A Daughter of To-Day | Page 5

off she can
teach. That was my idea in giving her the training."

"Settle down in Sparta!" Mrs. Bell repeated, with a significant curve of
her superior lip. "Why, who is there--"
"Lots of people, though it isn't for me to name them, nor for you either,
my dear. But speaking generally, there isn't a town of its size in the
Union with a finer crop of go-ahead young men in it than Sparta."
Mrs. Bell was leaning against the inside shutter of their bedroom
window, looking out, while she waited for her husband. As she looked,
one of Sparta's go-ahead young men, glancing up as he passed in the
street below and seeing her there behind the panes, raised his hat.
"Heavens, no!" said Mrs. Bell. "You don't understand, Leslie."
"Perhaps not," Mr. Bell returned. "We must get that packing-case
opened after dinner. I'm anxious to see the pictures." Mr. Bell put the
finishing touches to his little finger-nail and briskly pocketed his
penknife. "Shall we go downstairs now?" he suggested. "Fix your
brooch, mother; it's just on the drop."
Elfrida Bell had been a long year away--a year that seemed longer to
her than it possibly could to anybody in Sparta, as she privately
reflected when her father made this observation for the second and the
third time. Sparta accounted for its days chiefly in ledgers, the girl
thought; there was a rising and a going down of the sun, a little eating
and drinking and speedy sleeping, a little discussion of the newspapers.
Sparta got over its days by strides and stretches, and the strides and
stretches seemed afterward to have been made over gaps and gulfs full
of emptiness. The year divided itself and got its painted leaves, its
white silences, its rounding buds, and its warm fragrances from the
winds of heaven, and so there were four seasons in Sparta, and people
talked of an early spring or a late fall; but Elfrida told herself that time
had no other division, and the days no other color. Elfrida seemed to be
unaware of the opening of the new South Ward Episcopal Methodist
Church. She overlooked the municipal elections too, the plan for
overhauling the town waterworks, and the reorganization of the public
library. She even forgot the Browning Club.

Whereas--though Elfrida would never have said "whereas" --the days in
Philadelphia had been long and full. She had often lived a week in one
of them, and there had been hours that stretched themselves over an
infinity of life and feeling, as Elfrida saw it, looking back. In reality,
her experience had been usual enough and poor enough; but it had fed
her in a way, and she enriched it with her imagination, and thought,
with keen and sincere pity, that she had been starved till then. The
question that preoccupied her when she moved out of the Philadelphia
station in the Chicago train was that of future sustenance. It was under
the surface of her thoughts when she kissed her father and mother and
was made welcome home; it raised a mute remonstrance against Mr.
Bell's cheerful prophecy that she would be content to stay in Sparta for
a while now, and get to know the young society; it neutralized the
pleasure of the triumphs in the packing-box. Besides, their real delight
had all been exhaled at the students' exhibition in Philadelphia, when
Philadelphia looked at them. The opinion of Sparta, Elfrida thought,
was not a matter for anxiety. Sparta would be pleased in advance.
Elfrida allowed one extenuating point in her indictment of Sparta: the
place had produced her as she was at eighteen, when they sent her to
Philadelphia. This was only half conscious--she was able to formulate
it later --but it influenced her sincere and vigorous disdain of the town
correctively, and we may believe that it operated to except her father
and mother from the general wreck of her opinion to a greater extent
than any more ordinary feeling did. It was not in the least a sentiment
of affection for her birthplace; if she could have chosen she would very
much have preferred to be born somewhere else. It was simply an
important qualifying circumstance. Her actual and her ideal self, her
most mysterious and interesting self, had originated in the air and the
opportunities of Sparta. Sparta had even done her the service of
showing her that she was unusual, by contrast, and Elfrida felt that she
ought to be thankful to somebody or something for being as unusual as
she was. She had had a comfortable, spoiled feeling of gratitude for it
before she went to Philadelphia, which had developed in the meantime
into a shudder at the mere thought of what it meant to be an ordinary
person. "I