“Perhaps he will come to care a little, now, Thurley—success sometimes makes people seem different—more desirable, doesn’t it? I know it ought not to be the bait—but when you have cared so long—you are reckless. Money never brings a person the real things, does it?” And Polly began to sob, as she had refrained from sobbing for years while Thurley rocked her in her arms, playing comforting gray angel and understanding woman all in one. They ended quite normally by a heated argument as to whether Polly should or should not—now that she was to be placed on a pedestal with Francis Scott Key—wear a distinctive costume while she toured the country and sang her songs—say a bright red sailor and a blue cloth cape with a single line of white braid—and didn’t she feel ashamed to make such distressing faces because Thurley was planning a pink chiffon evening dress for her—base ingratitude of these newly arrived!
So Polly toured the country in the costume Thurley designed, singing her songs and meeting with success, while music shops plastered their windows with Polly Harris’ latest, and news of her triumph echoed in the trenches to startle Ernestine into cabling congratulations and Lissa into groaning in envy. Polly was to join Bliss in San Francisco for a spring campaign and, when she visited Thurley at the Fincherie, she took endless photographs and mental notes of the colony with which to regale him, asking if there was any special message Thurley wished him to have.
“How wonderfully it is coming on! How kind every one is and workmen seem to do wonders in no time! We shall have the last house restored by July—and tell him we have two hundred boys here and they say they never want to move along—”
“I mean personal message,” Polly interrupted.
Thurley shook her head.
“I’ll use my own judgment,” Polly added, not knowing how dangerously near she came to repeating words of grave and liberating importance.
The third event of the family happened in June when Ernestine and Caleb met each other at the steamer pier. Having faced reality and realized what she was not capable of doing, Ernestine was flying home in honest haste to try to do what she felt was her duty.
She looked forward to meeting Caleb as the same sentimental person who would propose to her before they had passed down the gangway. Ernestine had discovered that reality, while a stern friend at first, was a sincere and lasting one. The ooze had vanished from her scheme of things since she faced the horrors of—not war—but of the jumblers-in such as Lissa and Mark and the hysterical young things from Birge’s Corners. She had even come across Hortense Quinby who was occupied by making intellectual love to a thick-set young private who contemptuously accepted her affection with the excuse, “An educated dame is better than no one—but when I get back to my girl in Harlem—” while Hortense told herself that this Jo Carter had a soul above being an elevator boy; his was a spirit destined to lead men; and she tried to check his constant assault on the King’s English and planned on being his “fairy godmother” when he should return to America! Ernestine had watched with disapproval the onslaught of débutantes upon the regulars who accepted the adoration with scornful grins and conceited smirks, allowing these delicately bred and reared young creatures who had been so bored or misunderstood by their families, to lavish their attentions on them unchecked. She had seen, by way of contrast, the capable, heroic men and women who managed with admirable tact to suppress these feverish young things from doing their worst and yet not allow them to escape without a whirl at the grindstone. Ernestine looked upon these young things as one does at straggling boys, stray dogs and hoboes who invariably follow the wind-up of any dignified and splendid procession, tagging after and convinced in their own minds they are attracting as much attention as the mounted police who swish along in advance.
Having looked honestly at reality and judged it fairly, Ernestine had honestly judged of both her former and her present self. She felt she could never return to the unreal, intensive selfishness which she had fostered and excused under the title of “being different”—that she could greet Caleb in almost flapper fashion, saying,
“Here I am, ready to marry you! Let’s have a general confession. First, one Caleb Patmore has never done his best work—but he will. Secondly, one Ernestine Christian has been a neurotic, selfish soul but she is going to reform.”