O Genteel Lady!/Chapter 3
Pauline still watched for wonders from her protegée's brush, but now from force of habit and without many illusions. When she saw how much of her father's book really was Lanice's work, she thought either Lanice's name should be on the title-page or that her father should be 'too proud' to present as his own so much of the work of another. Captain Poggy appreciated his secretary's judgment and accepted her advice in matters of style. He did not guess that it was her work that made the book something of a work of art. She suggested that he should add a chapter on the history of European witchcraft, showing backgrounds from which the tragedy of 1692 sprang.
'Go to it, Cousin Laney. If 'tis a good chapter we'll use it, and buy you the finest of Indy shawls to boot.'
Every day she read in the Athenæum. She forgot she was a lady, delicate of mind as well as body. She forgot the hoopskirts which stood out as a barrier, holding the world at a little more than arm's length. She plunged into the Stygian dark of that most ancient and terrible of religions, witchcraft. A religion rather than a superstition, The librarian found for her 'Discourses of the Subtill Practices of Devilles,' Pleasant Treatises of Witches.' Glanville's 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' and 'The Hammer for Witches.'
Nothing in the Salem trials had prepared her for the magic of the earlier European beliefs. So old was this religion, older than Christianity. There were lithesome devils who came to the worshippers dressed in green leaves and danced in magic circles, and beautiful naked witches, the black goat, and unbaptized children with no cross to guard them. She learned the body-marks the Devil put upon his worshippers, and, safe in the scholastic gloom of the Athenæum, safe in Boston far, far away from the morning of the world when such things originated, she learned of the earth-old fertility rites. She blushed and went cold. She hated the human race that had thought so evilly. She tried to forget and hurry on. She learned of strange night demons, incubi and succubæ, and the use a cat can be put to in brewing a storm, or a wax puppet in the slaying of man, and how the fertility of field or beast or human may be blasted.
The world had been clothed, and now was naked. She gritted her teeth against its ugliness and from a small part of what she had learned she wrote her chapter. There was in it none of the mawkishness of her 'Godey's Book' or 'House and Home' stories. The thought that no one would guess her to be the author gave her assurance and poise. She did not have to think whether or not it was appropriate and becoming to one of the gentler sex to write such things. 'Your work on Father's book is done, Lanice. Surely Art will not take all your time. I wish you could give yourself, heart and soul, to some Cause. Perhaps the Cause of Women. The Society for the Promulgation of Belief in Women is to meet here as soon as Father goes to New York. I am sure that will point the way.'
'Perhaps it will, Cousin Pauline. But I cannot believe I will like live women as well as dead witches.'
The drawing-rooms were denuded of everything but chairs. Chairs brought up from the dining-room and down from the bedrooms, chairs hired from the undertaker. The meeting was to be addressed by a series of speakers who would represent various spheres of woman's success.
Mrs. Morgan would speak of their accomplishments in the cause of Temperance; Miss Cordelia Gatherall of their services to the Southern negro; Meminta Purse, author of two dozen novels, would represent literature; Mrs. Professor Channing was to explain woman's recent advancement in scholarship.
Miss Gatherall arrived first, and had to lie down to recover from her train journey. Then four or five Boston ladies in a group, and three or four from Cambridge, who came on the horse-car. More arrived in hackney coaches, in gigs, and on foot. It was really a stupendous gathering of shabby pelisses, bedraggled bonnets, spectacles, reticules bulging with papers and tracts. Miss Gatherall wondered if there could not be some way of temporarily whitewashing the negroes, furnishing them with wigs, and thus boldly walking them over the border. Miss Purse recounted the plot of her next novel. The gaslight flickered, the bonnets nodded. Lanice, detached and contemplative in spite of her excitement, watched them dubiously. They were such kind, good women. There sat old little Amy Spence in her demoralizing Zouave bloomers and ankle-length skirt, her forehead bulged like a baby's.
'Miss Bardeen'—she looked up with her soft childish gaze—'I think this is one of the greatest, if not the greatest moment of my life. Why, I do not suppose so many intellectual, high-minded women have ever before been gathered in one room. Why, there will be a marker here like the one on Bunker Hill some day, my dear, and you'll live to see it. Why, you'll live to cast the vote. You'll see women set free from the slavery of their clothes. Look at me. I haven't the strength to drag enormous skirts about on the ground, you know, getting in and out of those horse-cars as I do, but just because they're up three inches, rude little boys call attention to my nether limbs, and sermons have been preached against them. Dear Miss Bardeen, you'll live to walk without hoops. Dear me! If my great-niece—dear good girl she is, too, but spiritually in slavery—has my laying-out, I'll go to my grave with skirts to the floor, and...'
She chuckled and blinked at Lanice, who could not resist leaning over and putting the dingy little bonnet straight on the grandmotherly head. A wonderful old soldier this venerable woman was! There was no shade of bitterness in her voice as she referred to the vulgar little boys and her unemancipated great-niece. When she lay in her coffin with her skirts 'to the floor,' one could imagine her dowdy old spirit looking down and chuckling that at last the joke had been on her.
And it was true. Clothes, the great hoopskirts, the heavy shawls took so much strength to carry. Lanice bent her body inside of all her wrappings. There it was, a thin white sliver as supple as a willow twig. Why, indeed, should it be burdened and bound? Suddenly the long rings she wore in her ears dragged upon her.
Pauline found some difficulty in calling the meeting to order, but finally rapped so loudly with her improvised gavel that every one jumped and subsided guiltily into her chair.
'Ladies, and you few, kind, generous gentlemen. We have gathered here to-night...'
Pauline was already breathless, but the meeting was off. Lanice, sitting alone in the crimson-curtained bow window at the back of the improvised hall, felt again a generous impulse to help. The women seemed pitiful, and yet so frankly ugly. Why was it necessary to wear such hideous clothes? Their feet, too, their awkward hands, vaguely irritated her collectively, although individually so many were kind and admirable, like dear old Miss Spence.
All through Miss Gatherall's speech Lanice considered the subject. Women as a whole suddenly hurt her, and she wished she could do something for them, but hardly knew what. 'I think,' she thought, 'I'd study medicine and find out the way to keep them young and beautiful. They wear out so quickly as a rule, poor things. And wear isn't becoming to them as it often is to men. You hardly care how battered and worn a heavy old walking-boot may be, but a white kid slipper must be fresh. Women are the slippers—now. Perhaps not always. I don't know. Perhaps always.' She thought of Mamma and was proud of her youthful prettiness.
Late arrivals straggled in; now it seemed no more would come. The maid who attended the door had gone below to the kitchen to help with the refreshments. There was a vigorous pull at the bell. Lanice waited a moment until it was repeated, and then tiptoed into the vestibule and opened the door cautiously. She was amazed to find herself face to face with Captain Poggy's intimate and publisher, Mr. Fox. Lanice had often seen him and had always liked him, but had never talked with him before. He looked surprisingly young for his forty-five years, his figure slight, compact, and graceful; the narrow face resembled the animal who once was the totem of his ancestors.
'Oh, Mr. Fox! I don't think you want to come in, really!'
'Why not? Murder? Smallpox? A wedding? A baby?'
'No,' she laughed nervously, 'but Captain Poggy is in New York.'
Mr. Fox peered through the sidelights. 'I see—it's a party. Of course I do not wish to intrude.'
'Come inside for a moment,' she whispered, with the instincts of cordiality, but conscious of betrayal.
Mr. Fox would not sympathize. He was an earthly man. He whispered:
'They're Miss Pauline's females out for their rights! Is that it? And Captain Poggy is in New York.' Then added out loud, 'Oh, my God! Well, all I want is a glass of the Captain's Nautilus Madeira. I'm planning to read his "Salem Witchcraft" to-night and must strengthen myself for the endeavor.'
'Shhh. Can't you hear Mrs. Morgan talking about women's work in temperance? "We must demand," said a throaty voice, "the closing of the saloon; my sisters, if we must we can fight, and the Demon King, Alcohol, will need all of our fighting to dethrone him, to cast him down, each working in her own way, all working together, but the beginning of the end—is it now?"'
'Can men go to this thing?' asked Mr. Fox, his prominent brown eyes agog with interest.
'Yes, but—'
'Trust me.'
He seated himself on the wide window-sill and gestured her to join him. The crimson curtains of the bay window partially cut them off from the rest of the room.
Until Miss Meminta Purse began to speak, he behaved himself extremely well. The literary Miss Purse, however, was so unfortunate as to tread upon his professional toes. Her opinions irritated Mr. Fox. He cleared his throat, screwed about in his seat, twitched his stock, and cleared his throat again.
'I have never,' he whispered to Lanice, 'taken much stock in toothy women, especially when they have Adam's apples.'
Poor Miss Purse did actually have one of these secondary attributes of the male, and she was very toothy. Mr. Fox blew his nose. Miss Purse made the point that many women have assumed men's names as noms-de-plume. Homer, for instance—who knew whether or not Homer might not be some gifted Grecian matron whose husband had caddish objections to seeing his wife gain notoriety? She seized upon any little-known author as a potential lady. He jumped up.
'I like to prevaricate, even lie, as well as any man,' he whispered to Lanice, 'but may I hang if I can sit and listen to this rubbish, ugly as home-made sin.'
Lanice went out with him.
'Wait,' she whispered, 'I'll run down and fetch the Nautilus Madeira.'
He flimsily protested that he had been joking, that he never drank Madeira so late in the evening. But it was at best a half-hearted protest. They went below to the dining-room where the refreshments of oysters, ham, sponge cake, hidden mountain, lemonade, peach supreme, and ice water were spread out. Here Mr. Fox drank her health in the famous Madeira, and to the confusion of all ladies who think. He looked at her suddenly, as if for the first time.
'You don't think?' he asked.
Lanice blushed. 'I'm afraid I do. At least I draw pictures and I read serious works. You know, not merely the 'Godey's Book' and "Hearth and Home."' (Mr. Fox was the proprietor of the latter.)
'How splendid!' he exclaimed. 'I'd been saying to myself, this young lady is charming, lovely, generous, but probably she does not think, and now I find you are, beyond any reasonable doubt, a great mind.'
'But do you like ladies to think? I thought you did not.'
'Why do you say that?'
'You just drank to the confusion of all ladies who think.'
'How cruelly you mistake me. Ladies—especially wise ones, and how I admire that type—are never so irresistible as when they are somewhat confused. All this evening I have been saying to myself, "This young lady is charming, lovely, generous—she thinks, but nothing can confuse her." Look at yourself now in the glass! Probably you write stories as well as read them. Well, here's to the confusion of all lady authoresses—may they be extensively red.'
And at this atrocious pun the gifted Mr. Fox laughed convulsively. Lanice obliged him by blushing until the tears stood in her eyes. He led the conversation back to herself. It came out, she had had some dozen stories already published, a few even in his own 'Hearth and Home.' Now, however, she was consecrated to her Brush, but she was not at all sure but she would prefer to be an author. She secretly hoped he would ask her to bring in some more of her stories, and was surprised and hurt that he did not remember publishing 'Martha's Side Saddle' two years before (her nom-de-plume then had been Myron Kerfew), or 'Pharaoh's Daughter,' which had run for three issues even more recently. Considering the fact that he was nominally the head of this great woman's magazine, he seemed curiously innocent of it. Now that he had started her talking freely about her literary aspirations, they seemed to bore him. He jerked at his stock, and said abruptly:
'Well, that's that.'
Just as he was leaving the front door, he added:
'By the way, "Hearth and Home" needs what we call a captive artist. You know, one who will sketch out the lamp-mats, night-caps, knitted sacks and baby's blankets, occasionally do fashion plates from rough sketches sent us from New York and Paris, or even illustrate stories. Are you interested?'
'I'd love it.'
He answered her enthusiasm cautiously.
'We won't commit ourselves. Come around to my place on School Street, and I can give you a try and you can give me a try. The idea would be for you to stop in, say every other day, and take your work home with you to do. Probably you'll not care for it, but stop in and blush for me, anyway, and I'll show you all the graves in my back yard.'
That night neither Lanice nor Pauline could sleep. Wide awake one thought of working on a magazine for a great publisher, the other of women—women working in the South for the slaves, for temperance in evil-smelling bar-rooms, for a right to control the destiny of their children—women in hoops and laced with whalebone and buckram—who some time, God help us, should be as free as the envied males.
Lanice heard the Park Street Church clock strike three and then, almost before she realized she had been to sleep, it struck eight. She leaped out of bed, flung up the window, and found the day dull and cold for summer. She rapidly laced and buttoned herself into her clothes, choosing for the exterior a moss-green dress lavishly banded with mink. Her face was pale and the lavender shadows about her eyes that had haunted her since childhood showed against the pallor. Mr. Fox would not think her so charming as he had last night. He would not want her about, even as a captive artist. Absurd. It was her skill with a pencil that interested him, not her ladylike graces.
At breakfast Pauline, in 'half corset' and morning cap, lingered over a pile of correspondence. There were tumbled yellow ribbons in her cap. Pauline, who despised finery, often would suddenly indulge herself and then always overdid it. The bows were too big, too yellow, and too obviously ripped off a dress and pinned to the cap.
'Wonderful, wasn't it?' she asked Lanice.
'Oh, yes, Cousin Poggy, and wasn't it wonderful that Mr. Fox came and asked me...'
'Mr. Fox? Who permitted him? This is insufferable, an intrusion. Mr. Fox at our meeting! I had no idea...'
'I let him in. He wanted some of the Nautilus Madeira, you know, the wine that was sent back in the Nautilus when it carried food to Madeira during their famine. And so...'
'He dared to come begging for alcohol at such a time! Oh, if he only could have heard our Mrs. Morgan, that noble woman! Why, her lowest plane is as high above Mr. Fox's highest as God is higher than the angels! Oh, Cousin Lanice, dear child. It is such men who are our deepest, darkest enemies. They take us for—for toys, baubles. To think he begged for alcohol in the very house and the very evening that Mrs. Morgan spoke!'
'He heard her talking; that is why he wanted to come in. He sat in back almost hidden in the Beacon Street window. But Miss Purse angered him by saying that perhaps Homer was a female, and he twisted about so much I took him out and gave him some Madeira.'
'The low, sottish cur, poking into our business.'
'But he isn't low. He is so gifted! And this morning I'm going to see him, and if he likes my sketches he is going to hire me to draw for "Hearth and Home," fashion plates even. I'm overjoyed.'
There was a long, difficult pause. Pauline elaborately went on sorting letters. She cleared her throat.
'Miss Gatherall has had her letters left for her here. I must arrange for them to go to her at Roxbury. She has a lovely soul.'
'But—'
'Now, Lanice, I do not want to discuss Mr. Fox or his degrading magazines. I can't understand how you can turn to such opportunities as he offers. I was educating you to be a great artist, not to draw fashion plates for Mr. Fox.'
'Oh, Pauline, I know, but I'm not an artist, not really. It isn't in me. I realized it all last night. When Mr. Fox asked me to go to work for him, I knew that was as far as I could ever go with my brush. I've never painted anything wonderful; anyway, I'd so much rather write. Perhaps I may really develop talent in that field.'
'Well,' said Pauline, slapping the papers down on the table, 'if you can't decide what you do want to do, I'll tell you now you will never do anything.' From somewhere she produced a dingy reticule and snapped it open and shut viciously. Her eyes narrowed and her voice grew hard and logical. 'If it is writing that you want to do, what good is it to draw fashion plates for Mr. Fox? That's neither art nor literature.'
'Perhaps he will let me write for him, not merely stories for 'Hearth and Home,' but thoughtful articles to be printed in his 'Journal,' I might accomplish a world of good. I might...'
'Never!' blazed Pauline. 'He would not think a woman had the intellect. Lanice, he will just scorn you inside.'
'I think I will go to see him, anyway. Of course, Pauline, I realize that if I am not an artist and do not do what you want there is no reason why you should have me live with you. I have some money, you know, Pauline. I'd much prefer to pay. What I have done for your father certainly would not make up for my lovely room and all you have given me. And now his book is done.'
'How can you talk to me like this? You're a hardhearted girl, Lanice. You haven't any natural affection. You want to go away. I'd die rather than take money from you.' Pauline gulped awkwardly, gritted her teeth, gazed fixedly ahead of her, then, bursting into tears, fled from the room.
They had it out together in Pauline's tobacco-brown room, lying together on her tumbled unmade bed. Why could she not love Pauline? She realized humbly that Pauline loved her. 'You had better kiss her,' she thought coldly, and did, but hated herself for this false show of affection.
'If you feel so badly I won't go to Redcliffe & Fox. I'll continue to study at the Dummers' studio, but...'
'That's not it; but I don't want you to pay, I...I...' she gagged.
Fifteen minutes later, Pauline, complete master of herself and the situation, superciliously examined Lanice's appearance. 'You won't have such poor taste as to wear that costume! Green, with fur!'
'Oh, but it is very simple. I thought...'
'You thought,' jerked out Pauline, 'that it made you look pretty. Well, I don't see why a caged artist, or whatever you call such things, needs to look pretty. Mrs. Stowe has done a world of good in the plainest of old alpacas. Do Mrs. Morgan or Miss Gatherall wear green with fur? Do any great intellectual women, except'—she added in a whisper—'George Sand? Now I'd go up and put on your brown merino. It looks much more like cultured Boston.'
'I don't want to look like cultured Boston. I want to look like myself. And Mamma always insisted that I wear pretty gowns and have hats and gloves to go with everything.'
Pauline, still extraordinarily ugly from her weeping, said in a slow, cutting voice, 'I suppose you would like to look like your mother; act like her too, perhaps.'
This hurt. Lanice sprang to her feet, staring blankly at her cousin and looking surprisingly like a child's stiff doll in her voluminous green gown and tumbled black silk curls. 'Sometimes,' she said, her voice shaking with anger, 'you are horrid, Pauline. You can be horrider than any one else I have ever known. You can't love me or you wouldn't talk to me like that. I think you really hate me, and my dear Mamma.'
Wrangle, wrangle. Her nerves trembled with the confusion and bickering.
At eleven o'clock she crossed the Common, still wearing the uncultured, fascinating green costume. There were horses in gigs and shays tied under the trees along Park Street, but one slim saddle horse was tied upon the Common itself. This she knew was Mr. Redcliffe's own mount. He, the senior partner, was of a more tempestuous nature than the suave Mr. Fox. He kept this fast horse always ready so that when it was necessary for him to direct the printing at the Cambridge press he might throw himself out of his office on School Street, run the two blocks to the Common, fall upon his nervous mount, and disappear in a cloud of dust up Park Street and so out upon the Mill Dam along Beacon Street. Lanice had often seen Mr. Redcliffe dash past on his fleet Zephyr. Captain Poggy would say, 'There goes Redcliffe on his way to the Press,' and if Mr. Fox were sitting beside Captain Poggy he'd make some amusing remark that would make haste seem ridiculous. Mr. Fox could make haste himself if there were need, but he made haste slowly.
Lanice stopped and chirruped to the strawberry roan, feeling a new, almost proprietorial interest in him. He had been rubbing his bits against his ankle, and without raising his head he pricked his ears and gazed at her with wild shining eyes gleaming through his long forelock.
On the ground floor of the old brick building occupied by Messrs. Redcliffe & Fox was a bookshop where Lanice had often made purchases. She knew that here and in the publishers' rooms above, the greatest of Boston's literary men were apt to gather, talk, smoke, and enjoy their own and each other's wit and wisdom. Here Thackeray and Dickens had both held informal salons, and Whittier with his quaint 'thees' and 'thous,' Emerson, Longfellow, and Hawthorne all were habitués.
She entered by a narrow door crowded in beside the shop, and ascended to the editorial rooms. Extraordinary clutter! Files of magazines, their own and those of their rivals, piles of bound books, and books in 'sheets,' proofs, filing devices, and an odd assortment of intelligent-looking human beings gave the place a professional and literary appearance, confusing to the lay mind.
From the main room (once, Lanice judged, the dining-room of the mansion) cubby-holes and staircases radiated in all directions. On the walls were original drawings framed and unframed, autographs, maps, colored reproductions, and even hand-tinted fashion plates from 'Hearth and Home.' Lovely mincing things, exquisitely engraved and colored by hand. A very big little boy with a double chin swaggered forward to meet her.
'Miss Bardeen, I suppose? Mr. Fox expects you. He'll be free in a moment. Dr. Holmes is with him just now.' She caught a glimpse of the rare soul's little back slipping down a back stairway.
Mr. Fox graciously came to meet her.
'You are not, I see, merely a pleasant hallucination brought on by Mrs. Morgan's speech and the Captain's Madeira, but an actual young lady looking for pictures to draw. Well, come with me and all in good time we will see about the pictures.'
Three steps up, an unexpected twist past other desks where clerks and editors labored, and she was led into an old square room overlooking the King's Chapel Burying Ground. The disordered stones were tumbled about like jackstraws and the ripe grasses grew high among them.
'Hester Prynne is buried out there,' said Mr. Fox, seeming to remember that he had promised to show her the graves in his back yard. Perhaps he sensed her excitement and confusion, for he turned from her and stood gazing out the window. 'Or at least her prototype. There are that many people at least,' he said with satisfaction, 'who will never more submit a manuscript.'
Lanice got a vivid and unforgettable impression of the man as he stood half turned away from her, his shapely head silhouetted against the eternal melancholy of the graveyard.
'First of all'—he turned back to her—'remove whatever of your costume it is customary to remove under these circumstances, and be seated. Then we will talk things over. You didn't bring any paintings with you? That's good. Artists staggering in with their portfolios always are a pathetic and therefore irritating sight. Poets with rolls of poems are bad enough, but they are on the whole less docile and not so touching. You do draw, don't you?'
'I've been with Mrs. Dummer for the last eight months and I have always had the best instruction obtainable since I was a child.' She noticed he had some bound volumes of 'Hearth and Home' on the desk before him.
'Yes,' he confessed, 'I have been looking up those wonderful stories you said that you had written for us. They are pleasing—well adapted to this particular magazine. Perhaps as well as furnishing us with pictures you will occasionally do us a story. Probably you have a hatbox full of them hidden away somewhere in the Poggy house.'
Seeing an eager look in the young lady's eyes, he quickly put on the brakes. 'When you've worked with us for a couple of months and know our requirements, you might trot some in and we'll go over them.'
Obviously she was not to 'trot them in' immediately. 'Well,' he continued, 'turning to the case in hand...' He excused himself and soon returned with a manila envelope containing crude sketches and a letter.
'By the way, you tat, knit, crochet, stitch, sew, and so forth?'
'Yes.'
'Very well. Here in this envelope are directions for making articles for a 'Fancy Fair.' Our correspondent has done her best to draw pictures of the things she describes, but you are to re-render them in the more elegant manner of Mrs. Dummer. Select five of these objects, make me drawings of them several times larger than the finished cuts should be, and come back day after to-morrow.'
As Lanice started to thank him, he dismissed her abruptly with a 'That's that,' and almost showed her the door as if he was afraid he had given her the inch and she would take the ell.
She opened the bulky envelope alone in her airy, yellow chamber. Thank Heaven, Pauline had gone to Roxbury to deliver Miss Gatherafs mail. By the time Pauline returned, much cheered by a day with Mrs. Morgan and Miss Gatherall, five sketches were satisfactorily completed. They represented a crocheted basket of white glass beads and crimson wool, a watch-case in chenille, a 'Bosom Friend' or 'Sontag' (a knitted chest protector), and a billowy lamp-mat made in the shape of a doughnut. Pauline chatted eagerly, seeming to fear a pause less Lanice tell her of her engagement with Messrs. Redcliffe & Fox.
Before the drawings were finally submitted to Mr. Fox, she showed them to Mrs. Dummer. She was not enthusiastic, her eyeglasses glittered with emotion as she told her that there were 'more wonderful things in this lovely world of ours' to interpret than lamp-mats. But Mr. Fox was elated. He called one after another of his large staff and insisted that they admire the Bosom Friend or Sontag, a garment which seemed to have fascinated his restless mind. Through his admiration Lanice was secretly sure that he was laughing at it and at her. He next proposed a 'purgatorial' three weeks. At the end of this time, if she continued to show ability, she could consider herself 'Hearth and Home's' captive artist.
He introduced her to a number of his associates, Miss Bigley, a vast and dowdy lady who lived on West Cedar Street, and who, under Mr. Fox's supervision, was largely responsible for 'Hearth and Home's' prodigious success. Her complacent size did not save her from excessive nervousness. Mr. Trelawney, a tall, thin man with a dark, gypsyish face, and a suggestion of potential tragedy about him. There was also Mr. Poindexter who preached Sundays in a large church and during the week served as editor-in-chief of 'Church News,' a religious monthly. He was strongly Congregational and keenly interested in abolition. She wished she might have a desk in this interesting place and stay intimately with these charming people. No one else seemed to have thought of such a thing. Even Miss Bigley spent most of her time modestly in her father's house. While necessarily in the office, she kept her bonnet tied to her head and a shawl laid about her shoulders, symbols that she had not gone 'out into the world.' During the first meeting she told Lanice that she always considered a woman's first duty to be towards her family, and stared hard at her new assistant out of swimming blue eyes.
The antagonism which she instantly felt between herself and Miss Bigley was partially explained by Mr. Fox, who told her, as they strolled together across the Common, each on the way home to dinner that the lady editoress had always done the odds and ends of drawing herself. She often worked until after midnight. She was a 'convulsive worker' who had broken down a number of times and yet never seemed able to do less than all. Mr. Fox stopped abruptly to watch the ducks pushing about in the dirty water of the Frog Pond like tiny submersible tugboats. 'I wish she'd learn from them,' he said; 'they take life so agreeably. But if she were one of those ducks—say that white one'—he indicated a portly individual with a yellow bill—'instead of swimming about and being thankful for scum, she would make herself sick trying to eat it all up and get the place clean.'
Although Mr. Fox assured her that he himself always kept an eye on 'Hearth and Home,' he was especially concerned with his own 'Fox's Journal,' a weekly. This was stronger food than was fed out to 'elegant womanhood' and reflected to some extent the diverse, diverting, and sophisticated personality of Mr. Fox. He had run it for years in New York before old Mr. Redcliffe one day had come raging into his office and persuaded him into partnership. Then he removed his headquarters from the vulgar capital of fashion to that of culture and gained the benefit of a closer union with the celebrated Concord, Cambridge, and Boston literary men who were in those days sprouting up like mushrooms, but branching out like oaks. He boasted of the fact that he had never written one word for 'Hearth and Home,' except when he had first come, and was very much afraid of Miss Bigley, he had been left late in the office to finish the proof. A caption for one of the illustrations was missing and he was forced to select it. The picture represented an amazing garment—sort of an upside petticoat—which he, a bachelor, was sure personally never to have seen. Therefore it must be of an intimate, hidden nature. He indicated that the cut should be reversed and wrote below, 'This fashionable undergarment is ingeniously constructed of black velvet and pink tulle,' and let it go at that. Miss Bigley, home superintending the cleaning of her house, never forgave him. It was a black net cuff with a tight wristband. Lady correspondents and dressmakers wrote in buzzing with curiosity. The mistake did take, as Miss Bigley told Mr. Fox, 'a great deal of my valuable time.'
After Lanice's third or fourth visit to School Street, she found to her disappointment that it was to Miss Bigley she was to report, and not to Mr. Fox. Often she ran errands for her superior, usually back to the tidy swept house on West Cedar Street, where the rather rickety but cheerful progenitor of the mighty editoress could be found sitting in his armchair just as his daughter had left him, with newspapers spread beneath him to catch the dropping ashes of his pipe. Lanice liked this gnome-like little man, who always greeted her with a warm 'So you're here, are you?' and felt sorry for him because Miss Bigley kept him on newspapers as if he and his pipe were unclean foreign objects in her spotless house.
Miss Bigley 'put her whole heart,' as she said, in her uplifting articles, but also wrote poems. Among the titles were 'Wilt Thou Love Me When I'm Old,' 'The Maniac,' 'The Last Night at Home.' She wrote poetry only when there was a space to fill and no free contribution lying about her desk. This was also her attitude towards stories. They all pointed a moral, and Mr. Fox himself assured Lanice that Miss Bigley had a genius for this particular type of 'literary butter.' Lanice found that she, too, could write poems and stories of any length, at any time, and on any known subject. She learned the mechanical trick of starting in the middle of a scene.
'"Look here, Emma, isn't this the sweetest little pencil you ever saw?" said a young and beautiful girl to a companion as she danced lightly in at the open door one pleasant summer afternoon, holding the object of her remark at the same time before her friend's admiring gaze.' That was the way you did it!
She learned, from Miss Bigley, new elegancies of speech and was highly commended when she said the heart of the beautiful heroine was known to be as 'lovely as its earthly casket.'
Mr. Fox snorted over this and called up his myrmidons to admire, much as he had forced their attention to the 'Bosom Friend' or 'Sontag.' He repeated it with relish to Captain Poggy. 'You can't imagine what a monkey-see-monkey-do-of-a-girl your ex-amanuensis is. Why, she bigleys about like an old hand. Frankly she has a genius for writing the most unmitigated rot.'
'And you're not doing anything to help her? Really, Fox, you would sell not only your own soul, but that of my young cousin as well. Can't you point out to her the cheapness of the "Hearth and Home" literature? She has so much ability.'
'Oh, if she has any talent she'll see through herself pretty soon.' Mr. Fox remarked airily. 'But if she didn't write these things, what would she write about? She isn't very experienced in life. I'll admit the work she did on your witchcraft book is brilliant, quite free from all the trite elegancies of Miss Bigley's popular style.'
The great 'Historical Study of Salem Witchcraft' was published at last, and Lanice was almost moved to tears as she read Chapter Three, which was entirely the result of her studies and skill. Mr. Fox found her so engaged, noticed the chapter number, and slyly asked if she were reading her favorite author.
'I have always known that you wrote that chapter, and of course every one is one's own favorite author. It is well up to the standards of the "Journal."' Catching sight of Miss Bigley's bulk moving behind the packing-boxes he said, 'Miss Bigley, what if I take your "Hearth and Home" author-artist and shape her up for my "Journal"?'
Miss Bigley appeared, her dirty hands pushing her bonnet straight. 'Of course, if you feel the need, but personally I feel that the scope of "Hearth and Home" Is much more appropriate to a young lady than the deeper waters and further shores of the "Journal." Why should not Miss Bardeen be satisfied to write tales and articles that will serve and inspire her own sex and teach Christian morality and domestic virtue to countless numbers? The young people to-day need help as never before in the history of the world. Indeed, we are losing track of the simple virtues...'
'Well,' interrupted Mr. Fox, who was obviously very bored, 'that's that.' And he swung off, looking completely satisfied to leave Lanice writing stories of pure hearts in lovely earthly caskets and quite content with the morals of the younger generation.