Society at Balderville was of the fluctuant, intermittent order that obtains at minor resorts; the crop of visitors was bad or good, according to the year, like the peaches or cotton. With some of these visitors Dosia formed eager, transitory friendships, but with others there could be no assimilation. There were a few nice families settled in the place, more or less bound together by a community of interest centering in Balderville and the future of their children, who were usually sent away to school when half grown.
Youth is a surprisingly concrete thing, possessing faculties of its own—a terrible clear-sightedness, for one thing, and a black-and-white ruled-out sense of justice and injustice; it brought an absolutely new sense of values to Dosia. It was when she was seventeen that it began to dawn upon her that the conditions at home, always looked upon as entirely temporary and sporadic by her father and stepmother, were really the inevitable expressions of law. She saw that the true character of her parents was quite different from their own idea of it; that they would never change materially, and therefore, in the very nature of things, their fortunes could never change materially; they would always be going a little faster or a little slower on a down grade. She wondered at the exhaustless capacity of complacently believing in worn fallacies which her young eyes saw pitilessly as such. Her stepmother still looked upon the father, as he did upon himself, as a successful and energetic man of business for the moment only disabled by his failing health, and believed herself to be always on the point of managing the little money they had with superhuman economy, so that it would cover all household emergencies; only Dosia knew that there could never be more money, and that what there was must always slip away. This knowledge laid the future waste and rendered effort futile. What was the use, for instance, of putting cushions on the lounge over the place where there was a big hole in the cover, until they could buy the new one? There never would be a new one. What was the use of pretending that when the cracked and heterogeneous plates and dishes were replaced the table would be properly set once more? They never would be replaced.
If Theodosia had not been of a sweet nature, scorn would have embittered her; as it was, she was still loving, but she grew tired. She taught a little, in the odd chances that served, and gained a few pence here and there by it, for teaching brought an absurdly pitiful wage. She went to the simple entertainments of the place, which were mostly among the older people, and played the piano sometimes at them, when she could be spared long enough from her duties at home to practice beforehand. The young people around showed the usual rural effect of propinquity and childish habit in pairing off insensibly as they grew up; it was always said of such and such a one, in local parlance, that they “went together,” and arrangements were made in view of this known fact whenever festivities were in prospect, but Dosia had never “gone with” anyone for more than a few days at a time, when some young visitor staying in the place had given her the preference in the dances and picnics and straw-rides. For the rest, she sewed and mended and baked and took care of the children, and read, and found her father’s walking-sticks for him, and filled the lamps and fed the dogs and went on errands. Her father and stepmother were quite contented, and why should she not be?
But there came a time when there seemed to be no point to living; after the day’s work, what was there? What would there ever be? The children played merrily and went to bed happy. The father and mother loved each other, their very limitations made their engrossing interest, they were contented to be discontented. Dosia took herself to task for her own discontent, she prayed against it, she made bracing rules for herself which she strove to follow; she read, she sewed with fresh vigor, she was nobly self-sacrificing. Mrs. Linden often said that she didn’t know how they would ever get along without Dosia. She also often spoke of the advantages she would like to give the girl, and at first Dosia had listened with pleased hope to these aspirations, but as no effort was ever made to realize them in even the simplest way, they only served after a while to show more plainly the flatness of living.
Many a night—like many another girl!—Dosia sat in the window of her shelving attic room, bathed in the golden moonlight, with her hair falling on her shoulders and her hands clasped before her, a picture for none to see. The warm summer odors of pine and hickory were around her. The tide of youth was so strong in her heart! In vain she tried to stem it. She longed inexpressibly for that outer world, of which she had read, where youth was a power. In an age of modern young womanhood, clever, self-satisfying, potential, Dosia belonged to the old régime where sentiment still holds sway. She wanted, indeed, to learn more about many things,—she longed to study music,—but she felt no inspiration and no desire for the life of an artist; she was, in fact, just a girl, who longed with vague indefiniteness, yet none the less intensely, for the joyous life of a girl; the pleasure of being sought, the excitement of shining, for music and dancing and little daily delights, and—love. She dimly discerned unknown glories that made her breath come quickly. Dosia dreamed of some one in the far future who would be very good and very noble, whose love would hold her to everything that was beautiful and right, with whom she would prove herself extraordinarily witty and brilliant and fascinating, and whose hand on hers would set her heart beating. She imagined pouring out her heart to him,—that heart which seemed to be forever shut in her breast now, with none to understand it, none to care,—going to him with all these doubts and self-convictions and hopes, and feeling the blessedness of his response. “You darling,” he would say, “don’t you know I was loving you all the time? We neither of us knew each other, to be sure, but the love was there all the same; it had existed since the beginning of the world.”
She began to show the effects of that terrible atrophy which affects not only the mind but the very blood of girlhood, and which does not need iron as a curative power so much as a legitimate and healthy excitement. Even Mrs. Linden noticed that the girl looked thin and pale, and showed listlessness in place of energy, after several neighbors had openly commented on the fact; she said placidly that she was really worried about Dosia, and wished that she could have a change. And then one of those impossible, wonderful things happened which alter the whole surface of the earth. A rich aunt in Cincinnati wrote that Dosia was to go to New York to study music, and spend the winter with a married cousin, Lois Alexander, in one of the suburbs.
Thus it came that Theodosia was journeying North, dressed in a new suit of blue serge, which had been sent from Atlanta, to fit her measure, with the rest of her traveling outfit. As she sat in the Pullman car, with her head in its little gray felt hat against the high back of the seat, and looked down at the tips of her new shoes, and then at the fingers of her new gloves, she felt like a princess.
Dress in Balderville had been a matter of necessity, not of choice—bleared and shapeless in effect from much “making over,” as purchase was not to be thought of. Dosia had had no new clothing for such a long time that the sensation of delight was so keen that she almost felt as if it must be wicked. Her skin seemed satin smooth with the clean freshness of dainty linen against it, and the unwonted perfume of the suède gloves was subtly intoxicating. She took furtive glimpses of herself in the glass panel beside her, and the sight filled her with a delighted wonder. She could hardly believe that she really looked so much like other people.
It was her toilet that engaged her attention, not her face; she had that exaggerated idea of the importance of dress which belongs to people who have never been able to exercise their taste or fancy for it—particularly those who live in the country. A bit of bright velvet was like a picture to her, ribbons made a poem; for her face she cared little. It was not beautiful, but sweet and youthful—just a girl’s face; small, quite pale, except when she spoke, when the color