The Bent Twig

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

MOLLY IN HER ELEMENT

Sylvia faced her aunt's dictum with heartsick shrinking from its rigor; but she recognized it as an unexaggerated statement of the facts. "You can't go home now, Sylvia—everybody would say you couldn't stand seeing Molly's snatch at Felix successful. You really must stay on to let people see that you are another kind of girl from Molly, capable of impersonal interest in a man of Felix's brains."

Sylvia thought of making the obviously suitable remark that she cared nothing about what people thought, but such a claim was so preposterously untrue to her character that she could not bring the words past her lips. As a matter of fact, she did care what people thought. She always had! She always would! She remained silent, looking fixedly out of the great, plate-glass window, across the glorious sweep of blue mountain-slope and green valley commanded by Mrs. Marshall-Smith's bedroom. She did not resemble the romantic conception of a girl crossed in love. She looked very quiet, no paler than usual, quite self-possessed. The only change a keen eye could have noted was that now there was about her an atmosphere of slightly rigid dignity, which had not been there before. She seemed less girlish.

No eyes could have been more keenly analytical than those of Mrs. Marshall-Smith. She saw perfectly the new attribute, and realized perfectly what a resolute stiffening of the will it signified. She had never admired and loved Sylvia more, and being a person adept in self-expression, she saturated her next speech with her admiration and affection. "Of course, you know, my dear, that I'm not one of the herd. I know entirely that your feeling for Felix was just what mine is—immense admiration for his taste and accomplishments. As a matter of fact it was apparent to every one that, even in spite of all Molly's money, if you'd really cared to …"

Sylvia winced, actually and physically, at this speech, which brought back to her with a sharp flick the egregiousness of her absurd self-deception. What a simpleton she had been—what a little naïve, provincial simpleton! In spite of her high opinion of her own cleverness and knowledge of people, how stupidly steeped she had been in the childish, idiotic American tradition of entire disinterestedness in the relations of men and women. It was another instance of how betrayed she constantly was, in any manoeuver in the actual world, by the fatuous idealism which had so colored her youth—she vented her emotion in despising that idealism and thinking of hard names to call it.

"… though of course you showed your intelligence by not really caring to," went on Mrs. Marshall-Smith; "it would have meant a crippled life for both of you. Felix hasn't a cent more than he needs for himself. If he was going to marry at all, he was forced to marry carefully. Indeed, it has occurred to me that he may have thrown himself into this, because he was in danger of losing his head over you, and knew how fatal it would be. For you, you lovely thing of great possibilities, you need a rich soil for your roots, too, if you're to bloom out as you ought to."

Sylvia, receiving this into a sore and raw consciousness, said to herself with an embittered instinct for cynicism that she had never heard more euphonious periphrases for selling yourself for money. For that was what it came down to, she had told herself fiercely a great many times during the night. Felix had sold himself for money as outright as ever a woman of the streets had done.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith, continuing steadily to talk (on the theory that talking prevents too great concentration of thought), and making the round of all the possible things to say, chanced at this moment upon a qualification to this theory of Morrison's conduct which for an instant caught Sylvia's attention, "—and then there's always the possibility that even if you had cared to—Molly might have been too much for you, for both of you. She always has had just what she wanted—and people who have, get the habit. I don't know if you've noticed it, in the little you've seen of her, but it's very apparent to me, knowing her from childhood up as I have, that there's a slight coarseness of grain in Molly, when it's a question of getting what she wants. I don't mean she's exactly horrid. Molly's a dear in her way, and I'm very fond of her, of course. If she can get what she wants without walking over anybody's prostrate body, she'll go round. But there's a directness, a brilliant lack of fine shades in Molly's grab…. It makes one remember that her Montgomery grandfather had firmness of purpose enough to raise himself from an ordinary Illinois farmer to arbiter of the wheat pit. Such impossible old aunts—such cousins—occasionally crop up still from the Montgomery connection. But all with the same crude force. It's almost impossible for a temperament like Felix's to contend with a nature like that."

Sylvia was struck by the reflection, but on turning it over she saw in it only another reason for anger at Morrison. "You make your old friend out as a very weak character," she said.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith's tolerant, clear view of the infirmities of humanity was grieved by this fling of youthful severity. "Oh, my dear! my dear! A young, beautiful, enormendously rich, tremendously enamored girl? That's a combination! I don't think we need consider Felix exactly weak for not having resisted!"