His Second Wife | Page 7

the work
and the business, the scheming and planning and rush for money, were
focussed on this. And for this she was attracting those swift admiring
glances. What she would be, what she wanted to be, what she now
ardently longed to become, grew clearer to her day by day. For the
picture was there before her eyes. Each day it grew more familiar, as at
home in Amy's room she watched her beautiful sister, a stranger no
longer to her now, seated at her dressing table good-humouredly
chatting, and meanwhile revealing by numberless deft little things she
was doing the secrets of clothes and of figure, and of cheeks and lips
and eyes, with subtle hints behind it all of the ancient magic art of Pan.
She felt Amy ceaselessly bringing her out. This gave her thrills of
excitement. And looking at her sister she asked:
"Shall I ever be like that?"
And they kept talking, talking. And through it all the same feeling was

there, the sense of this driving force of the town.
With the sturdy independence which was so deep a part of her, Ethel
strove to hold up her end of these intent conversations and show that
she had views of her own. She was no old-fashioned country girl, but
modern, something different! They had discussed things in her club
which would have shocked their mothers, discussed them long and
seriously. They had spoken of marriage and divorce, of love and having
children, and then had gone eagerly on to suffrage, jobs and "mental
science," art, music and the rest of life. She had gathered there an
image of New York as a glittering region of strong clever men and
fascinating women, who not only loved to dance but held the most
brilliant discussions at dinners livened by witty remarks--a place of
vistas opening into a world of great ideas. And now with her older
sister, she questioned her about it all, the art and all the "movements,"
the "salons" and the clever talk. She asked:
"Do you know any suffragists? Do you know any men who write plays
or novels, or any musicians or painters--or actresses?" And again and
again by an air of assurance Ethel tried to hide her dismay, as her sister
subtly made all this seem like a school-girl's fancies.
"Yes," Amy would say good-humouredly, "there are such people, I
suppose--plenty of them, all over town. And they talk and talk and hold
meetings, and they go to high-brow plays--and some women even work.
But it doesn't sound very thrilling, does it? I don't know. They never
seem to me quite real."
And then Amy would go on to hint what did seem real to her in life.
And again that picture of the town, all centred on what emerged from
the shops and poured into the cafes to dance, was painted for her sister.
But behind her smiling manner of one with an intimate knowledge of
life, Amy would glance at the girl by her side in a curious, rather
anxious way. For vaguely she knew that years ago when she herself had
come to New York, she too had had dreams and imaginings of what her
young sister called "the real thing." And she knew that these had
dropped away--at first in the struggle, which for her had been so intense

and narrowing, to gain a foothold in the town; then through rebuffs
from the clever friends of Joe Lanier when she married him; and later
through a feeling of lazy acceptance of her lot. But Ethel's talk and
Ethel's eyes recalled what had been left behind. And Amy thought of
her present friends, and again with a little uneasy pang she put off their
meeting with Ethel. For they did not seem good to her then, and the
picture she found herself painting of their lives and her own appeared a
bit flat and trivial in the light of Ethel's eagerness. They dressed and
went shopping, they went to tea dances, they dined in cafés or in their
homes, rushed off in taxis to musical plays, and had supper and danced.
They loved and were loved, they "played the game."
"My dear," she said decisively, "it's not what you say that interests men;
it's how you look and what you have on."
But despite her air of assurance and her own liking of her life, she felt
the picture growing flat, and so she added quietly:
"Oh, my friends aren't all I'd like. They never are, if you've anything in
you. If you really want to be somebody--" and here her whole
expression changed to one of resolute faith in herself--"you need just
one thing, money. And you can't do anything about that, you have to
wait for your husband.