But although, after her graduation, she went out to dinners, she refused to go to parties, since that would have meant dancing, and she recoiled from contact with even these innocuous young men. Not, as she was aware, that she would have been importuned for dances, for the boys had “no use for her,” she was a “highbrow,” wasn’t a “regular girl,” “ought to have been a boy and tried to look like one.” The girls, with whom she was popular, tried to give her “points,” but desisted when they understood that her dislike of men was sincere, although they did not guess the cause. If she could have brought herself to tell the story of both her surface and her psychic life to these wise maidens, no doubt they would have blown the chaff from the wheat with their laughing common sense, told her to “forget it,” remember that youth was the only thing that mattered, and, when she had had a good time for a year or two, marry and have a baby. But Gita would rather have gone out into the breakers at the Cliff House and drowned herself than to have revealed the festering sores in her soul to anyone. And no less than three noxious experiences with married men, fascinated by her vivid youth and intolerance of their sex, extinguished any possibility she may have unconsciously cherished of forgetting the past.
Upon one occasion only did she appear to attract a “boy.” He had made an average record in the war, was the son of a rich man, and although he “played about” with the girls he “fell for” none of them. The other young men disliked and criticized him, but the girls retorted that he was too good a dancer and mah-jongg player to lose. One night he met Gita at a dinner, and more than once she saw him watching her with covert speculation. Later, with considerable finesse for a San Francisco youth, he lured her into the conservatory, and after telling her admiringly that she looked the real thing and made chromos of the other dear little daisies, seized her in his arms and tried to kiss her. He received an abraded shin, a scratch across his cheek, and a loosened front tooth, which sent him cursing out of her presence to find an exit at the back of the house. They met some weeks later and he said airily: “My mistake. Sorry. Hope you’ll forget it.” But she knew that he hated her and looked exultingly at the gold band across his front teeth.
The girls discussed her psychoanalytically and decided she had a complex, induced no doubt by resentment that she had not been born a boy. On the other hand she had not “rushed” any of them and was anything but masculine, in spite of her funny little swagger and lack of feminine adornment. Ann Melrose came nearer the truth. “She is so precocious on one side of her that she may have had a desperate love-affair at the age of sixteen, and the man turned out a rotter. Did something that horrified her. But if she doesn’t mend her ways she’ll never give any other man the chance to administer the right kind of shock. She’s about as approachable as a hedgehog and as adaptable as a wire fence. ’Fraid she’s got too much brains and not enough common sense. Something gave her a bad twist. That’s good enough for me. I’m sick of psycho. Too bad! She’s a game kid and as straight as they come. Wonder how she’ll turn out.”
When Gita was nineteen misfortune once more fell upon them. The trustee of the small estate, failing in his wooing of Millicent, absconded with all but the house, which was mortgaged. Life was gray once more. They took in lodgers, dismissed the cook, and did their own work. Gita saw less of her friends, although they ran in every few days and occasionally made the beds. Millicent’s friends sent her hampers from the country and carried her off now and then for a day in San Mateo, Menlo Park, Burlingame, or San Rafael. One of her old beaux proposed for the fifth time since her arrival, but Millicent had had her fill of marriage. Moreover, she knew that if she married again she would lose her daughter; of whom, although she was a rather silly woman, she had a considerable understanding.
The enterprise was not a success. The lodgers either made love to their pretty landlady or did not pay their rent and had to be evicted. Finally Gita turned them all out and took in only women; to find that some were respectable and others not. Recommendations were easily forged. After a scandal Millicent sold the house for a little more than the mortgage and accepted the position of housekeeper to one of her friends in San Mateo, while Gita taught French and Italian to a class of youngsters hastily assembled. Neither would accept invitations for “long visits until something turns up.”
Gita, saw her friends constantly once more although she refused to go to dinners or luncheons. Her clothes barely held together, and they dared not offer her presents. But she learned to ride, to play tennis, to swim (in pools), and her naturally robust health, which had been impaired by too much confinement and hard indoor work, was restored.
By this time Millicent’s spirit was broken and her strength had been failing for some time. Gita took her to a sanitarium for the tubercular on the California desert, paying the expenses with the few hundreds left from the sale of the house. On her death-bed Millicent wrote to Mrs. Carteret.
CHAPTER III
The tide was coming in. Gita realized that she was cold and rather tired. She ran along the beach to quicken her blood, then took a trolley to the mainland. As she walked up the avenue of the manor she saw a motor standing before the door of the house and hoped she would be able to slip upstairs to her room unseen. The elderly and middle-aged daughters of her grandmother’s contemporaries did not interest her and she was inclined to pay little heed to the old lady’s adhortations to lose no time making friends in her new life. She had been at the manor a month and not met anyone of her own age. Few of any other. She saw her grandmother in brief interviews only, for the nurse maintained that this alien relative excited the invalid.
As she was stepping carefully over the old rugs of the hall she sniffed a familiar aroma, and then observed that the door of the drawing-room was open, and that a blind had evidently been raised. She had entered this room only once, on the day after her arrival, when curiosity had led her to explore the cradle of her ancestors. She had felt no inclination to visit it again. It was immense and dark and dreary, paneled with mahogany to the ceiling and crowded with ill-assorted furniture representing every period from 1660 to 1880. She assumed that her grandmother’s funeral would be held in its musty grandeur and after that it would be less inviting than ever.