A Daughter of To-Day, Sara Jeannette Duncan [bill gates best books txt] 📗

work. I shall aim at something better--something perhaps even as good as that," she held up the marked article. "I wonder if she realizes how fortunate she is--to appear between the same covers as Swinburne!"

"It is not fortune altogether," Kendal answered; "she works hard."

"Do you know her? Do you see her often? Will you tell her that there is somebody who takes a special delight in every word she writes?" asked Elfrida impulsively. "But no, of course not! Why should she care--she must hear such things so often. Tell me, though, what is she like, and particularly how old is she?"

Kendal had begun to paint again; it was a compliment he was able to pay only to a very few people. "I shall certainly repeat it to her," he said. "She can't hear such things often enough--nobody can. How shall I tell you what she is like! She is tall, about as tall as you are, and rather thin. She has a good color, and nice hair and eyes."

"What colored eyes?"

"Brown, I think. No--I don't know, but not blue. And good eyebrows. Particularly good eyebrows."

"She must be plain," Elfrida thought, "if he has to dwell upon her eyebrows. And how old?" she asked again. "Much over thirty?"

"Oh dear, no! Not thirty. Twenty-four, I should say."

Elfrida's face fell perceptibly. "Twenty-four!" she exclaimed. "And I am already twenty! I shall never catch up to her in four years. Oh, you have made me so unhappy! I thought she must be _quite_ old--forty perhaps. I was prepared to venerate her. But twenty-four and good eyebrows! It is too much."

Kendal laughed. "Oh, I say!" he exclaimed, jumping up and bringing a journal from the other side of the room, "if you're going in for art criticism, here's something! Do you see the _Decade?_ The _Decade's_ article on the pictures in last week's number fairly brought me back to town." He held his brush between his teeth and found the place for her. "There! I don't know who did it, and it was the first thing Miss Cardiff asked me when I put in my appearance there yesterday, so she doesn't either, though she writes a good deal for the _Decade_."

Kendal had gone back to work, and did not see that Elfrida was making an effort of self-control, with a curious exaltation in her eyes. "I--I have seen this," she said presently.

"Capital, isn't it!"

"Miss Cardiff asked you who wrote it?" she repeated hungrily.

"Yes; she commissioned me to find out, and if he was respectable to bring him there. Her father said I was to bring him anyway. So I don't propose to find out. The Cardiffs have burned their fingers once or twice already handling obscure genius, and I won't take the responsibility. But it's adorably savage, isn't it?"

"Do you really like it!" she asked. It was her first taste of success, and the savor was very sweet. But she was in an agony of desire to tell him, to tell him immediately, but gracefully, delicately, that she wrote it. How could she say it, and yet seem uneager, indifferent? But the occasion must not slip. It was a miserable moment.

"Immensely," he replied.

"Then," she said, with just a little more significance in her voice than she intended, "you would rather not find out?"

He turned and met her shining eyes. She smiled, and he had an instant of conviction. "You," he exclaimed--"you did it! Really?"

She nodded, and he swiftly reflected upon what he had said. "Now criticise!" she begged impatiently.

"I can only advise you to follow your own example," he said gravely. "It's rather exuberantly cruel in places."

"Adorably savage, you _said!_"

"I wasn't criticising then. And I suppose," he went on, with a shade of awkwardness, "I ought to thank you for all the charming things you put in about me."

"Ah!" she returned, with a contemptuous pout and shrug, "don't say that--it's like the others. But," she clinched it notwithstanding, and rather quickly, "will you take me to see Miss Cardiff? I mean," she added, noting his look of consternation, "will you ask her if I may come? I forget--we are in London."

At this moment the boy from below-stairs knocked with tea and cakes, little Italian cakes in iced jackets and paper boats. "Yes, certainly--yes, I will," said Kendal, staring at the tray, and trying to remember when he had ordered it; "but it's your plain duty to make us both some tea, and to eat as many of these pink-and-white things as you possibly can. They seem to have come down from heaven for you."

They ate and drank and talked and were merry for quite twenty minutes. Elfrida opened her notebook and threatened absurdities of detail for publication in the _Age_; he defied her, tilted his chair back, put his feet on a packing-box, and smoked a cigarette. He placed all the studies he had made after she left Paris before her, and as she finished the last but one of the Italian cakes, they discussed these in the few words from which they both drew such large and satisfying meanings as do not lie at all in the vocabulary of outsiders. Elfrida felt the keenest pleasure of her whole life in the knowledge that Kendal was talking to her more seriously, more carefully, because of that piece of work in the _Decade_; the consciousness of it was like wine to her, freeing her thoughts and her lips. Kendal felt, too, that the plane of their relations was somehow altered. He was not sure that he liked the alteration. Already she had grown less amusing, and the real _camaraderie_ which she constantly suggested her desire for he could not, at the bottom of his heart, truly tolerate with a woman. He was an artist, but he was also an Englishman, and he told himself that he must not let her get into the way of coming there. He felt an obscure inward irritation, which he did not analyze, that she should talk so well and be so charming personally at the same time.

Elfrida, still in the flush of her elation, was putting on her gloves to go, when the room resounded to a masterful double rap. The door almost simultaneously opened far enough to disclose a substantial gloved hand upon the outer handle, and in the tones of confident aggression which habit has given to many middle-aged ladies, a feminine voice said, "May we come in?"

It is not probable that Lady Halifax had ever been so silently, surely, and swiftly damned before. In the fraction of an instant that followed Kendal glanced at the dismantled tray and felt that the situation was atrocious. He had just time to put his foot upon his half-smoked cigarette, and to force a pretence of unconcern into his "Come in! Come in!" when the lady and her daughter entered with something of unceremoniousness.

"Those are appalling stairs--" Lady Halifax observed Elfrida, and came to an instant's astonished halt--"of yours, Mr. Kendal, appalling!" Then as Kendal shook hands with Miss Halifax she faced round upon him in a manner which said definitely, "Explain!" and behind her sharp good-natured little eyes Kendal read, "If it is possible!" He looked at Elfrida in the silent hope that she would go, but she appeared to have no such intention. He was pushed to a momentary wish that she had got into the cupboard, which he dismissed, turning a deeper brick color as it came and went. Elfrida was looking up with calm inquiry, buttoning a last glove-button.

"Lady Halifax," he said, seeing nothing else for it, "this is Miss Bell, from America, a fellow-student in Paris. Miss Bell has deserted art for literature, though," he went on bravely, noting an immediate change in his visitor's expression, and the fact that her acknowledgment was quite as polite as was necessary. "She has done me the honor to look me up this afternoon in the formidable character of a representative of the press."

Lady Halifax looked as if the explanation was quite acceptable, though she reserved the right of criticism.

Elfrida took the first word, smiling prettily straight into Lady Halifax's face.

"Mr. Kendal pretends to be very much frightened," she said, with pleasant, modest coolness, and looked at Kendal.

"From America," Lady Halifax repeated, as if for the comfort of the assurance. "I am sure it is a great advantage nowadays to have been brought up in America." This was quite as delicately as Lady Halifax could possibly manage to inform Kendal that she understood the situation. Miss Halifax was looking absorbedly at Elfrida. "Are you really a journalist?" Miss Halifax asked. "How nice! I didn't know there were any ladies on the London press, except, of course, the fashion-papers, but that isn't quite the same, is it?"

When Miss Halifax said "How nice!" it indicated a strong degree of interest. The threads of Miss Halifax's imagination were perpetually twisting themselves about incidents that had the least unusualness, and here was a most unusual incident, with beauty and genius thrown in! Whether she could approve it or not in connection with Kendal, Miss Halifax would decide afterward. She told herself that she ought to be sufficiently devoted to Kendal to be magnanimous about his friends. Her six years of seniority gave her the candor to confess that she was devoted to Kendal--to his artistic personality, that is, and to his pictures. While Kendal turned a still uncomfortable back upon them, showing Lady Halifax what he had done since she had been there last--she was always pitiless in her demands for results--Elfrida talked a little about "the press" to Miss Halifax. Very lightly and gracefully she talked about it, so lightly and gracefully that Miss Halifax obtained an impression which she has never lost, that journalism for a woman had ideal attractions, and privately resolved if ever she were thrown upon the bleak world to take it up. As the others turned toward them again Elfrida noticed the conscience-stricken glance which Kendal gave to the tea-tray.

"Oh," she said, with a slight enhancement of her pretty Parisian gurgle, "I am very guilty--you must allow me to say that I am very guilty indeed! Mr. Kendal did not expect to see me to-day, and in his surprise he permitted me to eat up all the cakes! I am so sorry! Are there no more--anywhere?" she asked Kendal, with such a gay pretence of tragic grief that they all laughed together. She went away then, and while they waited for a fresh supply of tea, Kendal did his best to satisfy the curiosity of the Halifaxes about her. He was so more than thankful she had convinced them that she was a person about whom it was proper to be curious.


CHAPTER XII.

It was Arthur Rattray who generally did the art criticism for the _Decade_, and when a temporary indisposition interfered between Mr. Rattray and this duty early in May, he had acquired so much respect for Elfrida's opinion in artistic matters, and so much good-will toward her personally, that he wrote and asked her to undertake it for him with considerable pleasure. This respect and regard had dawned upon him gradually, from various sources, in spite of the fact that the Latin Quarter article had not been a particular success. That, to do Miss Bell justice, as Mr. Rattray said in mentioning the matter to the editor-in-chief, was not so much the fault of the article as the fault of their public. Miss Bell wrote the graphic naked truth about the Latin Quarter. Even after Rattray had sent her copy back to be