508
PARTISAN REVIEW
the name on the gates, "Vallombroso," had evidently been
r~cently
re·
painted. I had the impression that
~e
trees and the shrubbery had also
been recently pruned; and the sails had been put back on the windmill,
which was turning in a chilly wind that came up suddenly as
I
entered the
driveway.
Ellen herself I found rejuvenated in a most surprising way. She
no longer had rings under her eyes, and she displayed a kind of nervous
vitality which I thought at first was overwrought but which I presently
came to feel as natural. The rather recessive attitude which had grown
on her with her alienation from Sigismund seemed to have given way
to
a
readiness to meet and taste life. It seemed to me that the definite
break with him, which I noticed she never mentioned, had had the effect
of releasing her to revert to her own personality, which, I thought,
must
have suffered and shrunk in the course of her relationship with Sigis–
mund; and it seemed to be a symbol of this that she had completely
changed her style of dressing and her way of doing her hair. The last
time I had seen her she had been wearing the short skirt of
1926,
and
she had at one time had a bob, which had made her head a little
too
mannish; but now she had been letting her hair grow, and, parting it in the
middle and brushing it over her ears, had coiled it at the back of her
head and stuck a comb at an angle
b~hind
it, and she was wearing a
white shirtwaist with full sleeves and a long green-plaid skirt, which were
old-fashioned but very becoming to her. She looked somehow smarter
than she had before.
I
complimented her on her appearance, but said
nothing about the antiquity of the costume.
I
thought at first that she
had got it out of some trunk and that it must
be
at least twenty years
old; but as I looked at it, it seemed to me new, and I concluded that
she had had it made to order. It was an affectation, of course, perhaps a
self-conscious protest against Sigismund; but I rather enjoyed it for
the emphasis it gave to the non-fashionable character of her work: it was
a joke on the cult of jazz and the professional lost generation that one
of the most original American artists should have the aspect of a period
piece.
My relation with Ellen today seemed somehow a little less intimate.
She was not alienated as I had felt her to be at the end of my last visit,
as if she were losing the outside world; but it was as if her perceptions
were dimmed by the vividness of her musical interests. She looked at
me for a moment when I first appeared as if she were not quite sure
tha~
she recognized me, replying rather formally to my greeting; and
at one point she seemed to assume that I had personally known Dr. Bris–
tead. She was more obviously excited about her music than I had ever seen
her before and talked as if she had been composing with a new
gust
of
creative energy. She told me about playing some piano pieces - a
suite which she had just written - at the invitation of Arthur Whiting,
at a concert given in his studio, at which the Schirmers and the
Dam·
rosches had been present, ·and on a program with d'Indy and Loeffler.
Though she always maintained the attitude of the advanced and
self·
