Two years and Dirk, too, had learned to “grab the Century” in order to save an hour or so of time between Chicago and New York. Peel said it was a pleasure to fit a coat to his broad, flat tapering back, and trousers to his strong sturdy legs. His colour, inherited from his red-cheeked Dutch ancestors brought up in the fresh sea-laden air of the Holland flats, was fine and clear. Sometimes Selina, in pure sensuous delight, passed her gnarled, work-worn hand over his shoulders and down his fine, strong, straight back. He had been abroad twice. He learned to call it “running over to Europe for a few days.” It had all come about in a scant two years, as is the theatrical way in which life speeds in America.
Selina was a little bewildered now at this new Dirk whose life was so full without her. Sometimes she did not see him for two weeks, or three. He sent her gifts which she smoothed and touched delightedly and put away; fine soft silken things, hand-made—which she could not wear. The habit of years was too strong upon her. Though she had always been a woman of dainty habits and fastidious tastes the grind of her early married life had left its indelible mark. Now, as she dressed, you might have seen that her petticoat was likely to be black sateen and her plain, durable corset cover neatly patched where it had worn under the arms. She employed none of the artifices of a youth-mad day. Sun and wind and rain and the cold and heat of the open prairie had wreaked their vengeance on her flouting of them. Her skin was tanned, weather-beaten; her hair rough and dry. Her eyes, in that frame, startled you by their unexpectedness, they were so calm, so serene, yet so alive. They were the beautiful eyes of a wise young girl in the face of a middle-aged woman. Life was still so fresh to her.
She had almost poignantly few personal belongings. Her bureau drawers were like a nun’s; her brush and comb, a scant stock of plain white underwear. On the bathroom shelf her toothbrush, some vaseline, a box of talcum powder. None of those aids to artifice with which the elderly woman deludes herself into thinking that she is hoodwinking the world. She wore well-made walking oxfords now, with sensible heels—the kind known as Field’s special; plain shirtwaists and neat dark suits, or a blue cloth dress. A middle-aged woman approaching elderliness; a woman who walked and carried herself well; who looked at you with a glance that was direct but never hard. That was all. Yet there was about her something arresting, something compelling. You felt it.
“I don’t see how you do it!” Julie Arnold complained one day as Selina was paying her one of her rare visits in town. “Your eyes are as bright as a baby’s and mine look like dead oysters.” They were up in Julie’s dressing room in the new house on the north side—the new house that was now the old house. Julie’s dressing table was a bewildering thing. Selina DeJong, in her neat black suit and her plain black hat, sat regarding it and Julie seated before it, with a grim and lively interest.
“It looks,” Selina said, “like Mandel’s toilette section, or a hospital operating room just before a major operation.” There were great glass jars that contained meal, white and gold. There were rows and rows of cream pots holding massage cream, vanishing cream, cleansing cream. There were little china bowls of scarlet and white and yellowish pastes. A perforated container spouted a wisp of cotton. You saw toilet waters, perfumes, atomizers, French soaps, unguents, tubes. It wasn’t a dressing table merely, but a laboratory.
“This!” exclaimed Julie. “You ought to see Paula’s. Compared to her toilette ceremony mine is just a splash at the kitchen sink.” She rubbed cold cream now around her eyes with her two forefingers, using a practised upward stroke.
“It looks fascinating,” Selina exclaimed. “Some day I’m going to try it. There are so many things I’m going to try some day. So many things I’ve never done that I’m going to do for the fun of it. Think of it, Julie! I’ve never had a manicure! Some day I’m going to have one. I’ll tell the girl to paint my nails a beautiful bright vermilion. And I’ll tip her twenty-five cents. They’re so pretty with their bobbed hair and their queer bright eyes. I s’pose you’ll think I’m crazy if I tell you they make me feel young.”
Julie was massaging. Her eyes had an absent look. Suddenly: “Listen, Selina. Dirk and Paula are together too much. People are talking.”
“Talking?” The smile faded from Selina’s face.
“Goodness knows I’m not strait-laced. You can’t be in this day and age. If I had ever thought I’d live to see the time when—— Well, since the war of course anything’s all right, seems. But Paula has no sense. Everybody knows she’s insane about Dirk. That’s all right for Dirk, but how about Paula! She won’t go anywhere unless he’s invited. Of course Dirk is awfully popular. Goodness knows there are few enough young men like him in Chicago—handsome and successful and polished and all. Most of them dash off East just as soon as they can get their fathers to establish an Eastern branch or something. . . . They’re together all the time, everywhere. I asked her if she was going to divorce Storm and she said no, she hadn’t enough money of her own and Dirk wasn’t earning enough. His salary’s thousands, but she’s used to millions. Well!”