For an hour she lay quite still listening to the rain; and at the end of that time, hearing sounds from below stairs which forecast the arrival of supper, she rose and lighted the gas bracket above her dressing table.
At the first pin point of flame, the world of darkness and rain vanished and in its place, as if by some abracadabra, there sprang into existence the hard, definite walls of a room, square and commonplace, touched with quaint efforts to create an illusion of beauty. The walls were covered with wall paper bearing a florid design of lattices heavily laden with red roses on anemic stalks. Two Gibson pictures, faithfully copied by an admirer, hung on either side of the oak dresser. They were “The Eternal Question” and “The Queen of Hearts.” The bed, vast and ugly, and still bearing in the white counterpane the imprint of Ellen’s slim young body, fitted the room as neatly as a canal barge fits a lock. The chairs varied in type from an old arm chair of curly maple, brought across the mountains into the middle-west by Ellen’s great-grandfather and now relegated to the bedroom, to a damaged patent rocker upholstered in red plush with yellow tassels. On the top of the dressing table lay a cover made elaborately of imitation Valenciennes and fine cambric, profusely ornamented by bow knots of pink baby ribbon.
By the flickering light, the girl arranged her hair before the mirror. It was dark, heavy, lustrous hair with deep blue lights. Hastily tossing it into a pompadour over a wire rat, she washed her eyes with cold water to destroy the redness. She was preparing the face she showed the world. It was not a beautiful face though it had its points. It was too long perhaps and the nose was a trifle prominent; otherwise it was a pleasant face, with large dark eyes, fine straight lips and a really beautiful chin. It held the beginnings of a beauty that was fine and proud. The way the chin and throat leapt from her shoulders was a thing at which to marvel. The line was clear, triumphant, determined. Even Ellen was forced to admire it. What she lacked in beauty was amply compensated by the interest which her face inspired. The pompadour, to be sure, was ridiculous. It was but a week or two old, the sign of her emancipation from the estate of a little girl.
For a long time she studied the reflection in the mirror. This way and that she turned her proud head, admiring all the while the line of the throat and tilted chin. It delighted her as music sometimes delighted her, with a strange leaping sensation of triumph over people about her.
She thought, “Am I to be great one day? Am I to be famous? Is it written in my face? I will be or die ... I must be!”
Early in the afternoon, before the long rain settled in for the night, she had walked out of Miss Ogilvie’s little house down the brick path under the elms with a heart singing in triumph. Before she arrived home, the sense of triumph had faded a little, and by the time she reached her room it was gone altogether, submerged by a wave of despair. It seemed that her triumph only made life more difficult; instead of being an end it was only a beginning. It created the most insuperable difficulties, the most perilous and agitating problems.
Miss Ogilvie lived in a weathered old house that withdrew from the street behind a verdant bulwark of lilacs, syringas, and old apple trees abounding in birds,—wrens, blackbirds, finches and robins. In the warm season, as if the wild birds were not enough, a canary or two and a pair of love-birds hung suspended from the roof of the narrow piazza high above the scroll-work of the jig-saw rail. There were those who believed that Miss Ogilvie, in some earlier incarnation, was herself a bird ... a wren perhaps, or a song sparrow flitting in and out of hedges and tufts of grass, shaking its immaculate tail briskly in defiance of a changing world.
When she sat in her big rocker listening to the horrible exercises of her pupils, she resembled a linnet on a swaying bough. She rocked gently as if she found the motion soothing to some wildness inside her correct and spinsterish little body. Always she rocked, perhaps because it helped her to endure the horrible renderings of Schumann and Mendelssohn by the simpering daughters and the sullen sons of the baker, the butcher, the candle-stick maker. For Miss Ogilvie understood music and she was sensitive enough. In her youth, before her father failed in the deluge that followed the Civil War, she had been abroad. She had heard music, real music, in her day. In all the Town she and Grandpa Tolliver alone knew what real music could be. She had even studied for a time in Munich where she lived in her birdlike way in a well chaperoned pension. The other girls fluttered too, for in her day women were all a little birdlike; it was a part of their training.
In the early afternoon when Ellen Tolliver came for her weekly lesson, Miss Ogilvie, dressed in a tight-fitting basque of purple poplin ornamented with pins of coral and cameo, received her formally into the little drawing-room where she lived in a nest of pampas grass, conch shells, raffia baskets, and spotless bits of bric-a-brac. There was in the reception nothing unusual; Miss Ogilvie permitted herself no relaxation, even in the privacy of her own bed-chamber. She remained a lady, elegantly so, who supported herself in a genteel fashion by giving music lessons. But with Ellen a certain warmth and kindliness, seldom to be found in her contact with other pupils, occasionally tempered the formality. To-day her manner carried even a hint of respect.
Ellen sat at the upright piano and played. She played with a wild emotionalism unhampered by problems of technique. She poured her young, rebellious soul into the music until the ebony piano rocked and the ball-fringe of the brocade piano-cover swayed. Miss Ogilvie sat in her big rocking chair in a spot of sunlight and listened. It was significant that she did not rock. She sat quite still, her tiny feet barely touching the floor, her thin blue-veined hands lying quietly like little birds at rest in her purple poplin lap. The canaries too became still and listened. A hush fell upon the garden.