Just then the engine whistled for the crossing below Springdale, and there was a hurrying to and fro on the platform, for the crashing wheels scarcely came to rest in the little college town. Judith was glad of the interruption. Were all good men blind? A moment later she was waving farewell from the rear Pullman, as David stood beside the track, Theodora’s hand clasped in his.
III
On Saturday Eileen had her first glimpse of the Hudson. That evening the Ramsays called, and then ... Aladdin’s lamp was relegated to the attic along with the other wonders that had survived their day of glory. New York was the real fairy land. From the hippopotamus in the Bronx to the hippocampus in Battery Park, the girl saw it all. Sometimes with Judith, more often with Laura Ramsay or her mother, she went from elevated to subway, from the amusing little cross-town horse-cars that were more primitive even than Springdale, to the thrilling taxicab and the Fifth Avenue bus, with a zest that whetted the jaded appetites of the women for whom the city had long since lost its novelty.
After two weeks she decided that she had taken in all the impressions she could hold, and settled down to her music in earnest. There were daily letters from her father, empty because of that fullness he dared not express. Twice a week Theodora wrote—exhaustive discourses on the city, which her imagination rendered more real than reality itself. There were letters, long or brief, to Lary from Lavinia, with never a mention of Eileen. The girl wrote four times to her mother, and then her spirit revolted.
“She can go to grass before I’ll ever know she’s on earth. I suppose she’s afraid of contaminating herself. I’d like to tell her there are some thinking people—people whose opinions count—who don’t consider it half as immoral to go to the devil with the man you believe you love—as it is to bear six children for the man you know you hate.”
“Dearest, don’t do it,” Judith pleaded. “You must not stir up all that rancour in your soul. Remember what you are stamping on the mind and character of the child I am going to call my own. You owe it to me—not to make my burden too hard. And, Eileen, your mother is no more responsible for her limitations than you are for yours. She was brought up to a belief that there is something supernatural in a marriage certificate. Morality is wholly a matter of external forms. And she has the clear advantage of standing with the majority.”
“Yes, she always grabs a front seat in the bandwagon. If it ever gets popular to run off with some other woman’s husband—you’ll find her in the procession. No! you won’t find her. She’s too set in her ideas for that. But after the way she cottoned to Mrs. Nims—when it suited her purpose—and other swells in Springdale—” She choked, her face growing scarlet. “I hope I’ll never be intolerant.”
Judith sensed the thought that had flared up in the girl’s mind, from which she had retrieved herself in a swift change of subject. Ignoring Mrs. Trench’s reason for that first neighbourly call on Adelaide Nims, after her return from Bromfield, she fell back on the nature of toleration.
“My dear, don’t you know that you are just as intolerant of your mother as she is of you—that you are like her, when you justify to yourself the thing you want to do—and spare your lacerated feelings, when things go wrong, by finding flaws to pick in some other person’s conduct?”
Eileen hung her head. From infancy she had been branded as a Trench. And now it shamed her to be told that she resembled her mother, her mother in whom she could see nothing but bourgeois complacence. After a moment she said: