Letty Fox by Christina Stead Page A

mirror. Timidly each looked for another mate; such cowardly and inoffensive glances attract no one. But each said, it cannot last; and though there were tender reconciliations and moments when it was clear that they could understand each other as acquaintances, or as people living in the same city understand each other, there was nothing else between them but the children— myself a noisy, showy child, and slow-mooded, tender Jacky—and a gloomy feeling of years lost together.
    Convinced that in the familiarity of the marital bed she had cheapened herself, Mathilde now tried to keep the marriage together by spending months away from her husband with the children. He slaved away in the city, attended his meetings, visited his friends, came to a house cleaned once a week, lived through the cold, the heat, and made money to keep them. Mathilde, living unhappily with the noisy, greedy, money-loving Morgans in Green Acres Inn or in Long Beach, and even up in Lydnam Lodge, the Morgan place near Clinton, New Jersey, hoped that Solander would call her back, or even take a mistress, so that she could have a complaint against him—any real misdemeanor would force a solution. All this was a vague, almost incoherent dream. She lived from day to day and listened to the advice poured upon her. Presently her relatives began to neglect her, and between themselves said, “She’ll lose him.” Grandmother Morgan began introducing her to well-situated businessmen. “I like Sol, but businessmen are the best providers and they need a real home, they’ve got to have a place their bank manager and their boss can recognize. A bank manager likes a nice home. When you’re looking for credit you mustn’t have ideas. People with ideas have no bank account. For every idea you have you lose a dollar. I want to see my girls comfortable. A man with ideas can’t be a good provider, and an idea is a thing you can change overnight. Now, you can’t lose a good credit balance overnight.”
    Sometimes my mother left us in the country places and with families in the city while she lived with my father alone, to patch it up. I always had a great adaptability, was a regular chameleon; I was a country girl in the country, very pert and up-to-date in the city; I did my best to be ignorant and coarse in a rural one-room school, and head of the class in town; but I was always off on some fresh tack, learning, imitating, acting something new. I hated equals. I lied about gifted, traveled, or propertied children, fought rivals as well as I could, despised those who obeyed me. As for those who seemed to ignore me, I flattered myself they did not exist. Jacky accepted all change with a reasoning gaiety. Green Acres Inn, New Canaan, and Lydnam Lodge in northern New Jersey were our occasional refuges in those early years.

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    G reen Acres Inn was a white-painted house, New England style, with deep porches, gabled ends, and many windows opening on lawns and gardens. It was set back from the road but not too far back, for the visitors to the Inn were all of one sort—a sort that lives in the bustle made by others; that is to say, old people who would fret if they missed an automobile on the road, and who looked lugubriously and even desperately into their plates at lunch if they heard the other women callingacross the softaired dining room, “It was a Pierce-Arrow, wasn’t it?” “Yes, blue, with pale blue initials.” My grandmother knew these old women well enough. At such a moment, a hostess, a young woman of thirty or so, would come into the room and ask after their health or the meals. A short grumble about the soup, and the old creatures would begin to cheer up. But they were ill-natured and spoiled, living on someone else’s money for the most part, and they looked upon young women as encumbrances. They were intent upon their secret cocktail parties in bedrooms (from which they emerged with red