“It’s the claret,” Thurley insisted. She did not want to talk about herself because she did not seem a struggling, interesting human being like the rest.
“No, it’s not claret but second sight. Bliss knows I have second sight; he’s often asked me for opinions—for everything but my operas,” she added a trifle bitterly. “Now you do seem fey, as if you ought to become a rosy-cheeked matron, the sort that has a big, brick house just packed with young people who all confide in you, and a nice, gentle sort of relatives, linen closets with lavender bags between the snowy piles, jam closets, rooms with old, soft rugs and mellowed furniture, all kinds of books and pictures and nothing so wonderful that art dealers would ever employ burglars to borrow. Just the kind of things that years afterwards would cause your children to say, ‘Oh, that was mother’s—I shall never give it up,’ or ‘Here is her shawl. How she laughed at herself for huddling so eternally in it! Let’s keep it in the cedar chest she had as a bride, she’d like to have it so, I’m certain!’ You understand, Thurley dear, the lovely common things inspired by some one not common! There, that’s quite as smart as Caleb himself could have said it.”
Forgetting her errand and Hortense, Thurley repeated, “It’s the claret, Polly—and you’re quite mad....”
She rushed home to practise scales diligently, remembering with every thump of the keys that she was never to marry—tum-tum-tum, and that Bliss Hobart was a visionary dreamer—tum-tum, art never could be placed on a moral, idealistic basis, never—ti-ti, she had no idea of trying to be one of the vanguard because how useless it would be when one was tied to a ghost lady—tum-tum-ti, that wretched bohemian of a Polly had unsettled her—ti-ti-ti, anyway, Bliss had said he would not consider a vow to a ghost lady as binding—tra-la-la, yet after confiding his great secret, why did he rush off without a good-by, expecting her to do what? Why didn’t he go scold Ernestine or Caleb or Collin, some one besides herself—ta-ta-tum, she finished with a final thump and a superbly clear note which brought Miss Clergy to the door to applaud.
For the first time Thurley turned from her in recoil. She seemed a jailer preventing Polly’s vision from coming true—and what a lovely vision it had been!...
“Thurley, are you ill?” Miss Clergy was asking.
“I’m tired of everything,” she answered, without controlling her temper, “of singing and New York and myself—and you,” like a walli-walli windstorm she swept out of the room, remaining alone until she could laugh off her outburst by a light, humorous explanation of a tight slipper or the alarming story told by the weekly weight on undeniably uniform scales!
When Hobart did return, he was a tired and not easily enlivened man whose summer had been spent overseas planning things calculated to counteract the effects of “military poison ivy,” so he said enigmatically. He met Thurley with seemingly weary interest and a disapproving shake of the head when she tried again to convince him that her way and Lissa’s way was the best—as well as the easiest—and the chewing-gum king only one of a handful of “pet robins!”
Then he looked at her in her sophisticated maze of gold cloth and gave a boyish laugh. “If you told me you were totally depraved, I should only laugh,” he said. “You are trying to fool yourself into thinking yourself a first water adventuress, so how can you expect to fool me? Come, come, what terrific things have you allowed to happen to your voice! We shall have to send you to the nursery to begin again! So Lissa coached you! I knew the voice assassin’s marks of violence.”