White Ashes. Sidney R. Kennedy
"Is there anything in particular that you are so tired of?" she insinuatingly asked.
"Yes, Miss Portia, there is. And furthermore you know as well as I do what that something is."
"I would hesitate to mention it," said Miss Hurd, with a smile.
"Well, I wouldn't. On the contrary I freely and unqualifiedly announce that I am excessively tired of a thousand things, most of which begin with P. I am tired of portraits and portrait painters; I am tired of posing and of poseurs; I am tired of palettes and paint; I am tired of—" she stopped, breaking off a little suddenly.
"Well, complete it. You are tired of Pelgram, I suppose," said Isabel, composedly.
"Pelgram, then. Yes, I am," the other girl admitted.
Her friend raised her eyebrows, and glanced at her somewhat curiously.
"You don't have to marry him, you know," she remarked in a matter-of-fact tone.
"Of course I don't," Helen replied quickly. "But I have to sit to him four times a week until that unspeakable portrait is finished. And it's my belief that it never will be finished. He won't even let me look at it now. It's my opinion that he's doing like Penelope, and destroying every night what he has accomplished during the day. I would never have promised to have it done if I had suspected what I was in for. And if it were for any one else but old Aunt Mary Wardrop, I'd back out now."
Isabel regarded her sympathetically. A portrait was bad enough without the added embarrassment of an amatory artist.
"Is he really as difficult as that?" she asked.
"Even more difficult. He's more difficult than anything conceivable—except analytical trig," she added reflectively.
"Don't mix art, psychology, and mathematics, or you will certainly get into trouble," said her friend. "And really, if I were you, I would try to forget that I had been 'higher' educated. It's enough to give one the creeps to hear a perfectly normal girl talk of analytical trig—whatever that may be—if there is such a thing."
Helen laughed.
"I'm not actually sure, myself, that there is. For, as I remember it now, it deals almost exclusively with imaginary or worse than imaginary quantities. I remember distinctly that i with the acute accent meant the square root of minus one—and stood for 'imaginary' on the face of it. That was right at the start, and the farther you went the farther from reality you found yourself. But I don't remember anything of the subject—only the name—I wouldn't dream of being so Bostonian as that."
"Well, it's almost as bad merely to refer to it," said Miss Hurd.
"Especially when you know that I never could pass beginner's algebra."
The two girls laughed together. It was perfectly true that Isabel, who was keen almost to the point of brilliance in the application of mathematics to such practical matters as finance and real life, had never academically been anything but a hopeless dunce, while Helen, who had penetrated so far into the upper occult that the mind shuddered to follow, was notoriously incapable of making her personal accounts balance within fifty per cent. It was an understood situation that always amused them both.
They had been friends all their lives, these two, or so nearly all their lives that the residue was hardly worth consideration. As each was now nearing the middle twenties, it must have been almost a full generation since they had been presented to one another. It was at the respective ages of six and five that little Miss Maitland and little Miss Hurd had been discreetly conveyed to the decorous Back Bay Kindergarten which was known to all Bostonians of a certain class as the "Child's Cultural Institute" of Miss Dorcas Kingsbury. It was there they met, under the watchful eye and the eagle espionage of Miss Dorcas. That good lady was not distinguished for her social graces, but her introduction of these two small maids was an instant success. It has subsequently been established, by hesper light so to speak, that the bond which first united the two was their chastened and wide-eyed mutual marveling at six long black cockscrew curls which marked—for only by a figure of speech could they have been said to adorn—the lateral aspects of Miss Dorcas's chignon. Forth they jutted, these remarkable structures, from cul-de-lampes above the lady's ears, and thence they descended, three toward the right shoulder, three toward the left. But their most astonishing quality was their buoyancy, their resiliency, which made them vital and active things, and not mere soulless parts of an ordered design.
At all events the two little newcomers, cowering somewhat under the glittering gaze of their preceptress, drew for protection close to one another, small hand found small hand, and a friendship was cemented which the swirling years had proved unable to break.
Their later experiences at this fountain of learning served only to draw them closer still. Many a time, in later years, would they smile together, remembering incidents that had happened in the square old red brick house with the green blinds, and the orderly terrible courtyard with the straight narrow seats set bolt upright against a speechless wall, and the little green pump that only grown-up persons were permitted to touch; remembering, too, the long low-backed benches in the schoolroom, row after row to the end of the low-ceiled room, and the tiny gray blackboard, and the painful corner behind the stove where recalcitrant pupils were stood, awaiting the approach of tardy contrition or increased mental attainments; remembering, above all, the grave, kind face of the teacher herself, Miss Dorcas Kingsbury—of the Kingsburys—reduced in her middle age to conducting a "cultural institute," but as undeviating and inflexible in her idea of duty as was the very line of her uncompromising brow. Not bad training for small girls, that of Miss Dorcas; Helen and Isabel would not have changed it, in their memories at least, for the fairest lane of learning in the world.
Time went on and gradually carried them beyond the pale of Miss Dorcas's influence and over the horizon beyond the sight of her curious curls. But the school-girl lovers had become friends—which was of much more consequence. They stayed together as they grew, although in intellectual concerns Helen soon left Isabel behind. A year the elder, she was also the more dominant, and had always taken the lead in their mutual affairs. Isabel, who had a will of her own, did not always follow; but there was never any struggle for precedence, and Helen's unselfishness prevented her from ever assuming an unpleasant autocracy.
It would have been difficult, at any rate, to associate anything unpleasant with Miss Maitland. She was tall, well over the middle height, and her hair was of that uncompromising blackness that made one think of things Amazonian—or would have done so had not her deep violet eyes softened the effect in a peculiarly attractive manner. It was no wonder that poor Pelgram fluttered about so compelling a flame, and Isabel, as she looked at her friend, thought for the thousandth time that if she were a man—well, it was a little hard to say what she would do in that remote contingency, but she felt certain, at all events, that she would adore Helen.
As a matter of fact no young lady in all Boston seemed less likely to become a man in the next or any subsequent incarnation. There are Bostonian persons of the female kind who could with readiness be conceived as turning into men without any sea-change or especially startling biological transmutation. But Isabel was not one of them. Small and dainty, she was of the gold-and-white, essentially feminine type. She lived alone with her parents in the solid old-fashioned house on the north side of the Common, almost under the shadow of the State House dome. It made very little difference to Isabel where she lived, and since her father would never consider moving to any other locality nor rebuilding the rather patriarchal homestead which he had occupied for twenty-five years, it was just as well that the daughter was so complaisant. She, moreover, was the only person who looked upon John M. Hurd with a clear understanding of his habits of thought. She could herself accomplish things with him, when her way did not conflict too directly with his own, but she gained her points first by concentrating her attack on the matters really of import to her, and second by taking her way whenever she saw an avenue open, notifying her somewhat surprised parent afterward that she had done so.
"Father once told me a story," Isabel had said, "of a man who went to a railroad president about a culvert he wanted to build under the railroad track, and the president told him that he should have