Magnolia turned to wave to them as the chestnuts made the final curve in the driveway and stretched eagerly toward home.
Silence between the two for a long half hour. Then Ravenal, almost humbly: “Well—I suppose I’m in for it, Nola. Shoot!”
But she had been thinking, “I must take things in hand now. I have been like a foolish young girl when I’m really quite an old married woman. I suppose being bossed by Mama so much did that. I must take Kim in hand now. What a fool I’ve been. ‘Don’t be silly, darling.’ He was right. I have been——” Aloud she said, only half conscious that he had spoken, “What did you say?”
“You know very well what I said. I suppose I’m in for one of your mother’s curtain lectures. Go on. Shoot and get it over.”
“Don’t be silly, darling,” said Magnolia, a trifle maliciously. “What a lovely starlight night it is! . . .” She laughed a little. “Do you know, those dough-faced Fifis and Tantines and Mignons were just like the Ohio and Illinois farm girls, dressed up. The ignorant girls who used to come to see the show. I’ll bet that when they were on the farm, barefooted, poor things, they were Annie and Jenny and Tillie and Emma right enough.”
XVI
“And this,” said Sister Cecilia, “is the chapel.” She took still another key from the great bunch on her key chain and unlocked the big gloomy double doors. It was incredible that doors and floors and wainscotings so shining with varnish could still diffuse such an atmosphere of gloom. She entered ahead of them with the air of a cicerone. It seemed to Magnolia that the corridors were tunnels of murk. It was like a prison. Magnolia took advantage of this moment to draw closer still to Kim. She whispered hurriedly in her ear:
“Kim darling, you don’t need to stay. If you don’t like it we’ll slip away and you needn’t come back. It’s so gloomy.”
“But I do like it,” said Kim in her clear, decisive voice. “It’s so shiny and clean and quiet.” In spite of her lovely Ravenal features, which still retained something of their infantile curves, she looked at that moment startlingly like her grandmother, Parthenia Ann Hawks. They followed Sister Cecilia into the chapel. Magnolia shivered a little.
In giving Kim a convent education it was not in Magnolia’s mind to prepare her for those Sunday theatrical page interviews beginning, “I was brought up by the dear Sisters in the Convent.” For that matter, the theatre as having any part in Kim’s future never once entered Magnolia’s mind. Why this should have been true it is difficult to say, considering the child’s background, together with the fact that she was seeing Camille and Ben Hur, and the Rogers Brothers in Central Park at an age when other little girls were barely permitted to go to cocoa parties in white muslin and blue sashes where they might, if they were lucky, see the funny man take the rabbit out of the hat.