She accepted her part in this existence as inevitable, yet she was persistently aware of a feeling of strangeness, of essential difference from it. She was unable to lose a sense of looking on, as if morning, noon and night she were at another long play. Linda regarded it—as she did so much else—with neither enthusiasm nor marked annoyance. Probably it would continue without change through her entire life. All that was necessary, and easily obtained, was a sufficient amount of money.
Her manner, Pansy specially complained, was not intimate and inviting; in her room Linda usually closed the door; the frank community of the sisters was distasteful to her. She demanded an extraordinary amount of personal privacy. Linda never consulted Judith's opinion about her clothes, nor exchanged the more significant aspects of feeling. Alone in a bed-chamber furnished in silvery Hungarian ash, her bed a pale quilted luxury with Madeira linen crusted in monograms, without head or foot boards, and a dressing-table noticeably bare, she would deliberately and delicately prepare for the night.
While Judith's morning bath steamed with the softness and odor of lavender crystals, Linda slipped into water almost cold. This, with her clear muslins and heavy black silk stockings, her narrow unornamented slippers, represented the perfection of niceness.
There were others than Pansy, however, who commented on what they called her superiority—the young men who appeared in the evening. A number of them, cousins of the Feldt dinner parties or more casual, tried to engage her sympathies in their persons and prospects. It was a society of early maturity. But, without apparent effort, she discouraged them, principally by her serene lack of interest. It was a fundamental part of her understanding of things that younger men were unprofitable; she liked far better the contemporaries of Moses Feldt.
Reynold Chase had ceased his visits, but his place had been taken by another and still another emotionally gifted man. The present one was dark and imperturbable: they knew little of him beyond the facts that he had been a long while in the Orient, that his manner and French were unsurpassed, and that practically every considerable creative talent in New York was entertained in his rooms.
Judith had been to one of his parties; and, the following morning in bed, she told Pansy and Linda the most remarkable things.
“It would never do for Pansy,” she concluded; “but I must get Markue to ask you sometime, Linda. How old are you now? Well, that's practically sixteen, and you are very grown up. You would be quite sensational, in one of your plain white frocks, in his apartment. You'd have to promise not to tell your mother, though. She thinks I'm leading you astray now—the old dear. Does she think I am blind? I met a man last week, a friend of father's, who used to know her. Of course he wouldn't say anything, men are such idiots about that—like ostriches with their pasts buried and all the feathers sticking out—but there was a champagne expression in his smile.”
Linda wondered, later, if she'd care to go to a party of Markue's. There was a great deal of drinking at such affairs; and though she rather liked cordials, crême de thé and Grand Marnier, even stronger things flavored with limes and an occasional frigid cocktail, she disliked—from a slight experience—men affected by drink. Judith had called her a constitutional prude; this, she understood, was a term of reproach; and she wondered if, applied to her, it were just.
Usually it meant a religious person or one fussy about the edge of her skirt; neither of which she ever considered. She didn't like to sit in a corner and be hugged—even that she could now assert with a degree of knowledge—but it wasn't because she was shocked. Nothing, she told herself gravely, shocked her; only certain acts and moments annoyed her excessively. It was as if her mind were a crisp dress with ribbons which she hated to have mussed or disarranged.
Linda didn't take the trouble to explain this. Now that her mother had withdrawn from her into a perpetual and uncomfortable politeness she confided in no one. She would have been at a loss to put her complicated sensations and thoughts into words. Mr. Moses Feldt, the only one to whom she could possibly talk intimately, would be upset by her feelings. He would give her a hug and the next day bring up a new present from his pocket.