The Coryston Family | Page 8

some of their relations and old family
friends: he had really been impossible!
Meanwhile Lady Coryston gave her daughter no light on the situation.
She went silently up-stairs, followed by Marcia. The girl, a slight figure
in white, mounted unwillingly. The big, gloomy house oppressed her as
she passed through it. The classical staircase with its stone-colored
paint and its niches holding bronze urns had always appeared to her
since her childhood as the very top of dreariness; and she particularly
disliked the equestrian portrait of her great-grandfather by an early
Victorian artist, which fronted her as she ascended, in the gallery at the
top of the staircase, all the more that she had been supposed from her
childhood to be like the portrait. Brought up as she had been in the
belief that family and heredity are the master forces of life, she resented
this teasing association with the weak, silly fellow on the ill-balanced
rocking-horse whose double chin, button nose, and receding forehead
not even the evident flattery of the artist had been able to disguise. Her
hatred of the picture often led her to make a half-protesting pause in

front of the long Chippendale mirror which hung close to it. She made
it to-night.
Indeed, the dim reflection in the glass might well have reassured her.
Dark eyes and hair, a brunette complexion, grace, health, physical
strength--she certainly owed none of these qualities or possessions to
her ancestor. The face reminded one of ripe fruit--so rich was the
downy bloom on the delicate cheeks, so vivid the hazel of the wide
black-fringed eyes. A touch of something heavy and undecided in the
lower part of the face made it perhaps less than beautiful. But any man
who fell in love with her would see in this defect only the hesitancy of
first youth, with its brooding prophecy of passion, of things dormant
and powerful. Face and form were rich--quite unconsciously--in that
magic of sex which belongs to only a minority of women, but that, a
minority drawn from all ranks and occupations. Marcia Coryston
believed herself to be interested in many things--in books, in the
Suffrage, in the girls' debating society of which she was the secretary,
in politics, and in modern poetry. In reality her whole being hung like
some chained Andromeda at the edge of the sea of life, expecting
Perseus. Her heart listened for him perpetually--the
unknown!--yearning for his call, his command....
There were many people--witness Sir Wilfrid Bury's remark to her
mother--who had already felt this magic in her. Without any conscious
effort of her own she had found herself possessed, in the course of three
seasons since her coming out, of a remarkable place in her own circle
and set. She was surrounded by a court of young people, men and
women; she received without effort all the most coveted invitations;
she was watched, copied, talked about; and rumor declared that she had
already refused--or made her mother refuse for her--one or more of the
men whom all other mothers desired to capture. This quasi-celebrity
had been achieved no one quite knew how, least of all Marcia herself. It
had not, apparently, turned her head, though those who knew her best
were aware of a vein of natural arrogance in her character. But in
manner she remained nonchalant and dreamy as before, with just those
occasional leaps to the surface of passionate, or scornful, or chivalrous
feeling which made her interesting. Her devotion to her mother was

plain. She espoused all her mother's opinions with vehemence, and
would defend her actions, in the family or out of it, through thick and
thin. But there were those who wondered how long the subservience
would last, supposing the girl's marriage were delayed.
As to the gossip repeated by Sir Wilfrid Bury, it referred to the latest of
Marcia's adventures. Her thoughts played with the matter, especially
with certain incidents of the Shrewsbury House ball, as she walked
slowly into the drawing-room in her mother's wake.
The drawing-room seemed to her dark and airless. Taste was not the
Coryston strong point, and this high, oblong room was covered with
large Italian pictures, some good, some indifferent, heavily framed, and
hung on wine-colored damask. A feebly false Guido Reni, "The
Sacrifice of Isaac," held the center of one wall, making vehement claim
to be just as well worth looking at as the famous Titian opposite. The
Guido had hung there since 1820, and what was good enough for the
Corystons of that date was good enough for their descendants, who
were not going to admit that their ancestors were now
discredited--laughed out of court--as collectors, owing to the labors of a
few middle-aged intellectuals. The floor was held by a number of gilt
chairs and sofas covered also