A wilful Madigan, intoxicated with her first taste of a new pleasure, was Kate. She had outgrown her short skirts with regret; she was preparing to make them still longer with delight. She had the maturity of her motherless and quasi-fatherless state to add to the natural precocity of the mining-town girl, and of the eldest sister who has been pushed out of her childhood by the press of numbers behind her. And yet the wine of romance kept her almost babyishly young. She had a way of proclaiming the fact that she read everything her father did. (Madigan, marooned by his misfortunes in the most picturesque setting, where men were living the most picturesque lives, turned his back upon it all and found the action his dull days were denied in the elder Dumas.) By this Kate intended to show how proud and unrestrained a Madigan was; hoped, too, perhaps, that there might attach a bit—the least bit—of suggestive license to the phrase. And all the while she was pitiably unconscious of how innocuous the old romanticist's tales of adventure may be, read in translation, by the light of such purity and innocence as hers.
But she was pert, was Kate, and piquant; she presumed upon her youth, upon her age. She was a child when you expected her to be a woman, and a woman where you looked for the child. No dream of romance was romantic enough to hold her fickle soul constant to it—to satisfy the hopes of her heart. Every man she met was a prince; yet was he, too, bare and poor and mean compared with The Man to come. The child in her was gauche and crude, sitting in judgment—as cynical, as critical a spectator as Sissy herself—upon the very hopes the woman awakened. In her eyes the flash of coquetry was succeeded by the blank, childish irony which denied the emotion hardly passed. She loved to shock pretense, yet she was the most absurd and innocent of pretenders, for the terms in which convention speaks were Greek to her. She was masterful, being a Madigan, and daring and impertinent. A creature utterly impatient of forms, with a boy-like chivalry, revealing how incomplete the work of sex was yet, for the woman misunderstood—whom she, in her crude purity, understood least of all. This was Kate, ready, at fifteen, to battle single-handed with windmills, with world-old problems, with world-young prejudices; to burn intolerance to ashes in the white flame of her brave young innocence; to cry aloud the word that older, wiser cowards whisper or stifle in their hearts; to make no compromise; to know that black is black and white is white; to be unforgiving, as only cruel young inexperience can be; to flame at a wrong and glow at its righting; and yet to have her contradictions cased in a body of such vivid grace, a mind leavened by humor, and a heart of such sweetness as made her the irresistibly lovable Pretense she was.
Pretending to be a child, to annoy her Aunt Anne; pretending to be a woman, to infuriate her younger sisters; pretending to be a saint, pretending to be a sinner; pretending to scorn the world, yet quaffing its first sweet draughts of individual power and experience with full-opened throat; pretending to be mannish—driven to that extremity by the super-femininity of Henrietta Bryne-Stivers; pretending to be frivolous, to shock rigid Mrs. Pemberton; pretending to be a blue-stocking with a passion for the solid and heavy in literature; pretending to be a Spartan who must rise at dawn and, after a plunge in ice-cold mountain water, climb, with only big Don, the Newfoundland, for company, up to the sluice-box; there to pretend she was an esthete to whom the sunrise, while she communed alone with nature, revealed things invisible to the world below.
But Reality's day came. Miss Madigan went out into the future, sent thither by her auntly sense of responsibility, and brought it back with her. It led them straight to Warren Pemberton's office, and Pretense fled like a shy shadow before the sun when Reality looked at her through Pemberton's cold, dull eyes.
"Miss Madigan, Mr. Pemberton. My niece Kate," was the lady's introduction as they entered.
The red-faced, heavy little man, too important a personage to be expected to contribute socially to the life of the town, had been looking at Miss Madigan as though he knew he ought to remember having met her. She wanted something, of course. Everybody wanted something from Warren Pemberton, King Sammy's viceroy, in charge of his mining interests and his political plantations. But he brightened at the formula, recollecting having heard it before from the same lady's lips, and promptly placed her in the category of small political favors.
"I remember you, Miss Madigan—of course," he stammered. "Remember the little girl, too. Crosby's flame, eh?"
Kate flushed, struck dumb with the insult, and her black-gray eyes gleamed handsomely with anger. After getting herself up in her most mature fashion to be mistaken for Sissy!
"Why, Mr. Pemberton," exclaimed Miss Madigan, flustered by propinquity to greatness, "this is Kate, the Miss Madigan who—for whom—"
"Oh, excuse me." Pemberton sat rubbing his chin and silently blinking at the Miss Madigan for whom his influence had been invoked. She felt he was weighing her youth and inexperience against the thing that had been asked for her. And the Madigan in her fiercely resented it; was tempted to confirm his doubts by a saucy flippancy that would relieve her impatience of a false position. But there was that other Madigan in her to be reckoned with, that new one, on the reverse of whose shining, romantic shield a plain, dull, tenacious sense of duty was slowly spelling itself into legibility.