A Daughter of To-Day | Page 6

could bear not to be charming," said she sometimes to her
Philadelphia looking-glass, "but I could not bear not to be clever."

She said "clever," but she meant more than that. Elfrida Bell believed
that something other than cleverness entered into her personal equation.
She looked sometimes into her very soul to see what, but the writing
there was in strange characters that faded under her eyes, leaving her
uncomprehending but tranced. Meanwhile art spoke to her from all
sides, finding her responsive and more responsive. Some books, some
pictures, some music brought her a curious exalted sense of double life.
She could not talk about it at all, but she could slip out into the wet
streets on a gusty October evening, and walk miles exulting in it, and in
the light on the puddles and in the rain on her face, coming back, it
must be admitted, with red cheeks and an excellent appetite. It led her
into strange absent silences and ways of liking to be alone, which
gratified her mother and worried her father. When Elfrida burned the
gas of Sparta late in her own room, it was always her father who saw
the light under the door, and who came and knocked and told her that it
was after eleven, and high time she was in bed. Mrs. Bell usually
protested. "How can the child reach any true development," she asked,
"if you interfere with her like this?" to which Mr. Bell usually replied
that whatever she developed, he didn't want it to be headaches and
hysteria. Elfrida invariably answered, "Yes, papa," with complete
docility; but it must be said that Mr. Bell generally knocked in vain,
and the more perfect the submission of the daughterly reply the later
the gas would be apt to burn. Elfrida was always agreeable to her father.
So far as she thought of it she was appreciatively fond of him, but the
relation pleased her, it was one that could be so charmingly sustained.
For already out of the other world she walked in--the world of strange
kinships and insights and recognitions, where she saw truth afar off and
worshipped, and as often met falsehood in the way and turned raptly to
follow--the girl had drawn a vague and many-shaped idea of artistic
living which embraced the filial attitude among others less explicable.
It gave her pleasure to do certain things in certain ways. She stood and
sat and spoke, and even thought, at times, with a subtle approval and
enjoyment of her manner of doing it. It was not actual artistic
achievement, but it was the sort of thing that entered her imagination,
as such achievement's natural corollary. Her self-consciousness was a
supreme fact of her personality; it began earlier than any date she could
remember, and it was a channel of the most unfailing and intense

satisfaction to her from many sources. One was her beauty, for she had
developed an elusive beauty that served her moods. When she was dull
she called herself ugly--unfairly, though her face lost tremendously in
value then--and her general dislike of dullness and ugliness became
particular and acute in connection with herself. It is not too much to say
that she took a keen enjoying pleasure in the flush upon her own cheek
and the light in her own eyes no less than in the inward sparkle that
provoked it--an honest delight, she would not have minded confessing
it. Her height, her symmetry, her perfect abounding health were
separate joys to her; she found absorbing and critical interest in the
very figment of her being. It was entirely preposterous that a young
woman should kneel at an attic window in a flood of spring moonlight,
with, her hair about the shoulders of her nightgown, repeating Rossetti
to the wakeful budding garden, especially as it was for herself she did
it--nobody else saw her. She knelt there partly because of a vague
desire to taste the essence of the spring and the garden and Rossetti at
once, and partly because she felt the romance of the foolish situation.
She knew of the shadow her hair made around her throat, and that her
eyes were glorious in the moonlight. Going back to bed, she paused
before the looking-glass and wafted a kiss, as she blew the candle out,
to the face she saw there. It was such a pretty face, and so full of tire
spirit of. Rossetti and the moonlight, that she couldn't help it. Then she
slept, dreamlessly, comfortably, and late; and in the morning she had
never taken cold.
Philadelphia had pointed and sharpened all this. The girl's training there
had vitalized her brooding dreams of producing what she worshipped,
had given shape and direction to her informal efforts, had concentrated
them