Eleanor nodded. Then,
“What about refinement?” she asked unexpectedly. “I want to bring myself up good when—when all of my aunts and uncles are too busy, or don’t know. I want to grow up, and be ladylike and a credit, and I’m getting such good culture that I think I ought to, but—I get worried about my refinement. City refinement is different from country refinement.”
“Refinement isn’t a thing that you can worry about,” Gertrude began slowly. She realized perhaps better than any of the others, being a better balanced, healthier creature than either Beulah or Margaret, that there were serious defects in the scheme of cooperative parentage. Eleanor, thanks to the overconscientious digging about her roots, was acquiring a New England self-consciousness about her processes. A child, Gertrude felt, should be handed a code ready made and should be guided by it without question until his maturer experience led him to modify it. The trouble with trying to explain this to Eleanor was that she had already 129 had too many things explained to her, and the doctrine of unselfconsciousness can not be inculcated by an exploitation of it. “If you are naturally a fine person your instinct will be to do the fine thing. You must follow it when you feel the instinct and not think about it between times.”
“That’s Uncle Peter’s idea,” Eleanor said, “that not thinking. Well, I’ll try—but you and Uncle Peter didn’t have six different parents and a Grandpa and Grandma and Albertina all criticizing your refinement in different ways. Don’t you ever have any trouble with your behavior, Aunt Gertrude?”
Gertrude laughed. The truth was that she was having considerable trouble with her behavior since Jimmie’s arrival two days before. She had thought to spend her two months with Eleanor on Cape Cod helping the child to relate her new environment to her old, while she had the benefit of her native air and the freedom of a rural summer. She also felt that one of their number ought to have a working knowledge of Eleanor’s early surroundings and habits. She had meant to put herself and her own concerns entirely aside. If she had a thought for any one but Eleanor she meant it to be for the two 130 old people whose guest she had constituted herself. She explained all this to Jimmie a day or two before her departure, and to her surprise he had suggested that he spend his own two vacation weeks watching the progress of her experiment. Before she was quite sure of the wisdom of allowing him to do so she had given him permission to come. Jimmie was part of her trouble. Her craving for isolation and undiscovered country; her eagerness to escape with her charge to some spot where she would not be subjected to any sort of familiar surveillance, were all a part of an instinct to segregate herself long enough to work out the problem of Jimmie and decide what to do about it. This she realized as soon as he arrived on the spot. She realized further that she had made practically no progress in the matter, for this curly headed young man, bearing no relation to anything that Gertrude had decided a young man should be, was rapidly becoming a serious menace to her peace of mind, and her ideal of a future lived for art alone. She had definitely begun to realize this on the night when Jimmie, in his exuberance at securing his new job, had seized her about the waist and kissed her on the lips. She had thought a good deal about that kiss, 131 which came dangerously near being her first one. She was too clever, too cool and aloof, to have had many tentative love-affairs. Later, as she softened and warmed and gathered grace with the years she was likely to seem more alluring and approachable to the gregarious male. Now she answered her small interlocutor truthfully.
“Yes, Eleanor, I do have a whole lot of trouble with my behavior. I’m having trouble with it today, and this evening,” she glanced up at the moon, which was seemingly throwing out conscious waves of effulgence, “I expect to have more,” she confessed.
“Oh! do you?” asked Eleanor, “I’m sorry I can’t sit up with you then and help you. You—you don’t expect to be—provocated to slap anybody, do you?”
“No, I don’t, but as things are going I almost wish I did,” Gertrude answered, not realizing that before the evening was over there would be one person whom she would be ruefully willing to slap several times over.
As they turned into the village street from the beach road they met Jimmie, who had been having his after-dinner pipe with Grandfather Amos, with whom he had become a prime favorite. With him 132 was Albertina, toeing out more than ever and conversing more than blandly.
“This virtuous child has been urging me to come after Eleanor and remind her that it is bedtime,” Jimmie said, indicating the pink gingham clad figure at his side. “She argues that Eleanor is some six months younger than she and ought to be in bed first, and personally she has got to go in the next fifteen minutes.”