Half loaves

by Margaret Culkin Banning

CHAPTER VII

FLISS, opening her eyes reluctantly, found them resting on a fat gray roll of dust under her bureau. It made her uncomfortable and discouraged. She closed her eyes and shifted her position in bed, but waking on the other side was just as bad. Her window curtain hung saggily in soiled folds to greet her. She hated to see such things, not that they aroused in her any ambition to remedy the particular phases of slack housekeeping and tawdry living, but they emphasized her dislike of her home and all that surrounded it. She thought it utterly unjust that she should have to live in such an environment when there were so many girls her own age awaking to pleasant, clean, beautifully furnished rooms, and her ambition was not to reform the things about her but to discard them as quickly as possible. In this revealing morning hour Fliss usually faced her problems. There was no occasion for bluff since she was alone and her background gave her no advantages. Last night at one of the club cotillions she had worn a yellow malines scarf about her head and yellow satin slippers and never for a moment lost her rôle of gayety incarnate. This morning the yellow slippers poked their toes out from under a chair, streaks on them showing only too plainly that they had been dyed and the yellow scarf lay abandoned on her bureau, its charm and crispness gone forever. Her mood matched her wrecked finery. The crispness and charm had gone out of her too.

For nearly a year and a half now she had been out of school, searching in her vague, unskilled way for a chance to establish herself more securely and comfortably. A year and a half might not be long for a débutante, but Fliss knew that she could not take her own time. It was hard enough now to maintain her place, such as it was, without letting people tire of her. Also the time had sharpened her sense of values. She was not yet quite sure of what she wanted, but she knew most definitely what she did not want. Marriage for the sake of marriage had not the least appeal for her. She knew too much about the sordid parts of domesticity for that. There were too many girls who had a brief career of local popularity and were now wheeling baby carriages and making over last year’s hats; too many young men who, unmarried, had danced and flirted their gay way through society only to become preoccupied, somewhat shabby, hard-working flat-dwellers after their marriage. Fliss had no intention of making any blunder which would land her in such an existence. She was nice to all men. That was because it was wise, lest they become malicious, and because it kept her in practice. But she was more chary with her kisses than she had been in High School and she had learned many new ways of getting without giving.

She had learned too how to take snubs with considerable grace; not humbling herself too much, but rather ignoring them, pretending not to see what for the sake of her scrap of dignity she could not afford to see. But she did see. It was one thing to be a popular girl in High School, to hold the record for the number of invitations to dances, to be the best dancer and the most sought after girl—and another to be left when the school circles broke up and resolved into the social groups to which their families belonged, to be a girl without family backing or a college education, who was determined not to be “dropped.” There were many parents who had found Fliss an attractive little girl, but now saw no reason to include her in their parties for their daughters. Their daughters were young women with futures to be planned for, who must take their places in the community, and Fliss was a social anomaly, pretty but nondescript. People were less cruel, of course, than forgetful. Fliss “didn’t occur to them.” They were full of interests in which she could not share for lack of money, for lack of direction and chaperonage.

Working, as an alternative to marriage, was quite as distasteful to Fliss. She felt that working, especially at the things she could do, would put her definitely in the wrong class and out of the reach of the people to whom she pinned her ambitions. She preferred to be classless rather than to be in the wrong class. To her idleness her parents did not really object. Mr. Horton had little enough to give his wife and daughter, but he expected to give them what he had and to live in shabbiness and self-denial himself. He had suggested once that Fliss learn stenography, but at her scornful protest had dropped the matter, assuming that he did not, as Fliss said, “understand.” The suggestion had been made merely because he felt that Fliss must have time heavy on her hands, and not that he had any theory about her being a wage earner. Like millions of men of all grades of strength and success, he expected to be eternally liable for the women he accumulated in his family, and to be subject to them. Mrs. Horton had educated him in domestic life. He took it mildly as a blend of disorderly bedroom, where his possessions were crowded into the smallest possible space by an array of unattractive feminine things over which inevitably hung the smell of face powder, thick and sweet, a dining room in which food and service were inferior to his quick lunch place and a living-room in which he might sit unmolested, unless Fliss or his wife wanted him out of it, which often happened. When they did, he went to the moving picture house on the corner and saw the program through twice.

It was hard for Fliss to find the slightest interest in her parents. She might have been thrown with them casually, instead of sharing one of the closest of ties. Perhaps it was equally hard on the parents to be even semi-responsible—responsible as far as she wished to allow—for a bit of cold, hard brilliance like Fliss, whom their easy-going philosophy could never hope to comprehend. Mr. Horton would have been satisfied with the most commonplace of sons-in-law and Mrs. Horton delighted merely to have Fliss attain the vague dignity of marriage. How was it possible for them to imagine the scheming and plotting, the steps and retreats which filled the mind of their daughter? She did not bother to tell them about her status with different men—even when the men asked her to marry them. She had had three proposals in this year and a half. One was from a handsome young man who worked in a broker’s office in the daytime and danced and flirted in the evenings with as much abandon as did Fliss. She gave little thought to his offer. The frivolity which had stood him in such good stead as a companion on many an evening was absolutely against him as a candidate for husbandhood. And added to this was the fact that he was an unknown young man who came from another city, presumably from obscurity, and without money.

The second offer was a curious one, made half in jest and half in earnest by one of the city’s wealthiest and most dissipated young men. He was a young man whom Fliss might have handled to advantage had she taken his laughing proposal seriously, but she did not choose to take it so. She merely laughed at him, shrewdly gauging behind her mirth the difficulty of living with dissipation even if it were guarded by wealth. Fliss was in pursuit of solidity. That she might have found in some measure in the repeated boyish offers of Gordon, her High School companion. Gordon’s position was unassailable and in each college vacation he followed Fliss about with a devotion which was unremitting and should have been touching to her. He wanted to leave college and marry her—wanted to run away with her—but she held him off too, not quite so definitely as the others. There was a good chance that Gordon would always be useful to her. But he was very young and entirely dependent on his parents.

What Fliss was anxious for now was some definite opportunity to present itself. She was vaguely conscious that her technique was fairly perfect, but that she must have something to work on soon. The roll of dust, more obnoxious every morning, the torn window curtain, the dyed slippers, and, most of all, the sound of her mother’s voice in the other room, engaged in some interminable conversation over the telephone, filled her with an almost unbearable desire to do something about her situation soon.

The voice ceased, the receiver clicked and she heard her mother’s footsteps turned towards her room.

“Not up yet, Flissy?” Her mother came in a little apologetically. “I suppose you are tired after last night I heard you come in and then the cuckoo struck two. That’s pretty late.”