GITA, for the first time since her childhood, possessed a completely feminine wardrobe. Mrs. Brewster had set her face against even the most girlish and apotheosized of tailored suits, and persuaded Gita to buy a soft black frock of unbroken lines, to which were attached white linen cuffs above the half-sleeves, and a long white collar about the sloping neck; the opening, after furious controversy, displayed the lace of a camisole. Little frocks for the morning, suitably if austerely embellished. A soft silk hat pulled down over the ears, but with an ascending brim that revealed sleek sweeping eyebrows, and a tri-cornered one of straw. Two dinner-gowns, one of satin and one of georgette. Peach-bloom underwear, silk stockings, slippers, uncompromisingly feminine shoes. Mr. Donald paid the bills with a sigh of relief. What had brought his difficult client to her senses he knew not but drew the natural inference. He hoped the man was the right sort and would hasten to relieve him of an onerous responsibility. If he were not he would do his duty and remonstrate, but the girl was over age; and no one could blame him if she showed as poor judgment in husbands as she did in other things. She was the only young woman of his acquaintance who inspired in him no fatherly sentiments whatever. She reminded him of a prancing colt with a vicious pull on the bit, and he had been moved to wish that she were one and he could give her a taste of the whip.
He made subtle inquiries and learned that she lunched in Chelsea or Ventnor occasionally, and that she was more frequently in the society of Elsie Brewster, at which he frowned. Still, Mrs. Brewster was a steady-going young woman, as feminine as Polly Pleyden, and a good deal more respectable. And of course she was a lady—according to middle-class American standards—although the family had never aspired to social eminence and were not even Episcopalians. But the mother came of respectable Atlantic City stock (out of New England), and although Mr. Pelham had been in trade (hardware), like his father before him, he had been an educated man, a fine citizen, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce. Elsie had graduated with honors from the High School, and was now considered one of the rising young business women of Atlantic City. She had the respect and admiration of everyone. Still, Mr. Donald knew that Mrs. Carteret would not have permitted the intimacy, and he frowned in sympathy. He knew better than to remonstrate with Gita, however. All he longed for in that quarter was peace and quiet. Democracy was the rage among the young fools anyway.
Elsie, who prided herself justly upon being a psychologist, had insisted that Gita abandon pajamas and buy at least six nightgowns of fine cambric, delicately embroidered and trimmed with lace. Gita had protested, as she had done steadily throughout the entire program—although, being honest, she wondered if it were not for the pleasure of yielding, not merely the angry mutterings of outraged habit—but had jerked her shoulders finally and growled: “Have your own way, but I’ll feel like a fool. Lots of the girls wear pajamas.” “Yes, but they offend my artistic sense. I’d as soon arrange roses in my best bowl with weeds instead of maidenhair.”
She had also wrung from Gita a promise to give her old clothes “from the skin out” to one of Mrs. Pelham’s charities, and shuddered when she found in the trunk Gita fetched in a taxi a plentiful supply of B.V.D’s.
“You are thorough!” she exclaimed. “I only hope you’ll keep it up. Mind, you are to dress every night for dinner, as your grandmother wished, and you are to look at yourself approvingly in the glass later when you’ve on one of those nightgowns.”
But Gita felt bewildered and at times almost unhappy. She opened the doors of the mahogany wardrobe, which had sheltered so many changes of fashion, and fingered the soft texture of her gowns, and felt a thrill of pleasure in their flowing lovely lines. She folded and refolded the dainty contents of the drawers of the oaken carved highboy, as old as the manor, which still smelled faintly of lavender. She put on one of her white linen frocks in the morning and adjusted the black accessories with conscientious precision, or looked admiringly at her reflection in the “psyche mirror,” clad in white skirt and black silk sweater. She dressed for dinner in the black georgette, and shot a fleeting glance at herself when robed more simply but more elaborately for the night. Her hair, encouraged by violent brushing and a tonic, was springing out all over her head with an exultant life of its own.
But she was suffering from spiritual growing-pains, and felt as if she were learning to use a new and unclassified set of muscles and nerve arcs. There was a more superficial readjustment as well, for she found silk “queer” after B.V.D’s. and fancied it scratched her. The high-heeled slippers hurt her feet, and she was trying to limber her spine and cultivate the careless grace of other girls, although she had no intention of looking as if she were too weak to stand up straight. Elsie was erect without rigidity, and of course she could get the hang of the thing if she tried hard enough.
She also felt considerable resentment at the approving glances and mutters of Topper (who knew when he was beaten; moreover, had succumbed to the culinary graces of the new cook), and the staccato applause of Polly Pleyden. But this, she ruthlessly informed herself, was egoistical resentment at the intimation that she had been sadly in need of improvement.
But for six years she had thought herself into the rôle of a boy, even pecked her mother on the cheek like a boy, and, in their worst moments, reassured Millicent with bluff crisp phrases instead of the usual feminine endearments; to the end she had scorned sentiment and demonstrations, and, to the amazement and disapproval of Mrs. Melrose, had not shed a tear at the sad little funeral on the desert. “Boys do cry, you know,” the kind but exasperated lady had observed, while indulging freely in tears for the friend of her youth. “If you will play a part why not be consistent about it?” But Gita, who was wishing herself in the grave with her mother, had merely looked straight ahead, with the expression, Mrs. Melrose told Ann later, of a wooden Indian.
She had been furious with herself more than once for her secret pride in her eyelashes and had considered mutilation, but after various specious excuses: the breaking of her mother’s heart, their value as a sun-screen, etc., she had finally admitted she would as readily cut off her nose. Once, when she caught herself examining her fine Carteret profile with the aid of a hand-mirror, she had thrown the glass out of the window and filched from her father’s vocabulary.
It had been a matter of will induced by a special neurosis, but the accomplishment had stopped just short of perfection, and the effort to make herself over into a girl with a girl’s easy grace of carriage and mental lineaments, made her feel bruised all over. It would have been almost as easy for a cripple to stand erect and run a race. She was not only disoriented but apprehensive. Her semi-masculine garb and mental posturing had been like a protective armor, absurd, perhaps, but inspiring her with security and confidence.
Now she felt, she grumbled to herself, like a knight whose armor had been ripped off by the enemy, a turtle that had lost its shell, a bandit who had gone out to hold up a train and discovered he had left his “guns” at home.
But—there was no denying it!—having deliberately let down the bars and made a bonfire of them, her vanity was acting like a hungry bear after a long winter’s sleep. It surged over her in singing waves as she regarded herself in the long mirror when arrayed for dinner in one of the soft clinging frocks that revealed arms and the upper part of a neck (Elsie scowled at models high in front and bare to the waist behind) that, however thin, were round and smooth and of the tint of old ivory. She smiled with lips very red and sharply curved, that had been reclaimed (under Elsie’s orders) from their perverse hard line; at her bright black eyes with their curved lids and lashes that under artificial light were reflected in the clear light olive and red of her cheeks; at the sweep of her eyebrows and the slender firmness of her throat.
And then she would fall into a panic and feel an impulse to crawl under the bed.
The morning following her first surrender to sheer femininity at the psyche mirror and its almost terrified reaction she hired a horse on the beach and spent two hours galloping over the sands. Here, at least, she could wear a manlike coat, and breeches, and ride astride.
Of all this she never spoke to Elsie Brewster, and if the agile mind of her mentor darted close to the truth, that wise young woman was content with her large measure of success and, if only out of delicacy and loyalty, probed no further.
She gave Gita all the time she could spare, dined with her frequently, encouraged her to come to the office on Atlantic Avenue, and took her on several buying expeditions to Philadelphia and New York. She sometimes felt like a sculptor with a promising but singularly uncertain piece of clay in his hands: clay with unmalleable lumps and responsive but slippery surfaces.
Gita was kicking off a slipper from an aching foot one night, when her leg was arrested in mid-air. Something had been tapping at her conscious plane for several weeks, an elusive something, gone before she could rake it to the light. Now it darted forward of its own accord, and it seemed to her that an actual entity took form in her brain, smiling significantly.
For years she had had the same dream, and nearly every night. She had stood alone on a solitary mountain-peak, with barely a glimpse of the world below. The figure had been as aloof, as isolated, as the mountain itself. And it was always staring up at another peak, higher still.
She realized that she had not had that dream for a month.
“Well, much good may it do me,” she thought, as she kicked off the other slipper. “Coming down to brass tacks and liking them is all very well, but I still wish I had been a man.”
And then, standing before the mirror arrayed in the daintiest of her nightgowns, she wondered if she did.
She shrugged her shoulders, climbed into her ancestral four-poster and turned off the light by the bed. “Anyhow, I was born a philosopher,” she thought sincerely if erroneously, “and perhaps when I can afford a human bed I’ll feel more like the real thing. I might put bows on the corners.”