Alice Adams. Booth Tarkington
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They were pretty hands, of a shapeliness delicate and fine. “The best things she's got!” a cold-blooded girl friend said of them, and meant to include Alice's mind and character in the implied list of possessions surpassed by the notable hands. However that may have been, the rest of her was well enough. She was often called “a right pretty girl”—temperate praise meaning a girl rather pretty than otherwise, and this she deserved, to say the least. Even in repose she deserved it, though repose was anything but her habit, being seldom seen upon her except at home. On exhibition she led a life of gestures, the unkind said to make her lovely hands more memorable; but all of her usually accompanied the gestures of the hands, the shoulders ever giving them their impulses first, and even her feet being called upon, at the same time, for eloquence.
So much liveliness took proper place as only accessory to that of the face, where her vivacity reached its climax; and it was unfortunate that an ungifted young man, new in the town, should have attempted to define the effect upon him of all this generosity of emphasis. He said that “the way she used her cute hazel eyes and the wonderful glow of her facial expression gave her a mighty spiritual quality.” His actual rendition of the word was “spirichul”; but it was not his pronunciation that embalmed this outburst in the perennial laughter of Alice's girl friends; they made the misfortune far less his than hers.
Her mother comforted her too heartily, insisting that Alice had “plenty enough spiritual qualities,” certainly more than possessed by the other girls who flung the phrase at her, wooden things, jealous of everything they were incapable of themselves; and then Alice, getting more championship than she sought, grew uneasy lest Mrs. Adams should repeat such defenses “outside the family”; and Mrs. Adams ended by weeping because the daughter so distrusted her intelligence. Alice frequently thought it necessary to instruct her mother.
Her morning greeting was an instruction to-day; or, rather, it was an admonition in the style of an entreaty, the more petulant as Alice thought that Mrs. Adams might have had a glimpse of the posturings to the mirror. This was a needless worry; the mother had caught a thousand such glimpses, with Alice unaware, and she thought nothing of the one just flitted.
“For heaven's sake, mama, come clear inside the room and shut the door! PLEASE don't leave it open for everybody to look at me!”
“There isn't anybody to see you,” Mrs. Adams explained, obeying. “Miss Perry's gone downstairs, and——”
“Mama, I heard you in papa's room,” Alice said, not dropping the note of complaint. “I could hear both of you, and I don't think you ought to get poor old papa so upset—not in his present condition, anyhow.”
Mrs. Adams seated herself on the edge of the bed. “He's better all the time,” she said, not disturbed. “He's almost well. The doctor says so and Miss Perry says so; and if we don't get him into the right frame of mind now we never will. The first day he's outdoors he'll go back to that old hole—you'll see! And if he once does that, he'll settle down there and it'll be too late and we'll never get him out.”
“Well, anyhow, I think you could use a little more tact with him.”
“I do try to,” the mother sighed. “It never was much use with him. I don't think you understand him as well as I do, Alice.”
“There's one thing I don't understand about either of you,” Alice returned, crisply. “Before people get married they can do anything they want to with each other. Why can't they do the same thing after they're married? When you and papa were young people and engaged, he'd have done anything you wanted him to. That must have been because you knew how to manage him then. Why can't you go at him the same way now?”
Mrs. Adams sighed again, and laughed a little, making no other response; but Alice persisted. “Well, WHY can't you? Why can't you ask him to do things the way you used to ask him when you were just in love with each other? Why don't you anyhow try it, mama, instead of ding-donging at him?”
“'Ding-donging at him,' Alice?” Mrs. Adams said, with a pathos somewhat emphasized. “Is that how my trying to do what I can for you strikes you?”
“Never mind that; it's nothing to hurt your feelings.” Alice disposed of the pathos briskly. “Why don't you answer my question? What's the matter with using a little more tact on papa? Why can't you treat him the way you probably did when you were young people, before you were married? I never have understood why people can't do that.”
“Perhaps you WILL understand some day,” her mother said, gently. “Maybe you will when you've been married twenty-five years.”
“You keep evading. Why don't you answer my question right straight out?”
“There are questions you can't answer to young people, Alice.”
“You mean because we're too young to understand the answer? I don't see that at all. At twenty-two a girl's supposed to have some intelligence, isn't she? And intelligence is the ability to understand, isn't it? Why do I have to wait till I've lived with a man twenty-five years to understand why you can't be tactful with papa?”
“You may understand some things before that,” Mrs. Adams said, tremulously. “You may understand how you hurt me sometimes. Youth can't know everything by being intelligent, and by the time you could understand the answer you're asking for you'd know it, and wouldn't need to ask. You don't understand your father, Alice; you don't know what it takes to change him when he's made up his mind to be stubborn.”
Alice rose and began to get herself into a skirt. “Well, I don't think making scenes ever changes anybody,” she grumbled. “I think a little jolly persuasion goes twice as far, myself.”
“'A little jolly persuasion!'” Her mother turned the echo of this phrase into an ironic lament. “Yes, there was a time when I thought that, too! It didn't work; that's all.”
“Perhaps you left the 'jolly' part of it out, mama.”
For the second time that morning—it was now a little after seven o'clock—tears seemed about to offer their solace to Mrs. Adams. “I might have expected you to say that, Alice; you never do miss a chance,” she said, gently. “It seems queer you don't some time miss just ONE chance!”
But Alice, progressing with her toilet, appeared to be little concerned. “Oh, well, I think there are better ways of managing a man than just hammering at him.”
Mrs. Adams uttered a little cry of pain. “'Hammering,' Alice?”
“If you'd left it entirely to me,” her daughter went on, briskly, “I believe papa'd already be willing to do anything we want him to.”
“That's it; tell me I spoil everything. Well, I won't interfere from now on, you can be sure of it.”
“Please don't talk like that,” Alice said, quickly. “I'm old enough to realize that papa may need pressure of all sorts; I only think it makes him more obstinate to get him cross. You probably do understand him better, but that's one thing I've found out and you haven't. There!” She gave her mother a friendly tap on the shoulder and went to the door. “I'll hop in and say hello to him now.”
As she went, she continued the fastening of her blouse, and appeared in her father's room with one hand still thus engaged, but she patted his forehead with the other.
“Poor old papa-daddy!” she said, gaily. “Every time he's better somebody talks him into getting so mad he has a relapse. It's a shame!”
Her father's eyes, beneath their melancholy brows, looked up at her wistfully. “I suppose you heard your mother going for me,” he said.
“I heard you going for her, too!” Alice laughed. “What was it all about?”
“Oh, the same danged old story!”
“You mean she wants you to try something new when you get well?” Alice asked, with cheerful innocence. “So we could all have a lot more money?”
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