The Ordeal of Elizabeth. Anonymous

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СКАЧАТЬ was no music in the room now, no air of festivity. The atmosphere was close and musty, the sun poured in at the window beside which Amanda sat sewing. She bent closely over her work, her skin was more pasty than ever and her eyes were red and swollen. Elizabeth remembered her aunt's words about the headache; otherwise she might have thought that her cousin had been crying. She went over and kissed her with a friendliness born of her own superabundant joy. The lips she touched were dry and hot. Amanda did not respond to the caress. She stared stupidly at Elizabeth, as if half dazed by her sudden entrance.

      "How are you, Amanda?" Elizabeth said. "I'm sorry you have a headache. Perhaps it's the heat. It's a terribly hot day, and the roads are so dusty. Aunt Rebecca implied that my dress showed that very plainly. It was clean this morning—does it really look so badly?" She walked over to the mirror and inspected herself critically, setting her hat straight and adjusting the white ribbon about her throat. It was a long narrow glass, framed in black walnut, and there was a shelf underneath it, which supported a large sea-shell. The whole thing reminded her of a similar arrangement at her dressmaker's in town, and seemed in some way the crowning feature of the prosaic, painfully respectable character of the room. She hated to look at herself there—the glass brought out all one's defects. But to-day, in spite of the trying glare of the sunshine, her own image flashed back at her, so brilliantly fresh, in her white dimity gown, so redolent of health and beauty, that she could not help smiling back at it, as at some delightful apparition. Ah, yes, it was good to be young and pretty, and to have a lover waiting for one near by. Her eyes brightened unconsciously, and she gave a little caressing touch to the shining masses of wavy hair which stood out, like red molten gold, against the broad brim of her shady white hat.

      The other girl sat and watched her.

      "You like to look at yourself, don't you?" The words rang out harshly, suddenly. Elizabeth started and turned around. It seemed to her for a moment as if some third person had spoken—some one with a strange, mocking voice that she had never heard before. But there was no one else in the room.

      "Yes, you like to look at yourself." Amanda went on after a pause, more quietly, "you think yourself a beauty, and a good many people, perhaps, might agree with you. He tells you so, I suppose. I daresay he tells you your hair's picturesque—he used to tell me that about mine. He was going to paint my picture, but it went out of his head when he saw you. Most things did, I guess. He—he hasn't been here since." The girl's voice broke in a quick, convulsive sob, and she stopped for a moment, but went on almost immediately: "If you hadn't come in that day, it would have been all right. We were keeping company; every one in The Mills knew we were. All the girls were jealous of me—as if he'd have looked at them! Some of them work in the factory, there's many of them don't even have a piano and sit in their kitchens. I know what's genteel, even if I can't talk all that rubbish about music and Wagner that you learned at school. And what good will all that do you when you're married? What do you know about mending and sewing and cooking? What sort of a wife would you make him? You'd ruin him in a month with your fine clothes. But men are such fools!" She gave a short mirthless laugh, her eyes glittered strangely. Elizabeth stared at her paralyzed, glued to the spot in helpless fascination. She had never heard Amanda talk so much before. Her words came quickly, fiercely, one upon another, like some overwhelming torrent that had been suddenly let loose.

      "Why should you have so much more than me? Why should you have fine clothes, and a carriage, and go to school in New York, and have the swells in the neighborhood call on you? Was your mother any better than mine, or a hundredth part as good? She wasn't even respectable; no decent people at The Mills would speak to her before your father married her—I know that for a fact. And then to give yourself airs!" Amanda stopped short, panting, exhausted by her own vehemence. Elizabeth still stood before her powerless. When Amanda spoke of her mother the color rushed into her white face, and she made an effort to speak; but the words seemed to die away on her lips. Amanda, after a moment's pause, went on.

      "It isn't that I care so much about that; you might have had everything else, if you hadn't taken—him. Why did you come in that day looking like a dressed-up doll? You hadn't been here for weeks, and I was glad. I didn't want him to know you—I wasn't afraid of the other girls. But you who've got so much—couldn't you have had the decency to leave him alone? Couldn't you see that he was mine?"

      "Amanda," Elizabeth gasped out. "I—I didn't know. I—I never thought"—Her brain reeled, she stammered painfully, trying in vain for words to vindicate herself from this shameful charge. Amanda brushed her aside contemptuously.

      "You didn't think?—no, you never do, of anything but yourself, your pretty face and pretty clothes! You're selfish and spoiled—every one knows it; you've had every wish granted till you want everything, and you won't be satisfied with less. But what's the good of saying all this to you?" she broke off suddenly, with a sharp change of tone. "I must be crazy; I've felt so, I'm sure, these last weeks. It won't make any difference—nothing I say can bring him back. And yet he'd have married me—if you hadn't come." She went to Elizabeth and gripped her by the wrist. "He kissed me once," she said. "Has he kissed you yet?"

      "No," said Elizabeth, mechanically, "no." She shrank away a little and set her teeth. Amanda's grasp was painful, but she would not have cried out for worlds.

      "Well, when he does," Amanda said, "remember this—he kissed me first. You can't take that away from me—I have the first claim." She let go of Elizabeth's hands and fell back a step. There were two deep red marks from her grasp. "Now go," she said, "go to him. I knew you were going to him—I saw you thinking of it, and it made me hate you. Go to him and tell him that I hope his love for you will last as long as it did for me." She laughed again harshly and then suddenly burst into violent weeping. "Oh, it's ignominious," she said, "it's contemptible. No one can despise me more than I do myself. I haven't any pride. I hate him—I hate him; yet I'd take him back now, if he'd come to me." She sank down on the sofa and hid her face in the red plush cushions, while her whole frame shook with convulsive sobs.

      Elizabeth stood still in the middle of the floor. Mechanically she glanced at her reflection in the mirror; white, distraught, with startled eyes—a ghastly parody of the brilliant vision which had smiled back at her only a few minutes before. The hot sunlight, flooding the commonplace little room, seemed to bring out, with glaring vividness, all the tragic, sordid elements of the scene. A quarrel between two women about a lover! Could anything be more hopelessly vulgar and grotesque?

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