“The sweet-peas are lovely,” Cynthia said. “Thank you, my dear. They are much prettier than any I have had in my garden this year. Please sit down,” for Ellen was doubtful about availing herself of the proffered chair. She had so hoped that she might find Cynthia alone. She had dreamed, as a lover might have done, of a tête-à-tête with her, what she would say, what Cynthia would say. She had thought, and trembled at the thought, that possibly Cynthia might kiss her when she came or went. She had felt, with a thrill of spirit, the touch of Cynthia's soft lips on hers, she had smelt the violets about her clothes. Now it was all spoiled. She remembered things which she had heard about Mr. Risley's friendship with Cynthia, how he had danced attendance upon her for half a lifetime, and thought that she did not like him. She looked at his smiling, grizzled, blond face with distrust. She felt intuitively that he saw straight through her little subterfuge of the flowers, that he divined her girlish worship at the shrine of Cynthia, and was making fun of her.
“Do you object to a cigar, Miss Brewster?” asked Robert, and Risley looked inquiringly at her.
“Oh, no,” replied Ellen, with the eager readiness of a child to fit into new conditions. She thought of the sitting-room at home, blue with the rank pipe-smoke of Nahum Beals and his kind. She pictured them to herself sitting about on these warm evenings in their shirt-sleeves, and she saw the two gentlemen in their light summer clothes with their fragrant cigars at their lips, and all of a sudden she realized that between these men and the others there was a great gulf, and that she was trying to cross it. She did not realize, as later, that the gulf was one of externals, and of width rather than depth, but it seemed to her then that from one shore she could only see dimly the opposite. A great fear and jealousy came over her as to her own future accessibility to those of the other kind among whom she had been brought up, like her father and Granville.
Ellen felt all this as she sat beside Cynthia, who was casting about in her mind, in rather an annoyed fashion, for something to say to this young beneficiary of hers which should not have anything to do with the benefit.
Finally she inquired if she were having a pleasant vacation, and Ellen replied that she was. Risley looked at her beautiful face with the double radiance of the electric-light and the lamp-light from the window on it, giving it a curious effect. It suddenly occurred to him to wonder why everybody seemed to have such an opinion as to the talents of this girl. Why did Cynthia consider that her native ability warranted this forcible elevation of her from her own sphere and setting her on a height of education above her kind? She looked and spoke like an ordinary young girl. She had a beautiful face, it is true, and her shyness seemed due to the questioning attitude of a child rather than to self-consciousness, but, after all, why did she give people that impression? Her valedictory had been clever, no doubt, and there was in it a certain fire of conviction, which, though crude, was moving; but, after all, almost any bright girl might have written it. She had been a fine scholar, no doubt, but any girl with a ready intelligence might have done as well. Whence came this inclination of all to rear the child upon a pedestal? Risley wondered, looking at her, narrowing his keen, light eyes under reflective brows, puffing at his cigar; then he admitted to himself that he was one with the crowd of Ellen's admirers. There was somehow about the girl that which gave the impression of an enormous reserve out of all proportion to any external evidence. “The child says nothing remarkable,” he told Cynthia, after she had gone that evening, “but somehow she gives me an impression of power to say something extraordinary, and do something extraordinary. There is electricity and steel behind that soft, rosy flesh of hers. But all she does which is evident to the eye of man is to worship you, Cynthia.”
“Worship me?” repeated Cynthia, vaguely.
“Yes, she has one of those aberrations common to her youth and her sex. She is repeating a madness of old Greece, and following you as a nymph might a goddess.”
“It is only because she is grateful,” returned Cynthia, looking rather annoyed.
“Gratitude may be a factor in it, but it is very far from being the whole of the matter. It is one of the spring madnesses of life; but don't be alarmed, it will be temporary in the case of a girl like that. She will easily be led into her natural track of love. Do you know, Cynthia, that she is one of the most normal, typical young girls I ever saw, and that makes me wonder more at this impression of unusual ability which she undoubtedly gives. She has all the weaknesses of her age and sex, she is much younger than some girls of her age, and yet there is the impression which I cannot shake off.”
“I have it, too,” said Cynthia, rather impatiently.