She also felt considerable resentment at the approving glances and mutters of Topper (who knew when he was beaten; moreover, had succumbed to the culinary graces of the new cook), and the staccato applause of Polly Pleyden. But this, she ruthlessly informed herself, was egoistical resentment at the intimation that she had been sadly in need of improvement.
But for six years she had thought herself into the rôle of a boy, even pecked her mother on the cheek like a boy, and, in their worst moments, reassured Millicent with bluff crisp phrases instead of the usual feminine endearments; to the end she had scorned sentiment and demonstrations, and, to the amazement and disapproval of Mrs. Melrose, had not shed a tear at the sad little funeral on the desert. “Boys do cry, you know,” the kind but exasperated lady had observed, while indulging freely in tears for the friend of her youth. “If you will play a part why not be consistent about it?” But Gita, who was wishing herself in the grave with her mother, had merely looked straight ahead, with the expression, Mrs. Melrose told Ann later, of a wooden Indian.
She had been furious with herself more than once for her secret pride in her eyelashes and had considered mutilation, but after various specious excuses: the breaking of her mother’s heart, their value as a sun-screen, etc., she had finally admitted she would as readily cut off her nose. Once, when she caught herself examining her fine Carteret profile with the aid of a hand-mirror, she had thrown the glass out of the window and filched from her father’s vocabulary.
It had been a matter of will induced by a special neurosis, but the accomplishment had stopped just short of perfection, and the effort to make herself over into a girl with a girl’s easy grace of carriage and mental lineaments, made her feel bruised all over. It would have been almost as easy for a cripple to stand erect and run a race. She was not only disoriented but apprehensive. Her semi-masculine garb and mental posturing had been like a protective armor, absurd, perhaps, but inspiring her with security and confidence.
Now she felt, she grumbled to herself, like a knight whose armor had been ripped off by the enemy, a turtle that had lost its shell, a bandit who had gone out to hold up a train and discovered he had left his “guns” at home.
But—there was no denying it!—having deliberately let down the bars and made a bonfire of them, her vanity was acting like a hungry bear after a long winter’s sleep. It surged over her in singing waves as she regarded herself in the long mirror when arrayed for dinner in one of the soft clinging frocks that revealed arms and the upper part of a neck (Elsie scowled at models high in front and bare to the waist behind) that, however thin, were round and smooth and of the tint of old ivory. She smiled with lips very red and sharply curved, that had been reclaimed (under Elsie’s orders) from their perverse hard line; at her bright black eyes with their curved lids and lashes that under artificial light were reflected in the clear light olive and red of her cheeks; at the sweep of her eyebrows and the slender firmness of her throat.
And then she would fall into a panic and feel an impulse to crawl under the bed.
The morning following her first surrender to sheer femininity at the psyche mirror and its almost terrified reaction she hired a horse on the beach and spent two hours galloping over the sands. Here, at least, she could wear a manlike coat, and breeches, and ride astride.
Of all this she never spoke to Elsie Brewster, and if the agile mind of her mentor darted close to the truth, that wise young woman was content with her large measure of success and, if only out of delicacy and loyalty, probed no further.
She gave Gita all the time she could spare, dined with her frequently, encouraged her to come to the office on Atlantic Avenue, and took her on several buying expeditions to Philadelphia and New York. She sometimes felt like a sculptor with a promising but singularly uncertain piece of clay in his hands: clay with unmalleable lumps and responsive but slippery surfaces.