Very swiftly it was becoming clear to Thurley that fame, even the great, dazzling fame of which the workaday world reads with awe, merely meant one had a different standard of values; that all emotions such as joy, sorrow, anger, renunciation, cowardice, heroism and so on were relative. Tom Jones and wife and child in Skiddeoot, Missouri, might attain as great joy over acquiring a terrifically green-colored bungalow and veneered mahogany to decorate the parlor, while Mrs. Tom was to have a woman to wash, and Mr. Tom membership in the Skiddeoot bowling club—quite as much joy as Ernestine Christian when she stayed at Buckingham Palace an honored guest and had on her dressing table the miniatures of the young princes and a certain jewelled box given her by the king of Italy. The lives of these luminaries, when one came to know them on equal footing, were composed of a multitude of trivial details, the same as were the Joneses’ of Skiddeoot—the proper breakfast food, annoyance of a thunder shower, the wrong-sized-gaiters, the intense dislike of parsnips, the fondness for Japanese prints, the staunch conviction as to when the world was to end, the way to eat one’s melons (in Skiddeoot it would be porridge), the best style of spring motor car (in Skiddeoot it would be whether to have the Ford wheels red or yellow)—and so on through an endless list of things about which physical and mental existence is centered.
Thurley had been exceptionally spared the grind and slow advancement of the average artist. On the other hand, she had experienced both grind and decidedly depressing experiences during her travels in the box-car. She was now placed, as it were, in the front ranks of the artistic world and allowed to gaze about, investigate, presume, acquire knowledge, as much as her own possibilities would permit. Her possibilities being above the average, Thurley, inside of the few months in New York, had come to the settled conviction that folks were really just folks no matter how they were dressed, and the artists quite the same as the population of Birge’s Corners, only in a different setting and with a different set of values.
It was rather disappointing to come to the conclusion, not at all romantic and stimulating or in keeping with the conclusions Caleb Patmore’s “Victorious Victoria” had arrived at in an amazingly short space of time. It was like a child’s suddenly being put on everyday relations With Santa Claus himself and finding out, besides his ability to ride reindeer skyward, and, toy-laden, shoot down narrow chimneys, that he had a gouty foot the same as Oyster Jim’s, was rather caustic if his eggs were overdone, was a Republican, body, boots and breeches, the same as Ali Baba, and, if he lost three games of cribbage straight running, was distinctly “peeved.”
So Thurley advanced beyond the illusions of the uninitiated. Before she came into Bliss Hobart’s dominion she had been one of the public, the sort of public who believe newspaper reports of opera singers having frolicsome boa-constrictors as family pets, to welcome them when they stagger home under van-loads of orchids from the evening’s work! She saw now with the clear, innocent eyes of youth, which is so often wiser than dictatorial and narrow middle age, that the common lot was the universal lot and that in the sum total of all things the famous ones were spared no more nor less nor given greater qualities of endurance or supreme power.
Had the invitation to the “family” dinner come a week ago, Thurley would have hesitated before accepting. But Ernestine Christian’s personality—as yet it was not Ernestine Christian’s real self since she betrayed that to no one—had woven a big-sister armor about Thurley’s wild-rose self. She was eager to become one of the family, unconscious of the honor for which many had sighed and bribed for in vain. She showed the note to Miss Clergy and became very flapperlike on the subject of her costume.
“Wear any you like,” Miss Clergy said fondly. “Dear me, I sha’n’t go. I’m an old lady, sleepy as an infant by half after eight.”
“Must I always be alone?” Thurley protested.
Miss Clergy, whose girlhood had been bounded on all sides by the “Polite Letter Writer” and “Godey’s Lady’s Book,” hesitated. “Take a maid,” she urged.
“For protection? Goodness, no! Why, I’ve walked at midnight in the darkest road at home, when Philena would be taken very ill and we had to have the north end doctor. I’ll go alone—and wear my green velvet.”
“If you want more dresses—” began Miss Clergy cheerily. When one had a wild-rose girl with the voice of a lark, revenge just naturally lost its grim and ugly aspects.