But from Rachel Salting and from Ashley not one single word!
II
More than ever her determination to sail became fixed. “Some people,” she said to Jinny, “might think it the thing to stay here and fight things out. Martha, for instance, is keenly disappointed because I won’t let the committee which had been working for Miss Powell take up my case. I suspect she thinks we’re all quitters. But I know when I’ve had enough. I told her I wanted to spend my life doing something besides fighting. Moreover, the Committee, like myself, is pretty sick of the whole affair, though not for the same reason, and I think there’d be even less chance for a readjustment in my case than there was in Miss Powell’s.”
An interview with Clarke Otter, Chairman of the Advisory Board of the American Committee, had given her this impression. Mr. Otter’s attitude betokened a curious admixture of resentment at what he seemed to consider her deceit in “passing” and exasperation at her having been quixotic enough to give the show away. “We think you are quite right in expressing your determination not to take advantage of the Committee’s arrangements. It evidences a delicacy of feeling quite unusual in the circumstances.” Angela was boiling with anger when she left.
A letter to the donor of the prize brought back the laconic answer that the writer was interested “not in Ethnology but in Art.”
“I’d like to see that party,” said Angela, reverting to the jargon of her youth. “I’ll bet he’s nowhere near as stodgy as he sounds. I shouldn’t wonder but what he was just bubbling over with mirth at the silliness of it all.”
Certainly she herself was bubbling over with mirth or with what served for that quality. Virginia could not remember ever having seen her in such high spirits, not since the days when they used to serve Monday’s dinner for their mother and play at the roles in which Mrs. Henrietta Jones had figured so largely. But Angela herself knew the shallowness of that mirth whose reality, Anthony, unable to remain for any length of time in her presence and yet somehow unable to stay away, sometimes suspected.
Her savings, alas! including the prize money, amounted roughly to 1,400 dollars. Anthony had urged her to make the passage second class on one of the large, comfortable boats. Then, if she proved herself a good sailor, she might come back third class.
“And anyway don’t put by any more than enough for that,” said Jinny maternally, “and if you need any extra money write to me and I’ll send you all you want.”
From stories told by former foreign students who had sometimes visited the Union it seemed as though she might stretch her remaining hundreds over a period of eight or nine months. “And by that time I’ll have learned enough to know whether I’m to be an honest-to-God artist or a plain drawing teacher.”
“I almost hope it will be the latter,” said Jinny with a touching selfishness, “so you’ll have to come back and live with us. Don’t you hope so, Anthony?”
Angela could see him wince under the strain of her sister’s artlessness. “Eight or nine months abroad ought to make a great difference in her life,” he said with no particular relevance. “Indeed in the lives of all of us.” Both he and Angela had only one thought these days, that the time for departure would have to arrive. Neither of them had envisaged the awfulness of this pull on their self-control.
Now there were only five days before her departure on Monday. She divided them among the Sandburgs, Anthony and Jinny who was coming down with a summer cold. On Saturday the thought came to her that she would like to see Philadelphia again; it was a thought so persistent that by nine o’clock she was in the train and by 11:15 she was preparing for bed in a small side-room in the Hotel Walton in the city of her birth. Smiling, she fell asleep vaguely soothed by the thought of being so close to all that had been once the scene of her steady, unchecked life.
The propinquity was to shake her more than she could dream.
In the morning she breakfasted in her room, then coming downstairs stood in the portico of the hotel drawing on her gloves as she had done so many years before when she had been a girl shopping with her mother. A flood of memories rushed over her, among them the memory of that day when her father and Virginia had passed them on the street and they had not spoken. How trivial the reason for not speaking seemed now! In later years she had cut Jinny for a reason equally trivial.
She walked up toward Sixteenth Street. It was Sunday and the beautiful melancholy of the day was settling on the quiet city. There was a freshness and a solemnity in the air as though even the atmosphere had been rarified and soothed. A sense of loneliness invaded her; this was the city of her birth, of her childhood and of most of her life. Yet there was no one, she felt, to whom she could turn this beautiful day for a welcome; old acquaintances might be mildly pleased, faintly curious at seeing her, but none of them would show any heartwarming gladness. She had left them so abruptly, so completely. Well, she must not think on these things. After all, in New York she had been lonely too.
The Sixteenth Street car set her down at Jefferson Street and slowly she traversed the three long blocks. Always quiet, always respectable, they were doubly so in the sanctity of Sunday morning. What a terrible day Sunday could be without friends, ties, home, family. Only five years ago, less than five years, she had had all the simple, stable fixtures of family life, the appetizing breakfast, the music, the
