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PARTISAN REVIEW
w.ith me again. But if I do as he wants, I'll feel that rm betraying Fred's
love and trust in me. Now how would you advise me to act?"
This, then, was an earlier turning-point, a moment to determine the
future; and again there was the curious effort to thrust the decision on me.
This plea of Miss Bristead's, who
I.
gathered was now in her lateish
twenties, reminded me of Ellen's appeal at the time I had seen her in her
girlhood, that I should put in a word with her grandfather to have her
sent away to school. And I had now a very clear conv·iction of something
that I had only felt without figuring to myself before: that Dr. Bristead
was an egregious old egoist, selfish in his relations with his family and
oppressive in his opinionated omnisicience. Ellen, too, would want to
get
away, and she would have sympathized with her mother. I sympathized
with her, certainly, myself. Miss Bristead had a genuine distinction, she
was handsome in her glamorless way; above all, as she leaned forward
in her smart dress that reminded me of Ellen's plaid skirt when she
had just come back from Paris, and threw out her very well-shaped hands
that might have been reproduced in china for those vases that hold single
flowers-above all, she was an eager young woman who wanted to escape
from that house· and marry an urgent suitor. Besides, there was a certain
authority, a certain force of assertion that she commanded and to which
I felt myself yielding. Why shouldn't she, I asked myself, be bored with
ministering to her father's hobbies? Why shouldn't she want to live in
the city? Why shouldn't she yearn for and why shouldn't she share in
that codified social life for which she was obviously well adapted and
of which her father had undoubtedly skimped her? Why shouldn't she
marry Fred? He was doing no one any good in his present situation of
man-about-town past his prime. He could at least give her an independent
position, help her to found a family. It was as if I could not foresee the
future.
"I dare say you ought to marry him," I replied to her request for
advice. "I do wish you would tell Papa that!"-she was grateful to me
for telling her to do the thing that she wanted to do at .the same time
that she must have been fairly sure that I should follow the lead she had
given.
"If
anyone could persuade him, you could. I don't want to do
anything without his consent-it would be so distressing for everybody!"
"I'll try," I said, smiling.
She looked away toward the adjoining music-room, the door into
which was open, but which I could not see from where I sat, as if she had
just heard somebody enter it. Then she was turning to me again as i.f to
go on talking when someone began. to play the piano--ringing out, as I
imagined at random, the Don Juan theme from Strauss, which had not been
quite accurately remembered. Miss Bristead looked up as
if
uncertain how
to deal with the situation; but the music went on consecutively, developing
and playing with the theme. We saw that it was an organized piece. "Oh,
yes: do play it, dear!"-she looked toward the music-room. "This is your
new composition, isn't it? I want so very much to hear it!" She leaned
