“You don’t know what a privilege it is, Mr. Cravat, to find myself talking to someone whose mind can soar above the sordid life of this horrible town.”
Yancey’s ardent eyes took on their most melting look. “Madam, it is you who have carried me with you to your heights. ‘In youth and beauty wisdom is but rare!’ ” It was simply his way. He could not help it.
“Ah, Shakespeare!” breathed Mrs. Wyatt, bridling.
“Shakespeare—hell!” said Yancey to Sabra, later. “She doesn’t know Pope when she hears him. No woman ought to pretend to be intelligent. And if she is she ought to have the intelligence to pretend she isn’t. And this one looks like Cornelia Blimber, to boot.”
“Cornelia? …”
“A schoolmarm in Dickens’s Dombey and Son. A magnificent book, honey. I want you to read it. I want Cim to read it by the time he’s twelve. I’ve got it somewhere here on the shelves.” He was searching among the jumble of books. Five minutes later he was deep in a copy of Plutarch which he had bewailed as lost.
Sabra persisted. “But why did you make her think she was so smart and attractive when you were talking to her?”
“Because she is so plain, darling.”
“It’s just that you can’t bear not to have everybody think you’re fascinating.”
She never read Dombey and Son, after all. She decided that she preferred exchanging recipes and discussing the rearing of children with the other women to the more intellectual conversation of Mrs. Wyatt.
It was Sabra who started the Philomathean Club. The other women clutched at the idea. It was part of their defense against these wilds. After all, a town that boasted a culture club could not be altogether lost. Sabra had had no experience with this phase of social activity. The languorous yet acid Felice Venable had always scorned to take part in any civic social life that Wichita knew. Kansas, even then, had had its women’s clubs, though they were not known by this title. The Ladies’ Sewing Circle, one was called; the Twentieth Century Culture Society; the Hypatias.
Felice Venable, approached as a prospective member, had refused languidly.
“I just naturally hate sewing,” she had drawled, looking up from the novel she was reading. “And as for culture! Why, the Venables and the Marcys have had it in this country for three hundred years, not to speak of England and France, where they practically started it going. Besides, I don’t believe in women running around to club meetings. They’ll be going into politics next.”
Sabra timidly approached Mrs. Wyatt with her plan to form a woman’s club, and Mrs. Wyatt snatched at it with such ferocity as almost to make it appear her own idea. Each was to invite four women of the town’s elite. Ten, they decided, would be enough as charter members.
“I,” began Mrs. Wyatt promptly, “am going to ask Mrs. Louie Hefner, Mrs. Doc Nisbett—”
“Her husband’s horrid! I hate him. I don’t want her in my club.” The ten barrels of water still rankled.
“We’re not asking husbands, my dear Mrs. Cravat. This is a ladies’ club.”
“Well, I don’t think the wife of any such man could be a lady.”
“Mrs. Nisbett,” retorted Mrs. Wyatt, introducing snobbery into that welter of mud, Indians, pine shacks, drought, and semi-barbarism known as Osage, Indian Territory, “was a Krumpf of Ouachita, Arkansas.”
Sabra, descendant of the Marcys and the Venables, lifted her handsome black eyebrows. Privately, she decided to select her four from among the less vertebrate and more ebullient of Osage’s matrons. Culture was all very well, but the thought of mingling once every fortnight with nine versions of the bony Mrs. Wyatt or the pedigreed Mrs. Nisbett (née Krumpf) was depressing. She made up her mind that next day, after the housework was done, she would call on her candidates, beginning with that pretty and stylish Mrs. Evergreen Waltz. Sabra had inherited a strain of frivolity from Felice Venable. At supper that evening she told Yancey of her plans.
“We’re going to take up literature, you know. And maybe early American history.”
“Why, honey, don’t you know you’re making it?”
This she did not take seriously. “And then current events, too.”
“Well, the events in this town are current enough. I’ll say that for them. The trick is to catch them as they go by. You girls’ll have to be quick.” She told him of her four prospective members.
“Waltz’s wife!” Surprise and amusement, too, were in his voice, but she was too full of her plans to notice. Besides, Yancey often was mystifyingly amused at things that seemed to Sabra quite serious. “Why, that’s fine, Sabra. That’s fine! That’s the spirit!”
“I noticed her at church meeting last Sunday. She’s so pretty, it rests me to look at her, after all these—not that they’re—I don’t mean they’re not very nice ladies. But after all, even if it’s a culture club, someone nearer my own age would be much more fun.”
“Oh, much,” Yancey agreed, still smiling. “That’s what a town like this should be. No class distinctions, no snobbery, no highfalutin notions.”
“I saw her washing hanging on the line. Just by accident. You can tell she’s a lady. Such pretty underthings all trimmed with embroidery, and there were two embroidery petticoats all flounced and every bit as nice as the ones Cousin Belle French Vian made for me by hand, for my trousseau.”
“I’m not surprised.” Yancey was less loquacious than usual. But then, men were not interested in women’s clothes.
“She looks kind of babyish and lonely, sitting there by the window sewing all day. And her husband’s so much older, and a cripple, too, or almost. I noticed he limps quite badly. What’s his trouble?”
“Shot in the leg.”
“Oh.” She had already learned to accept this form of injury as a matter of course. “I thought I’d ask her to prepare a paper for the third meeting on Mrs. Browning’s Aurora Leigh. I could lend her yours to read up on, if you don’t mind, just in case she hasn’t got it.”
Yancey thought
