Tina sat on an ottoman in the centre of the big, mahogany-furnished, old-fashioned room, with her light hair falling over one ear and her large, clear, blue eyes fixed tragically on the face of the parent who sat busily sewing. Tina’s slim shoulders were hunched forward and her feet crossed in the attitude which always brought forth her mother’s rebuke:
“Don’t sit that way, dear; it’s very unladylike. How often have I told you, Tina, that if you get in the habit of sitting like that when we’re alone you’ll do it when you don’t realize it.”
Mrs. Malison’s voice had the tone of a well-worn persistency. She was a young-looking woman for her years, and still handsome enough to make the resemblance to her youngest daughter very apparent even to the obstinate little curve of the short upper lip. The answer was almost as automatic:
“I wouldn’t care! Momsey, why won’t you let me go to the dance?”
“Now, Tina, what is the use of teasing mother any more about that?” said the second daughter, coming into the room. Elinor was small and dark, with finely marked eyebrows, regular features, and an expression of great intelligence, wrecked at times by a shattering wave of nervousness. At the moment she carried in her hand a bird’s bathtub, filled with water, destined for the cage over by the window, where a brown and dishevelled canary hung mopingly from a perch. She went on:
“You know perfectly well that mother thinks you’ve been staying up a great deal too late in the evening. You cannot study and go out at the same time. And she told you she didn’t approve of your being so much with Francis Fanshawe—none of us do. He may be a nice enough boy, but he isn’t our kind. We all of us think you’d better let the acquaintance drop.”
“Oh, if you don’t want me to do anything!” Tina’s eyes began to sparkle ominously. “It doesn’t make the slightest difference to me when you talk that way about my friends. I like them, no matter what you and Annette say. You’ve always been down on Francis! And I don’t care whether I keep on with my studies or not.”
“Tina!” Elinor carefully inserted the bathtub in the cage before flinging herself volubly upon the subject. “Tina, you can’t mean that—you want to be educated, I hope! Besides, you’ll enjoy coming out into society a great deal more later, and if you’re seen everywhere now, people will be taking you for much older than you are.”
“I wouldn’t care!” Tina’s defiant tone took on an increasing rapidity. “I don’t see what good it does to be educated, anyway. People like you just as well when you’re silly. I think it’s dreadfully stupid to go to college the way you did and get so critical, and never see any fun in things, and analyze everybody the way you do Robert Harper, so that you never know whether you like him or not. I wish you’d take enough interest in him to get him to shave off that horrid, little, black mustache—it makes him look so sleek! I don’t care for what they teach in books. It doesn’t do me any good to learn about the ancient Egyptians and the battles of the Civil War, and write Enoch Arden over upside down; I hate Enoch Arden, he makes me so cross—— I care for automobiles, and skating and having a good time with my friends, and dancing. And it’s no use telling me I’ll enjoy myself more later. I want to enjoy myself now! Maybe there won’t be any ‘later’; maybe I’ll be dead.”
“I wonder how you make a bird take a bath,” said Elinor in an absorbed tone. She regarded the canary with a baffled eye. “I’ve had the water warm and I’ve had it cold; I’ve put the tub in every position I can think of, and left it there for half a day at a time, and he only hops around and looks at it.” Her voice rose in sudden, nervous excitement. “I don’t know what to do. He hasn’t taken a bath in a week. He must take a bath!”