“You don’t really have to do anything, Eleanor,” she said kindly. “I don’t want you to make an effort to please me, only to be happy yourself. Why don’t you try and see what you can do with this modeling clay? Just try making it up into mud pies, or anything.”
“Mud pies?”
“Let the child teach himself the significance of contour, and the use of his hands, by fashioning the clay into rudimentary forms of beauty.” That was the theory. 36
“Yes, dear, mud pies, if you wish to.”
Whereupon Eleanor, conscientiously and miserably, turned out a neat half-dozen skilful, miniature models of the New England deep dish apple-pie, pricked and pinched to a nicety.
Beulah, with a vision related to the nebulous stages of a study by Rodin, was somewhat disconcerted with this result, but she brightened as she thought at least she had discovered a natural tendency in the child that she could help her develop.
“Do you like to cook, Eleanor?” she asked.
In the child’s mind there rose the picture of her grim apprenticeship on Cape Cod. She could see the querulous invalid in the sick chair, her face distorted with pain and impatience; she could feel the sticky dough in her fingers, and the heat from the stove rising round her.
“I hate cooking,” she said, with the first hint of passion she had shown in her relation to her new friends.
The day dragged on wearily. Beulah took her to walk on the Drive, but as far as she was able to determine the child saw nothing of her surroundings. The crowds of trimly dressed people, 37 the nursemaids and babies, the swift slim outlines of the whizzing motors, even the battleships lying so suggestively quiescent on the river before them—all the spectacular, vivid panorama of afternoon on Riverside Drive—seemed absolutely without interest or savor to the child. Beulah’s despair and chagrin were increasing almost as rapidly as Eleanor’s.