A Daughter of To-Day

by Sara Jeannette Duncan

Cardiff laid down his journal again at the appealing note.

"No!" she cried, "I won't bore you with it now; wait till the proofs come. Good-night!" She kissed him lightly on the cheek. "About Elfrida," she added, still bending over him. "You'll be very careful, won't you, daddy dear—not to hurt her feelings in any way, I mean?"

After she had gone, Lawrence Cardiff laid down the Revue again and smoked meditatively for half an hour. During that time he revolved at least five subjects which he thought Elfrida, with proper supervision, might treat effectively. But the supervision would be very necessary.

A fortnight later Mr. Cardiff sat in the same chair, smoking the same pipe, and alternately frowned and smiled upon the result of that evening's meditation. It had reached him by post in the afternoon without an accompanying word; the exquisite self-conscious manuscript seemed to breathe a subdued defiance at him, with the merest ghost of a perfume that Cardiff liked better. Once or twice he held the pages closer to his face to catch it more perfectly.

Janet had not mentioned the matter to him again; indeed, she had hardly thought of it. Her whole nature was absorbed in her fight with herself, in the struggle for self-control, which had ceased to come to the surface of her life at intervals, and had now become constant and supreme with her. Kendal had made it harder for her lately by continually talking of Elfrida. He brought his interest in her to Janet to discuss as he naturally brought everything that touched him to her, and Janet, believing it to be a lover's pleasure, could not forbid him. When he criticised Elfrida, Janet fancied it was to hear her warm defence, which grew oddly reckless in her anxiety to hide the bitterness that tinged it.

"Otherwise," she permitted herself to reflect, "he is curiously just in his analysis of her—for a man," and hated the thought for its touch of disloyalty.

Knowing Elfrida as she thought she knew her, Kendal's talk wounded her once for herself and twice for him. He was going on blindly, confidently, trusting, Janet thought bitterly, to his own sweetness of nature, to his comeliness and the fineness of his sympathies—who had ever refused him anything yet? And only to his hurt, to his repulse—from the point of view of sentiment, to his ruin. For it did not seem possible to Janet that a hopeless passion for a being like Elfrida Bell could result in anything but collapse. Whenever he came to Kensington Square, and he came often, she went down to meet him with a quaking heart, and sought his face nervously for the haggard, broken look which should mean that he had asked Elfrida to marry him and been artistically refused. Always she looked in vain; indeed, Kendal's spirits were so uniformly like a schoolboy's that once or twice she asked herself, with sudden terror, whether Elfrida had deceived her—whether it might not be otherwise between them, recognizing then, with infinite humiliation, how much worse that would be. She took to working extravagantly hard, and Elfrida noticed with distinct pleasure how much warmer her manner had grown, and in how many pretty ways she showed her enthusiasm. Janet was such a conquest! Once when Kendal seemed to Janet on the point of asking her what she thought of his chances, she went to a florist's in the High, and sent Elfrida a pot of snowy chrysanthemums, after which she allowed herself to refrain from seeing her for a week. Her talk with her father about helping Elfrida to place her work with the magazines had been one of the constant impulses by which she tried to compensate her friend, as it were, for the amount of suffering that young woman was inflicting upon her—she would have found a difficulty in explaining it more intelligibly than that.

As he settled together the pages of Miss Bell's article on "The Nemesis of Romanticism" and laid them on the table, Lawrence Cardiff thought, of it with sincere regret.

"It is hopeless—hopeless," he said to himself. "It must be rewritten from end to end. I suppose she must do it herself," he added, with a smile that he drew from some memory of her, and he pulled writing materials toward him to tell her so. Re-reading his brief note, he frowned, hesitated, and tore it up. The next followed it into the waste-paper basket. The third gave Elfrida gently to understand that in Mr. Cardiff's opinion the article was a little unbalanced—she would remember her demand that he should be absolutely frank. She had made some delightful points, but there was a lack of plan and symmetry. If she would give him the opportunity he would be very happy to go over it with her, and possibly she would make a few changes. More than this Cardiff could not induce himself to say. And he would await her answer before sending the article back to her.

It came next day, and in response to it Mr. Cardiff found himself walking, with singular lightness of step, toward Fleet Street in the afternoon with Elfrida's manuscript in his pocket. Buddha smiled more inscrutably than ever as they went over it together, while the water hissed in the samovar in the corner, and little blue flames chased themselves in and out of the anthracite in the grate, and the queer Orientalism of the little room made its picturesque appeal to Cardiff's senses. He had never been there before.