Ellen Terhune
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475) ·
At any rate, she withdrew to the ladies' room and stayed there so long that
I became uneasy. I found her rigid on a couch, with a worried attend–
ant bending over her and trying to get her to speak. As soon as the
concert was finished, Sigismund and I took her back to the hotel. He told
me that she had had such fits before, and that they sometimes lasted
rather long. On this occasion, however, she came to and got into a cab,
though I did not hear her speak again.
I was afraid now that she might be working up to another seizure
of the kind. But she smiled and tried to reassure me.
"It
makes me
nervous to play that thing," she said. "I wish I could get it finished.
The last part has been driving me crazy, and even this part isn't right
yet. - I can see you're thoroughly depressed by it." "Oh, no," I said
untruthfully. "I think it's extremely interesting." She smiled at the con–
ventional evasion, and I disliked having to talk so to Ellen.
I asked her before I left whether there were somebody in the house,
and she told me that there was. I didn't like to remind her of the concert:
she was the kind of self-managing woman that it is hard to do anything
for. I told her that she must let me know if there was any way I could
help her; and she apologized for talking so much about herself - "but
you're one of the few people I can talk to. Out here you're the only one -
I don't really know any more even who the people are who live here,
though we used to know everybody"."
It was all pretty awful, I thought, as I walked along the drive toward
the gate, between the lawns which the late sun was gilding and the mag–
nificent collection of trees (a true collection planted by the doctor and
including many curiosities and rarities), with the vision of Ellen's wide
sweating forehead under her none-to-abundant brown hair and of her
eyes which I had thought in the last moments of my visit were getting
a little out of touch with me till they had come again to responsive life
at the moment of our parting. She did not know even who lived here,
she had said; and there had been a few seconds just now when I had been
talking about her music and she had seemed to stumble in replying and
to stare and go into herself when I had not been quite sure she knew
me.
I turned my mind, I confess, with a certain self-indulgence, to a
party I was going to that evening: one of those gatherings where great
quantities of tan-backed girls and scarlet-faced men, with highballs
fizzing in their hands, lift laughing and strident voices among glass–
topped cocktail tables and lamps that give indirect lighting.
II
I dropped in on her again in September when I came back from a
short summer trip. I noticed that Ellen's place showed signs of restoration
and refreshment. The honeysuckle on the fence had been trimmed, and
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