"Pooh!" I sneered. "Nietzsche was a rank woman-hater;" then I began my work on Mrs. Beacon's portrait, the fashionable Mrs. Beacon, and tried to forget all about the finer issues and the satisfied sterility of its ideals.
AN IBSEN GIRL
I
As Ellenora Vibert quietly descended the stairs of the apartment house in Harlem where she had lived with her husband until this hot morning in May, she wondered at her courage. She was taking a tremendous step, and one that she hoped would not be a backward one. She was leaving Arthur Vibert after a brief year of marriage for another man. Yet her pulse fluttered not, and before she reached the open doorway a mocking humor possessed her.
Her active brain pictured herself in the person of Ibsen's Nora Helmer. But Nora left children behind, and deserted them in hot blood; no woman could be cold after such a night in the Doll's House—the champagne, the tarantella, the letter and the scene with Torvald! No, she was not quite Nora Helmer; and Paul, her young husband, was hardly a Scandinavian bureaucrat. When Ellenora faced the cutting sunshine and saw Mount Morris Park, green and sweet, she stopped and pressed a hand to her hip. It was a characteristic pose, and the first inspiration of the soft air gave her peace and hardihood.
"I've been penned behind the bars too long," she thought. Arthur's selfish, artistic absorption in his musical work and needless indifference to the development of her own gifts must count no longer.
She was free, and she meant to remain so as long as she lived.
Then she went to the elevated railroad and entered a down-town train, left it at Cortlandt Street, reached the Pennsylvania depot before midday, and in the waiting-room met Paul Goddard. A few minutes later they were on the Philadelphia train. The second chapter of Ellenora Vibert's life began—and most happily.