“It must be a delightful sensation to have your future assured at seventeen,” thought Patience. “Mine is as problematical as the outcome of the Temperance cause. I have had one unexpected change, and may have more. If it were not for Rosita’s letters I should almost forget those sixteen years in California. I certainly am not the same person. I haven’t lost my temper for a year and a half, and I don’t seem to be disturbed any more by vague yearnings. Life is too practical, I suppose.”
Miss Tremont did not visit the Gardiner Peeles this summer: they spent the season in travel. Late in the fall Rosita returned to America. She wrote the day before she sailed. That was the last letter Patience received from her. Later she sent a large envelope full of clippings descriptive of her triumphal début; thereafter nothing whatever. Patience, supposing herself forgotten, anathematised her old friend wrathfully, but pride forbade her to write and demand an explanation.
She noticed with spasms of terror that Miss Tremont was failing. The rush and worry of a lifetime had worn the blood white, and the nerve-force down like an old wharf pile. But Miss Tremont would not admit that she had lost an ounce of strength. She arose at the same hour and toiled until late. When Patience begged her to take care of herself, she became almost querulous, and all Patience could do was to anticipate her in every possible way. But when school reopened she had little time for anything but study. She was to finish in June, and the last year’s course was very difficult.
She graduated with flying colours, and Miss Tremont was so proud and excited that she took a day’s vacation. A week later Patience hinted that she thought she should be earning her own living; but Miss Tremont would not even discuss the subject. She fell into a rage every time it was broached, and Patience, who would have rebelled, had Miss Tremont been younger and stronger, submitted: she knew it would not be for long.
XII
Patience was languid all summer, and lay about in the woods, when she could, reading little and thinking much. Her school books put away forever, she felt for the first time that she was a woman, but did not take as much interest in herself as she had thought she should. She speculated a good deal upon her future career as a newspaper woman, and expended two cents every morning upon the New York “Day.” But she forgot to study it in the new interest it created: she had just the order of mind to succumb to the fascination of the newspaper, and she read the “Day’s” report of current history with a keener pleasure than even the great records of the past had induced. She longed for a companion with whom to talk over the significant tendencies of the age, and gazed upon Beverly Peele’s dome-like brow with a sigh.
Once, in the Sunday issue, she came upon a column and a half devoted to Rosita, “The Sweetheart of the Public,” “The Princess Royal of Opera Bouffe.” The description of the young prima donna’s home life, personal characteristics, and footlight triumphs, was further embellished by a painfully décolleté portrait, a lace night gown, a pair of wonderfully embroidered stockings, and a rosary.
Patience read the article twice, wondering why fame realised looked so different from the abstract quality of her imagination.
“Somehow it seems a sort of tin halo,” she thought. Then her thoughts drifted back to Monterey, and recalled it with startling vividness. “Still even if I haven’t forgotten it, it is like the memory of another life. Its only lasting effect has been to make me hate what is coarse and sinful; and dear auntie, even if she hasn’t converted me, has developed all my good.
“I wonder if Rosita has been in love, and if that is the reason she has forgotten me. But she hasn’t married, so perhaps it’s only adulation that has driven everything else out of her head.” And then with her eyes on the river, which under the heavy sky looked like a stream of wrinkling lead from which a coating of silver had worn off in places, she fell to dreaming of Beverly Peele and an ideal existence in which they travelled and read and assured each other of respectful and rarefied affection.