“He took a box of cigars and a novel and went up to his room, to bed. At six o’clock in the morning he got up and roused the household, apparently in the jolliest humor, ringing all through the house the big dinner-bell that we use to call the children from the woods. He made Dorothy put on her new knickers, and got the car out, and drove off to town with the children, ‘for a lark,’ he said. They came back about noon, and drove up to the door, and honked. I went out; and there was Dorothy in her knickers on the front seat with her father, both of them smoking, and Dorothy with her hair—her lovely soft hair—bobbed above her ears, and her neck shaved like a convict’s. I could have cried—either with grief or with rage. And Oliver, simply bubbling with joy, called out, ‘I’ve met them halfway, Cornelia darling!’ Wasn’t he horrid? Wasn’t he perfectly horrid? I didn’t cry. But Oliver went back to New York by the afternoon train. And now you know why there was no birthday party last night.”
III
BLOOM
“Cornelia,” I said after a moment of intense meditation, “I think—I am not sure, but I think you are making a mistake.”
“I am sure!” she retorted. “I am not making a mistake. I know perfectly well what I am doing. I have never been more certain about anything in my life than that Oliver is wrong—utterly wrong. What mistake am I making?”
“You are making the mistake which nine tenths of the good people of our generation are making in dealing with their own children. You are making the mistake of trying to suppress the symptoms instead of diagnosing the disease. Knickers and the rest are symptoms. Of what? You ought to be thinking about that, but you are not. Cigarettes and bobbed hair are flags of revolt. You are interested only in capturing the flags and burning them. But what is the revolt about? That is what you ought to be thinking about; and you aren’t thinking about it at all.”
“I am thinking about it,” she protested. “I am thinking about nothing else. I am not a simpleton. Personally I do abominate bobbed hair and cigarettes, but I am not afraid of them. What I am afraid of is the disease, or the revolt, of which they are the signals. It is the state of mind which goes along with them. It is the precious and irrecoverable things that disappear when these things appear.”
“I don’t quite follow you.”
“I mean the sweetness and freshness of young girls—their bloom. Don’t you care, don’t you really care, even you—Oh, how shall I make you understand what I feel about the preciousness of the bloom on things, and on boys and girls who have been brought up happily and wisely in the right surroundings! Ever since I can remember I have had the strangest ecstatic sense about everything that has just come new into the world—dewy things, roses and morning glories early in the morning, little bits of babies, a pear tree all a soft mist of white blossoms, the slender little new moon in a green sky low in the west over treetops at nightfall, robin’s eggs, just peeped at, in a lilac bush, the rosy-white tips of old grapevines, the silvery mist of plums before they are picked—anything, everything lovely before dust or heat has touched it and before anyone, anyone, has pawed it over. When I was a young girl my heart fairly ached with tenderness for this quality in things—and with a passionate desire to preserve it. When one grows older, the desire doesn’t die out; it becomes only intenser, sharper, with years, till it goes through one like pain. And as I was walking over here this morning, I kept thinking of all these things that have it—have the bloom; and of my little Dorothy—who had it, till her own father brushed it off.”
Cornelia uttered this speech swiftly and with a kind of soft, eager, glowing sincerity which terribly disquieted my judgment. But I somehow felt that I had slipped into the position of advocate for the rest of Cornelia’s family, which stood at the moment in dire need of advocacy. I smothered my instinctive emotional response, and exclaimed:
“Nonsense! What you value in Dorothy can’t be brushed off. Bloom is only the transient breath of qualities that extend in her from rind to core, like the red in a blood orange. You are reveling in a mood, or you yourself would recognize that bloom—intactness—is preserved only by unsuccessful, undiscovered, sterile things. If it remains, it becomes a badge of uselessness. It is meant only for a brief seasonal show, which we may enjoy while it lasts; but it is silly to grieve over it. Other beauties follow—the full moon, and birds that break the lovely blue shells to bits and sing. Dorothy is breaking through her shell. That is all.”