Three years of solitary life, following on a youth of confidential intimacy with the mother she had lost, had produced in her the quaint habit of half-loud soliloquy. “Fine feathers, Justine!” she laughed back at her laughing image. “You look like a phoenix risen from your ashes. But slip back into your own plumage, and you’ll be no more than a little brown bird without a song!”
The luxurious suggestions of her dress, and the way her warm youth became it, drew her back to memories of a childhood nestled in beauty and gentle ways, before her handsome prodigal father had died, and her mother’s face had grown pinched in the long struggle with poverty. But those memories were after all less dear to Justine than the grey years following, when, growing up, she had helped to clear a space in the wilderness for their tiny hearth-fire, when her own efforts had fed the flame and roofed it in from the weather. A great heat, kindled at that hearth, had burned in her veins, making her devour her work, lighting and warming the long cold days, and reddening the horizon through dark passages of revolt and failure; and she felt all the more deeply the chill of reaction that set in with her mother’s death.
She thought she had chosen her work as a nurse in a spirit of high disinterestedness; but in the first hours of her bereavement it seemed as though only the personal aim had sustained her. For a while, after this, her sick people became to her mere bundles of disintegrating matter, and she shrank from physical pain with a distaste the deeper because, mechanically, she could not help working on to relieve it. Gradually her sound nature passed out of this morbid phase, and she took up her task with deeper pity if less exalted ardour; glad to do her part in the vast impersonal labour of easing the world’s misery, but longing with all the warm instincts of youth for a special load to lift, a single hand to clasp.
Ah, it was cruel to be alive, to be young, to bubble with springs of mirth and tenderness and folly, and to live in perpetual contact with decay and pain—to look persistently into the grey face of death without having lifted even a corner of life’s veil! Now and then, when she felt her youth flame through the sheath of dullness which was gradually enclosing it, she rebelled at the conditions that tied a spirit like hers to its monotonous task, while others, without a quiver of wings on their dull shoulders, or a note of music in their hearts, had the whole wide world to range through, and saw in it no more than a frightful emptiness to be shut out with tight walls of habit….
A tap on the door announced Mrs. Dressel, garbed for conquest, and bestowing on her brilliant person the last anxious touches of the artist reluctant to part from a masterpiece.
“My dear, how well you look! I knew that dress would be becoming!” she exclaimed, generously transferring her self-approval to Justine; and adding, as the latter moved toward her: “I wish Westy Gaines could see you now!”
“Well, he will presently,” Miss Brent rejoined, ignoring the slight stress on the name.
Mrs. Dressel continued to brood on her maternally. “Justine—I wish you’d tell me! You say you hate the life you’re leading now—but isn’t there somebody who might–-?”
“Give me another, with lace dresses in it?” Justine’s slight shrug might have seemed theatrical, had it not been a part of the ceaseless dramatic play of her flexible person. “There might be, perhaps…only I’m not sure—” She broke off whimsically.
“Not sure of what?”
“That this kind of dress might not always be a little tight on the shoulders.”
“Tight on the shoulders? What do you mean, Justine? My clothes simply hang on you!”
“Oh, Effie dear, don’t you remember the fable of the wings under the skin, that sprout when one meets a pair of kindred shoulders?” And, as Mrs. Dressel bent on her a brow of unenlightenment—“Well, it doesn’t matter: I only meant that I’ve always been afraid good clothes might keep my wings from sprouting!” She turned back to the glass, giving herself a last light touch such as she had bestowed on the roses.
“And that reminds me,” she continued—“how about Mr. Amherst’s wings?”
“John Amherst?” Mrs. Dressel brightened into immediate attention. “Why, do you know him?”
“Not as the owner of the Westmore Mills; but I came across him as their assistant manager three years ago, at the Hope Hospital, and he was starting a very promising pair then. I wonder if they’re doing as well under his new coat.”
“I’m not sure that I understand you when you talk poetry,” said Mrs. Dressel with less interest; “but personally I can’t say I like John Amherst—and he is certainly not worthy of such a lovely woman as Mrs. Westmore. Of course she would never let any one see that she’s not perfectly happy; but I’m told he has given them all a great deal of trouble by interfering in the management of the mills, and his manner is so cold and sarcastic—the truth is, I suppose he’s never quite at ease in society. Her family have never been really reconciled to the marriage; and Westy Gaines says–-“
“Ah, Westy Gaines would,” Justine interposed lightly. “But if Mrs. Amherst is really the Bessy Langhope I used to know it must be rather a struggle for the wings!”
Mrs. Dressel’s flagging interest settled on the one glimpse of fact in this statement. “It’s such a coincidence that you should have known her too! Was she always so perfectly fascinating? I wish I knew how she gives that look to her hair!”
Justine gathered up the lace sunshade and long gloves which her friend had lent her. “There was not much more that was genuine about her character—that was her very own, I mean—than there is about my appearance at this moment. She was always the dearest little chameleon in the world, taking everybody’s colour in the most flattering way, and giving back, I must say, a most charming reflection—if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor; but when one got her by herself, with no reflections to catch, one found she hadn’t any particular colour of her own. One of the girls used to say she ought to wear a tag, because she was so easily mislaid–- Now then, I’m ready!”
Justine advanced to the door, and Mrs. Dressel followed her downstairs, reflecting with pardonable complacency that one of the disadvantages of being clever was that it tempted one to say sarcastic things of other women—than which she could imagine no more crying social error.
During the drive to the garden-party, Justine’s thoughts, drawn to the past by the mention of Bessy Langhope’s name, reverted to the comic inconsequences of her own lot—to that persistent irrelevance of incident that had once made her compare herself to an actor always playing his part before the wrong stage-setting. Was there not, for instance, a mocking incongruity in the fact that a creature so leaping with life should have, for chief outlet, the narrow mental channel of the excellent couple between whom she was now being borne to the Gaines garden-party? All her friendships were the result of propinquity or of early association, and fate had held her imprisoned in a circle of well-to-do mediocrity, peopled by just such figures as those of the kindly and prosperous Dressels. Effie Dressel, the daughter of a cousin of Mrs. Brent’s, had obscurely but safely allied herself with the heavy blond young man who was to succeed his father as President of the Union Bank, and who was already regarded by the “solid business interests” of Hanaford as possessing talents likely to carry him far in the development of the paternal fortunes. Harry Dressel’s honest countenance gave no evidence of peculiar astuteness, and he was in fact rather the product of special conditions than of an irresistible bent. He had the sound Saxon love of games, and the most interesting game he had ever been taught was “business.” He was a simple domestic being, and according to Hanaford standards the most obvious obligation of the husband and father was to make his family richer. If Harry Dressel had ever formulated his aims, he might have said that he wanted to be the man whom Hanaford most respected, and that was only another way of saying, the richest man in Hanaford. Effie embraced his creed with a zeal facilitated by such evidence of its soundness as a growing income and the early prospects of a carriage. Her mother-in-law, a kind old lady with a simple unquestioning love of money, had told her on her wedding day that Harry’s one object would always be to make his family proud of him; and the recent purchase of the victoria in which Justine and the Dressels were now seated was regarded by the family as a striking fulfillment of this prophecy.