A chill white dawn faintly shot with gold ... for Antonia? for herself and Antonia? But surely such divine hesitancy and glamour were for the girl of eighteen, seventeen, sixteen ... wide eyes, intent on vision, tremulous childish lips, “no one shall kiss me until he comes....” And the end of the legend was that he came, and kissed her—just before she was tired of waiting—at twenty, say; or twenty-one. That answered the riddle so easily for young Artemis. But if the legend missed its obvious conclusion?... She was now twenty-four, and Antonia twenty-six ... Antonia’s austere demands were rather a strain on passion unsatisfied in the late twenties—rather a strain on the chill-white-dawn ideal. Antonia at sixteen, tingling from hot indignant scorn at anything which ran counter to her unshaken, unshakeable schoolgirl principles of what was “right”—Antonia at sixteen, not unlike Deb at sixteen; dreaming in a walled garden of lilacs. They had outgrown it——
What now?
Some sort of a compromise ... a dream semi-yielded, semi-cherished.... Oh, just chance it! A separate code of rules for every transient episode—or none at all—or trust to the moment’s inspiration—take love haphazard—compromise.... Burton Ames had left her possessed by the very desperation of restlessness. And it was easier now to give lightly, since striving to compete with Jenny, she had once broken bounds. Jenny had died, without getting what she wanted; Jenny had shown how easy, how frighteningly easy, it was to die ... slip away. So cram in something at all costs, lest it should happen to you like that....
“Here you are!” Antonia threw her the sketch on which she had the last half hour been working. It was a startlingly clever study in crayons. Underneath it was scrawled “Girl of the Transition Period.”
Petulantly Deb flicked it away. “‘It’s pretty—but is it art?’” she quoted.
“No. It’s psychology.”
“Résumé of our conversation. And yet my people allow me to do what I please, say what I please, go where I please, with whom I please—they’re awfully broad-minded.”
“That’s just why your career is so precarious, my wee one. You’re up against nothing—except your own extremely hazy sense of self-respect. If your father and your Aunt Stella were saying ‘don’t’ all the time, and locking you in your room, and forbidding men the house, and intercepting letters, and generally behaving as we’ve been taught the Best Parents ought to behave, you’d be kept busy defying them, which is a quite healthy occupation. At the worst, in a mood of superlative defiance, you’d go right over the wall ... well, that’s at least honest. All this laxness and let-her-do-as-she-likes, and ‘I’m sure young men are to be trusted now-a-days’.... But parents are not to be trusted. I don’t know what parents are coming to. My mother—it’s her sorrow that I haven’t yet formed a Bold Free Union for her to countenance and encourage——”
“And you would never consent to do it; have no desire to do it. It’s a sad waste of an indulgent parent, Antonia. Thousands of girls get cursed and kicked out of home for just that boldness and freeness which your mother pines to find in you.”
“The darling!—it’s only theoretical pining. Any vivid details of a Bold and Free Union would shock her beyond words. I suppose the truth is that parents are thinking too much—and not enough. It’s still only surface lenience. They’d howl quite as loudly, and break their hearts quite as vehemently as the old-fashioned parent, if we really transgressed.”