The house where the Severances lived, and had lived for half a century, was built by Lucius Quintus Severence, Alabama planter, suddenly and, for the antebellum days, notably rich through a cotton speculation. When he built, Washington had no distinctly fashionable quarter; the neighborhood was then as now small, cheap wooden structures where dwelt in genteel discomfort the families of junior Department clerks. Lucius Quintus chose the site partly for the view, partly because spacious grounds could be had at a nominal figure, chiefly because part of his conception of aristocracy was to dwell in grandeur among the humble. The Severence place, enclosed by a high English-like wall of masonry, filled the whole huge square. On each of its four sides it put in sheepish and chop-fallen countenance a row of boarding houses. In any other city the neighborhood would have been intolerable because of the noise of the rowdy children. But in Washington the boarding house class cannot afford children; so, few indeed were the small forms that paused before the big iron Severence gates to gaze into the mysterious maze of green as far as might be--which was not far, because the walk and the branching drives turn abruptly soon after leaving the gates.
From earliest spring until almost Christmas that mass of green was sweet with perfume and with the songs of appreciative colonies of bright birds. In the midst of the grounds, and ingeniously shut in on all sides from any view that could spoil the illusion of a forest, stood the house, Colonial, creeper-clad, brightened in all its verandas and lawns by gay flowers, pink and white predominating. The rooms were large and lofty of ceiling, and not too uncomfortable in winter, as the family was accustomed to temperatures below the average American indoors. In spring and summer and autumn the rooms were delightful, with their old- fashioned solid furniture, their subdued colors and tints, their elaborate arrangements for regulating the inpour of light. All this suggested wealth. But the Severances were not rich. They had about the same amount of money that old Lucius Quintus had left; but, just as the neighborhood seemed to have degenerated when in fact it had remained all but unchanged, so the Severence fortune seemed to have declined, altogether through changes of standard elsewhere. The Severances were no poorer; simply, other people of their class had grown richer, enormously richer. The Severence homestead, taken by itself and apart from its accidental setting of luxurious grounds, was a third-rate American dwelling-house, fine for a small town, but plain for a city. And the Severence fortune by contrast with the fortunes so lavishly displayed in the fashionable quarter of the capital, was a meager affair, just enough for comfort; it was far too small for the new style of wholesale entertainment which the plutocracy has introduced from England, where the lunacy for aimless and extravagant display rages and ravages in its full horror of witless vulgarity. Thus, the Severences from being leaders twenty years before, had shrunk into "quiet people," were saved from downright obscurity and social neglect only by the indomitable will and tireless energy of old Cornelia Bowker.
Cornelia Bowker was not a Severence; in fact she was by birth indisputably a nobody. Her maiden name was Lard, and the Lards were "poor white trash." By one of those queer freaks wherewith nature loves to make mockery of the struttings of men, she was endowed with ambition and with the intelligence and will to make it effective. Her first ambition was education; by performing labors and sacrifices incredible, she got herself a thorough education. Her next ambition was to be rich; without the beauty that appeals to the senses, she married herself to a rich New Englander, Henry Bowker. Her final and fiercest ambition was social power. She married her daughter to the only son and namesake of Lucius Quintus Severence. The pretensions of aristocracy would soon collapse under the feeble hands of born aristocrats were it not for two things--the passion of the masses of mankind for looking up, and the frequent infusions into aristocratic veins of vigorous common blood. Cornelia Bowker, born Lard, adored "birth." In fulfilling her third ambition she had herself born again. From the moment of the announcement of her daughter's engagement to Lucius Severence, she ceased to be Lard or Bowker and became Severence, more of a Severence than any of the veritable Severences. Soon after her son-in-law and his father died, she became so much
the Severence that fashionable people forgot her origin, regarded her as the true embodiment of the pride and rank of Severence--and Severence became, thanks wholly to her, a synonym for pride and rank, though really the Severences were not especially blue-blooded.
She did not live with her widowed daughter, as two establishments were more impressive; also, she knew that she was not a livable person--and thought none the worse of herself for that characteristic of strong personalities. In the Severence family, at the homestead, there were, besides five servants, but three persons--the widowed Roxana and her two daughters, Margaret and Lucia--Lucia so named by Madam Bowker because with her birth ended the Severence hopes of a son to perpetuate in the direct line the family Christian name for its chief heir. From the side entrance to the house extended an alley of trees, with white flowering bushes from trunk to trunk like a hedge. At one end of the alley was a pretty, arched veranda of the house, with steps descending; at the other end, a graceful fountain in a circle, round which extended a stone bench. Here Margaret was in the habit of walking every good day, and even in rainy weather, immediately after lunch; and here, on the day after the Burke dance, at the usual time, she was walking, as usual--up and down, up and down, a slow even stride, her arms folded upon her chest, the muscles of her mouth moving as she chewed a wooden tooth-pick toward a pulp. As she walked, her eyes held steady like a soldier's, as if upon the small of the back of an invisible walker in front of her. Lucia, stout, rosy, lazy, sprawling upon the bench, her eyes opening and closing drowsily, watched her sister like a sleepy, comfortable cat. The sunbeams, filtering through the leafy arch, coquetted with Margaret's raven hair, and alternately brightened and shadowed her features. There was little of feminine softness in those unguarded features, much of intense and apparently far from agreeable thought. It was one of her bad days, mentally as well as physically--probably mentally because physically. She had not slept more than two hours at most, and her eyes and skin showed it.
"However do you stand it, Rita!" said Lucia, as Margaret approached the fountain for the thirty-seventh time. "It's so dull and tiring, to walk that way."
"I've got to keep my figure," replied Margaret, dropping her hands to her slender hips, and lifting her shoulders in a movement that drew down her corsets and showed the fine length of her waist.
"That's nonsense," said Lucia. "All we Severences get stout as we grow old. You can't hope to escape."
"Grow old!" Margaret's brow lowered. Then she smiled satirically. "Yes, I
am growing old. I don't dare think how many seasons out, and not married, or even engaged. If we were rich, I'd be a young girl still. As it is, I'm getting on.'"
"Don't you worry about that, Rita," said Lucia. "Don't you let them hurry you into anything desperate. I'm sure
I don't want to come out. I hate society and I don't care about men. It's much pleasanter lounging about the house and reading. No dressing--no fussing with clothes and people you hate."
"It isn't fair to you, Lucy," said Margaret. "I don't mind their nagging, but I do mind standing in your way. And they'll keep you back as long as I'm still on the market."
"But I want to be kept back." Lucia spoke almost energetically, half lifting her form whose efflorescence had a certain charm because it was the over-luxuriance of healthy youth. "I shan't marry till I find the right man. I'm a fatalist. I believe there's a man for me somewhere, and that he'll find me, though I was hid-- was hid--even here." And she gazed romantically round at the enclosing walls of foliage.
The resolute lines, the "unfeminine" expression disappeared from her sister's face. She laughed softly and tenderly. "What a dear you are!" she cried.
"You can scoff all you please," retorted Lucia, stoutly. "I believe it. We'll see if I'm not right. ...How lovely you did look last night! ... You wait for your 'right man.' Don't let them hurry you. The most dreadful things happen as the result of girls' hurrying, and then meeting him when it's too late."
"Not to women who have the right sort of pride." Margaret drew herself up, and once more her far-away but decided resemblance to Grandmother Bowker showed itself. "I'd never be weak enough to fall in love unless I wished."
"That's not weakness; it's strength," declared Lucia, out of the fulness of experience gleaned from a hundred novels or more.
Margaret shook her head uncompromisingly. "It'd be weakness for me." She dropped upon the bench beside her sister. "I'm going to marry, and I'm going to superintend your future myself. I'm not going to let them kill all the fine feeling in you, as they've killed it in me."
"Killed it!" said Lucia, reaching out for her sister's hand. "You can't say it's dead, so long as you cry like you did last night, when you came home from the ball."
Margaret reddened angrily, snatched her hand away. "Shame on you!" she cried. "I thought you were above spying."
"The door was open between your bedroom and mine," pleaded Lucia. "I couldn't help hearing."
"You ought to have called out--or closed it. In this family I can't claim even my soul as my own!"
"Please, dear," begged Lucia, sitting up now and struggling to put her arms round her sister, "you don't look on
me as an outsider, do you? Why, I'm the only one in all the world who knows you as you are--how sweet and gentle and noble you are. All the rest think you're cold and cynical, and--"
"So I am," said Margaret reflectively, "except toward only you. I'm grandmother over again, with what she'd call a rotten spot."
"That rotten spot's the real you," protested Lucia.
Margaret broke away from her and resumed her walk. "You'll see," said she, her face stern and bitter once more.
A maidservant descended the steps. "Madam Bowker has come," announced she, "and is asking for you, Miss Rita."
A look that could come only from a devil temper flashed into Margaret's hazel eyes. "Tell her I'm out."
"She saw you from the window."
Margaret debated. Said Lucia, "When she comes so soon after lunch she's always in a frightful mood. She comes then to make a row because, without her after-lunch nap, she's hardly human and can be more--more fiendish."
"I'll not see her," declared Margaret.
"Oh, yes, you will," said Lucia. "Grandmother always has her way."
Margaret turned to the maid. "Tell her I had just gone to my room with a raging headache."
The maid departed. Margaret made a detour, entered the house by the kitchen door and went up to her room. She wrenched off blouse and skirt, got into a dressing sacque and let down her thick black hair. The headache was now real, so upsetting to digestion had been the advent of Madam Bowker, obviously on mischief bent. "She transforms me into a raging devil," thought Margaret, staring at her fiercely sullen countenance in the mirror of the dressing table. "I wish I'd gone in to see her. I'm in just the right humor."
The door opened and Margaret whisked round to blast the intruder who had dared adventure her privacy without knocking. There stood her grandmother--ebon staff in gloved hand--erect, spare body in rustling silk--gray-white hair massed before a sort of turban-- steel-blue eyes flashing, delicate nostrils dilating with the breath of battle.
"Ah--Margaret!" said she, and her sharp, quarrel-seeking voice tortured the girl's nerves like the point of a lancet. "They tell me you have a headache." She lifted her lorgnon and scrutinized the pale, angry face of her granddaughter. "I see they were telling me the truth. You are haggard and drawn and distressingly yellow."
The old lady dropped her lorgnon, seated herself. She held her staff out at an angle, as if she were Majesty enthroned to pass judgment of life and death. "You took too much champagne at those vulgar Burkes last night," she proceeded. "It's a vicious thing for a girl to do--vicious in every way. It gives her a reputation, for moral laxity which an unmarried woman can ill-afford to have-- unless she has the wealth that makes men indifferent to character. ... Why don't you answer?"
Margaret shrugged her shoulders. "You know I detest champagne and never drink it," said she. "And I don't purpose to begin, even to oblige you."
"To oblige me!"
"To give you pretext for contention and nagging and quarreling."
Madam Bowker was now in the element she had been seeking--the stormy sea of domestic wrangling. She struck out boldly, with angry joy. "I've long since learned not to expect gratitude from you. I can't understand my own weakness, my folly, in continuing to labor with you."
"That's very simple," said Margaret. "I'm the one human being you can't compel by hook or crook to bow to your will. You regard me as unfinished business."
Madam Bowker smiled grimly at this shrewd analysis. "I want to see you married and properly settled in life. I want to end this disgrace. I want to save you from becoming ridiculous and contemptible--an object of laughter and of pity."
"You want to see me married to some man I dislike and should soon hate."
"I want to see you married," retorted the old lady. "I can't be held responsible for your electing to hate whatever is good for you. And I came to tell you that my patience is about exhausted. If you are not engaged by the end of this season, I wash my hands of you. I have been spending a great deal of money in the effort to establish you. You are a miserable failure socially. You attach only worthless men. You drive away the serious men."
"Stupid, you mean."
"I mean serious--the men looking for wives. Men who have something and have a right to aspire to the hand of
my grandchild. The only men who have a right to take the time of an unmarried woman. You either cannot, or will not, exert yourself to please. You avoid young girls and young men. You waste your life with people already settled. You have taken on the full airs and speech of a married woman, in advance of having a husband--and that is folly bordering on insanity. You have discarded everything that men--marrying men--the right sort of men--demand in maidenhood. I repeat, you are a miserable failure."
"A miserable failure," echoed Margaret, staring dismally into the glass.
"And I repeat," continued the old lady, somewhat less harshly, though not less resolutely, "this season ends it. You must marry or I'll stop your allowance. You'll have to look to your mother for your dresses and hats and gee-gaws. When I think of the thousands of dollars I've wasted on you--It's cheating--it's cheating! You have been stealing from me!" Madam Bowker's tone was almost unladylike; her ebon staff was flourishing threateningly.
Margaret started up. "I warned you at the outset!" she cried. "I took nothing from you that you didn't force on me. And now, when you've made dress, and all that, a necessity for me, you are going to snatch it away!"
"Giving you money for dress is wasting it," cried the old lady. "What is dress for? Pray why, do you imagine, have I provided you with three and four dozen expensive dresses a year and hats and lingerie and everything in proportion? Just to gratify your vanity? No, indeed! To enable you to get a husband, one able to provide for you as befits your station. And because I have been generous with you, because I have spared no expense in keeping you up to your station, in giving you opportunity, you turn on me and revile me!"
"You
have been generous, Grandmother," said Margaret, humbly. There had risen up before her a hundred extravagances in which the old lady had indulged her--things quite unnecessary for show, the intimate luxuries that contribute only indirectly to show by aiding in giving the feeling and air of refinement. It was of these luxuries that Margaret was especially fond; and her grandmother, with an instinct that those tastes of Margaret's proved her indeed a lady--and made it impossible that she should marry, or even think of marrying, "foolishly"--had been most graciously generous in gratifying them. Now, these luxuries were to be withdrawn, these pampered tastes were to be starved. Margaret collapsed despairingly upon her table. "I wish to marry, Heaven knows! Only--only--" She raised herself; her lip quivered-- "Good God, Grandmother, I
can't give myself to a man who repels me! You make me hate men--marriage--everything of that kind. Sometimes I long to hide in a convent!"
"You can indulge that longing after the end of this season," said her grandmother. "You'll certainly hardly dare show yourself in Washington, where you have become noted for your dress.... That's what exasperates me against you! No girl appreciates refinement and luxury more than you do. No woman has better taste, could use a large income to better advantage. And you have intelligence. You know you must have a competent husband. Yet you fritter away your opportunities. A very short time, and you'll be a worn, faded old maid, and the settled people who profess to be so fond of you will be laughing at you, and deriding you, and pitying you."
Deriding! Pitying!
"I've no patience with the women of that clique you're so fond of," the old lady went on. "If the ideas they profess--the shallow frauds that they are!--were to prevail, what would become of women of our station? Women should hold themselves dear, should encourage men in that old-time reverence for the sex and its right to be sheltered and worshiped and showered with luxury. As for you--a poor girl--countenancing such low and ruinous views--Is it strange I am disgusted with you? Have you no pride--no self- respect?"
Margaret sat motionless, gazing into vacancy. She could not but endorse every word her grandmother was saying. She had heard practically those same words often, but they had had no effect; now, toward the end of this her least successful season, with most of her acquaintances married off, and enjoying and flaunting the luxury she might have had--for, they had married men, of "the right sort"--"capable husbands"--men who had been more or less attentive to her--now, these grim and terrible axioms of worldly wisdom, of upper class honor, from her grandmother sounded in her ears like the boom of surf on reefs in the ears of the sailor.
A long miserable silence; then, her grandmother: "What do you purpose to do, Margaret?"
"To hustle," said the girl with a short, bitter laugh. "I must rope in somebody. Oh, I've been realizing, these past two months. I'm awake at last."
Madam Bowker studied the girl's face, gave a sigh of relief. "I feel greatly eased," said she. "I see you are coming to your senses before it's too late. I knew you would. You have inherited too much of my nature, of my brain and my character."
Margaret faced the old woman in sudden anger. "If you had made allowances for that, if you had reasoned with me quietly, instead of nagging and bullying and trying to compel, all this might have been settled long ago." She shrugged her shoulders. "But that's past and done. I'm going to do my best. Only--I warn you, don't try to drive me! I'll not be driven!"
"What do you think of Grant Arkwright?" asked her grandmother.
"I intend to marry him," replied Margaret.
The old lady's stern eyes gleamed delight.
"But," Margaret hastened to add, "you mustn't interfere. He doesn't like you. He's afraid of you. If you give the slightest sign, he'll sheer off. You must let me handle him."
"The insolent puppy," muttered Madam Bowker. "I've always detested him."
"You don't want me to marry him?"
"On the contrary," the old lady replied. "He would make the best possible husband for you." She smiled like a grand inquisitor at prospect of a pleasant day with rack and screw. "He needs a firm hand," said she.
Margaret burst out laughing at this implied compliment to herself; then she colored as with shame and turned away. "What frauds we women are!" she exclaimed. "If I had any sense of decency left, I'd be ashamed to do it!"
"There you go again!" cried her grandmother. "You can't be practical five minutes in succession. Why should a woman be ashamed to do a man a service in spite of himself? Men are fools where women are concerned. I never knew one that was not. And the more sensible they are in other respects, the bigger fools they are about us! Left to themselves, they always make a mess of marriage. They think they know what they want, but they don't. We have to teach them. A man needs a firm hand during courtship, and a firmer hand after marriage. So many wives forget their duty and relax. If you don't take hold of that young Arkwright, he'll no doubt fall a victim to some unscrupulous hussy."
Unscrupulous hussy! Margaret looked at herself in the mirror, met her own eyes with a cynical laugh. "Well, I'm no worse than the others," she added, half to herself. Presently she said, "Grant is coming this afternoon. I look a fright. I must take a headache powder and get some sleep." Her grandmother rose instantly. "Yes, you do look badly--for you. And Arkwright has very keen eyes-- thanks to those silly women of your set who teach men things they have no business to know." She advanced and kissed her granddaughter graciously on top of the head. "I am glad to see my confidence in you was not misplaced, Margaret," said she. "I could not believe I was so utterly mistaken in judgment of character. I'll go to your mother and take her for a drive."