She could have cried. Erard suggested another topic.
“Why do our Amazons despise the other rôle! Isn’t it enough to be clever and charming and a woman?”
She looked at his ungainly figure, and curled her lip haughtily. If that were her inevitable career, she would not spend herself on him. “You mean something between a politician in petticoats and a dabbler in art!”
“Well, one of these days we shall see you, running your little piece of the world over there, like our friend Wilbur. An ‘authority’ on ‘art,’ a great reader of papers before clubs, and an ‘organizer,’ and a ‘power.’ A gracious, energetic woman, who knows how to make good looks imposing, to order a large house and make herself felt in her neighbourhood,—an important career I am sketching for you. Voilà!”
He rose with a disagreeable, high-pitched laugh. Irony was his keenest weapon. It rendered him invulnerable, because it placed “the others” in a category by themselves—deluded simpletons, who had his sympathy. Miss Anthon felt the mortification of being included among “the others.”
“You have been very good to take me about,” she said simply, with reserves of dignity, “and to tell me so plainly that I am a—fool. I shall have to leave you now to dress for dinner.”
When Erard had gone, she struggled to support her pride. How deluded she had been to think that he could find anything important in her, or could be interested in her abilities! Like a silly country girl, she had been dreaming of—well, making a noise in the world. She could never endure to see him again, for he had read her character too easily. And he was right in thinking her ridiculous. She was crude: how the work she had seen at the studios had puzzled her! Finally she resolved to see him again, to show him that she had sense enough left to laugh at her own folly.
CHAPTER VII
The more Miss Anthon thought the matter over, the more completely she came to accept Erard’s bitter lesson. She realized that her blindness had been childish, and that by opening her eyes he had saved her many futile hours. Now that she was content to put away vain personal aspirations Erard condescended to spend more time than ever with her. Mrs. Anthon grumbled insistently at this increasing intimacy, and, as her sneers had little effect on her daughter, inflicted her grievances upon her brother-in-law. “Sebastian,” she warned him, “Adela is fooling away her time with nobodies. She has had about enough of this art business and of your Erard. You know I only want the best for my children, and I have never crossed her anywheres. But that man has altogether too much influence with her. She may start up any day and do some crazy thing, as she did about Wilbur. She may take it into her head to marry Erard!” Mrs. Anthon gasped at the enormity of her own imagination.
“He had the brass,” she explained to her son, “to want Sebastian to take him to Spain this spring, along with Ada and me.”