A YOUNG woman who is in her twenty-third year, who is possessed of bright wits, perfect health, great personal beauty, and a fortune of nearly a million of dollars in her own right, and who moreover is untroubled by a disquieting preference for any single individual in the whole army of males, ought not, by all the rules, to be unhappy.
Kate Minster defied the rules, and moped. Not infrequently she found herself in the mood to think, “Now I realize how rich girls must feel when they commit themselves to entering a convent.” Oftener still, perhaps, she caught her tongue framing impatient or even petulant answers to her mother, to her mother’s friends, to everybody, in truth, save her sister Ethel. The conviction that she was bad-tempered had begun to enter her mind as it were without rapping, and with the air of a familiar. By dint of repeated searchings in the mirror, she had almost discovered a shadow between her brows which would presently develop into a wrinkle, and notify to the whole world her innate vixenish tendencies. And indeed, with all this brooding which grew upon her, it was something of a triumph for youth that the wrinkle had still failed to come.
It is said that even queens yawn sometimes, when nobody is looking. But at least they have work to do, such as it is, and grow tired. Miss Kate had no work of any sort, and was utterly wearied. The vacuity of existence oppressed her with formless fatigue, like a nightmare.
The mischief was that all of his own tremendous energy which Stephen Minster had transmitted to the generation following him was concentrated in this eldest child of his. The son had been a lightheaded weakling. The other daughter, Ethel, was as fragile and tenderly delicate as a Christmas rose. But Kate had always been the strong one of the family, physically vigorous, restive under unintelligent discipline, rebellious to teachers she disliked, and proudly confident of her position, her ability, and the value of her plans and actions. She had loved her father passionately, and never ceased to mourn that, favorite of his though she was, business cares had robbed her of so much of his company for years before his death. As a girl she had dreamed her dreams—bold, sweepingly ambitious visions they were; but this father of whom she was so proud, this powerful father who had so manfully subdued things under his feet, was always the one who was to encompass their fulfilment. When he died, her aêrial castles at a stroke tumbled into chaos. All her plans and aspirations had turned upon him as their pivot. Without him all was disorganized, shapeless, incomprehensible.
Nearly three years had gone by, and still matters about her and possibilities before her alike refused to take on definite outlines. She still did not do today the things she wanted to do, yet felt as powerless as ever to tell what her purposes for to-morrow clearly were. All the conditions for achievement were hers to command, and there was nothing to achieve.
There was something alike grotesque and pathetic in the record of her attempts to find work. She had gathered at considerable expense all the books and data she could learn about relating to the life and surroundings of Lady Arabella Stuart, and had started to write what should be the authoritative work on the subject, only to discover that she did not know how to make a book, and would not want to make that kind of a book if she had known how. She had begun collections of orchids, of coins, of engraved portraits, of cameos, and, at varying times, of kindred other trifles, and then on some gray and rainy morning had found herself impelled to turn upon each of these in its order with disgust and wrath. For music she unluckily had no talent, and a very exhaustive and costly outfit of materials for a painter’s studio amused her for less than one short month. She had a considerable feeling for color, but was too impatient to work laboriously at the effort to learn to draw; and so she hated her pictures while they were being painted, and laughed scornfully at them afterward. She wrote three or four short stories, full of the passions she had read about, and was chagrined to get them back from a whole group of polite but implacable editors. Embroidery she detested, and gardening makes one’s back ache.
Miss Minster was perfectly aware that other young ladies, similarly situated, got on very well indeed, without ever fluttering so much as a feather for a flight toward the ether beyond their own personal atmosphere; but she did not clearly comprehend what it was that they did like. She had seen something of their daily life—perhaps more of their amusements than of their occupations—and it was not wholly intelligible to her. They seemed able to extract entertainment from a host of things which were to her almost uninteresting. During her few visits to New York, Newport, and Saratoga, for the most part made during her father’s lifetime, people had been extremely kind to her, and had done their best to make her feel that there existed for her, ready made, a very notable social position. She had been invited to more dinners than there were days at her disposal in which to eat them; she had been called with something like public acclamation the belle of sundry theatre parties; her appearance and her clothes had been canvassed with distinctly overfree flattery in one or two newspapers; she had danced a little, made a number of calls, suffered more than was usual from headaches, and yawned a great deal. The women whom she met all seemed to take it for granted that she was in the seventh heaven of enjoyment; and the young men with huge expanses of shirt front, who sprang up everywhere in indefinite profusion about her, like the clumps of white double-hollyhocks in her garden at home, were evidently altogether sincere in their desire to please her. But the women all received the next comer with precisely the smile they gave her; and the young men, aside from their eagerness to devise and provide diversions for her, and the obvious honesty of their liking for her, were deadly commonplace. She was always glad when it was time to return to Thessaly.
Yet in this same village she was practically secluded from the society of her own generation. There were not a few excellent families in Thessaly who were on calling and even dining terms with the Minsters, but there had never been many children in these purely native households, and now most of the grown-up sons had gone to seek fortune in the great cities, and most of the girls had married either men who lived elsewhere or men who did not quite come within the Minsters’ social pale.
It was a wearisome and vexatious thing, she said to herself very often, this barrier of the millions beyond which she must not even let her fancy float, and which encompassed her solitude like a prison wall. Often, too, she approached the point of meditating revolt, but only to realize with a fresh sigh that the thought was hopeless. What could she do? If the people of her own class, even with the advantages of amiable manners, cleanliness, sophisticated speech, and refined surroundings, failed to interest her, it was certain enough that the others would be even less tolerable. And she for whose own protection these impalpable defences against unpleasant people, adventurers, fortune-hunters, and the like, had all been reared, surely she ought to be the last in the world to wish them levelled. And then she would see, of course, that she did not wish this; yet, all the same, it was very, very dull!
There must be whole troops of good folk somewhere whom she could know with pleasure and gain—nice women who would like her for herself, and clever men who would think it worth their while to be genuine with her, and would compliment her intelligence by revealing to it those high thoughts, phrased in glowing language, of which the master sex at its best is reputed to be capable—if only they would come in her way. But there were no signs betokening their advent, and she did not know where to look for them, and could not have sallied forth in the quest if she had known; and oh, but this was a weary world, and riches were mere useless rubbish, and life was a mistake!
Patient, soft-eyed Ethel was the one to whom such of these repinings against existence as found their way into speech were customarily addressed. She was sympathetic enough, but hers was a temperament placid as it was tender, and Kate could do everything else save strike out sparks from it when her mood was for a conflagration. As for the mother, she knew in a general way that Kate had a complaining and unsatisfied disposition, and had always had it, and accepted the fact much as she did that of Ethel’s poor health—as something which could not be helped, and therefore need not be worried about. Hence, she was but rarely made the confidante of her elder daughter’s feelings, but Kate occasionally railed at destiny in the hearing of Miss Tabitha Wilcox, whom she liked sometimes much more than at others, but always enough to have a certain satisfaction in mildly bullying her.
“You know as well as I do, Tabitha,” said Miss Kate one afternoon in January, rising from the couch where she had been lounging in sheer idleness, and walking over to the window with slow indolence of gait, “that our whole life here is simply ridiculous. We girls have lived here in Thessaly ever since we were little children, and if we left the place for good to-morrow, positively there would not be a single personal tie to be broken. So far as making friends go, we might as well have lived in the moon, where I believe it is settled that there are no people at all. And pray what is there in life worth having but friends—I mean real friends?”
“I had supposed,” began the little lady with the iron-gray curls, who sat primly beside the window at one corner of the great drawing-room—“I had supposed that I would be reckoned among—”
“Oh, don’t take me up in that way, Tabitha! Of course, I reckoned you—you know that well enough—that is, you count and you don’t count, for you are like one of us. Besides, I was thinking of people of my own age. There are some few nice girls here, but they are never frank with me as they are among themselves; I suppose because they are always thinking that I am rich. And how many young men do I know? Say ten, and I always think I can see dollar-marks shining in their eyes whenever I look at them. Certainly they have nothing else inside their heads that would shine.”
“I am sure you exaggerate their—”
“Oh, no, Tabitha! Don’t be sure of any such thing. They couldn’t be exaggerated; they wouldn’t bear it. Candidly now, can you think of a single man in the place whom you would like to hear mentioned as entertaining the shadow of a hope that some time he might be—what shall I say?—allowed to cherish the possibility of becoming the—the son-in-law of my mother?”
“I didn’t think your mind ran on such—”
“And it doesn’t,” broke in the girl, “not in the least, I assure you. I put it in that way merely to show you what I mean. You can’t associate on terms of equality with people who would almost be put out of the house if they ventured to dream of asking you to marry them. Both sides are at a disadvantage. Don’t you see what I mean? There is a wall between them. That is why I say we have no friends here; money brings us nothing that is of value; this isn’t like a home at all.”
“Why, and everybody is talking of how much Thessaly has improved of late years. And quite nice people coming in, too! They say the Bidwells, who already talk of building a ............