“Well, I might some day, when my ship comes in,” said Eleanor.
“Oh, well, I’ll never be rich,” said Eveline. “My father’s a clergyman
… Let’s go to Florence together, Eleanor, and call on your father. If we arrived there he couldn’t very well throw us out.”
“I’d love to take a trip some day.”
“It’s time I was home. By the way, where do you live? Let’s meet tomorrow afternoon and look at all the pictures together.”
“I’m afraid I’ll be busy tomorrow.”
“Well, maybe you can come to supper some night. I’ll ask mother when I can have you. It’s so rare to meet a girl you can talk to. We live on Drexel Boulevard. Here’s my card. I’ll send you a postcard and you’ll promise to come, won’t you?”
“I’d love to, if it’s not earlier than seven… You see I have an occupation that keeps me busy every afternoon except Sunday, and Sundays I usually go out to see my relatives in…”
“In Lake Forest?”
“Yes… When I’m in town I live at a sort of Y.W.C.A. place, Moody House; it’s plebeian but convenient… I’ll write down the address on this card.” The card was of Mrs. Lang’s, “Imported Laces and Hand-Embroidered Fabrics.” She wrote her address on it, scratched out the other side and handed it to Eveline. “That’s lovely,” she said, “I’ll drop you a card this very night and you’ll promise to come, won’t you?”
Eleanor saw her onto the streetcar and started to walk slowly along the street. She had forgotten all about feeling sick, but now that the other girl had gone she felt let down and shabbily dressed and lonely picking her way through the windy evening bustle of the streets.
Eleanor made several friends through Eveline Hutchins. The first time she went to the Hutchinses she was too awed to notice much, but later she felt freer with them, particularly as she discovered that they all thought her an interesting girl and very refined. There were Dr. and Mrs. Hutchins and two daughters and a son away at college. Dr. Hutchins was a Unitarian minister and very broadminded and Mrs. Hutchins did watercolors of flowers that were declared to show great talent. The elder daughter, Grace, had been at school in the East, at Vassar, and was thought to have shown ability in a literary way, the son was taking postgraduate Greek at Harvard and Eveline was taking the most interesting courses right there at Northwestern. Dr. Hutchins was a softvoiced man with a large smooth pinkish face and large smooth white deadlooking hands. The Hutchinses were all planning to go abroad next year which would be Dr. Hutchins’ sabbatical. Eleanor had never heard talk like that before and it thrilled her.
Then one evening Eveline took her to Mrs. Shuster’s. “You mustn’t say anything about Mrs. Shuster at home, will you?” said Eveline as they were coming down from the Elevated. “Mr. Shuster is an art dealer and my father thinks they’re a little too Bohemian… It’s just because Annie Shuster came to our house one night and smoked all through dinner…. I said we’d go to the concert at the Auditorium.”
Eleanor had made herself a new dress, a very simple white dress, with a little green on it, not exactly an evening dress, but one she could wear any time, for the occasion, and when Annie Shuster, a dumpy little redhaired woman with a bouncy manner of walking and talking helped them off with their wraps in the hall she exclaimed how pretty it was. “Why, yes, it’s lovely,” said Eveline. “In fact, you’re looking pretty as a peach tonight, Eleanor.” “I bet that dress wasn’t made in this town… Looks like Paris to me,” said Mrs. Shuster. Eleanor smiled deprecatingly and blushed a little and looked handsomer than ever.
There were a great many people packed into two small rooms and cigarette smoke and coffeecups and smell of some kind of punch. Mr. Shuster was a whitehaired grayfaced man with a head too large for his body and a tired manner. He talked like an Englishman. There were several young men standing round him; one of them Eleanor had known casually when she had studied at the Art Institute. His name was Eric Egstrom and she had always liked him; he was tow-haired and blue-eyed and had a little blond mustache. She could see that Mr. Shuster thought a lot of him. Eveline took her around and introduced her to everybody and asked everybody questions that seemed sometimes disconcerting. Men and women both smoked and talked about books and pictures and about people Eleanor had never heard of. She looked around and didn’t say much and noticed the Greek silhouettes on the orange lampshades and the pictures on the walls which looked very odd indeed and the two rows of yellowbacked French books on the shelves and felt that she might learn a great deal there.
They went away early because Eveline had to go by the Auditorium to see what the program at the concert was for fear she might be asked about it, and Eric and another young man took them home. After they’d left Eveline at her house they asked Eleanor where she lived and she hated to say Moody House because it was in such a horridlooking street, so she made them walk with her to an Elevated station and ran up the steps quickly and wouldn’t let them come with her, although it scared her to go home alone as late as it was.
Many of Mrs. Lang’s customers thought Eleanor was French, on account of her dark hair, her thin oval face and her transparent skin. In fact, one day when a Mrs. McCormick that Mrs. Lang suspected might be one of “the” McCormicks asked after that lovely French girl who waited on her before, Mrs. Lang got an idea. Eleanor would have to be French from now on; so she bought her twenty tickets at the Berlitz School and said she could have the hour off in the morning between nine and ten if she would go and take French lessons there. So all through December and January Eleanor studied French three times a week with an old man in a smelly alpaca jacket and began to slip a phrase in now and then as unconcernedly as she could when she was talking to the customers, and when there was anybody in the shop Mrs. Lang always called her “Mademoiselle.”
She worked hard and borrowed yellowbacked books from the Shusters to read in the evenings with a dictionary and soon she knew more French than Eveline did who had had a French governess when she was little. One day at the Berlitz School she found she had a new teacher. The old man had pneumonia and she had a young Frenchman instead. He was a thin young man with a sharp blueshaved chin and large brown eyes with long lashes. Eleanor liked him at once, his thin aristocratic hands and his aloof manner. After half an hour they had forgotten all about the lesson and were talking English. He spoke English with a funny accent but fluently. She particularly liked the throaty way he pronounced “r.”
Next time she was all tingling going up the stairs to see if it would be the same young man. It was. He told her that the old man had died. She felt she ought to be sorry but she wasn’t. The young man noticed how she felt and screwed his face up into a funny half laughing, half crying expression and said, “Vae victis.” Then he told her about his home in France and how he hated the conventional bourgeois life there and how he’d come to America because it was the land of youth and the future and skyscrapers and the Twentieth Century Limited and how beautiful he thought Chicago was. Eleanor had never heard anyone talk like that and told him he must have gone through Ireland and kissed the blarney stone. Then he looked very aggrieved and said, “Mademoiselle, c’est la pure vérité,” and she said she believed him absolutely and how interesting it was to meet him and how she must introduce him to her friend Eveline Hutchins. Then he went on to tell her how he’d lived in New Orleans and how he’d come as a steward on a French Line boat and how he’d worked as dishwasher and busboy and played the piano in cabarets and worse places than that and how much he loved Negroes and how he was a painter and wanted so much to get a studio and paint but that he hadn’t the money yet. Eleanor was a little chilled by the part about dishwashing and cabarets and colored people, but when he said he was interested in art she felt she really would have to introduce him to Eveline and she felt very bold and unconventional when she asked him to meet them at the Art Institute Sunday afternoon. After all if they decided against it they wouldn’t have to go.