Star-Dust. Fannie Hurst
of tonsils.
"Oh," she cried, "how could you? I'll never look him in the face again!
Oh—oh—how could you?"
"Are you crazy? How could I what?"
"The poem. The—the glint in—his hair. He'll think it was his hair I meant. Oh! Oh!"
The ready ire which could flame up in Mrs. Becker leaped out then.
"If you are ashamed of your mother, maybe you had better not be seen out with her again. All I am good for is to stint and manage to get you pretty clothes."
"No, n-no, mamma, I didn't mean that, dear."
"For a horse-face like him I won't be made little."
"Sh-h-h-h, dear! The whole street car doesn't need to hear."
"I wouldn't give a row of pins for ten like him."
"Mamma, the way you—talked."
"The way I talked, what? I suppose hereafter when I go out with my educated daughter I will have to wear a muzzle."
"I—Oh, it wasn't what you said, mamma; it was—the way you said it."
"The way I said it? That's a rich one. If I don't tell your father! My own child is ashamed of her mother. Well, let me tell you I—"
"No, mamma, you don't understand. Take that word 'swells,' for instance. Oh, I know I've used it myself, but all of a sudden, to-day, it—it sounded so ordinary."
"For a hundred-dollar-a-month school-teacher that your papa has to pay taxes to support, I'm not afraid of my p's and q's."
"And, mamma," suddenly and acutely sensitive to pleonasm, "you begin every sentence with 'say' and you say 'certainly' so often."
"If I don't have a talk with your father when he comes home this night! That's the thanks I get for sitting through a concert with you when I might have been enjoying myself at my euchre club. Just get those high-tone notions out of your head. We're simple people, not swells. You're a changed child these days."
It was true. An ineffable ache, a darting neuralgia of spirit, too cunning and quick for diagnosis, was shooting through Lilly her last two years at High School.
That Horace Lindsley, who was hardly to indent her life and whose interest in the clean-eyed girl was little more than a leaf upon his consciousness, and whose feet were already feeling the tug of the quicksands of mediocrity which were to suck him out of her reckoning, should have been the innocent source of this neurosis, is hardly remarkable.
Lilly, with the mysterious tenacity of a crannied flower, was pulling from her soil toward the light. And light in all its chiaroscuras rules the se leve, couche, complexion, and humors of the world. Lindsley was a ray.
And so her adolescence came in suddenly, almost stormlike, uprooting little forests of sapling traditions.
At sixteen she still slept on the cot drawn across the bed end and rode her bicycle up and down the sidewalks, holding her skirts down against the wind, but also she had ransacked the boarding-house shelves and High School library, reading her uncensored way through Lady Audrey's Secret, Canterbury Tales, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Plain Facts About Life, Arabian Nights, Golden Treasury, Childe Harold, To Have and to Hold, Tales from Shakespeare, Pilgrim's Progress, Old Curiosity Shop, Diary of Marie Baschkertcheff, Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, Les Misérables, Stories of the Operas, and a red volume rescued from propping up the hall hatrack, Great Lovers.
Within that same year Katy Stutz twice lowered her skirt hems.
"Mamma, I think it is terrible I haven't a room to myself."
The entire surface of Mrs. Becker seemed to coat over with sensitiveness to this frequently discussed issue.
"Why," her lips writhing with an excoriating brand of self-pity, "who am
I that I should want a home for my daughter, now that she is grown? Mr.
Kemble can treat his wife like a queen, but me—why, I'm mud under my
husband's feet."
The Kemble family, on a wave of putative prosperity, had eight months since gone to housekeeping in a rather pretentious rock-fronted house on one of the many newly graded streets west of Kingshighway. Every Friday night Lilly slept with Flora, the two side by side in Flora's pretty new bird's-eye-maple bed, exchanging unextinguishable confidences well through nights wakeful with their dreams.
"Flora has her own parlor to practice in, and here I can't even sing a little without the entire boarding house rapping on the wall."
"It's a shame. Watch me talk to your father to-night."
"Mamma, can't I please take elocution?"
"I should say not. Aren't piano and voice sufficient? The idea! I wouldn't give a row of pins for all the elocution in the world. Reciting is out of date."
"Mamma, it isn't. Mr. Lindsley says the modern woman of culture should cultivate her speaking voice the same as she learns to use her singing voice. Please, mamma; only a dollar a lesson."
"Oh, I don't care! Goodness knows where the money is coming from, with flax twine where it is; but anything for peace."
And so when Lilly graduated from High School, third in her class, and again slightly to the rear of Estelle Foote, who read the valedictory, she was executing excitedly, if sloppily, "The Turkish Patrol," was singing in an abominably trained but elastic enough soprano, the "Jewel Song" from "Faust," and "Jocelyn," a lullaby, and at a private recital of the Alden School of Dramatic Expression had recited "A Set of Turquoise" to incidental music.
Mrs. Schum's boarding house, to the man, turned out to Lilly's High School graduation, Katy Stutz and Willie standing in the wings and all unwittingly visible from the house. A German-silver manicure set, handsomely embossed, bore the somewhat cryptic card, "To Lilly Becker, as she stands on the threshold of life, from her friends in the house." There were a Honiton-lace fan with mother-of-pearl sticks, with the best wishes of her mother's euchre club, and from her parents a tiny diamond ring set high in gold facets, "To Lilly, from her parents, June, 1901," engraved in the hoop.
That night, still in her white organdie frock, with its whirligig design of too much Valenciennes lace, her hair worn high and revealing an unsuspectedly white nape of neck, Lilly regarded her parents across a little table-display of gifts.
"I feel so queer," she said, looking off through the chocolate-ochre wall paper, the reaction already set in. "So sort of—finished. Nothing to do."
MR. BECKER: "That was certainly a fine speech the president of the Board of Education made. You've something now that no one can take away from you. Knowledge is power."
"Two girls in our class are going to the University of Missouri, papa.
That's what I'd like to do—go to college."
"Don't spoil a good thing by trying to overdo it, Lilly. It is as bad for a young girl to permit herself to be educated into one of those bold, unwomanly woman's-rights girls as it is for her to be frivolous and empty-headed. When women get too smart they get unattractive."
"But, papa, girls are beginning more and more to go to college, and all women will be—suffrage—some day."
"Not womanly girls, Lilly."
"I always said that High School would be her ruination."
"I didn't learn it there, mamma. I always wanted to be something—"
"Well, you're a finished stenographer, aren't you? Why not go down to your father's office a couple of mornings a week?"
"I don't mean stenography. I hated learning it. I mean something—something—beyond—"
Suddenly Mrs. Becker, quiet at the business of wrapping away some of the gifts, glanced up, two round spots of color on her cheeks.