And Miss Elton! She hated Miss Elton for that irritating calmness, for
that easy appropriation of the good things of life. She hated with a
hate that tingled her spine and shook her small body. The tragedy of
littleness made her grit her teeth as she thought of the unconscious
girl now going to bed in the next room.
"I'll get even with her somehow," was Miss Lena's resolve. "Just let me
get the hang of things a little, and I'll show her!" Miss Quincy was
conscious that though she as yet lacked knowledge of their world, she
had the advantage of the inheritance of guile.
But things! things! things! Lena thought a little of the irony of
it--that all her life she had pined to be set in luxury, and yet now and
here the very rugs and chairs and soft lights, the pictures of
unrecognized subjects, the unfamiliar delicacies before her at the
table, all seemed to loom up and crush her into insignificance by their
importance and expensiveness. They were her masters still.
But it was not Lena's way to waste her time on abstractions. While she
sat and watched her fire crumble away into ashes, she was chiefly
occupied with the concrete, and there entered into her soul and took
possession of its empty chambers and began to mold her to her own
purposes the demon of social ambition, which is not the desire to do or
to be, but rather the longing to appear to be and to seem to do--to take
the chaff and leave the wheat.
Mastered by this powerful spirit, Lena actually did make great strides
in the next few days. She learned to lounge quite comfortably, to
pretend with verisimilitude, even to chatter a little, helped chiefly by
a certain persistent light-weight on the part of Mr. Lenox; but the life
was hard and the rewards meager. All the time she suspected Miss Elton
and Mrs. Lenox of despising her, because she had so much less than they.
Their kindliness was but an added insult.