The Little Lady of the Big House / Маленькая хозяйка большого дома. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“Oh, she is rigid New England[324],” Mrs. Tully insisted, “the solidest of creatures as to honor and rectitude, dependableness and faithfulness. As a girl she really couldn’t bring herself to lie, except to save others. In which case all her New England ancestry took flight and she would lie as magnificently as her father before her. And he had the same charm of manner, the same daring, the same ready laughter, the same vivacity. But what is lightsome and blithe in her, was debonaire in him. He won men’s hearts always, or, failing that, their bitterest enmity. No one was left cold by him in passing. Contact with him quickened them to love or hate. Therein Paula differs, being a woman, I suppose, and not enjoying man’s prerogative of tilting at windmills[325]. I don’t know that she has an enemy in the world. All love her, unless, it may well be, there are cat-women who envy her her nice husband.”

And as Graham listened, Paula’s singing came through the open window from somewhere down the long arcades, and there was that ever-haunting thrill in her voice that he could not escape remembering afterward. She burst into laughter, and Mrs. Tully beamed to him and nodded at the sound.

“There laughs Philip Desten,” she murmured, “and all the Frenchwomen behind the original Frenchman who was brought into Penobscot, dressed in homespun, and sent to meeting[326]. Have you noticed how Paula’s laugh invariably makes everybody look up and smile? Philip’s laugh did the same thing.

“Paula had always been passionately fond of music, painting, drawing. As a little girl she could be traced around the house and grounds by the trail she left behind her of images and shapes, made in whatever medium she chanced upon – drawn on scraps of paper, scratched on bits of wood, modeled in mud and sand.

“She loved everything, and everything loved her,” said Mrs. Tully. “She was never timid of animals. And yet she always stood in awe of them; but she was born sense-struck, and her awe was beauty-awe. Yes, she was an incorrigible hero-worshiper, whether the person was merely beautiful or did things. And she never will outgrow that beauty – awe of anything she loves, whether it is a grand piano, a great painting, a beautiful mare, or a bit of landscape.

“And Paula had wanted to do, to make beauty herself. But she was sorely puzzled whether she should devote herself to music or painting. In the full swing of work under the best masters in Boston, she could not refrain from straying back to her drawing. From her easel she was lured to modeling.

“And so, with her love of the best, her soul and heart full of beauty, she grew quite puzzled and worried over herself, as to which talent was the greater and if she had genius at all. I suggested a complete rest from work and took her abroad for a year. And of all things, she developed a talent for dancing. But always she harked back to her music and painting. No, she was not flighty. Her trouble was that she was too talented —”

“Too diversely talented,” Graham amplified.

“Yes, that is better,” Mrs. Tully nodded. “But from talent to genius is a far cry[327], and to save my life, at this late day, I don’t know whether the child ever had a trace of genius in her. She has certainly not done anything big in any of her chosen things.”

“Except to be herself,” Graham added.

“Which is the big thing[328],” Mrs. Tully accepted with a smile of enthusiasm. “She is a splendid, unusual woman, very unspoiled, very natural. And after all, what does doing things amount to? I’d give more for one of Paula’s madcap escapades – oh, I heard all about swimming the big stallion – than for all her pictures if every one was a masterpiece. But she was hard for me to understand at first. Dick often calls her the girl that never grew up. But gracious, she can put on the grand air when she needs to. I call her the most mature child I have ever seen. Dick was the finest thing that ever happened to her. It was then that she really seemed for the first time to find herself. It was this way.”

And Mrs. Tully went on to sketch the year of travel in Europe, the resumption of Paula’s painting in Paris, and the conviction she finally reached that success could be achieved only by struggle and that her aunt’s money was a handicap.

“And she had her way[329],” Mrs. Tully sighed. “She – why, she dismissed me, sent me home. She would accept no more than the meagerest allowance, and went down into the Latin Quarter on her own, batching with two other American girls. And she met Dick. Dick was a rare one. You couldn’t guess what he was doing then. Running a cabaret – oh, not these modern cabarets, but a real students’ cabaret of sorts. It was very select. They were a lot of madmen. You see, he was just back from some of his wild adventuring at the ends of the earth, and, as he stated it, he wanted to stop living life for a while and to talk about life instead.