Daily new demands are being made upon me, new opportunities opening, new friendships being formed, and though my new friends are very interesting to me, I hardly think they would be to Kitty. I rarely speak of them to her.
Miss Hardy, the woman labor inspector for the state, a girl who had worked in various factories since she was twelve and who had gotten her education at a night school, where often she fell asleep at her desk, I find both entertaining and instructing, but Kitty would not care for her. She wears spectacles, and Kitty has an unyielding antipathy for women who wear spectacles. Neither would she care for Miss Bayne, another state employee, a clever, capable woman who is an expert in her line. It is her business to discover feeble-mindedness, to test school children, and inmates of institutions to which they have been sent, or of places to which they have gone because of incapacity or delinquency or sin of any sort; and nothing I have read in books has been so revealing concerning conditions that exist as her frank statements simply told.
In my sitting-room at Scarborough Square she comes in frequently for tea with me, and meets there Fannie Harris, the teacher of an open-air school for the tuberculosis children of our neighborhood; and Martha White, the district nurse for our particular section; meets Miss Hay, a probation officer of the Juvenile Court, and Loulie Hill, a girl from the country who had once gone wrong, and who is now trying to keep straight on five dollars a week made in the sewing-room of one of the city's hospitals. Bettie Flynn, who lives at the City Home because of epileptic fits, also comes in occasionally. Bettie is a friend of Mrs. Mundy. Owing to kinlessness and inability to care for herself, owing, also, to there being nowhere else to which she could go, she has been forced to enter the Home. Her caustic comments on its management are of a clear-cut variety. Bettie was born for a satirist and became an epileptic. The result at times is speech that is not guarded, a calling of things by names that are their own.
These and various others who are facing at short range realities of which I have long been personally ignorant, are taking me into new worlds, pumping streams of new understandings, new outreaches, into my brain and heart, and life has become big and many-sided, and a thing not to be wasted. Myself of the old life I am seeing as I never saw before, seeing in a perspective that does not fill with pride.
Last night I went to my first dinner-party since Aunt Matilda's death. In Kitty's car I watched with interest, on the way to her house, the long stretches of dingy streets, then cleaner ones, with their old and comfortable houses; the park, with its bare trees and shrubs, and finally the Avenue, with its smooth paving and pretentious homes, its hurrying cars of luxurious make, its air of conscious smartness. As contrast to my present home it interested greatly.
Kitty's house is very beautiful. She is that rare person who knows she does not know, and the house, bought for her by her father as a wedding-gift, she had put in the hands of proper authorities for its furnishings. It is not the sort of home I would care to have, but it is undeniably handsome, and undoubtedly Kitty understands the art of entertaining.
Her dinner-party was rather a large one, its honor guest an English writer whose books are unendurably dull; but any sort of lion is helpful in reducing social obligations, and for that purpose Kitty had captured him. She insisted on my coming, but begged me not to mention horrid things, like poor people and politics and babies who died from lack of intelligent care, but to talk books.
"So few of the others talk books, except novels, and he thinks most modern novels rotten," she had told me over the telephone. "So please come and splash out something about these foreign writers whose names I can't remember. Bergyson is one, I believe, and Brerr another, and France-Ana—Ana something France. He's a man. And there's another one. Mater. . . Yes, that's it. Maeterlinck. And listen: Wear that white crepe you wore at my wedding; it's frightfully plain, but all your other things are black. I don't see why you still wear black. Aunt Matilda hated it."
As I went up-stairs to take off my wraps I smiled at Kitty's instructions. In her room she hastily kissed me.
"Do hurry and come down. I'm so afraid he'll come before the others, and I might have to talk to him. Literary people are the limit, and this one, they say, is the worst kind. Billy refuses to leave his room until you go down; says he'd rather be sent to jail than left alone with him ten minutes. He met him at the club."