“And what made you think I could make such girls my friends?” she asked, lightly reproachful, with an air of quietly posing her cousin, and even in this pleasant little phrase Gay detected the pretty pride in herself, her line, her blood, her code and intelligence and judgment that indeed actuated all that Sylvia did. “No, the Montallens are—unusual,” Sylvia added, half to herself. “And so,” she said, smiling, as she dextrously pinned up her rich black braid, “so it was all the nicer that they should like my cousin Gabrielle! Tell me,” she went on, “how do things go here? Are you happy—getting nicely rested? Not too lonely?”
“Rested?” Gay echoed, at a loss.
“Between school,” Sylvia explained, “and—and what?”
She said the last word with a really winning and interested smile, and sat looking expectantly at Gay, with an air almost motherly.
“Or have you plans?” she elucidated, as Gay looked puzzled. “Is there something you tremendously want to do? If you are like me,” Sylvia added, now with just a hint of academic enlightenment in her voice, “you have forty, instead of one! I almost wish sometimes that I had to choose what I would do. I adore teaching! I love languages. I’d love anything to do with books—old books, reviewing books, library work, even bindings. My professor of economics wants me to go after a doctor’s degree and my English man wants me to write books. So there you are! And here is David telling me that I must learn to manage my own estate.”
Gay flushed, and hated herself for flushing. She had often enough, in the last quiet weeks, thought that she would like to work, to do anything rather than dream through all her quiet days at Wastewater; she had thought vaguely of little tea shops with blue cotton runners, and the companionship of some little girl of fourteen who would adore her—of offices—schools——
But embarrassed and taken by surprise, with her thoughts in no sort of order, she stammered, half laughingly, she knew not why, that she had thought she might like to be an actress. Sylvia’s look of astonishment was so perfectly what it should have been that Gay felt even less comfortable than before.
“But, my dear child,” she said, amusedly, “I don’t believe that would be practical! We have—absolutely—no connections in that line, you know. And you’re quite too young. I don’t mean,” Sylvia went on, kindly, as Gay, hot-cheeked, was silent, very busy with night ribbons, “I don’t mean that it isn’t a splendid profession for some women. But it takes character, it takes experience, associations. What makes you feel that you are fitted for it? Have you—you can’t have!—seen more than a dozen plays in your life?”
“I just thought of it!” Gay said, with an uncomfortable laugh.
“Then I think I should just stop thinking of it!” Sylvia said. And with an affectionate arm about Gay’s waist, she nodded toward the thick rope of tawny braided hair. “Such pretty hair. Gay!”