In fact, the agitation of Mrs. Adams was genuine,
but so well under her control that its traces vanished
during the three short steps she took to cross the
narrow hall between her husband’s door and the
one opposite. Her expression was matter-of-course,
rather than pathetic, as she entered the pretty room
where her daughter, half dressed, sat before a dressing-table
and played with the reflections of a three-leafed
mirror framed in blue enamel. That is, just
before the moment of her mother’s entrance,
Alice had been playing with the mirror’s reflections—posturing
her arms and her expressions, clasping her hands behind
her neck, and tilting back her head to foreshorten
the face in a tableau conceived to represent sauciness,
then one of smiling weariness, then one of scornful
toleration, and all very piquant; but as the door
opened she hurriedly resumed the practical, and occupied
her hands in the arrangement of her plentiful brownish
hair.
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.
