Chapter 17

"I am sure you are enjoying it," said Elfrida.

"Yes," Miss Kimpsey returned. "It's a great treat—it's a very great treat. Everything surpasses my expectations, everything is older and blacker and more interesting than I looked for. And I must say we're getting over a great deal in the time. Yesterday afternoon we did the entire Tower. It did give one an idea. But of course you know every stone in it by now!"

"I'm afraid I've not seen it," Elfrida confessed gravely.

"I know it's shocking of me."

"You haven't visited the Tower! Doesn't that show how benumbing opportunity is to the energies! Now I dare say that I," Miss Kimpsey went on with gratification, "coming over with a party of tourists from our State, all bound to get London and the cathedral towns and the lakes and Scotland and Paris and Switzerland into the summer vacation—I presume I may have seen more of the London sights than you have, Miss Bell." As Miss Kimpsey spoke she realized that she had had no intention of calling Elfrida "Miss Bell" when she saw her again, and wondered why she did it. "But you ought to be fond of sight-seeing, too," she added, "with your artistic nature."

Elfrida seemed to restrain a smile. "I don't know that I am," she said. "I'm sorry that you didn't leave my mother so well as she ought to be. She hasn't mentioned it in her letters." In the course of time Miss Bell's correspondence with her parents had duly re-established itself.

"She wouldn't, Elf—Miss Bell. She was afraid of suggesting the obligation to come home to you. She said with your artistic conscience you couldn't come, and it would only be inflicting unnecessary pain upon you. But her bronchitis was no light matter last February. She was real sick."

"My mother is always so considerate," Elfrida answered, reddening, with composed lips. "She is better now, I think you said."

"Oh yes, she's some better. I heard from her last week, and she says she doesn't know how to wait to see me back. That's on your account, of course. Well, I can tell her you appear comfortable," Miss Kimpsey looked around, "if I can't tell her exactly when you'll be home."

"That is so doubtful, just now—"

"They're introducing drawing from casts in the High School," Miss Kimpsey went on, with a note of urgency in her little twanging voice, "and Mrs. Bell told me I might just mention it to you. She thinks you could easily get taken on to teach it. I just dropped round to one or two of the principal trustees the day before I left, and they said you had only to apply. It's seven hundred dollars a year."

Elfrida's eyebrows contracted. "Thanks very much! It was extremely kind—to go to so much trouble. But I have decided that I am not meant to be an artist, Miss Kimpsey," she said with a self-contained smile. "I think my mother knows that. I—I don't much like talking about it. Do you find London confusing? I was dreadfully puzzled at first."

"I would if I were alone. I'd engage a special policeman—the policemen are polite, aren't they? But we keep the party together, you see, to economize time, so none of us get lost. We all went down Cheapside this morning and bought umbrellas—two and three apiece. This is the most reasonable place for umbrellas. But isn't it ridiculous to pay for apples by the pound? And then they're not worth eating. This room does smell of tobacco. I suppose the gentleman in the apartment below smokes a great deal."

"I think he does. I'm so sorry. Let me open another window."

"Oh, don't mind me! I don't object to tobacco, except on board, ship. But it must be bad to sleep in."

"Perhaps," said Elfrida sweetly. "And have you no more news from home for me, Miss Kimpsey?"

"I don't know as I have. You've heard of the Rev. Mr. Snider's second marriage to Mrs. Abraham Peeley, of course. There's a great deal of feeling about it in Sparta—the first Mrs. Snider was so popular, you know —and it isn't a full year. People say it isn't the marriage they object to under such circumstances, it's—all that goes before," said Miss Kimpsey, with decorous repression, and Elfrida burst into a peal of laughter. "Really," she sobbed, "it's too delicious. Poor Mr. and Mrs. Snider! Do you think people woo with improper warmth—at that age, Miss Kimpsey?"

"I don't know anything about it," Miss Kimpsey declared, with literal truth. "I suppose such things justify themselves somehow, especially when it's a clergyman. And of course you know about your mother's idea of coming over here to settle?"

"No!" said Elfrida, arrested. "She hasn't mentioned it.

Do they talk of it seriously?"

"I don't know about seriously. Mr. Bell doesn't seem as if he could make up his mind. He's so fond of Sparta you know. But Mrs. Bell is just wild to come. She thinks, of course, of having you to live with them again; and then she says that on their present income—you will excuse my referring to your parents' reduced circumstances, Miss Bell?"

"Please go on."

"Your mother considers that Mr. Bell's means would go further in England than in America. She asked me to make inquiries; and I must say, judging from the price of umbrellas and woollen goods, I think they would."

Elfrida was silent for a moment, looking steadfastly at the possibility Miss Kimpsey had developed. "What a complication!" she said, half to herself; and then, observing Miss Kimpsey's look of astonishment: "I had no idea of that," she repeated; "I wonder that they have not mentioned it."

"Well then!" said Miss Kimpsey, with sudden compunction, "I presume they wanted to surprise you. And I've gone and spoiled it!"

"To surprise me!" Elfrida repeated in her absorption. "Oh yes; very likely!" Inwardly she saw her garret, the garret that so exhaled her, where she had tasted success and knew a happiness that never altogether failed, vanish into a snug cottage in Hampstead or Surbiton. She saw the rain of her independence, of her delicious solitariness, of the life that began and ended in her sense of the strange, and the beautiful and the grotesque in a world of curious slaveries, of which it suited her to be an alien spectator, amused and free. She foresaw long conflicts and discussions, pryings which she could, not resent, justifications which would be forced upon her, obligations which she must not refuse. More intolerable still, she saw herself in the role of a family idol, the household happiness hinging on her moods, the question of her health, her work, her pleasure being eternally the chief one. Miss Kimpsey talked on about other things —Windsor Castle, the Abbey, the Queen's stables; and Elfrida made occasional replies, politely vague. She was mechanically twisting the little gold hoop on her wrist, and thinking of the artistic sufferings of a family idol. Obviously the only thing was to destroy the prospective shrine.

"We don't find board as cheap as we expected," Miss