Bildungsromans; Domestic fiction; Middle West -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
"Not so bad," said Arnold, with a kindly willingness to be pleased,
looking about him discriminatingly at one detail after another of
the interior, the heavy velvet and gold bullion of the curtains, the
polished marble of the paneling, the silk brocade of the upholstery,
the heavy gilding of the chairs.... Everything in sight exhaled an
intense consciousness of high cost, which was heavy on the air like a
musky odor, suggesting to a sensitive nose, as does the odor of musk,
another smell, obscured but rancidly perceptible--the unwashed smell,
floating up from the paupers' cellars which support Aladdin's palaces
of luxury.
But the three adolescents, hanging over the well-designed solid
mahogany railing, had not noses sensitive to this peculiar, very
common blending of odors. Judith, in fact, was entirely unconscious
even of the more obvious of the two. She was as insensitive to all
about her as to the too-abundant pictures of the morning. She might
have been leaning over a picket fence. "I wouldn't give in to Her!"
she said to Arnold, staring squarely at him.
Arnold looked nettled. "Oh, I don't! I don't pay any attention to what
she says, except when she's around where I am, and that's not so often
you could notice it much! _Saunders_ isn't that kind! Saunders is a
gay old bird, I tell you! We have some times together when we get
going!"
It dawned on Sylvia that he was speaking of the man who, five years
before, had been their young Professor Saunders. She found that she
remembered vividly his keen, handsome face, softened by music to quiet
peace. She wondered what Arnold meant by saying he was a gay old bird.
Arnold went on, shaking his head sagely: "But it's my belief that
Saunders is beginning to take to dope ... bad business! Bad business!
He's in love with Madrina, you know, and has to drown his sorrows some
way."
Even Judith, for all her Sioux desire to avoid seeming surprised or
impressed, could not restrain a rather startled look at this lordly
knowledge of the world. Sylvia, although she had scarcely taken in the
significance of Arnold's words, dropped her eyes and blushed. Arnold
surveyed them with the indulgent look of a rakish but good-hearted man
of the world patting two pretty children on the head.
Judith upset his pose by bringing the talk abruptly back to where she
had begun it. "But you _did_ give in to her! You pretend you didn't
because you are ashamed. She just looked you down. I wouldn't let
_any_body look me down; I wouldn't give in to anybody!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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