Under the Law. Edwina Stanton Babcock
was accustomed to these cheerful little exits made with the bustling manner of one with much business on hand. When Miss Aurelia wanted to evade anything——Suddenly it flashed over the girl, "Why, she's always like that, she—she—never meets anything; she wouldn't discuss it with me that morning I tried to talk with her about Colter. She has pretended all along she didn't know about Colter, and now, with Dora crying there, red-eyed while she serves the meals, she tried not to know that—why," Sard's eyes opened, "I'm old, she's young."
"I ought to be her aunt," said the young girl to herself. "I ought to be sending her in a picture hat with an organdy dress and blue sash to meet Minga."
The girl stood motionless in the center of the floor, thinking. When youth begins to think and to think clearly and hard with its brave young mind, it is time for the world to take notice—Sard frowning at the floor, spoke aloud:
"Yes—that's living Under the Law," she said slowly, "I see what Dora meant; we live under a made law, we don't build up on it, away from it, to a better law; we just live, cramped, confined, ignorant, stupid, under it—Under the Law, that's it!!!" Sard laughed a little wonderingly. "I shall meet Minga this afternoon and we will go motoring and laughing over the country roads and Dunce will come home and we'll all eat fudge and dance to the Victrola to-night, and one or two of the bunch will come in and we'll play Rookie and Cheat and Toddle Top, and then at nine o'clock Minga will want a nut sundae, and we'll all pile into a machine and slew around to Dingman's and eat sundaes and then hoot along the roads until a tire pops and we think it time to go to bed, because under the law that is our privilege.
"But in that little top room Dora will wake up and think about her brother, who, she says, is Under the Law——" Sard looked out of the open house door toward the fleur de lis and the peonies, massed purple and crimson against the silver sparkle of the river. She stood gazing at the wealth and the shimmer of spring leaves. "Why," said Sard slowly, "those laws were only made for people who haven't grown up; surely," said the girl to herself, "surely we were meant to bring out of them other, better laws; why," said Sard, a deep light came into her long eyes with their straight clear brown, "surely there are other Laws! We can build above the Law, we don't need to stay Under the Law."
CHAPTER VI
MINGA'S LAWS
Minga arrived in a spasm of long thin legs, short skimpy skirt, a fluff of bobbed curls, a rather unnatural whiteness of face, lugging a suitcase, golf sticks and tennis racket with the independent gestures of an experienced baggagesmasher. It was an effect calculated to impress a girl's camp or a parcel of immigrants, but as that of the arrival of a maiden of eighteen summers at a quiet house in the little center of Willow Roads, it was hardly distinguished.
The meeting of the two girls was a curious clinched clasp done technically and punctuated by gasps, long, over-emphasized kisses and such half-shrieked protests as: "Oh, you dear brute, you're squeezing the life out of me—You silly old darned duck—Oh, Honey, isn't this great?" Then they fell apart, and with mutual cool glance of appraisement took each other in. As they turned talking and went up the long stairs, Sard's look was laughingly interrogative.
"Minga, you've bobbed your hair."
"Yes, you like it? The Mede and Persian don't! I had an awful row with the Mede, meaning Dad, but he came around, of course."
Sard looked lovingly at the little curly head; she felt of the thick knot at the back of her own young head and felt somehow old; she tossed it like an impatient colt.
"It must feel nice."
"It feels like October wind blowing over the pink heather," Minga laughed; she passed an arm around the older girl. "Let's go up town and get yours done right away. What do you want with hammocks of long hair? Why, if Absalom had only had his hair bobbed, the whole Bible would have been changed."
The voices of the girls had a curious cadence of indolence, also a rising sense of potential shriek, yet they were not raucous.
This was, however, merely cultivation that was unconscious; other girls of their age who copied their ways of wearing their sport-hats and "rolled" stockings had not attained to the cool middle register of these young tones, the pleasantly insistent quality of the aimless dialogue. Yet all their movements, restless and ungainly with curiously athletic emphasis, seemed to correspond to their sentences, over-stressed yet indifferent, while their young eyes, particularly Minga's, under long-lashed, artificially penciled brows, had hardness and clearness under which lay an everlasting watchfulness.
It is with this watchfulness that the youth of to-day betrays itself. Free from restrictions, from cares and responsibilities, it yet has within it the potentialities of these things. It unconsciously needs standards, longs for them and has them not; therefore, it unconsciously is seeking these standards, if only in the wearing of clothes, in the foot work of a tennis match, in new swimming strokes, in the use of new words. Poor little youth of to-day longing for values, saying with its strange wistful little face: "Does she bob her hair?—then, I'll bob my hair. Does she drink?—well then, I'll drink; does she sprawl over and maul her young men friends?—well, then I'll sprawl and maul."—Poor babies, not one of them strong enough to carve a path of his or her own, all led by the nose, trotting around after each other, all with hats, neckties, turned-down stockings, bathing suits, conventional stencils, voices and ignorance exactly alike. Pathetic, wistful, funny, hungry little American youth.
At the head of the stairs stood Miss Bogart. "My dear!" she held out two hands to Minga, who resolutely seized them and with calm effect of masculinity, gripped them until the lady's mouth twitched with pain.
"This is nice," almost shrieked Miss Reely—she also tried to put her arms around the young form, but she might as well have tried to embrace the string of a toy balloon. Minga, wafting along, recited some sentences, with the rather easy-going cadence which for a better name might be called "the chewing-gum accent."
"Awfully nice to see you, Miss Bogart; Mother and Father sent love. Isn't this great, though? You and Sard were ducks to ask me. My faith, what a jolly room." Minga peered into the adjacent bathroom. "Swell mirror, some towels; do I use these embroidered ones for cold cream?"
"Did you notice the view, dear, coming over the hill—the river—the dogwoods?" asked Sard's aunt complacently.
"The—er—view——? Oh, yes, I remember now, Sard said something; was it where they built that new garage? Say, Sard, did you know that garage is a big thing, the nippiest thing along the Hudson River—this shore anyway? A lot of money went into it. I know, because Father coughed up a few shekels, to help the man out, you know, and he says they are piling up coin already. He'll realize, all right!"
Miss Reely, rather ignored by the two girls, fussed about the room, settling a pillow sham, plumping up a cushion. She turned back to the new arrival, who, tossing her small provocative hat on the bed, turned with an anxious frown to the mirror. "Girls," announced Minga, unfastening her wrist-watch, "I'm pale." From a small leather case in her pocketbook she produced a tiny golden box of color, dabbed a bit of it on each young cheek and as she stood talking to her hostess calmly smoothed it in. Minga's eyes, wide open, cool as purple morning-glories, surveyed them. She stood, a trim, insignificant little figure of modernity, suggesting nothing, giving promise of nothing, dreaming of nothing, but curiously capable of anything and everything.
Miss Aurelia, primming her mouth, turned to the door; she paused with the immemorial formula of the hostess,
"Dinner is announced at a quarter of seven, dear; will you let us know if you want anything?" Irresolutely she drifted away; they heard the soft pat of her low-heeled slippers, the swish of her starched skirt, looked at each other and smiled.
"Exactly the same! What?" Minga giggled. "Does she still think it's awful to say 'Darn'?" Then, conscious of Sard's restraint, "Well, she's a sweet old sport. I'd like to take her up in an airplane. Now," apologetically, "you