vingt-et-un while Savage Girl knelt beside them on the carpet, watching their faces as they managed the play. She had been entirely mild these few days, wholly unsavage, as a matter of fact.
Late morning on our second day out from the Comstock, the quartet of ladies gathered in a tight grouping in the corner of the parlor car: Tu-Li and the berdache working at Virginia’s hair, Ginny herself with eyes closed, leaning back on a red satin fainting couch, Anna Maria reading to them from
David Copperfield.
My new life had lasted for more than a week, and I was stronger than ever in those tremendous practical resolutions that I felt the crisis required. . . .
I crossed the parlor to witness the detangling process, a futile one, I thought, doomed to fail. And unnecessary. I didn’t understand why Savage Girl warranted all the attention.
One single hair separated laboriously from a strand, teased out to the length of its tangle, traced back to its knot, picked at, freed. Tu-Li employed the paired sticks the heathen Chinese use in place of eating utensils. Tahktoo worked only with his fingers, which were thick but surprisingly deft. All that knitting and weaving he did.
As yet, Little Dora was quite unconscious of my desperate firmness, otherwise than as my letters darkly shadowed it forth. . . .
Watching them work, staring down at her closed, expressionless face, I thought I might go mad from impatience right on the spot. They had been at it for a day and a half and had completed a portion but three inches in length.
How many individual hairs on a human head? As an anatomist I was distressed that I didn’t know. Thousands. I turned and left the parlor, finding my own refuge at my drawing table. Shave her bald, for all I would care.
• • •
My car,
Fury,
divided itself into four generous compartments. First my sleeping quarters, with water closet. Next was supposed to be my brother Nicky’s room, but I had taken it over for anatomical specimens. My glass specimen jars ranged in serial ranks, inside a cabinet I kept locked, more to prevent surprises to the staff than over any worry about theft.
Adjacent to this, what I called my office, with the custom-made drawing table that Anna Maria had installed in front of an expanse of windows. Finally my parlor, in which I entertained guests, of which there were never any.
I sat down and lost myself in my drawing.
After a light supper at noon, which we took in the main parlor car(omelets, kippered salmon, Cookie’s fresh-baked rolls), Anna Maria, ever the ringleader, announced that we would perform tableaux vivants.
“We will simply get out whatever old costumes we have, and all the spare sheets and blankets,” she said. “I will assign the roles.”
Having always abjured taking part in a tableau, I had nevertheless observed, in the last few years at dinner dances, charity balls and coming-out parties, most of the girls I knew throw themselves wholeheartedly into their performances.
Dowler, Mrs. Kate and B. C. Coyle rigged sheets in the parlor car into something near resembling a framed space in which to perform.
My mother was an inveterate raffle rigger. She only pretended to draw names of participants from a hat.
“Freddy?” she said. “Hugo?”
Tu-Li laughed and clapped her hands.
My father looked game, so I could not very well refuse, though I felt unaccountably shy. Colm Cullen joined in, that we might further dilute the humiliation among three of us.
We rooted through the costume trunk and awaited our instructions. But a simple representational painting or a biblical scene was not the particular hoop through which my mother intended us to jump.
She made a show of drawing another slip of paper from the “subject” hat. “Woman’s rights!” she announced.
What an assignment! I looked at my father, Colm looked at me, and we shook our heads helplessly. However might we represent such an abstract concept?
But we did what we could, and
Late morning on our second day out from the Comstock, the quartet of ladies gathered in a tight grouping in the corner of the parlor car: Tu-Li and the berdache working at Virginia’s hair, Ginny herself with eyes closed, leaning back on a red satin fainting couch, Anna Maria reading to them from
David Copperfield.
My new life had lasted for more than a week, and I was stronger than ever in those tremendous practical resolutions that I felt the crisis required. . . .
I crossed the parlor to witness the detangling process, a futile one, I thought, doomed to fail. And unnecessary. I didn’t understand why Savage Girl warranted all the attention.
One single hair separated laboriously from a strand, teased out to the length of its tangle, traced back to its knot, picked at, freed. Tu-Li employed the paired sticks the heathen Chinese use in place of eating utensils. Tahktoo worked only with his fingers, which were thick but surprisingly deft. All that knitting and weaving he did.
As yet, Little Dora was quite unconscious of my desperate firmness, otherwise than as my letters darkly shadowed it forth. . . .
Watching them work, staring down at her closed, expressionless face, I thought I might go mad from impatience right on the spot. They had been at it for a day and a half and had completed a portion but three inches in length.
How many individual hairs on a human head? As an anatomist I was distressed that I didn’t know. Thousands. I turned and left the parlor, finding my own refuge at my drawing table. Shave her bald, for all I would care.
• • •
My car,
Fury,
divided itself into four generous compartments. First my sleeping quarters, with water closet. Next was supposed to be my brother Nicky’s room, but I had taken it over for anatomical specimens. My glass specimen jars ranged in serial ranks, inside a cabinet I kept locked, more to prevent surprises to the staff than over any worry about theft.
Adjacent to this, what I called my office, with the custom-made drawing table that Anna Maria had installed in front of an expanse of windows. Finally my parlor, in which I entertained guests, of which there were never any.
I sat down and lost myself in my drawing.
After a light supper at noon, which we took in the main parlor car(omelets, kippered salmon, Cookie’s fresh-baked rolls), Anna Maria, ever the ringleader, announced that we would perform tableaux vivants.
“We will simply get out whatever old costumes we have, and all the spare sheets and blankets,” she said. “I will assign the roles.”
Having always abjured taking part in a tableau, I had nevertheless observed, in the last few years at dinner dances, charity balls and coming-out parties, most of the girls I knew throw themselves wholeheartedly into their performances.
Dowler, Mrs. Kate and B. C. Coyle rigged sheets in the parlor car into something near resembling a framed space in which to perform.
My mother was an inveterate raffle rigger. She only pretended to draw names of participants from a hat.
“Freddy?” she said. “Hugo?”
Tu-Li laughed and clapped her hands.
My father looked game, so I could not very well refuse, though I felt unaccountably shy. Colm Cullen joined in, that we might further dilute the humiliation among three of us.
We rooted through the costume trunk and awaited our instructions. But a simple representational painting or a biblical scene was not the particular hoop through which my mother intended us to jump.
She made a show of drawing another slip of paper from the “subject” hat. “Woman’s rights!” she announced.
What an assignment! I looked at my father, Colm looked at me, and we shook our heads helplessly. However might we represent such an abstract concept?
But we did what we could, and
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