She had almost poignantly few personal belongings. Her bureau drawers were like a nun’s; her brush and comb, a scant stock of plain white underwear. On the bathroom shelf her toothbrush, some vaseline, a box of talcum powder. None of those aids to artifice with which the elderly woman deludes herself into thinking that she is hoodwinking the world. She wore well-made walking oxfords now, with sensible heels—the kind known as Field’s special; plain shirtwaists and neat dark suits, or a blue cloth dress. A middle-aged woman approaching elderliness; a woman who walked and carried herself well; who looked at you with a glance that was direct but never hard. That was all. Yet there was about her something arresting, something compelling. You felt it.
“I don’t see how you do it!” Julie Arnold complained one day as Selina was paying her one of her rare visits in town. “Your eyes are as bright as a baby’s and mine look like dead oysters.” They were up in Julie’s dressing room in the new house on the north side—the new house that was now the old house. Julie’s dressing table was a bewildering thing. Selina DeJong, in her neat black suit and her plain black hat, sat regarding it and Julie seated before it, with a grim and lively interest.
“It looks,” Selina said, “like Mandel’s toilette section, or a hospital operating room just before a major operation.” There were great glass jars that contained meal, white and gold. There were rows and rows of cream pots holding massage cream, vanishing cream, cleansing cream. There were little china bowls of scarlet and white and yellowish pastes. A perforated container spouted a wisp of cotton. You saw toilet waters, perfumes, atomizers, French soaps, unguents, tubes. It wasn’t a dressing table merely, but a laboratory.
“This!” exclaimed Julie. “You ought to see Paula’s. Compared to her toilette ceremony mine is just a splash at the kitchen sink.” She rubbed cold cream now around her eyes with her two forefingers, using a practised upward stroke.
“It looks fascinating,” Selina exclaimed. “Some day I’m going to try it. There are so many things I’m going to try some day. So many things I’ve never done that I’m going to do for the fun of it. Think of it, Julie! I’ve never had a manicure! Some day I’m going to have one. I’ll tell the girl to paint my nails a beautiful bright vermilion. And I’ll tip her twenty-five cents. They’re so pretty with their bobbed hair and their queer bright eyes. I s’pose you’ll think I’m crazy if I tell you they make me feel young.”
Julie was massaging. Her eyes had an absent look. Suddenly: “Listen, Selina. Dirk and Paula are together too much. People are talking.”
“Talking?” The smile faded from Selina’s face.
“Goodness knows I’m not straitlaced. You can’t be in this day and age. If I had ever thought I’d live to see the time when—Well, since the war of course anything’s all right, seems. But Paula has no sense. Everybody knows she’s insane about Dirk. That’s all right for Dirk, but how about Paula! She won’t go anywhere unless he’s invited. Of course Dirk is awfully popular. Goodness knows there are few enough young men like him in Chicago—handsome and successful and polished and all. Most of them dash off East just as soon as they can get their fathers to establish an Eastern branch or something. … They’re together all the time, everywhere. I asked her if she was going to divorce Storm and she said no, she hadn’t enough money of her own and Dirk wasn’t earning enough. His salary’s thousands, but she’s used to millions. Well!”
“They were boy and girl together,” Selina interrupted, feebly.
“They’re not any more. Don’t be silly, Selina. You’re not as young as that.”
No, she was not as young as that. When Dirk next paid one of his rare visits to the farm she called him into her bedroom—the cool, dim shabby bedroom with the old black walnut bed in which she had lain as Pervus DeJong’s bride more than thirty years ago. She had on a little knitted jacket over her severe white nightgown. Her abundant hair was neatly braided in two long plaits. She looked somehow girlish there in the dim light, her great soft eyes gazing up at him.
“Dirk, sit down here at the side of my bed the way you used to.”
“I’m dead tired, Mother. Twenty-seven holes of golf before I came out.”
“I know. You ache all over—a nice kind of ache. I used to feel like that when I’d worked in the fields all day, pulling vegetables, or planting.” He was silent. She caught his hand. “You didn’t like that. My saying that. I’m sorry. I didn’t say it to make you feel bad, dear.”
“I know you didn’t, Mother.”
“Dirk, do you know what that woman who writes the society news in the Sunday Tribune called you today?”
“No. What? I never read it.”
“She said you were one of the jeunesse dorée.”
Dirk grinned. “Gosh!”
“I remember enough of my French at Miss Fister’s school to know that that means gilded youth.”
“Me! That’s good! I’m not even spangled.”
“Dirk!” her voice was low, vibrant. “Dirk, I don’t want you to be a gilded youth, I don’t care how thick the gilding. Dirk, that isn’t what I worked in the sun
