522
PARTISAN REVIEW
in her thoughts did she employ more than a minimum of memory.
And when she did remember, it was in flat pictures, rigorously in–
dependent of one another: she saw her thin, poetic mother who grew
thinner and more poetic in her canvas deck-chair at Saranac reading
Lalla Rookh.
She saw herself in an inappropriate pink hat drinking
iced tea in a garden so oppressive with the smell of phlox that the tea
itself tasted of it. She recalled .an afternoon in autumn in Vermont
when she had heard three dogs' voices in the north woods and she
could tell, by the characteristic minor key struck three times at in–
tervals, like bells from several churches, that they had treed some–
thing: the eastern sky was pink and the trees on the horizon looked
like some eccentric vascular system meticulously drawn on colored
paper.
What Pansy thought of all the time was her own brain. Not
only the brain as the seat of consciousness, but the physical organ
itself which she envisaged, romantically, now as a jewel, now as a
flower, now as a light in a glass, now as an envelope of rosy vellum
containing other envelopes, one within the other, diminishing in–
finitely. It was always pink and always fragile, always deeply interior
and invaluable. She believed that she had reached the innermost
chamber of knowledge and that perhaps her knowledge was the same
as the saint's achievement of pure love. It was only convention, she
thought, that made one say "sacred heart" and not "sacred brain."
Often, but never articulately, the color pink troubled her and
the picture of herself in the wrong hat hung steadfastly before her
mind's eye. None of the other girls had worn hats and since autumn
had come early that year, they wece dressed in green and rusty brown
and dark yellow. Poor Pansy wore a white eyelet frock with a lacing
of black ribbon around the square neck. When she came through
the arch, overhung with bittersweet, and saw that they had not yet
heard her, she almost turned back, but Mr. Oliver was there and she
was in love with him. She was in love with him though he was ten
years older than she and had never shown any interest in her beyond
asking her once, quite fatuously but in an intimate voice, if the
yodeling of the little boy who peddled clams did not make her wish to
visit Switzerland. Actually, there was more to this question than met
the eye, for some days later Pansy learned that Mr. Oliver, who was
immensely rich, kept an apartment in Geneva. In the garden that
day, he spoke to her only once. He said, "My dear, you look exactly
like something out of Katherine Mansfield," and immediately turned
and within her hearing asked Beatrice Sherburne to dine with him
