He felt her eyes on him, and turned as she looked away. She knew he disliked to be surprised in a self-revelatory mood, and she had time to notice his features assume their usual impersonal cast. That she regretted; the wistfulness had been ingenuous and touching. At times she felt that he deliberately submerged his most likable traits. That was a great pity, because it gave Louise new incentives to go off on her independent courses. Miriam felt that his self-consciousness had begun by hurting Louise, driving her to protect herself against a coldness she couldn’t understand. The unfortunate result was that Louise had rather more than protected herself: had gradually attained a self-sufficiency that took Keble’s coldness for granted, even inducing it. That was a moral advantage which Miriam’s femininity resented, though nothing could have drawn the admission from her.
She was glad when Louise, by a new manoeuvre in the talk, gave her an excuse to go into the next room. For there were times when nothing sheathed the sharp edges of life so satisfactorily as a half hour at the piano.
4
Only when she had waved Keble farewell from the back of the train at Witney did Louise allow herself to dwell on the significance of the step she had taken. Keble’s generous acquiescence in her plan merely underlined the little question that kept irritating her conscience. For all her skill she hadn’t known how to assure Keble that she wasn’t turning her back on him; for all her love she couldn’t have admitted to him that she was setting out for a sanatorium, to undergo treatment for social ignorances in the hope of returning to him more fit than ever. With the train now bolting east, she had the nervous dread of a prospective patient.
Yet as province after province rolled by, and the dreary prairie began to be broken first by lakes and woods, then by larger and larger communities, graduating her approach into civilization, her natural optimism asserted itself in a typically vehement reaction. Now that there was no turning back, the obvious thing to do was to wring every possibility out of the experience to which she was committed. Nothing should be too superficial for her attention. To Miriam’s relief her despondency gave place to a feverish activity of observation. She began to notice her fellow-travelers and to tick them off mercilessly, one by one, with all their worths and blemishes.
“Let’s leave no stone unturned, Miriam,” she said, imperatively, as they neared their first halting place. “I won’t go home till I’ve done and seen and had one of everything. Then for the next eighty years I shall be able to out-small-talk the most outrageous dude that ever dares cross my threshold.”
She kept rein on the excitement caused in her by the hotels, shops, museums, and theatres of Toronto and Montreal, for from Miriam’s lukewarmness she divined that they were at best but carbon copies of the hotels, shops, museums, and theatres of New York. So she contented herself with watching the movements of her companion, marveling at Miriam’s easy way with porters and chambermaids, her ability to arrive on the right platform ten minutes before the right train departed, to secure the most pleasant rooms at the least exorbitant rate and order the most judicious dinners, all without fuss or worry. Having learned that traveling was one of the major modern arts, she added it to the list of subjects in which she was enrolled as student. By the time they had reached Fifth Avenue and put up at a hostelry that was still imposing, though it had been half forgotten in the mania for newer and gayer establishments, Louise was imperturbable.
During the next few days the experience that made the deepest impression on her was the religious earnestness with which one was expected to cultivate one’s exterior. On a memorable, but modest visit to Winnipeg with her father,—who was attending a medical conference,—she had “gone in and bought” whatever she had been in need of. Never had she dreamt that so much art and science could be brought to bear on the merely getting of oneself groomed. But after a few seances in the neighborhood of Fifty-Seventh Street, Louise threw herself into this strange new cult with characteristic fervor. This was partly due to the fact that Madame Adèle, the dressmaker, and Monsieur Jules, the hairdresser, had accomplished what good portrait painters often accomplish, and thrown into relief properties of body and soul of which she had never been aware.
At the end of a fortnight she had mastered many rites, and when the last frocks, hats, gloves, and slippers had arrived, and she had adapted her steps and gestures and rhythms to the unbelievable new picture she made, Miriam, for the first time since their association, expressed herself as satisfied.
“I’ve been waiting to see you dressed,” she announced as they sat in the tea-room of a fashionable hotel. “It’s the final test. And you pass—magna cum laude. Opposite you I feel dull and not at all what you would once have called distinguished-looking.”