The Crystal Cup

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

Moreover, a wife’s duty was to her husband, no matter what he might be. Even at the age of ten Gita sniffed. But her lovely mother was the one perfect being in a too imperfect world, and if she said it was right to live with a man who was intoxicated most of the time, hit her, subjected her to every form of insult, then right it must be. But she conceived a strong distaste for husbands and abominated her father, informing him more than once she wished he were dead. He would scowl or grin down at the small child, straight and defiant, and smack her or toss her to the ceiling, according to his mood.

Carteret was an unlucky gambler, on the whole, and lived “on the interest of his debts,” after his own and his wife’s inheritances had expired. When his creditors became too pressing he bundled his family out in the night and set up in another capital. When fortune ran with him he was charming and generous; when luck jibed he struck his wife, his child, his servants, whoever got in his raging way, raved like a madman, then collapsed in drunken tears at his Madonna’s feet and implored her forgiveness. . . .

Gita hated him increasingly, hated the other men, with their well-bred dissipated faces, who persecuted her mother . . . in time herself. . . . Herself! These were the ugliest and most indelible memories of all. . . .

This life, in which the war made no appreciable difference, ended abruptly when Gita was sixteen. Gerald Carteret died of typhoid fever in a French provincial town where he was hiding from his creditors. Gita sold her grandmother Sears’ engagement-ring, the only remaining jewel, and buried him thankfully; then sat for three months at her mother’s bedside in the charity ward of a hospital, exercising her will frantically to keep life in her mother’s exhausted body; a poor family in the neighborhood keeping life in her own.

Mrs. Carteret recovered and the two faced starvation. Then for her child’s sake Millicent wrote to her aunt, and received much scornful criticism in return, more sound advice, and a promise of a hundred dollars a month.

After that life was a succession of cheap pensions, with poor food, dingy company, and always some idle husband who made love to the indestructibly charming Millicent; to the expressed indignation of his wife. Constant peregrinations interfered with Gita’s schooling but she received an education of sorts. She was quick at languages and had ample opportunity to pick them up. As men ogled her on the street as well as in the pensions she abandoned the graceful languid carriage that had been a part of her anxious training, throwing back her shoulders and striding along like a stiff young soldier on parade; finally, to her mother’s wailing accompaniment, cut off her abundant black hair.

“I should have been a boy anyhow,” she told the superlatively feminine Millicent. “It was a horrid mistake of Nature. Then I not only could have taken you out of this rotten poverty-stricken life one day, and given you lovely gowns and delicate food, but I could have stood up to these awful men that annoy you.”

When she was seventeen the old aunt died and left her small fortune and the house built by the first Sears to adventure in California, to “my only remaining relative and not unloved niece, Millicent Sears Carteret.” The heiress decided to leave Europe, which she frankly hoped never to see again, and take her child to San Francisco. It was far from Carteret Manor, pride had gone the way of vanity, and she longed for her old friends; moreover, Gita could finish her education and have proper associates for the first time.

In San Francisco Gita was almost happy for two years. She enjoyed her school, the cool electric climate, the magnificent views, the drifting fogs, the long walks over the hills, and the Chinese cook’s admirable confections. Millicent’s friends were as faithful as she had anticipated, and Gita drifted into a semi-intimacy with girls who filled her at first with wonder and then with emulation. They were very modern young people, with the wisdom of the serpent, a fixed intent to do as they pleased, and a canny ability to take care of themselves. Gita, with her extensive and barely interrupted knowledge of the nocuous side of life and the hideous lust of men, at times felt old enough to be their grandmother, at others like the little sister of these amused and cynical maidens. Her mother had inculcated obedience, to one’s maternal parent, at least, as the first law of nature, and the only time Gita had ever defied her was when she had done her best to transform herself into a boy. She had been as severely chaperoned as was possible and admonished against all things unladylike, particularly cigarettes. It had been unnecessary to warn her against too free a manner with men as she hated all men, and never danced as she would have preferred to be embraced by a snake; but the consequence was that she had not the most elementary knowledge of flirtation.

Flirtation, however, she was informed by her new friends, was out of date. Past was the day of subtle methods, of practiced coquetry, of recourse to every feminine device to win and keep a man, while he, poor dupe, played the hollow rôle of hunter. The girls called the “boys” up on the telephone as often as the boys called them, and even took them out to restaurants and paid the bill. This was the day of fifty-fifty, of equality of the sexes. Gita looked in vain for romance, still in a measure the mainspring of fiction. But these girls laughed at the word, in spite of the movies, where, in the intervals between parties, they took their followers of an evening; conversation, apparently, was among the lost arts. One young married woman told Gita casually that her husband, after a more or less desultory wooing, suggested they “hitch up,” and she had accepted him, not because she liked him better than several others, but because his type pleased her, she was in the mood to marry, and wanted a baby. By this time Gita had ceased to blush at a frankness which would have horrified her mother, and at one time herself, accustomed to the finesse of Europeans (when sober); and, with the plasticity of youth, superimposed something of a new self upon what she had believed to be a finished and permanent structure.