Russell’s expression became more serious, as it did whenever his cousin was made their topic. “You think not?” he said. “You think she’s–-“
“No. But it’s not because she isn’t sincere exactly. It’s only because she has such a lot to live up to. She has to live up to being a girl on the grand style to herself, I mean, of course.” And without pausing Alice rippled on, “You ought to have seen ME when I had the stage-fever! I used to play ‘Juliet’ all alone in my room.’ She lifted her arms in graceful entreaty, pleading musically,
“O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon, That monthly changes in her circled orb, Lest thy love prove–-“
She broke off abruptly with a little flourish, snapping thumb and finger of each outstretched hand, then laughed and said, “Papa used to make such fun of me! Thank heaven, I was only fifteen; I was all over it by the next year.”
“No wonder you had the fever,” Russell observed. “You do it beautifully. Why didn’t you finish the line?”
“Which one? ‘Lest thy love prove likewise variable’? Juliet was saying it to a MAN, you know. She seems to have been ready to worry about his constancy pretty early in their affair!”
Her companion was again thoughtful. “Yes,” he said, seeming to be rather irksomely impressed with Alice’s suggestion. “Yes; it does appear so.”
Alice glanced at his serious face, and yielded to an audacious temptation. “You mustn’t take it so hard,” she said, flippantly.
“It isn’t about you: it’s only about Romeo and Juliet.”
“See here!” he exclaimed. “You aren’t at your mind-reading again, are you? There are times when it won’t do, you know!”
She leaned toward him a little, as if companionably: they were walking slowly, and this geniality of hers brought her shoulder in light contact with his for a moment. “Do you dislike my mind-reading?” she asked, and, across their two just touching shoulders, gave him her sudden look of smiling wistfulness. “Do you hate it?”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t,” he said, gravely. “It’s quite pleasant. But I think it says, ‘Gentlemen, beware!’”
She instantly moved away from him, with the lawless and frank laugh of one who is delighted to be caught in a piece of hypocrisy. “How lovely!” she cried. Then she pointed ahead. “Our walk is nearly over. We’re coming to the foolish little house where I live. It’s a queer little place, but my father’s so attached to it the family have about given up hope of getting him to build a real house farther out. He doesn’t mind our being extravagant about anything else, but he won’t let us alter one single thing about his precious little old house. Well!” She halted, and gave him her hand. “Adieu!”
“I couldn’t,” he began; hesitated, then asked: “I couldn’t come in with you for a little while?”
“Not now,” she said, quickly. “You can come–-” She paused.
“When?”
“Almost any time.” She turned and walked slowly up the path, but he waited. “You can come in the evening if you like,” she called back to him over her shoulder.
“Soon?”
“As soon as you like!” She waved her hand; then ran indoors and watched him from a window as he went up the street. He walked rapidly, a fine, easy figure, swinging his stick in a way that suggested exhilaration. Alice, staring after him through the irregular apertures of a lace curtain, showed no similar buoyancy. Upon the instant she closed the door all sparkle left her: she had become at once the simple and sometimes troubled girl her family knew.
“What is going on out there?” her mother asked, approaching from the dining-room.
“Oh, nothing,” Alice said, indifferently, as she turned away. “That Mr. Russell met me downtown and walked up with me.”
“Mr. Russell? Oh, the one that’s engaged to Mildred?”
“Well—I don’t know for certain. He didn’t seem so much like an engaged man to me.” And she added, in the tone of thoughtful preoccupation: “Anyhow—not so terribly!”
Then she ran upstairs, gave her father his tobacco, filled his pipe for him, and petted him as he lighted it.
CHAPTER XI
After that, she went to her room and sat down before her three-leaved mirror. There was where she nearly always sat when she came into her room, if she had nothing in mind to do. She went to that chair as naturally as a dog goes to his corner.
She leaned forward, observing her profile; gravity seemed to be her mood. But after a long, almost motionless scrutiny, she began to produce dramatic sketches upon that ever-ready stage, her countenance: she showed gaiety, satire, doubt, gentleness, appreciation of a companion and love-in-hiding— all studied in profile first, then repeated for a “three-quarter view.” Subsequently she ran through them, facing herself in full.
In this manner she outlined a playful scenario for her next interview with Arthur Russell; but grew solemn again, thinking of the impression she had already sought to give him. She had no twinges for any underminings of her “most intimate friend”—in fact, she felt that her work on a new portrait of Mildred for Mr.
Russell had been honest and accurate. But why had it been her instinct to show him an Alice Adams who didn’t exist?
Almost everything she had said to him was upon spontaneous impulse, springing to her lips on the instant; yet it all seemed to have been founded upon a careful design, as if some hidden self kept such designs in stock and handed them up to her, ready-made, to be used for its own purpose. What appeared to be the desired result was a false-coloured image in Russell’s mind; but if he liked that image he wouldn’t be liking Alice Adams; nor would anything he thought about the image be a thought about her.
Nevertheless, she knew she would go on with her false, fancy colourings of this nothing as soon as she saw him again; she had just been practicing them. “What’s the idea?” she wondered. “What makes me tell such lies? Why shouldn’t I be just myself?” And then she thought, “But which one is myself?”
Her eyes dwelt on the solemn eyes in the mirror; and her lips, disquieted by a deepening wonder, parted to whisper:
“Who in the world are you?”
The apparition before her had obeyed her like an alert slave, but now, as she subsided to a complete stillness, that aspect changed to the old mockery with which mirrors avenge their wrongs. The nucleus of some queer thing seemed to gather and shape itself behind the nothingness of the reflected eyes until it became almost an actual strange presence. If it could be identified, perhaps the presence was that of the hidden designer who handed up the false, ready-made pictures, and, for unknown purposes, made Alice exhibit them; but whatever it was, she suddenly found it monkey-like and terrifying. In a flutter she jumped up and went to another part of the room.
A moment or two later she was whistling softly as she hung her light coat over a wooden triangle in her closet, and her musing now was quainter than the experience that led to it; for what she thought was this, “I certainly am a queer girl!” She took a little pride in so much originality, believing herself probably the only person in the world to have such thoughts as had been hers since she entered the room, and the first to be disturbed by a strange presence in the mirror. In fact, the effect of the tiny episode became apparent in that look of preoccupied complacency to be seen for a time upon any girl who has found reason to suspect that she is a being without counterpart.
This slight glow, still faintly radiant, was observed across the dinner-table by Walter, but he misinterpreted it. “What YOU lookin’ so self-satisfied about?” he inquired, and added in his knowing way, “I saw you, all right, cutie!”
“Where’d you see me?”
“Downtown.”
“This afternoon, you mean, Walter?”