The Bent Twig

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

It was beside this same table that she met, one day in early December, Jermain Fiske's distinguished father. He explained that he was in La Chance for a day on his way from Washington to Mercerton, where the Fiske family was collecting for its annual Christmas house-party, and had dropped in on Mrs. Draper quite unexpectedly. He was, he added, delighted that it happened to be a day when he could meet the lovely Miss Marshall of whom (with a heavy accent of jocose significance) he had heard so much. Sylvia was a little confused by the pointed attentions of this gallant old warrior, oddly in contrast with the manner of other elderly men she knew; but she thought him very handsome, with his sweeping white mustache, his bright blue eyes, so like his son's, and she was much impressed with his frock-coat, fitting snugly around his well-knit, erect figure, and with the silk hat which she noticed on the table in the hall as she went in. Frock-coats and silk hats were objects seldom encountered in La Chance, except in illustrations to magazine-stories, or in photographs of life in New York or Washington. But of course, she reflected, Colonel Fiske lived most of his life in Washington, about the cosmopolitan delights of which he talked most eloquently to the two ladies.

As was inevitable, Sylvia also met Eleanor Hubert more or less at Mrs. Draper's. Sylvia had been rendered acutely self-conscious in that direction by Mrs. Draper's very open comments on her rôle in the life of the other girl, and at first had been so smitten by embarrassment as positively to be awkward, a rare event in her life: but she was soon set at ease by the other girl's gentle friendliness, so simple and sincere that even Sylvia's suspicious vanity could not feel it to be condescension. Eleanor's sweet eyes shone so kindly on her successful rival, and she showed so frank and unenvious an admiration of Sylvia's wit and learning, displayed perhaps a trifle ostentatiously by that young lady in the ensuing conversation with Mrs. Draper, that Sylvia had a fresh, healing impulse of shame for her own recently acquired attitude of triumphing hostility towards the world.

At the same time she felt a surprised contempt for the other girl's ignorance and almost illiteracy. Whatever else Eleanor had learned in the exclusive and expensive girls' school in New York, she had not learned to hold her own in a conversation on the most ordinary topics; and as for Mrs. Draper's highly spiced comments on life and folk, her young friend made not the slightest attempt to cope with them or even to understand them. The alluring mistress of the house might talk of sex-antagonism and the hatefulness of the puritanical elements of American life as much as she pleased. It all passed over the head of the lovely, fair girl, sipping her tea and raising her candid eyes to meet with a trustful smile, perhaps a little blank, the glance of whomever chanced to be looking at her. It was significant that she had the same smile for each of the three very dissimilar persons who sat about the tea-table. Of all the circle into which Sylvia's changed life had plunged her, Eleanor, the type of the conventional society bud, was, oddly enough, the only one she cared to talk about in her own extremely unconventional home. But even on this topic she felt herself bruised and jarred by the severity, the unpicturesque austerity of the home standards. As she was trying to give her mother some idea of Eleanor's character, she quoted one day a remark of Mrs. Draper's, to the effect that "Eleanor no more knows the meaning of her beauty than a rose the meaning of its perfume." Mrs. Marshall kept a forbidding silence for a moment and then said: "I don't take much stock in that sort of unconsciousness. Eleanor isn't a rose, she isn't even a child. She's a woman. The sooner girls learn that distinction, the better off they'll be, and the fewer chances they'll run of being horribly misunderstood."

Sylvia felt very angry with her mother for this unsympathetic treatment of a pretty phrase, and thought with resentment that it was not her fault if she were becoming more and more alienated from her family.

This was a feeling adroitly fostered by Mrs. Draper, who, in her endless talks with Sylvia and Jermain about themselves, had hit upon an expression and a turn of phrase which was to have more influence on Sylvia's development than its brevity seemed to warrant. She had, one day, called Sylvia a little Athenian, growing up, by the oddest of mistakes, in Sparta. Sylvia, who was in the Pater-reading stage of development, caught at her friend's phrase as at the longed-for key to her situation. It explained everything. It made everything appear in the light she wished for. Above all it enabled her to clarify her attitude towards her home. Now she understood. One did not scorn Sparta. One respected it, it was a noble influence in life; but for an Athenian, for whom amenity and beauty and suavity were as essential as food, Sparta was death. As was natural to her age and temperament, she sucked a vast amount of pleasure out of this pitying analysis of her subtle, complicated needs and the bare crudity of her surroundings. She now read Pater more assiduously than ever, always carrying a volume about with her text-books, and feeding on this delicate fare in such unlikely and dissimilar places as on the trolley-cars, in the kitchen, in the intervals of preparing a meal, or in Mrs. Draper's living-room, waiting for the problematical entrance of that erratic luminary.

There was none of Mrs. Draper's habits of life which made more of an impression on Sylvia's imagination than her custom of disregarding engagements and appointments, of coming and going, appearing and disappearing quite as she pleased. To the daughter of a scrupulously exact family, which regarded tardiness as a fault, and breaking an appointment as a crime, this high-handed flexibility in dealing with time and bonds and promises had an exciting quality of freedom.

On a good many occasions these periods of waiting chanced to be shared by Eleanor Hubert, for whom, after the first two or three encounters, Sylvia came to have a rather condescending sympathy, singularly in contrast to the uneasy envy with which she had regarded her only a few months before. However, as regards dress, Eleanor was still a phenomenon of the greatest interest, and Sylvia never saw her without getting an idea or two, although it was plain to any one who knew Eleanor that this mastery of the technique of modern American costume was no achievement of her own, that she was merely the lovely and plastic material molded, perhaps to slightly over-complicated effects, by her mother's hands.

From that absent but pervasive personality Sylvia took one suggestion after another. For instance, a very brief association with Eleanor caused her to relegate to the scrapheap of the "common" the ready-made white ruching for neck and sleeves which she had always before taken for granted. Eleanor's slim neck and smooth wrists were always set off by a few folds of the finest white chiffon, laid with dexterous carelessness, and always so exquisitely fresh that they were obviously renewed by a skilful hand after only a few hours' wearing. The first time she saw Eleanor, Sylvia noticed this detail with appreciation, and immediately struggled to reproduce it in her own costume. Like other feats of the lesser arts this perfect trifle turned out to depend upon the use of the lightest and most adroit touch. None of the chiffon which came in Aunt Victoria's boxes would do. It must be fresh from the shop-counter, ruinous as this was to Sylvia's very modest allowance for dress. Even then she spoiled many a yard of the filmy, unmanageable stuff before she could catch the spirit of those apparently careless folds, so loosely disposed and yet never displaced. It was a phenomenon over which a philosopher might well have pondered, this spectacle of Sylvia's keen brain and well-developed will-power equally concerned with the problems of chemistry and philosophy and history, and with the problem of chiffon folds. She herself was aware of no incongruity, indeed of no difference, between the two sorts of efforts.

Many other matters of Eleanor's attire proved as fruitful of suggestion as this, although Aunt Victoria's well-remembered dictum about the "kitchen-maid's pin-cushion" was a guiding finger-board which warned Sylvia against the multiplication of detail, even desirable detail.

Mrs. Hubert had evidently studied deeply the sources of distinction in modern dress, and had grasped with philosophic thoroughness the underlying principle of the art, which is to show effects obviously costly, but the cost of which is due less to mere brute cash than to prodigally expended effort. Eleanor never wore a costume which did not show the copious exercise by some alert-minded human being, presumably with an immortal soul, of the priceless qualities of invention, creative thought, trained attention, and prodigious industry. Mrs. Hubert's unchallengeable slogan was that dress should be an expression of individuality, and by dint of utilizing all the details of the attire of herself and of her two daughters, down to the last ruffle and buttonhole, she found this medium quite sufficient to express the whole of her own individuality, the conspicuous force of which was readily conceded by any observer of the lady's life.