CHAPTER XII GROWING PAINS
Eleanor did not yield without a struggle to the tyranny of this new affection. The seclusion in which she and her mother lived, a natural shyness as deep, though not as manifest, as that which her mother had so strangely developed, and the keen ambition implanted and nourished by Dr. Green had prevented thus far the characteristic seeking of youth for emotion to match its own.
Nor had she been humiliated by the failure of a lover to seek her. Waltonville had seemed to offer no one who was not too old or too young or too dull or already married. She admired her teachers, Dr. Lister and Dr. Scott, and would have selected Dr. Scott as a specimen of her favorite masculine type.
Now she found herself changed. She could not rise in the morning and fill her leisurely summer day as she had planned. The long mornings and longer afternoons and quiet evenings were not hers to divide and use. Instead of steady practicing at exercises and scales, she practiced the bass or treble of duets; instead of sitting at her desk for many quiet productive hours, she sat on the porch or in the little parlor. Plots which she had expected to crystallize promptly now that school was over, refused to progress beyond the point where she had left them in her notebooks; images grew dim, words refused to fit themselves to thought, thought itself was dull and valueless. She could put her mind upon one object, Richard Lister; could wish for but one thing, his company.
In the mornings she was least possessed. Then she had still the hope of his coming; the childish belief that if she practiced a certain number of hours or wrote a certain number of pages, the fates would reward her. If afternoon did not bring him, she tried vainly to work, as though she would by her very striving win a blessing. The evenings, if he did not appear, were intolerable. At bedtime she made up her mind definitely to think of him no more, to make to-morrow a day of accomplishment. She saw herself in a dim future greeting him placidly from some tall peak of literary achievement, but she knew while she planned that literary achievement, hitherto so intensely desired, allured no more. In anger at herself she wept.
"I am a fool! I will do differently! I will not think of him!"
The excuses which she invented for him only made a bad matter worse. He was under no obligation to come to see her. Then he did not need her as she needed him! He was surely under no obligation to come to see her every day since he was preparing for the splendid career which was to be his. But she would never shut him out from any career of hers! He was spending his days in the society of his father and mother or of Thomasina or—with Cora Scott. The first possibility she could endure, the second was tolerable, though it brought a pang. But that he could be seeking out Cora Scott, little, quiet, dull Cora Scott! That could not be believed.
A score of pin-pricking anxieties, which she would have laughed at at another time, rose now to vex her. There was a new gown which did not fit; there was an entirely imaginary coolness in Thomasina's greeting; there was, especially, the outrageous use she had made of Dr. Lister's shoelaces and Dr. Scott's den. Her unconsciousness of the offense made it all the more terrible since it seemed to indicate a lack of fine feeling. It was now impossible for her to understand how she could have ever committed so grave a fault.
When Richard had not presented himself for three days, she deliberately collected the meager facts which she knew about her mother and herself. Her mother had been the daughter of the tavern-keeper—Eleanor saw the present tavern-keeper. She had gone away from Waltonville and had married and had afterwards returned. Her father was dead long since; that she had told Eleanor definitely; and her husband was dead also, and she could not bear to speak of either of them or be spoken to about them. She had ample means for their simple living—enough, indeed, for such a luxury as the finest piano in Waltonville, enough so that she and Eleanor could go to New York or Boston for the next winter if they wished. Her money came to her each month from a lawyer in Baltimore who attended to her affairs. There was the total which Eleanor possessed.