The Crystal Cup — Reading Companion

a staccato delivery, which she made no attempt to modify in the sick-room, and the old lady frowned.

“I never cared for your mother, but she had a soft low voice, ‘an excellent thing in woman.’ Why did you not model your own upon it? And you do all you can to distort and destroy the Carteret beauty in your attempt to look like a boy. The Carteret women were all dashing brunettes, but feminine. Otherwise they never would have had men crawling at their feet, generation after generation.”

“If men crawled at my feet—which they don’t do these days, anyhow—I’d kick them out of the way. And if I were a man myself—and I wish to God I were—I’d see women to the devil before I’d make a fool of myself——”

“I don’t like your language. I don’t like your voice. I don’t like your bobbed hair——”

“My hair is not bobbed.”

“Bad enough whatever it is. I don’t like your ‘brooding brows,’ to quote an expression I read in a silly novel. I don’t like your boyish defiant bearing; it is not ladylike. I don’t like your ugly tailored suits—I’ve never seen you with a single feminine adornment——”

“You never will. Haven’t I told you I hate—loathe—being a female?”

“Fiddlesticks. I don’t pretend to know what bee you’ve got in your bonnet, but if you’ll take my advice you’ll pluck it out before it’s too late——”

“It’s not in my bonnet. It’s inside my skull.”

“Don’t interrupt me. You’ve no manners. . . . But you’re a Carteret all the same, in spite of your ridiculous airs and notions, and you look—could look—exactly as I did in my youth: I was your grandfather’s second cousin and a Carteret to my finger-tips—except that you are not tall enough. I was five-feet-eight and you must be quite three inches shorter. I was the beauty and the belle of my day, and that is more than you will ever be unless you take heed before it is too late.”

The gray old voice, with its sudden moments of vehement life, trailed off and her gaze turned inward. The light from the open window shone on her face high on the pillows in the ancient four-post bed, and Gita looked at it with the cold appraisement of youth. Beautiful? Once, perhaps. The black eyes were still keen and bright, although sunken deep in sockets as yellow and crinkled as an old Asiatic’s. The bony ridge of the nose was high and thin, but the cheeks were seamed with a thousand little wrinkles and the mouth was a pale satiric line. She looked more like an old bird of prey than the remnants of a woman, and Gita decided it was not worth the mental effort to repad that face with firm young flesh and give it the pedestal of a swan-like neck or any of the other absurdities of archaic youth. She looked longingly through the window at the sunlight, but she had made up her mind to “do the decent thing” as the old lady had rescued her from poverty and heaven knew what not. Besides, she admitted grudgingly, blood was blood, and her grandmother had no one else. Noblesse oblige. Moreover, she rather liked this new-found relative, with her sharp, sarcastic, if superannuated, mind. If she had been affectionate life would have been unendurable once more.

The old Carteret Manor was not far from the island covered by Atlantic City, and behind the Old Shore Road. It was surrounded on three sides by pine woods but open to the sea on the east. There had been a storm the night before and from this high window Gita could see the tossing spray that hid the horizon. She forgot her grandmother until the old lady spoke again.

“They named you Gita, anyhow!” she said triumphantly. “The first daughter of every son was always named Gita, but it would have been like your father to break the tradition, especially as your mother disliked me. . . . There have been many Gita Carterets! And you are a Carteret through and through. Not a trace of your mother, thank heaven——”

“I won’t hear a word against my mother! My mother was an angel and a martyr, and as for my father—I don’t care if he was your son——”