Elsie Marley, Honey

by Joslyn Gray

CHAPTER XXIII

Late one afternoon early in December, Miss Pritchard telephoned to Elsie to say that she would not be home to dinner as she was going directly from the office to see a friend who had been taken suddenly to a hospital. She was to dine in town on her way back and would be late home. Mr. Graham, whom Elsie would remember, had spoken of calling in the evening, and Miss Pritchard asked her to explain the circumstance to him and keep him until her return.

As she turned away from the telephone, Elsie sighed deeply. Mr. Graham's name stirred up uncomfortable recollections. In any case, much as she had admired and liked him, she would have dreaded meeting him again; and to entertain him alone for an indefinite period, with his undivided attention focussed upon her, seemed an ordeal not only to be dreaded but truly to be shunned.

Suppose he should refer again to her darling mother—as he surely would! Acting or no acting, the girl felt that she couldn't deny her again. Should she do so, it would be like the Palladium ceasing to stand and Troy falling. And yet, what was she to do? If she didn't hold to her statement of the summer, wouldn't she hazard spoiling everything, not only for herself, but for the Elsie at Enderby?

Too wretched to allow herself the comfort of the window-seat in the bow, Elsie dropped down on the floor before one of the long, low windows of the adjacent side of the room, and gazing drearily out into the dusky street, tried to prepare herself for an impromptu scene with the coming guest wherein the matter of extraordinary dimples or sticky babies might come up at any moment and be skilfully parried. But stage-fright, confusion, and tears threatened imminently, like an ugly nightmare, and she said to herself there was no use, she simply dared not face it.

The temptation came to her to avoid the whole encounter by going to bed at once. She certainly felt queer—almost faint; and when she should be missed at the dinner-table and some one came up to see what had happened, she could truly say she didn't feel able to see Mr. Graham, and send word that he was to wait for Miss Pritchard.

As she considered the suggestion, reaching the point where Cousin Julia came in, the girl's heart smote her. Cousin Julia would be startled—yes, frightened. What a wretch she was deliberately to plan to cause her utterly gratuitous anxiety! And how practised, how grounded, in deceit she had grown, to turn thereto so readily for help out of difficulty! How very far she was getting from her class motto, "Per aspera ad astra"! And she recollected a word, strange hitherto to her, which Cousin Julia had used in the summer. She had mentioned her hope, as she had looked forward to the coming of the real Elsie Marley, that she shouldn't have, at sixteen, become inveterate in the ways of the Pritchard family. Well, wasn't she fast becoming inveterate in the ways of deceit? Wasn't she, perhaps, already inveterate? Truly, she must be perilously near it. And oh, wasn't this a far, far worse sort of inveterateness than the Pritchard sort? And if Cousin Julia had dreaded that, how, pray, would she feel in regard to this?

Rising suddenly, Elsie rushed into her own room as if she were running away from the visions she had conjured. As she made herself tidy for dinner, her desperation grasped at a third expedient, a middle way. Couldn't she get around the difficulty by preventing or forestalling the introduction of any doubtful topic into the conversation? During the time that would elapse between Mr. Graham's arrival and Cousin Julia's return—three-quarters of an hour at the longest, she supposed—she would keep him from bringing up any matter of resemblances, of big dimples, of madonnas, or sticky babies. She would monopolize the conversation, so far as she could, and direct it all the time. At the risk of utterly losing the good opinion of one of Cousin Julia's most valued friends, of appearing forward, conceited, tiresome, she would rattle on like the empty-headed society girl in certain modern plays. She would introduce utterly impersonal subjects, such as—at the moment she couldn't think of anything but prohibition, which would last about two minutes—and chatter foolishly and fast upon them, one after another. Then, if she exhausted them and all else failed, she would make such pointed and brazen references to her own singing that he would be obliged to ask her to sing—and once going, she could easily keep that up until Cousin Julia came to the rescue. And she certainly wouldn't sing "Elsie Marley" nor anything that would in any way remind Mr. Graham of it. Either she would shock that elegant gentleman's taste with the ugliest of ragtime, or she would inflict him with a succession of the operatic selections she had taken up with Madame Valentini. The latter choice would probably, upon Miss Pritchard's arrival, serve to bring up the unhappy matter of her abandoning the stage for music, but that would be a minor evil.

Mr. Graham appeared promptly at the hour Miss Pritchard had predicted, and Elsie greeted him in the rôle she had chosen and proceeded to give him a gushing account of their journey back to New York at the end of the summer. The artist, who had looked forward to seeing again the charming little creature who had been such a vision of grace and loveliness as she had sung and danced on the hotel veranda that summer day, was surprised and dismayed at the change, the almost distressing change, that had come upon the girl meantime. At first he took it for granted that it was the coarsening effect of studying for the stage, but very shortly he had decided otherwise. Whatever his skill in reproduction, Charles Graham had the eye, the mind, and the heart of the portrait-painter; and now he read the little actress's behavior with a good measure of precision. Her restlessness, her chattering, the high, unpleasing pitch of her naturally lovely low voice, her assumption of the manner and speech of the blasé young person of the stage, he saw to be primarily the cover of nervousness. He understood that the girl was troubled about something, was perhaps suffering, and tried to conceal it in this way. Moreover, he felt that, whatever it was, she was bearing it altogether alone, hiding it from everybody.

So far, so good. But presently he jumped to a false conclusion. As he referred casually to Miss Pritchard as an inveterate optimist, suddenly all the color died out of the girl's face, the shadow in her eyes became momentarily genuine distress, and the bravado dropped from her manner. It struck him that there was some misunderstanding between his friend and her young cousin. And the pain this realization brought him was curiously acute.