V
Mona Milton was what the French, with their feeling for nuance, would call "fausse-maigre"; she gave an impression of slenderness which her solidly-built figure contradicted. She was partial to draperies and that, perhaps, created the illusion of diaphaneity. Her health was excellent. Not even at the time when women are 'minions of the moon' did she relapse into that forlorn flabbiness noticeable even to the ordinary obtuse male. Her mother had reared her in the old-fashioned way and had put the fear of God in her heart (read: human respect for the polite conventions of a rapidly disintegrating social hierarchy). But her father, who called himself agnostic, had quietly pooh-poohed his wife's solicitousness regarding the little virtues. Hedges to be vaulted if needs must, he told his daughter, the chief companion of his long tramps through Central Park, when it was a green, delightful retreat from the city's menacing encroachment. Truth is stranger than morals, he also said. Mona loved the park. Every day saw her reading or walking through the less-footed by-ways. For her, mornings were mysteries. She would sit in the sun for hours, a book in her lap, her eyes dreaming. Her sub-conscious life was struggling for self-recognition. Her ego was transformed after puberty announced itself. She was an orchestra of cells; the multiplicity of her egos astonished, yet did not distress her. She accepted the new stream of consciousness in her that had burst its barriers and painted over her imagination a fresher, more beautiful world. Of physiology and psychology she had more than the rudiments. Sex did not puzzle her, only its cabined seclusion from the general current of daily life. Her mother had been frank with her since she had reached the age of curiousness; in turn Mona was frank with her father. She asked him questions that she would not ask her mother and he answered them unhesitatingly. He believed that insincerity cloaked a multitude of stupidities. One day when she was hardly sixteen she said: "Papa, why do I love dolls so much?" "The maternal instinct," he had replied. "Oh, yes, anybody knows that, but why am I different from other girls?" "Different, my dear?" "Yes, different. I haven't one friend who loves dolls. They are fond of dogs but laugh at me when I dress and undress my darling doll. Lydia Fuller says I'll be married at eighteen and have twins at nineteen—maybe sooner," added Mona, pensively. The old man only shook his head and resumed his Schopenhauer.
The rearing of the girl, withal superficial, covered a wide variety of authors and subjects. She knew French fiction so well that she couldn't become interested in the hypocritical half-way house of English-writing novelists. What's the use of writing about life, she complained to her mother, and leave life out of the story? The scabrous element in Gallic light literature amused her, but she preferred Flaubert to Paul de Kock, Balzac to Zola. Memoirs enchained her fancy. The utterances and actions of real men and women appealed. Casanova, who has left the world its most frank and complete autobiography, was for Mona as is romance to other girls of her age; Casanova, Benvenuto Cellini and the Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon. Rabelais she dismissed and for Benjamin Constant and Stendhal she only entertained mild respect. She admired the electric energy of Julien Sorel and Mathilde de la Môle, but they left her cold. As for the pessimists, Senacour, Amiel and them that confide to diaries, their pen dipped in their own salty tears, she spoke contemptuously. Weaklings, all. What if they did write charmingly? She longed for virility; that spelled charm for her. The more violent pages in the Old Testament, Shakespeare and Faust; but she held the revelation of the New Testament in moderate esteem. Too much oriental fatalism. Too much turning the "other cheek," to please her. The person of Christ seemed apochryphal. Such a man couldn't exist twenty-four hours without being killed on our murder-loving planet. Notwithstanding all these contradictions in her undeveloped character, Mona was far from being an "advanced" young woman; indeed, her classmates at college had voted her desperately old-fashioned; worse—a womanly woman. Secretly she wished that her soul could be like a jungle at night, filled with the cries of monstrous sins. But it wasn't.
She continued to love her doll, not that she disliked cats and dogs and birds, only that the doll, the simulacrum of the future child, touched her to her innermost fibres. She had the brother-cult, yet she loved no one, except her father, so much as the absurdly big French doll, the last of a long line dating back to her babyhood, that slept with her every night. The old folks were at first amused, then edified by this stubborn reaction to a profound instinct. In time they became accustomed to seeing a staring wax effigy on the pillow of their daughter's couch, attired in a neat nightdress and lace cap. Ah, well! had said the father, it is a premonitory symptom, yet she is happier now, dear child, than she will be with her future husband. Considering her self-effacing nature, the reply of his wife was rather tart: "If you read less Schopenhauer you wouldn't be so prejudiced against my sex. To hear you talk one might suppose that your married life had been a vale of tears." To which the old man humbly and affectionately replied: "Instead of a bed of roses, as it is," and surprised his spouse by warmly kissing her.
They didn't forbid Mona the company of young men but she made no attempt to meet anyone. Her brother was away most of the time at the seminary and his friends were theological students, neuter persons she evaded rather than despised. Voluntary eunuchs, enemies of the very source of life, she felt uncomfortable in their presence, as she would have been embarrassed if a hermaphrodite had been pointed out to her. The unnatural was merely a mediaeval idea, but the anti-natural was to be feared and avoided. She did not say this to her brother, who in her eyes was a saint, but she said as much to her father who sympathised with her. Another confusion in her mind was the degrading of the major instinct of life—after hunger; Reproduction. If, as the Bible says, fornication is a rank sin, why do a few words mumbled over a man and woman by a clergyman or magistrate make it less a sin? It's the same vile act isn't it, even in marriage? Her mother was more shocked at her expression than at the idea which prompted it—an idea as old as the hills. "But Mona, people don't think such things, much less speak them." "They do mother. There isn't a girl in the world who hasn't had this same thought, though she may keep it in the secret cabinet of her mind." Her mother shook her head but didn't dare speak of sin, or redemption or the holy sacrament of matrimony instituted by the Church to bless the most animal of the functions, to lend it dignity, to create a safeguard for the children, not to mention the fact that this sacrament screens the shock and doubts and hesitations of pure-minded girls, to whom physical union with a man would be otherwise repulsive. No, this "theological bric-à-brac" as Mr. Milton called the tenets of religion, his wife had been forbidden to speak of to her children. Her son was to her a surprise, like a swan hatched from a brood of ducklings, and now Mona was beginning to disquiet her. A good girl, a loving dutiful daughter—nevertheless, disquieting because of her absolutely natural attitude toward forbidden themes, so natural that she often embarrassed her mother.
"Mother," she had abruptly exclaimed about this time, "Mother, I wonder why brother is so inclined to piety. He should have been the girl, I the boy. Mother—I am beginning to believe that something was wrong in your marriage—" "Oh!" ejaculated the unhappy woman, who didn't know what terrible speech would follow: "I firmly believe, you dear old fraidcat Mother, that papa has never been unfaithful to you since you two darling old sillies were married." Mrs. Milton refused to unbend during an entire evening.
VI
After Ulick had given his hat and stick to the garderobe he walked through the café to the dining room on the University Place side. Martin's was his favourite rendezvous. The cuisine, the cellar, the service, were the best in town. Ulick lived at the Maison Felicé, but liked a change of menu and venue. He was known at Martin's and was soon taken to a window table when, astonished, he noted his immediate neighbor. She held out her hand: "Such coincidences do occur, outside of novels," she said. He sank into a seat facing her. "May I?" he begged. She nodded. Mona was fond of good things to eat. At home if the cook had served stewed potato-peelings her parents would have meekly swallowed them. They had little appetite for food or drink, none at all for the finer shades of cookery for the gentle art of the gourmet. Mona went daily into the kitchen and conspired in company with the cook; therefore, she occasionally ate something that had flavour. But when she was hard-pressed by artistic hunger, as she called it, she walked down the Avenue to 9th Street, there turned eastward and reached Martin's, always in a famished condition.
"You haven't ordered, have you, Miss Milton?" asked Ulick. She shook her head, negatively. He beckoned to the captain of the dining-room and after some whispering a waiter was instructed. No wine was commanded, neither drank wine. Vichy Celestins and wonderful coffee with cream made their appearance in company with French rolls and butter, followed by a variation on the theme of eggs—oeufs à la Martin—then a filet de sole au gratin—and a Chateaubriand steak with a Salade Russe—good heavens, mused the girl, he has a master-palate. It was true. Ulick, despite his fondness for mince pie and Philadelphia scrapple, could not endure the national cuisine. We are barbarians compared with the French, he openly asserted, who know how to eat, drink and think.