The Gorgeous Girl. Nalbro Bartley
boudoir cap, and her feet flopping along in tattered silk slippers.
“Oh, dear, it’s Sunday again,” she began. “Goodness me, Mary, I’d hate to be as good as you are––always up and smiling! Why don’t you have a permanent smile put on your face? It would be lots easier.”
At which joke Luke giggled, and Mrs. Faithful, ensconced in a large rocker behind the starched curtains so that nothing passing on the street could escape her eagle, melancholy eye, nodded approval and added: “I should think Mary would lie abed the one morning she could. But no, she gets Luke up no matter what the weather is, and flies round like a house afire. When I was in my father’s house I 22 never had to lift a finger. Trudy, I wish you could have seen my bedroom. I had a mahogany four-poster bed with white draperies, and a dresser to match the bed, and my father bought me a silver toilet set when he was in Lexington, Kentucky, one time. He used to go there to sell horses. I remember one time I went with him and if I do say so I was much admired.
“I rode horseback those days and I had a dappled-gray pony named Pet, and everyone said it was just like looking at a picture to see me go prancing by. Of course I never thought about it. I wore a black velvet riding habit with a long train and a black velvet hat with a white plume just floating behind, and I had white gauntlets, too.
“Mary, Trudy wants her coffee. Hot cakes? Oh, pshaw, they won’t hurt you a mite. I was raised on ’em. I guess I’ll have another plateful, Mary, while you’re frying ’em. I’m so comfortable I hate to get up.... You poor little girls having to go out and hustle all week long and not half appreciated! Never mind, some Prince Charming will come and carry you off sometime.” Whereat she waddled to the table to wait for the hot cakes to arrive.
Mrs. Faithful had pepper-and-salt-coloured hair and small dark eyes that snapped like an angry bird’s, and a huge double chin. Her nondescript shape resolved itself into a high, peaked lap over which, when not eating hot cakes, her stubby hands seemed eternally clasped.
“Mary takes after her pa, poor child,” she had told Trudy confidentially. “Lean and lank as a clothes pole! And those gray eyes that look you straight through. I wish she didn’t think so much of the 23 office and would get a nice young man. I’d like to know what it is in those books she finds so fascinating. Can you tell me? I tried to read Omar Canine myself but it was too much for me.”
“I’m no highbrow,” Trudy had laughed. “Mary is; and a fine girl, besides,” she had added, resentfully.
With all Trudy’s shallow nature and shrewd selfishness she was as fond of Mary as she was capable of being fond of any one. Besides, it was more comfortable to be a member of the Faithful household for nine dollars a week and be allowed hot cakes and sirup à la kimono on Sunday morning; to have Gaylord Vondeplosshe, her friend, frequent the parlour at will; to use the telephone and laundry, and to occupy the best room in the house than to have to tuck into a room similar to Miss Lunk’s––and she was truly grateful to Mary for having taken her in. She felt that Mrs. Faithful underestimated her man of the family.
Mary at the present time earned forty dollars a week. Out of this she supported her family and saved a little. At regular intervals she tried persuading her mother to leave the old-fashioned house and move into a modern apartment, which would give her the opportunity of dispensing with Trudy as a boarder. But her mother liked Trudy, with her airs and graces, her beaux, her startling frocks. Trudy was company; Mary was not. She was the breadwinner and a wonderful daughter, as Mrs. Faithful always said when callers mentioned her. But the mother had never been friends with her children nor with their father. So Mary had grown up accustomed to work and loneliness; and, most important of all, accustomed to considering everyone else first 24 and herself last. It was Mary who saw beneath the boisterousness of Luke’s boy nature and spied the good therein, trying to develop it as best she could. Aside from Luke and her business she found amusement in her dream life of loving Steve O’Valley and vicariously sharing his joys and sorrows, safeguarding his interests.
She had told herself four years ago: “You clumsy, thin business woman––the idea of halfway dreaming that such a man as Steve would ever love you! Of course he’s intended for the Gorgeous Girl; the very law of opposites makes him care for her––pretty, useless doll. So take your joy in being his business partner, because the Gorgeous Girl can never share the partnership any more than you could share his name; and there’s a heap of comfort in being of some use.”
After which self-inflicted homily Mary had set to work and followed her own advice. She had discovered very shortly that there were many things to enjoy and be thankful for.
As soon as she was able Mary had refurnished her father’s study and taken it for her own. Here she made out household bills, lectured Luke, planned work, sewed, and read. It was a shabby, cheery room with a faded old carpet, an open fireplace, some easy-chairs, and a black-walnut secretary over which her father had dreamed his dreams. On the walls were stereotyped engravings such as Cherry Ripe and The Call to Arms, which Mrs. Faithful refused to part with; no one, herself included, ever knowing just why.
Mary also took herself to task in the little study in as impersonal a manner as a true father confessor. “You are twenty-six and growing set in your ways,” 25 she would mentally accuse––“always wanting a certain table at the café and a certain waitress. Old Maid! Must have your little French book to read away at as you munch your rolls and refuse to be sociable. Hermitess! And always buy chocolates and a London News on Saturday night. Getting so you fuss if you have square-topped hairpins instead of round, and letting milliners sell you any sort of hats because you are too busy to prink! Going to art galleries and concerts alone––and quite satisfied to do so. Now, please, Mary, try not to be so queer and horrid!” Followed by a one-sided debate as to whether or not these were normal symptoms of maturity, and if she were mistress of a house would she not entertain equally set notions regarding brands of soap, and so on?
“Office notions are not so nice as the frilly, cry-on-a-shoulder-when-the-biscuits-burn notions,” she would end, dolefully. “Fancy my tall self weeping on the superintendent’s shoulder because a cablegram has gone astray! Making women over into commercial nuns is a problem––some of us take it easily and don’t try to fight back, some of us fight and end defeated and bitter, and some of us don’t play the game but just our own hand––like Trudy. And what’s the square game for a commercial nun? That is what I’d like to know.”
She would then find herself dreaming of two distinct forks in the road, both of which might be possible for her but only one of which was probable. Each fork led to a feminine rainbow ending.
The more probable fork would resolve itself, a few years hence, into a trim suburban bungalow with a neat roadster to whisk her into business and whisk 26 her away from it. The frilly, cry-on-a-shoulder-when-the-biscuits-burn part of Mary would have long ago vanished, leaving the business woman quite serene and satisfied. She would find her happiness in mere things––in owning her home; in facing old age single-handed and knowing it would not bring the gray wolf; in helping Luke through college while her mother was in a comfy orthodox heaven with plenty of plates of hot cakes and dozens of starched window curtains; in rejoicing at some new possession for her living room, at her immaculate business costumes, new books, tickets for the opera season; in vacationing wherever she wished, sometimes with other commercial nuns and sometimes alone; in having that selfish, tempting freedom of time and lack of personal demands which permit a woman to be always well groomed and physically rested, and to take refuge in a sanitarium whenever business worries pressed too hard. To sum it up: it meant to sit on the curbstone––a nice, steam-heated, artistically furnished curbstone, to be sure, and have to watch the procession pass by.
The other fork in the road led to a shadowy rainbow since Mary knew so little concerning it. It comprised the exacting, unselfish role of having baby fingers tagging at her skirts and shutting her away from easy routines and lack of responsibility; of having a house to suit her family first and herself last; of growing old and tired with the younger things growing up and away from her, and the strong-shouldered man demanding to be mothered, after the fashion of all really strong-shouldered and successful men––requiring more of her patience and love than