettish person, with a modern tendency to audacities in dress and speech. Every one wondered; no one could explain. She could have explained, but she would not have admitted the truth even to herself. Four men proposed within two weeks after her return. She refused them all—in a gay, mocking way, thus enabling them to feel that they had not humiliated themselves, that she had imagined they were proposing merely to make interesting conversation.
The cause she would not admit? A lank, homely, ill dressed country town lawyer, one George Helm. The year before he had been the joke of Harrison because of his absurd beard and his seedy suit with its flowing tails. The shaving of the beard, the changing of the “statesman’s frock” for an ill fitting sack suit, two campaigns in which he had developed power and originality as a speaker, an election to the State Senate by attacking “everything that was respectable and decent,” that is, by telling the truth about the upper-class grafters—these circumstances had combined to make him a considerable and serious figure in Harrison. But for such as the Hollisters and the Clearwaters he remained a bumpkin, a demagogue, an impossible lower-class person.