“No,” said Ginger, coloring hotly but steady-eyed, “New York.” She considered for a moment and then said, gravely. “But it is—connected with Boston, in a way, Aunt Fan.”
She put it, rather stumblingly, into words. Dr. Mayfield had made her realize how unjust she had been to Dean Wolcott with regard to his riding, and that had made her understand the possibility of being unjust in other ways. She was very brief and very dry about it; Mrs. Featherstone was not the sort of person to whom one opened the shy depths of one’s heart—she pounced too much, and chattered. It was enough for her to know that her niece was open-mindedly going to give eastern culture a chance at polishing the surface of her rugged westernism.
Aunt Fan was delighted. “Of course I’ll go, child! We’ll have a wonderful time—you’ll see! You’ll be crazy about it! Just wait till you see Fifth Avenue—and Peacock Alley! You know, Jim’ll just be pleased to the bone to beau us around—you can’t see anything of New York at night without a man, of course—and if we see it with him, we’ll see it right!” She beamed affectionately upon the girl for the first time since Dean Wolcott’s exodus from Dos Pozos. “Honey, I’m tickled pink to go with you. We’ll see all the new shows, and you know what I’m thinking of?— You know, I may have my face lifted!”
Ginger thought grimly that she, personally, might have her heart lifted, but she didn’t say so. She went downtown and saw about reservations and bought a wardrobe trunk and put her two evening gowns in it (Aunt Fan had banned all the rest) and in a fortnight they were on their way across the continent.
It surprised Ginger a great deal and at first annoyed her considerably to find how much country there seemed to be outside of California. She had known, of course, that New York would be larger and more impressive than San Francisco or Los Angeles, but she had felt that most of the desirable out-of-doors was contained in her own state. The great city itself startled and saddened her; she had not realized that there were as many people as that in the world, and most of them tired-looking and pale and in a hectic hurry to get somewhere else. They stopped at an opulent and ornate hotel and Aunt Fan was very gay and amiable, and on their first day—they had arrived in the morning—they shopped on the Avenue, lunched at the Ritz, did a matinée and had tea, and then Jim Featherstone called for them and took them down to dinner at the Brevoort and to a play, and afterwards to one of the roofs, where they ate again and danced.
Jim Featherstone was a tall, thin, middle-aged man with a rather melancholy expression and much skill in assembling a meal. He and Aunt Fan were unfeignedly glad to see each other, and Ginger was content to have them talk together and leave her to herself. They left her to herself a great deal in the days and evenings which followed—not that they ever forgot her or neglected her, but she had a sense of being with them but not of them, and she felt that it always would be so. Her aunt, languid as a wilted lily at Dos Pozos, developed an amazing energy in New York; from their nine o’clock tray breakfast in their sitting-room until one the next morning, she was in perpetual and enthusiastic motion—always panting a little, taking her short, chugging steps in her short-vamped, high-heeled pumps, her blue eyes prominent, like a gold fish’s.
“This is the life, dearie,” she said, breathlessly, one day. “And you know, I haven’t gained an ounce, for all I’ve eaten like a human being; it’s being so active that saves me. Jim doesn’t want me to have my face lifted; not for two or three years anyway, he says. He says you get a sort of hard look; he says he wouldn’t like to have my expression changed.” She sighed. “Isn’t it a crime— A man that can be a friend like that, a total loss as a husband?” She patted Ginger’s arm (she was very fond of her, in these days) affectionately. “Dearie, I don’t know that I regret—you know! He was a sweet boy, and class, class if ever I saw it in my life, but I’m not so sure he would have made you happy. If Jim Featherstone couldn’t make a woman happy, I don’t know who——”
“I think,” said Ginger, almost to herself, “a woman has to make herself happy, Aunt Fan. I guess no one can do it for you.” Ginger was saying “I think” a good deal at that time, and she was actually thinking. She was growing very tired of long parades of food, and the pavements made her feet ache for the sun-baked earth, for her stirrups. She had seen so many plays—“shows,” Jim Featherstone and her Aunt Fan invariably called them—“a good show,” “a bad show,” “a peach of a little show,” that they were blurred and jumbled in her memory, and her eyes wanted distance and sky line instead of bright lights indoors and quivering electric signs on the streets.
She had been more than a month, now, in the east, and she had docilely done everything and bought everything she was asked to do and to buy, and she had gone everywhere they wanted to take her, but she was puzzled. Was this the sort of thing which had made Dean Wolcott different from ’Rome Ojeda?
Her aunt sensed her restlessness and grew uneasy; she had no wish to terminate her own holiday. “Jim,” she said urgently, “I wish to goodness you could rustle up a man for Ginger—not just anybody, of course, but some really nice chap. One that looks like a collar ad—you know! The child’s getting homesick and blue, and if we don’t give her something to think about she’ll rush home and marry that wild-man—that immorally good-looking Ojeda boy.”