It occurred to Ellen that Miss Schönberg, with remarkable speed, had undertaken the position of guide and messenger toward the heights of success. She was like a trainer who had taken in charge a new animal to teach it a whole set of tricks. She did not protest, because Rebecca Schönberg did not annoy her; on the contrary she was vastly amusing. In her restless energy there was a quality akin to the vitality of Ellen herself. They went everywhere; they saw everything; they absorbed the people about them, and returned late at night as fresh as they had started.
“Vitality,” observed Rebecca, as they lunched at the Ritz on the day she left for Riga, “is nine-tenths of success. With one grain of genius and nine of vitality, any one can succeed.”
As she made this observation, she regarded Ellen with an intense and speculative scrutiny. The girl was looking about her with a naïve interest in the people who sat near them. Her whole manner was one of a vast wonder, as if she thought, “I, Ellen Tolliver, lunching at the Ritz in Paris. It is not possible that I am awake!” Miss Schönberg must have seen that she was still a bit crude, still not quite free of the multitude, but she had an unmistakable air, a certain distinction born in her which had to do with the superb poise of the head, the slight arch of the nose and the line of the throat. It had been sharpened and polished mysteriously during the few months in Paris. The clothes were right for her style ... simple almost to severity, fitting the tall, strong, energetic body to perfection. They came from dressmakers, Miss Schönberg reflected, who knew their business. Madame Shane must have had taste to have guided the girl so well. A touch here and there and she would be perfect. What she lacked was a sense of the bizarre which the public expected from artists. There was plenty of time to accomplish that....
“As I was saying,” continued Miss Schönberg, over her coupe marron, “vitality is everything. I once saw Mary Garden at a rehearsal on a stage cluttered by the jumbled scenery of Pelléas and Melisande. There were scores of people on the stage ... carpenters, musicians, a director, journalists ... all alive and moving about, but one didn’t see them. One saw only Mary moving back and forth, in and out among them. No one else existed. It was a case of vitality. She is ninety-nine per cent. vitality ... nothing else. She hypnotizes the public. Why, she has even adapted the French language to suit her own ideas.”
The men and women who sat at the adjoining tables must have found them an interesting pair; they were both so neat, so trim, so raffiné. It was not without reason that more than one person, in the years that followed, spoke of Ellen as resembling a fine greyhound. The one, it was plain, was a Jewess and very likely, if one could judge from the bright shrewd eyes, a clever one. The other might have been anything ... Russian, French, American, Hungarian; it was impossible to say. And she was young and handsome.
“You must exercise,” continued Miss Schönberg, “so as not to lose your figure or your vitality.”
So after Miss Schönberg had gone, Ellen took up riding, a thing she had not done since the days when, as a wild young girl, she had ridden her grandfather’s horses over fences and ditches without a saddle. And in the Bois, as in the Ritz, people came to notice her, that she rode magnificently and was dressed by the best of habit makers. Presently, Lily’s friend Paul Schneidermann, who sometimes called at the house in the Rue Raynouard to see young Jean, took to riding with her. He was a languid young man, devoted to the arts, who led a sybaritic life, but he came presently to rise at dawn in order to ride by her side through the dewy park.
In those days, she did not forget her mother; on the contrary she wrote to her more frequently than she had ever done, and her letters were real letters, filled with the details of her progress. She wrote that Sanson had placed her with the proper teachers, that she had been to see the great Philippe and that everything had been arranged for her to work under him. She described Rebecca Schönberg.
Sometimes in the letters that came from the Town, Ellen discerned a note of subdued and passionate jealousy which had, somehow, taken the place of her mother’s old distrust of Lily. She understood all that well enough: Hattie Tolliver hated Lily for giving her daughter all those things which she had herself desired so earnestly to give. But there was in Hattie’s letters no sense of remoteness, not the faintest note of her having yielded the possession of her daughter. She treated Ellen still as a little girl. She saw her still as she had seen her on that last afternoon, a stiff, proud, awkward girl carrying her skates as she stepped through the door of the Tolliver house into the bright sunlight on her way to Walker’s Pond.