“I think she’ll be over it. Miss Frazier’s away on vacation, and I need Petra more than ordinary these days.”
“You seem a trifle brutal, darling. Don’t you believe the girl had a headache? I do. She looked terrible. I know Clare didn’t believe it, but then she hadn’t seen her. I heard Clare telling Lowell it was temper. I thought that was rather horrid of Clare, I must say. And now you are almost as heartless.”
“Cynthia Pryne Allen! Do I hear criticism of Clare? I’d better take your temperature. You look all right but I am afraid you must be delirious!”
Cynthia leaned back in her chair. She had finished her grapefruit and black coffee. That was all she allowed herself for breakfast, having no ambition to compete with her Harry in avoirdupois.
“No, I’m not criticizing Clare. Not exactly. But lately—well, lately I’ve sort of come to understand Petra a little better. I feel as if I have, anyway. I don’t think things are so frightfully easy for her at Green Doors. Not that Clare means to be unkind. Oh, hardly! But their temperaments don’t jibe, that’s all. Clare can’t take it in, that any one can be so simple as Petra is. That’s the trouble, I think. She thinks Petra’s simplicity is always covering some design. But Petra hasn’t any design. She’s just a healthy, nice, rather sweet girl. She seems sweet to me, anyway. Just these last few weeks I’ve grown fond of her. You don’t have to wonder where you are with her, ever. Why, I told Clare just last night that if I had a daughter I’d adore her to be a second Petra. She’d be so comfortable to live with.”
“Yes? And what did Clare reply, if anything?”
“That made me rather cross, Lewis. She said that I didn’t know Petra. She said she was ‘deep.’”
“Did she mean it as insult or compliment?”
“Dear Lewis! When one woman calls another deep!—It has looked to me lately—nights at the Country Club, when they were all there together, the Farwells and Dick and Neil (that simply grand McCloud person, you know)—that Clare was almost jealous of Petra. Harry’s got an idea that that’s why Neil doesn’t come to Green Doors any more. I shouldn’t be surprised if he’s seeing Petra secretly, somewhere else. I think Clare suspects it too. She’s almost insufferable, anyway, the way she questions Petra as to where she has been and what she has been doing. And she doesn’t mind who’s there, listening. It makes one very uncomfortable. It’s hateful for Petra.”
“Yes. One feels that,” Lewis agreed. “But it isn’t worth Petra’s bothering about, or yours, really. Clare is—incorrigible. All the same, she must have some nice qualities, I suppose, or she couldn’t plan gardens so astutely, and care about the books she does care about, and music and all. She does honestly care for those things. That’s not sham. One can’t sham that. Do you know what I think, Cynthia? I think that people like Clare are so awful simply because they are so close to being really fine. If Clare were just any silly woman, ‘out for the men,’ you’d laugh at her and find her, possibly, rather touchingly human. You might even like her. But it’s precisely because she isn’t a silly, superficial creature that the cruelty and ugliness in her seems such wretched cruelty, such wretched ugliness. She is an exquisite person—has exquisite perceptions, anyway. There’s only that one unpleasant spot, her vanity in the admiration she excites in every one around her. If she were only sensual or selfish (openly, healthily selfish, I mean)—if she had any mean qualities at all, like the rest of us—she’d be forgivable. But it is the under-bogging of all this highly emphasized spirituality with endless quicksands of vanity that gives a fellow the jitters—unless he’s sucked under, like Dick, and suffocated in it. It is obvious that Clare deliberately took Petra on as handicap to add to the zest of a game that was becoming almost too easy to be exciting any longer. But now that the handicap begins really to weigh—as it did last night—she’s lost her poise—and her pose. Last night Clare was openly vicious. One could sympathize—just possibly—with her wanting to vie with Petra for Dick’s attention. But when it is in enchanting and holding Petra’s own father she uses the girl as her foil, I must say I find it revolting. That’s vanity gone rotten. It’s better, though, she should show her hand. It won’t do Farwell any harm to see it. He had it coming to him. I didn’t mind seeing him squirm last night. It’s for Petra I mind.”