“I shall never marry. Might as well make up your mind to it, grandmother.”
The old lady sighed heavily, although her eyes flashed with temper. “Well! I shan’t live long enough to see you come to your senses; but just mark my words: you are a woman, a female, as you choose to call it, much as you may resent the fact; and trying to look like a boy does not make you one. You may hold yourself like a ramrod, but you have a graceful body if it is as thin as a plank, and the fine points of the Carterets. You have a lovely round throat and your eyelashes would make any boy ridiculous. Oh, yes, you are a girl, my dear, you are a girl. Don’t grind your teeth. It’s bad for the enamel. Now run out and take a walk. It’s time for my nap—and I hear the starched petticoats of that nurse.”
CHAPTER II
Gita stood with her hands in the pockets of her sport skirt surveying the old manor house from the drive. It was built of oblong blocks of stone obviously cemented together in the fashion of so many Northern Colonial mansions: a great square box of a house, surmounted by a gabled roof; without architectural grace but solid and imposing, and immune to the elements and time. The gardener was as old as her grandmother and the lawns were thin, the rose-bushes and other flowering plants looked as senile as himself. But the pine woods on three sides were beautiful and dim and old, and Gita was conscious of a thrill of pride in her inheritance. She frowned, then shrugged her shoulders philosophically.
“Why not? It’s all I’ve got. And perhaps a background is something to lean against, anyhow.” She would not admit that she had felt curiously at home from the hour of her arrival.
She sauntered out of the park and across the bridge of the Thoroughfare, a narrow body of salt water dividing the mainland from the most famous of its islands. Atlantic City amused her, but she did not turn toward the town. Some distance to the south, below the hotels, the Boardwalk had been demolished during a storm uncommonly heavy for even that wild part of the Atlantic coast; with its record, during the days of sailing vessels, of thousands of wrecks and bodies washed ashore, of evil men and false lights and ghouls crouching in wait.
Since the disaster to this end of the promenade it was deserted by idle saunterers. Walking briskly, sometimes running, with elbows pressed close to her sides, Gita made directly for this solitary spot and sat down on the sands, embracing her knees and staring out at the tossing ocean. Gradually her hard spine drooped forlornly, and although she scorned tears and self-pity, her mouth relaxed into the soft and charming curves of her youth. She felt small and desolate and alone. What was a dilapidated old manor to a girl who had been deprived of a far more significant birthright? If she could have grown up in that old place, a Carteret of the Carterets, she would have been a normal innocent girl, full of hope and day-dreams and every kind of delightful nonsense. At twenty-two she had not an illusion, and a horror and hatred of life. And her mother, the one person she had ever been able to care for, the one person who had it in her power to make her feel young and human and necessary, was dead.
More than once she had taken herself to task, scowled ferociously at her distorted ego. Common sense dictated that she should ignore her unfortunate experience of life as too uncommon to warp any educated woman’s viewpoint, readjust, reorient, herself. Other girls had had unfortunate experiences—but not hers. Not hers.
Her earliest memory was of Paris . . . an old detached house in Passy . . . a constant uproar downstairs that kept her awake in the nursery under the roof . . . ribald laughter and singing, brawls, banging doors all over the house. . . . Sometimes she would hang over the banisters in her nightgown, shivering with cold, fretful but curious. . . . Her mother with white desperate face, running up the stairs, snatching the child, darting into the nearest room, locking the door . . . a man running after her . . . mumbling at the keyhole, cursing. . . . Gerald Carteret, later, pounding on the door, commanding her to return to his guests and not make a silly little fool of herself. . . . Her mother’s terrified sobbing, then quailing obedience lest he keep his threat and break down the door.
And moving, always moving. As Gita grew older she learned that her father and his guests not only drank and caroused but gambled, sometimes all day as all night . . . that his friends persecuted her mother, whom they called the Blonde Madonna. She received little protection from her husband, with whom, nevertheless, she was at that time infatuated; she hated him later. Gita begged her mother to leave him and return to San Francisco, but this seemed a poor alternative to the tormented Millicent. Her parents were dead, her only relative was an aunt, whom she disliked. She had no desire to return to a city, where, in her first season, and to the envy of the other girls, she had captured the handsome and dashing Easterner, visiting polo friends in Burlingame. Now they thought of her as living brilliantly in Europe, although it must have struck them as odd sometimes that they never were able to communicate with her in their many trips abroad.