“It seems to me that a good deal happens. Now nothing really ever does happen to me. And I’m most shamelessly ignorant. They didn’t send me to school; my Aunt Julia kept me moving. I’ve lived in a trunk so long that it seems to me the lid is always crowding down on top of my head.”
She shrugged her shoulders and put up her hands as though to protect herself from an imaginary trunk-lid.
“Oh, but to see things and places and people!”
“But you don’t see them,—when you’re traveling with your aunt! Then you go boldly into a beautiful city and are taken in a closed carriage to a hotel, or worse yet, a pension, and you are warned not to speak to any one, particularly to any one that looks interesting, for the interesting people usually have something wrong with them. Isn’t it strange that the interesting people are always wicked? I know that from personal experience.”
Olive was listening to her cousin’s talk with a happy light in her eyes and the smile that forever hovered about her pretty mouth.
“It isn’t so funny, I would have you know! to be dragged around, always in a carriage, mind you, to look at only the most respectable ruins, and statues of people that labored for some noble cause and had so little sense they lost their heads. I worked for weeks in Paris before Aunt Julia would let me see Napoleon’s tomb. And all because his domestic life was not what it should be! As though that mattered, when he made those silly old dynasties over there gasp for breath.”
Zelda’s voice,—its depth and music, and the elusive disappearing note in it, wove an enchantment for Olive. Her own life had been colorless and practical; but she had her dreams, and her cousin Zelda seemed a realization of some of them.
“Anything is better than not going at all!”
“Maybe so. But I had tutors—queer people that came to teach me French and German. That was odious, most odious.”
“I’m sure you know a lot. You can’t help knowing a lot.”