As soon as Betty heard that the European offer was refused she turned her attention to the lessons. Bustling about, making appointments, talking over reluctant mothers, forcing people to study singing who never thought of doing so, she is an inspiring sight to everybody but the object of her campaign.
Lizzie makes me uneasy. She has shown no enthusiasm, taking it all for granted as though busy ladies could not better employ their time than by helping her to fortune. Betty thinks it timidity, that she is distrustful of herself. I know better. Her languor conceals a dreary disinclination. She has never said a word of thanks to Betty or Mrs. Ashworth. Once or twice I have suggested that they have taken a good deal of trouble and she might—I have always stopped there and she has never asked me to go on. What is the good of telling a person they ought to have feelings which nature seems to have left out of them?
Last night Roger came and after a few moments with me suggested that we go up-stairs and talk over the new work with her. I wouldn’t, said I was sleepy and wanted to go to bed. When he had gone I lowered the lights and sat waiting to hear his footsteps coming down. I waited an hour and a half, and then they came, descending the creaking staircase, passing my door, and going on to the street. That wasn’t a good night for sleeping. In the small hours I got up and tried to read. The book was painfully appropriate, The Love Letters of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. I read them till I heard the milkman making his rounds.
There is something horribly humiliating about women’s love-letters. When the passion is unrequited, or half requited as it was with De Lespinasse, they are so abject. She made a brave stand, poor soul, tried to find Guibert a wife and pretend she didn’t mind. But when she began to sicken to her death, all her bravery vanished. Those last letters are like a shrill frenzied wail. And she was a very first-class woman in love with a very second-class man. I suppose it’s a sort of sex tradition that we should adore and adhere in this ignominious way. We’ve had it hammered into us that to love and cling was our mission till it’s grown to have a fictitious value, and we feel if we don’t love and cling something is wrong with us. And what’s accomplished by it—who is benefited by our useless suffering?
The other evening down-town in the dusk I passed a girl waiting on the corner by a show-window. The light fell full on her face and I knew by her expression why she was there—a rendezvous with her young man who was late. She was angry, close-lipped and sullen-eyed. I could read her thoughts—she was going to tell him her opinion of him, be haughty and frigid, give him a piece of her mind and leave him. Just then he came slouching up, a lowering surly cub, and when she saw him she couldn’t hide her joy. Her anger vanished at his first word. She’d have believed anything he told her knowing in her heart it was a lie. She hardly wanted his excuses, so glad he’d come, so pitifully slavishly glad.
It’s shameful, crushing, revolting. Here am I, the heir of all the ages in the foremost files of time, feeling just the same as that subjugated shop-girl. Roger up-stairs with Lizzie, and I can’t sleep, and can’t eat, and can’t stop caring, and worst of all, if he wanted to come back to me I’d open my arms to him. Talk of the forward march of women! When the cave man went forth to find a new wife, the old discarded one left in the corner by the fire felt just the same as I do in the opening of the twentieth century.
But now, as Pepys says, to bed. I’ll sleep if I have to take a thumping dose of trional which I was taught in my youth was even more wicked than powdering your nose.
This afternoon Lizzie went forth to give her first lesson and I stayed in to wait for her. I was anxious about it. If the survival of the fittest prevails among educators as it does in the animal kingdom I felt sure that Lizzie as a teacher would not survive. Her pupil is the spoiled child of fortune, sixteen, with a voice as small as her dot will be large. Betty had conjured me to make our protégée give up the black tea-tray hat and I had tried and failed. Before her haughty and uncomprehending surprise I had wilted. No one would have had the courage to tell her why she should look meek and unassuming. As it was she had dressed herself with unusual care, even to the long green earrings which I hadn’t seen for months. She was more like the duchess in an English comedy cast for Broadway, than a penniless music teacher being pushed up the ladder.
As I sat waiting Miss Bliss came in—wrapped in the Navajo blanket. She threw it back and stood for me to admire, very dainty in a new pink blouse with a Pierrot frill encircling her neck and a broad pink ribbon tied round her head. Boyishly slender, her arms extended to hold out the blanket, she had the fragile grace of a Tanagra figurine—a modern Tanagra with a powdered nose and a dash of carmine on the lips. When I told her she was pretty she blushed, dropped the blanket on the floor and herself on the blanket, and said a girl owed it to herself always to look her best.
“You might meet a man in the hall,” she murmured, mechanically reaching for the poker, “and what’s the sense of looking like a slob?”