“No, look at Madeline. She’s full of the same spirit Fliss is full of.”
“And Dick?”
“Dick’s a jazzer thrown into high company,” mocked Fliss.
“Dick’s a jazzer—reformed.” Dick put his arm about his wife’s shoulders and drew her close to him. “You’re all wrong. Jazzing or whatever you call it is purely a matter of age. When you draw near thirty you get over it, just as the average man gets over tennis.”
“But I’m not thirty.”
“No,” said Dick, looking down at her tenderly, “but you’ve other fish to fry. Besides you can’t be classified.”
“French model, one only.” Fliss could always be counted on to remain flippant. The others caught her note with amusement.
It was one of their many idle, undeveloped, cross-purposed conversations, which in spite of its lightness had a kind of function in bringing them nearer together, teaching them what to expect from each other, revealing their quality to each other. The weeks slipped along, each one important and interesting in its relation to the coming of Cecily’s child, bringing that great anticipation closer to them. And the lives of all of them clung to their own little orbits in the midst of a storm already world devastating, though there were many moments when they all shivered as some great tragedy, dulled by distance, came over the wires and through the papers to them. Cecily, of course, dated all things by the fifteenth of May, and as the winter changed into spring and the whole world opened happily under the warming sun, she was more and more eager to bring her waiting to a close. Dick was impatient, she knew, and that made her more so. She was catching some of Dick’s quality as she lived with him. She was trying to learn how to frost the depths of the spiritual isolation which was absorbing her with a surface companionship during hours which demanded lightness. There was some sacrifice in learning this new lightness, but she had a vague feeling that it would make Dick happy if she were not only happy, but gay.
The wonder of Cecily was that she was twenty, as yet unbigoted, and that her personality was still vague in its outlines. The convent was of course mainly responsible for this—in leaving so much to God. The implied educational method of most schools and colleges is that you have to work things out “on your own” as definitely as possible—work out God, too, when you get to it—but the convent method was not so. When things became tangled or overerudite, or too introspective, or embarrassing and indelicate, the gentle nuns turned the solutions over to God and left them there without asking for an accounting. Working with material like Cecily they took care to perfect her English and her French, even if they totally neglected economics, gave her a cultural knowledge of science and a knowledge of history, which was colored by faith in the church, and sent her out with a clean mind. There were plenty of fine fresh minds coming out of women’s colleges every day, but their freshness was like the antiseptic freshness of a laboratory after corruption has been studied and its traces scoured away; Cecily’s was the freshness of the out-of-doors, which is different. Mental and emotional qualities were still to develop and, stepping as she did into marriage so quickly, she had all of psychology, all of philosophy, to learn. The bag of women’s tricks, already so thoroughly ransacked by Fliss, was quite unknown to Cecily.
While Dick was teaching her love and some gayeties as well, she was learning other things. It was absurd to say that Matthew had set himself to the forming of her mind—what he did was too intangible for him to have had a definite purpose—but still, he did try to help Cecily to think. Undoubtedly it was at first for the pure pleasure of seeing the effect that much discussed themes would have upon a mind as inexperienced as hers that Matthew introduced many of his conversations. Her ready response led him further. He lent her books, catching up the broken thread of a conversation about some problem by sending her relevant printed thought; he stimulated her mind constantly. And the mind, which must have been a reproduction in part at least of Allgate Moore’s mind, the part which was responsible for the fact that people called him “genius,” began to grow. Such a year for Cecily! There were many nights when she sat listening to the men talking about the affairs which were absorbing almost all thinking people’s minds—the sinking of ships at sea, the slaughters of war, the advances and retreats of the hostile armies, the surmises as to new alliances—all of it deepening in Cecily her natural sense of the gravity of the world’s affairs and of the world’s dangers. Then when they stopped—and they would stop when her comments or queries became too intense, too worried—she always marveled at the way they, and Dick especially, could spring back to lightness of thought and word.