Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

A charabanc had already conveyed two footmen, three armchairs and a number of hampers to the site of the picnic. The novelist, wearing a white satin dress (made by Vass of Manhattan for Marina who had lately lost ten pounds), with Ada sitting beside her, and Lucette, très en beauté in a white sailor blouse, perched next to sullen Wright, drove there in the calèche. Van rode behind on one of his uncle’s or grand-uncle’s bicycles. The forest road remained reasonably smooth if you kept to its middle run (still sticky and dark after a rainy dawn) between the sky-blue ruts, speckled with the reflections of the same birch leaves whose shadows sped over the taut nacrine silk of Mlle Larivière’s open sunshade and the wide brim of Ada’s rather rakishly donned white hat. Now and then Lucette from beside blue-coated Ben looked back at Van and made slacken-speed little signals with the flat of one hand as she had seen her mother do to Ada when fearing she would crash with her pony or bicycle into the back of the carriage.

Marina came in a red motorcar of an early ‘runabout’ type, operated by the butler very warily as if it were some fancy variety of corkscrew. She looked unwontedly smart in a man’s gray flannels and sat holding the palm of her gloved hand on the knob of a clouded cane as the car, wobbling a little, arrived to the very edge of the picnic site, a picturesque glade in an old pinewood cut by ravishingly lovely ravines. A strange pale butterfly passed from the opposite side of the woods, along the Lugano dirt road, and was followed presently by a landau from which emerged one by one, nimbly or slowly, depending on age and condition, the Erminin twins, their young pregnant aunt (narrationally a great burden), and a governess, white-haired Mme Forestier, the school friend of Mathilde in a forthcoming story.

Three adult gentlemen, moreover, were expected but never turned up: Uncle Dan, who missed the morning train from town; Colonel Erminin, a widower, whose liver, he said in a note, was behaving like a pecheneg; and his doctor (and chess partner), the famous Dr Krolik, who called himself Ada’s court jeweler, and indeed brought her his birthday present early on the following day — three exquisitely carved chrysalids (‘Inestimable gems,’ cried throatily Ada, tensing her brows), all of which were to yield before long, specimens of a disappointing ichneumon instead of the Kibo Fritillary, a recently discovered rarity.

Stacks of tender crustless sandwiches (perfect rectangles five inches by two), the tawny corpse of a turkey, black Russian bread, pots of Gray Bead caviar, candied violets, little raspberry tarts, half a gallon of Goodson white port, another of ruby, watered claret in thermos flasks for the girls, and the cold sweet tea of happy childhoods — all this is more readily imagined than described. One found it instructive [thus in the MS. Ed.].

One found it instructive to place side by side Ada Veen and Grace Erminin: the skimmed-milk pallor of Ada and her coeval’s healthy hot flush; the straight black witchwench-hair of the one and the brown bob of the other; my love’s lackluster grave eyes and the blue twinkle behind Grace’s horn-rimmed glasses; the former’s naked thigh and the latter’s long red stockings; the gipsy skirt and the sailor suit. Still more instructive, perhaps, was to note how Greg’s plain features had been transposed practically intact into his sister’s aura where they acquired a semblance of girlish’ good looks’ without impairing the close resemblance between sailor boy and maiden.

The ruins of the turkey, the port wine which only the governesses had touched, and a broken Sèvres plate were quickly removed by the servants. A cat appeared from under a bush, stared in a shock of intense surprise, and, despite a chorus of ‘kitty-kitty,’ vanished.