ELLEN TERHUNE
509
confident woman who is not afraid of conventions and who knows that
she
can compete with men in fields which they have largely monopolized,
she was obviously
g~atified
by this; ·and I was at first a little puzzled
at her pleasure in recognition from so relatively antiquated a quarter;
but I felt that she was perhaps, as sometimes happens, falling back for
reassurance in her new personal loneliness on appreciation of her work
from anywhere and _by anybody. "Well, that makes you a classic!"-1
IIIDiled. "They don't really approve of me at all," she replied. "They
think I'm a freak like Carrie Nation. Arthur Whiting made one of his
sly jokes about my being more masculine than Debussy. But Whiting
at
-least
is no fool. Some of the people there are still sure that Debussy
is
a lunatic, and they think that my use of the whole-tone scale has some·
thing to do with Max Nordau's Degeneration-and that the whole thing's
mixed up with woman suffrage. I don't know why American musicians·
have to be such a lot of old women!"
Yet she seemed to me herself today unmistakably and agreeably
feminine. The very outspokenness and challenge to men which the women
of that generation had cultivated when they set out on professional careers
characterized her as a woman more vividly than the sexually neutralized
role of the business-girl or bar-companion did the women of my own
generation ; and she had also a pretty keen instinct to make her attractive–
ness felt: she talked with a certain flashing play with her proud and
arresting eyes. So she must have looked, I imagined, in the days when
she had been wholly independent and after her grandfather's death.
By this time our old understanding had completely been re-estab–
lished, and she was letting herself go. She was very amusing and ruthless
about the older American composers--the fancy dress costumes from
Italy and France and the mythological insipidities which played so large
a part in their work: the reveries at Carcassonne and the tone-poems on
Pippa Ptl$$u,
the Icaruses and Daphnes and Psyches, the sarabands of
satyrs and nymphs. "David Emery Nickerson's
Semiramis,"
she said, "is
simply Mrs. Wentworth of Boston. In the first part you ·see her in her
Brookline house surrounded by obedient Nubians; in the second, she has a
conversation with David Emery Nickerson and he reads her some sonnets
by Rossetti; in the third, she regrets that she can never be married to
David Emery Nickerson and goes in for social work."
I was rather surprised, however, when she told me that the pieces
o£ her own that she had played at Whiting'!! concert had titles which
aeemed to connect them with the impressionism of an earlier period
and which did not seem characteristic of the harder and more formal
style in which she had lately been working. They were
Gulls off the Coast
of Nantucket, The Lighthouse,
and
The Island
Cemetery-the products,
she said, of her vacation. I forebore to ask about the sonata which had
eeemed to worry her so. She had evidently been to Nantucket since ,..the
time I had seen her in August, and managed to come back refreshed.
r
begged her to play her new suite and she consented with a frank-
