Angela's Business Part 17

"Well, Angela, how are you?" said she, entering confidently, and kissed Angela's cheek. "I hope I didn't break into your nap, or anything unforgivable like that?"

"Oh, no, indeed, Cousin Mary. How d' you do? I wasn't asleep."

Cousin Mary was enveloped from neck to heels in a becoming gray raincoat. Beneath that were seen glimpses of a costume rather elaborate for bad weather and a workaday world. Nor did Cousin Mary's manner seem in the least crushed or subdued, as morals demanded that the manner of a disgraced person should be.

All the same, Angela greeted her cordially enough, with only a faint conscientious stiffness traceable to her mother. For one thing, she was really sorry for Mary now; right or wrong, she genuinely wished they hadn't expelled her from the High School, and sent her off to a Grammar School, in a low quarter of the city. And then besides that, whatever Cousin Mary's strange ideas and behavior, the fact remained that she happened still to be one of her, Angela's, particular little coterie--that small group of friends and relatives with whom she herself seemed to be sadly out of touch just now.

Mary entered with the air of being in a hurry. In the car-shaped parlor she unb.u.t.toned her coat, nevertheless, the Latrobe heater being, like the doorbell, small but powerful. Angela, seated on the famous sofa, said:--

"Cousin Mary, you're all dressed up! I believe you're going to a party!"

Mary glanced down at herself with indifference.

"No," said she, "but I've been to a little sort of one, a luncheon. And we didn't leave the hotel till half an hour ago, either--"

"Oh, a luncheon! They're fun, I think. Where was it?"

"At the Arlington--very fine and beautiful, but it took hours! That's why I'm so late getting around here. I've wanted specially to see you for several days, Angela, but I haven't seemed to find a minute, and this was my last chance. I wondered if you had any engagement for to-morrow afternoon?"

"No, indeed, Cousin Mary, I haven't any engagement."

"Then I want you to come with me to a lecture," said Cousin Mary, "at four o'clock."

The young girl's face, which had become brightly expectant at the mention of engagements, fell perceptibly. She covered her disappointment with a little laugh.

"Well,--thank you, very much, Cousin Mary,--but you know I don't appreciate lectures very much. I'm not clever enough--"

"But this isn't an ordinary lecture. In fact, I shouldn't have used that word at all. It's a talk, a personal talk to women by a woman, and a wonderful one--Dr. Jane Rainey. You may have heard of her?"

"Well, I'm not sure. What is she going to talk about?" asked Angela politely.

"The subject that means most to every woman, no matter what she thinks or says! And Dr. Rainey, I do believe, knows more about it than anybody else living. Jane Clemm she was--but that was years ago, before you could remember. I got her to come here to speak, myself,--and expect to lose some money on the transaction, too,--heigho! But I don't mind really, it's such a privilege to have the whole subject lit up, from the modern point of view, by a speaker like this. Jane Rainey's a practicing physician, a fine human being, the mother of four children herself, and she--"

"But what _is_ her subject, Cousin Mary?"

"That's it!--marriage and motherhood."

Angela stared at her cousin, and then looked rather shocked. Next, faint color appeared in her smooth cheeks. It really seemed that Mary had learned nothing, from the painful lesson she had just received. Why did she have this persistent interest in the unpleasant side of life?

She said more decisively than was her wont: "No, Cousin Mary, I really don't think I'd care to go--thank you."

Mary Wing, checked in her forensic by Angela's expression, looked surprised, though, perhaps, not taken aback, and certainly not rebuked.

"Now, why not? I honestly hoped the subject would have a special interest for you. You--"

"For me!--Oh, no! I--"

"My dear, you know you told me once what your ambition was--to be a good wife some day, when the right man came for you. And that's the ambition of every normal woman, I believe,--or one of them,--no matter what else she may have in her head! Well, you see, that's exactly what this brilliant student--and woman--wants to advise us about--how to fulfill this ambition; how to prepare ourselves to be good wives and--"

"But I don't think of it that way at all, Cousin Mary. I hope," said Angela, pink-cheeked, but once more standing firm for propriety against all the astonis.h.i.+ng Newness--"I hope I'll know how to be a good wife--to the man I love--without going to any lectures--"

"Do you think anybody on earth knows as much as that, just by intuition?

It seems to me ... But perhaps your feeling is--you don't like the idea of a public talk on the subject?"

"I don't, Cousin Mary--frankly. I know I seem to you dreadfully behind the times--and all. But that's the way I was brought up to feel, and it's the way I do feel. I'm not advanced at all, I thought you knew."

There was a silence in the dingy little parlor, during which the pouring rain became audible.

"Of course I don't want to press you against your will, Angela," said Mary slowly. "You know that? But--I can't get away from feeling that being a good wife--and mother--in this awfully upset, transitional age, when men's ideals are changing step for step with women's--and perhaps a little in advance of them, who knows?--I believe it's the most complicated and difficult vocation in the world. Compared with it, any ordinary man's profession--like engineering, for instance--looks to me like simplicity itself. And, Angela, I can't believe that every woman is born with all this understanding, all this difficult expert knowledge in her head, any more than I believe that every man is born knowing by intuition how to be a good engineer. Of course we'd think it quite strange--shouldn't we?--if Donald, as a boy wanting to be an engineer, had thought he mustn't read any books that mentioned engineering, and must stop his ears if--"

Angela, feeling almost ready to stop her ears herself, interrupted with some warmth:--

"Cousin Mary, we simply don't understand each other! I don't think of--of romance--and marriage--as anything in the least like _engineering_--not in the least! I don't think of them as subjects for lectures by _experts_! And I was brought up to feel there were some things not very--suitable to talk about. I was brought up not to think about them at all."

"Of course, my dear!--I understand. But every woman thinks about marriage--doesn't she? She can't help it. Take me," said Mary, good-humoredly--"a confirmed old maid school-teacher who's just scandalized half the city, and been publicly dismissed from her job. I haven't the slightest idea of marrying, ever, and yet I think about it often, and would like to feel--"

"You do? Well, I am different. I _don't_ think about it."

"You don't think about marriage?"

"I never think of it at all," said Angela.

That settled Cousin Mary. After a brief pause she said, in the nicest way: "Well, then, forgive me, Angela, and forget everything I've said."

Angela forgave her readily enough. Shut your eyes to the horrid, unwomanly streak in her, and Mary Wing was really a very pleasant person. She had always said that, to her mother and others. So talk flowed easily into other channels, and the air of cousinly amity was soon restored. But just when that was accomplished, Mary rose unexpectedly to go, and Angela found herself left with several topics not yet mentioned at all.

"Oh, don't go yet!" said she. "I want to--"

"I _must_! I really had no time at all to-day, but came anyway, whether or no. How pretty you look, Angela," said Mary, and kissed the now unblus.h.i.+ng cheek again.

"I wish the lunch-party hadn't kept you so long! I haven't--"

"I do, too! A whole good afternoon! And the worst of it was," said Mary, eyeing her with a sort of speculative archness, "I stayed after everybody was gone just to talk to Charles Garrott, whom you dislike so much! Still," she added, with a fading of archness, "I had something to tell him for his own good, at least."

Cousin Mary's changes of expression were lost upon Angela. "Mr. Garrott!

Was he at the lunch party?"

"He gave it--didn't I say? It was just a little _bon voyage_ party for Donald--and Helen Carson! Donald's leaving to-morrow for Wyoming, you know, to be gone a month--"

"No--you hadn't told me.... Who else was at the lunch, Cousin Mary?"

"Oh, just those I've mentioned, and f.a.n.n.y for chaperon, and Talbott Maxon."

Angela, naturally, felt more lonely and out of things than ever. In fact, she felt blankly depressed. Mr. Garrott's luncheon had included exactly her coterie, only she herself being omitted.

"Why do you say I dislike Mr. Garrott, Cousin Mary? Of course I like him very much. You know I told you long ago he was much the most attractive man I've met here."

"Well, but I thought you must have changed your opinion, when you told me the other day that his ideals were so low."