V. V.'s Eyes

by Henry Sydnor Harrison

And then, bowling homeward in the brisk airs, she could return to her own thoughts again, which, as by the rubbing of an Aladdin's lamp, had suddenly become so happy and so absorbing. Later, she must think about mamma, and with what time and solaces she could close that breach. But in these hours her thought was all for her father, whom she seemed just to be beginning to understand for the first time in her life....

Now all the imaginative dreads and nightmare terrors were faded away, and she felt beneath her feet the solid sanity of Hugo's self. She had seen the Works on an exceptionally bad day; she had gone there, overdrawn and ignorant, looking for horrors; what she had actually seen and felt had been mysteriously intensified a hundredfold by her violent encounter with Colonel Dalhousie. For all that she knew, to this very moment, the Works might be, indeed (as the beautifully tactful girl Corinne had said), the best place to work in town.

But what Cally was thinking now was that, in sitting in judgment on her father, she had blindly judged him as if he were a free man--she, of all people, who had felt so poignantly the imprisoning powers of a groove. Now it appeared, as by a sudden light upon him, that papa had always been clamped fast in a groove of his own, exactly as she had been; a groove fixed for him by his place in society, by the way other men ran their cheroot factories,--for, of course, papa must do as his competitors did, or be crowded out, and the hardest-driving, meanest man set the pace for the kind ones, like papa,--and last and chiefly by the extravagances of a wife and daughter who always cried "give, give," and didn't care at all where the gifts came from. How could papa possibly be free with two costly women on his back all the time?... Strange that she hadn't grasped all this clearly, the minute she had recognized herself as a horse-leech's daughter....

Now the first thing to do, obviously, was to get off papa's back at once. Her fifty thousand dollars would be a sound starter there; of course papa would take it, since she wanted him to so much. And her mind, as she drove, kept recurring to this symbol, kept bringing up pictures of the new Works that would be, built perfect with her money. She saw it considerably like the beautiful marble palace of her childhood's thought, the pride of Canal Street without, and within wonderfully clean, spacious and airy, and most marvellously fragrant. In this new palace of labor, faints and swoons were things undreamed of. Trim, smiling, pretty girls, all looking rather like French maids in a play, happily plied their light agreeable tasks; and, in especial, the cheeks of poor Miller (who had stoutened gratifyingly) were observed to blossom like the rose.

Yet the creator of all these wonders was well aware that she was not giving her dowry to Miller, exactly....

Descending from the car at her own door, Cally encountered Mr. Pond, of the Settlement. The dark-faced Director was loafing, oddly enough, on Mrs. Mason's steps, which had once been Mr. Beirne's, four doors from home. He raised his hat about two inches at the sight of her, returned his watch and some typewritten papers to his pocket, and came forward.

"Don't run," said he, unsmiling. "I want to know plainly whether or not you are coming to my meeting to-morrow. Yes or no."

Cally laughed gaily. There was a radiance within her, and she liked this man increasingly. Several times they had met, since their antagonistic talk at the Settlement; and in the blunt Director's manner she had lately observed that creeping change which she had witnessed in men as stalwart, before now....

"Don't look so fierce," said she, "for I'll not be bullied. Or at least not till you explain why you're hanging around in front of the neighbors' at twelve o'clock in the morning--you who always pretend to be so frightfully busy."

"Waiting for Vivian. And I am busy, confound him.... Not too busy, as you see, to take a kind interest in your welfare--"