“She has a great deal of personality for a child of her age, which I have respected. I find myself constantly shrinking, however, from some undercurrent of feeling which she doesn’t express. She gets on very well with my two girls, but they don’t understand her any more than I do. Of course, she is treated exactly as they are—I really wouldn’t get one a hair ribbon without buying its match for Charlotte.
“For a convent-reared girl, she is not so difficult to deal with as might be. I send her to church every Sunday in the brougham with the parlor maid, who happens to be of her faith; and I called on the parish priest and commended her to his fatherly mercies. He is a rather robust person, clearly of Irish peasant origin, and speaks with a very decided brogue. She is plainly growing a bit fastidious about him, and I am inclined to feel that she is none too deeply enamored of her church. She has a curious gift of worldliness for a child brought up in a convent.”
Eight years later Mrs. Spencer penned another brief note to this same elderly relative’s daughter.
“I suppose it would be asking too much of you to run down to Smith and see Charlotte take her degree. I can’t go—Natalie’s engagement is just on—and somebody ought to appear from the family. She takes high honors, I understand. She wrote me a very pretty little note, saying it wasn’t to be expected of any of us to get up, but I can see she is hurt. Do go if you can.”
Six weeks later in that same year, the military lady found herself at a very quiet and exclusive resort in the White Mountains, and once more delivered herself to her husband of many impressions.
“You remember that incident I told you of some years ago of seeing Charlotte K’s daughter engulfed in the Spencer household. Well, they are all here for a brief stay, Martha engrossed in her two girls. Natalie’s engagement to young X—— of the Navy has been announced. Charlotte Ponsonby is really a magnificent creature—from a woman’s standpoint, that is. But the outcome of the affair is just what might have been expected. Somehow they have mortally wounded her, and to protect herself from them and their curiosity she has built a wall between herself and the whole world. I tried to cross it, and was most delicately and effectively rebuffed. She is the most solitary girl I have ever known, and yet she is not morbid. She moves among us in the most self-possessed, unasking spirit that was ever held by a girl of twenty-two. She is remarkably well bred, quite at ease outwardly, and is altogether too clever to please men—who are dreadfully shy of her, though they speak of her admiringly. I would not have you think that her cleverness is of that cheap type which sharpens its wits on others, and prides itself on its brilliancy. She is not in the least talkative, but she gives you the feeling of one who is weighing, sifting, analyzing, judging; who is using her brain to its best purposes at all times.
“The pathetic part of it all is that she is playing up to a rôle that somebody—I don’t know what idiot—assigned her. I find among all the kindred and all the family acquaintance the general opinion that Charlotte has no emotions, nothing but a brain; and the poor child is nothing but a bundle of emotions that she is desperately trying to conceal. I understand her perfectly. I never was so sorry for anyone in my life—anyone in our condition, that is. She has been tagged a girl of brains, and it has somehow been impressed upon her that, if she shows any feminine weakness, she will disgrace herself. So there she is, on her intellectual tiptoes, striving to conceal a very human disposition to come down on her heels, exiling herself from all that girlhood prizes.
“Of course, you dear old goose, you are saying to yourself, ‘Why don’t you put her wise, then?’ My dear, she has analyzed it all just as clearly as I have. She knows what is going on. She merely hasn’t the courage to break through the convention and, on the whole, I don’t wonder at it. It takes more courage to fight the accepted conception of oneself than it does to do any other sort of fighting in the world. Charlotte Ponsonby is a victim of the Spencer stupidity and of her own timidity and sensitiveness. There has grown up an impression that Charlotte doesn’t care for dancing; and night after night she goes off to her room, pretending a desire to read when her heart is in her toes, where a normal girl’s heart should be. If there is an expedition of any sort, Charlotte is always handed over to some elderly fossil because she is so intelligent and serious, and so entertaining to old gentlemen. If a man pays her the least attention, everybody notes it (and you know we pride ourselves an our breeding too); and so much interest, sympathy, and, yes, my dear, damnable curiosity, is openly shown in the matter that the girl’s pride is outraged, and in sheer self-defence she snubs her admirer incontinently.
“She lives and has always lived, as nearly as I can see, utterly without intimate companionship, confidence, or any of that wholesome dependence that belongs to girlhood. There is something infinitely pathetic in her isolation, which, much as I should like to, I dare not invade. There is a pride in life born of indigence as there is the pride of wealth. Charlotte Ponsonby is armored in the pride born of spiritual indigence. Her soul is hungering and thirsting for that thing for which all the world has decided she cares nothing. Mark my words, my dear, in the end, tragedy will come of it.”
It was at the close of their stay in the mountains that Mrs. Spencer again unburdened herself to the Vermont relative.