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

have not had your confidence--that you have not thought it worth while to be single-minded in your relation to me. From a personal point of view there is more that I might say, but perhaps that is damning enough, and I have no desire to be abusive. It is on my conscience to add, moreover, that I find you a sophist, and your sophistry a little vulgar. I find you compromising with your ambitions, which in themselves are not above reproach from any point of view. I find you adulterating what ought to be the pure stream of ideality with muddy considerations of what the people are pleased to call the moralities, and with the feebler contamination of the conventionalities--"

"I _couldn't_ smoke with her," commented Janet, reading over his shoulder. "It wasn't that I objected in the least, but it made me so very--uncomfortable, that I would never try a second time."

Kendal's smile deepened, and he read on without answering, except by pressing her finger-tips against his lips.

"I should be sorry to deny your great cleverness and your pretensions to a certain sort of artistic interpretation. But to me the _artist bourgeois_ is an outsider, who must remain outside. He has nothing to gain by fellowship with me, and I--pardon me--have much to lose.

"So, if you please, we will go our separate ways, and doubtless will represent, each to the other, an experiment that has failed. You will believe me when I say that I am intensely sorry. And perhaps you will accept, as sincerely as I offer it, my wish that the future may bring you success even more brilliant than you have already attained." Here a line had been carefully scratched out. "What I have written I have written under compulsion. I am sure you will understand that.

"Believe me,

"Yours sincerely,

"ELFRIDA BELL.

"P.S.--I had a dream once of what I fancied our friendship might be. It is a long time ago, and the days between have faded all the color and sweetness out of my dream--still, I remember that it was beautiful. For the sake of that vain imagining, and because it was beautiful, I will send you, if you will allow me, a photograph of a painting which I like, which represents art as I have learned to kneel to it."

Kendal read this communication through with a look of keen amusement until he came to the postscript. Then he threw back his head and laughed outright. Janet's face had changed; she tried to smile in concert, but the effort was rather piteous. "Oh, Jack," she said, "please take it seriously." But he laughed on, irrepressibly.

She tried to cover his lips. "_Don't_ shout so!" she begged, as if there were illness in the house or a funeral next door, and he saw something in her face which stopped him.

"My darling, it can't hurt--it doesn't, does it?"

"I'd like to say no, but it does, a little. Not so much as it would have done a while ago."

"Are you going to accept Miss Bell's souvenir of her shattered ideal? That's the best thing in the letter --that's really supreme!" and Kendal, still broadly mirthful, stretched out his hand to take it again; but Janet drew it back.

"No," she said, "of course not; that was silly of her. But a good deal of the rest is true, I'm afraid, Jack."

"It's damnably impudent," he cried, with, sudden anger. "I suppose she believes it herself, and that's the measure of its truth. How dare she dogmatize to you about the art of your work! _She_ to _you_!"

"Oh, it isn't that I care about. It doesn't matter to me, how little she thinks of my aims and my methods. I'm quite content to do my work with what artistic conception I've got without analyzing its quality--I'm thankful enough to have any. Besides, I'm not sure about the finality of her opinion--"

"You needn't be!" Kendal interrupted, with scorn.

"But what hurts--like a knife--is that part about my insincerity. I _haven't_ been honest with her--I haven't! From the very beginning I've criticised her privately. I've felt all sorts of reserves and qualifications about her, and concealed them--for the sake of--of I don't know what--the pleasure I had in knowing her, I suppose."

"It seems to me pretty clear, from this precious communication, that she was quietly reciprocating," Kendal said bluntly.

"That doesn't clear me in the least. Besides, when she had made up her mind she had the courage to tell me what she thought; there was some principle in that. I--I admire her for doing it, but I couldn't, myself."

"Thank the Lord, no. And I wouldn't be too sure, if I were you, darling, about the unmixed heroism that dictates her letter. I dare say she fancied it was that, but--"

Janet's head leaped up from his shoulder. "Now you are unjust to her," she cried. "You don't know Elfrida, Jack. If you think her capable of assuming a motive--"

"Well, do you know what I think?" said Kendal, with an irrelevant smile, glancing at the letter in her hand. "I think she has kept a copy."

Janet looked at him with reproachful eyes, which nevertheless had the relief of amusement in them. "Don't you?" he insisted.

"I--dare say."

"And she thoroughly enjoyed writing as she did. The phrases read as if she had rolled them under her tongue. It was a _coup_, don't you see?--and the making of a _coup_, of any kind, at any expense, is the most refined joy which life affords that young woman."

"There's sincerity in every line."

"Oh, she means what she says. But she found an exquisite gratification in saying it which you cannot comprehend, dear. This letter is a flower of her egotism, as it were--she regards it with natural ecstasy, as an achievement."

Janet shook her head. "Oh no, no" she cried miserably. "You can't realize the--the sort of thing there was between us, dear, and how it should have been sacred to me beyond all tampering and cavilling, or it should not have been at all. It isn't that I didn't know all the time that I was disloyal to her, while she thought I was sincerely her friend. I did! And now she has found me out, and it serves me perfectly right--perfectly."

Kendal reflected for a moment, and then he brought comfort to her from his last resource.

"Of course the intimacy between two girls is a wholly different thing, and I don't know whether the relation between Miss Bell and myself affords any parallel to it--"

"Oh, Jack! And I thought--"

"What did you think, dearest?"

"I thought," said Janet, in a voice considerably muffled by contact with his tweed coat collar, "that you were perfectly _madly_ in love with her."

"Heavens!" Kendal cried, as if the contingency had been physically impossible. "It is a man's privilege to fall in love with a woman, darling--not with an incarnate idea."

"It's a very beautiful idea."

"I'm not sure of that--it looks well from the outside. But it is quite incapable of any growth or much, change," Kendal went on musingly, "and in the end--Lord, how a man would be bored!"

"You are incapable of being fair to her," came from the coat collar.

"Perhaps. I have something else to think of--since yesterday. Janet, look up!"

She looked up, and for a little space Elfrida Bell found oblivion as complete as she could have desired between them. Then--

"You were telling me--" Janet said.

"Yes. Your Elfrida and I had a sort of friendship too--it began, as you know, in Paris. And I was quite aware that one does not have an ordinary friendship with her--it accedes and it exacts more than the common relation. And I've sometimes made myself uncomfortable with the idea that she gave me credit for a more faultless conception of her than I possessed; for the honest, brutal truth is, I'm afraid, that I've only been working her out. When the portrait was finished I found that somehow I had succeeded. She saw it, too, and so I fancy my false position has righted itself. So I haven't been sincere to her either, Janet. But my conscience seems fairly callous about it. I can't help reflecting that we are to other people pretty much what they deserve that we shall be. We can't control our own respect."

"I've lost hers," Janet repeated, with depression, and Kendal gave an impatient groan.

"I don't think you'll miss it," he said.

"And, Jack, haven't you any--compunctions about exhibiting that portrait?"

"Absolutely none." He looked at her with candid eyes. "Of course if she wished me to I would destroy it. I respect her property in it so far as that. But so long as she accepts it as the significant truth it is, I am entirely incapable of regretting it. I have painted her, with her permission, as I saw her, as she is. If I had given her a, squint or a dimple, I could accuse myself; but I have not wronged her or gratified myself by one touch of misrepresentation."

"I am to see it this afternoon," said Janet. Unconsciously she was looking forward to finding some measure of justification for herself in the portrait; why, it would be difficult to say.

"Yes; I put it into its frame with my own hands yesterday. I don't know when anything has given me so much pleasure. And so far as Miss Bell is concerned," he went on, "it is an unpleasant thing to say, but one's acquaintance with her seems more and more to resolve itself into an opportunity for observation, and to be without significance other than that. I tell you frankly I began to see that when I found I shared what she called her friendship with Golightly Ticke. And I think, dear, with people like you and me, any more serious feeling toward her is impossible."

"Doesn't it distress you to think that she believes you incapable of speaking of her like this?"

"I think," said Kendal slowly, "that she knows how I would be likely to speak of her."

"Well," Janet returned, "I'm glad you haven't reason to suffer about her as I do. And I don't know at all how to answer her letter."

"I'll tell you," Kendal replied. He jumped up and brought her a pen and a sheet of paper and a blotting pad, and sat down again beside her, holding the ink bottle. "Write 'My dear Miss Bell.'"

"But she began her letter, without any formality."

"Never mind; that's a cheapness that you needn't imitate, even for the sake of politeness. Write 'My dear Miss Bell.'"

Janet wrote it.

"'I am sorry to find,'" Kendal dictated slowly, a few words at a time, "'that the flaws in my regard for you are sufficiently considerable--to attract your attention as strongly as your letter indicates. The right of judgment in so personal a matter--is indisputably yours, however--and I write to acknowledge, not to question it.'"

"Dear, that isn't as I feel."

"It's as you will feel," Kendal replied ruthlessly. "Now add: 'I have to acknowledge the very candid expression of your opinion of myself--which does not lose in interest--by the somewhat exaggerated idea of its value which appears to have dictated it,--and to thank you, for your extremely kind offer to send me a picture. I am afraid, however--even in view of the idyllic considerations you mention--I cannot allow myself to take advantage of that--"

"On the whole I wouldn't