“It seems to me that a good deal happens. Now nothing really ever does happen to me. And I’m most shamelessly ignorant. They didn’t send me to school; my Aunt Julia kept me moving. I’ve lived in a trunk so long that it seems to me the lid is always crowding down on top of my head.”
She shrugged her shoulders and put up her hands as though to protect herself from an imaginary trunk-lid.
“Oh, but to see things and places and people!”
“But you _don’t_ see them,--when you’re traveling with your aunt! Then you go boldly into a beautiful city and are taken in a closed carriage to a hotel, or worse yet, a _pension_, and you are warned not to speak to any one, particularly to any one that looks interesting, for the interesting people usually have something wrong with them. _Isn’t_ it strange that the interesting people are always wicked? I know that from personal experience.”
Olive was listening to her cousin’s talk with a happy light in her eyes and the smile that forever hovered about her pretty mouth.
“It isn’t so funny, I would have you know! to be dragged around, always in a carriage, mind you, to look at only the most respectable ruins, and statues of people that labored for some noble cause and had so little sense they lost their heads. I worked for weeks in Paris before Aunt Julia would let me see Napoleon’s tomb. And all because his domestic life was not what it should be! As though that mattered, when he made those silly old dynasties over there gasp for breath.”
Zelda’s voice,--its depth and music, and the elusive disappearing note in it, wove an enchantment for Olive. Her own life had been colorless and practical; but she had her dreams, and her cousin Zelda seemed a realization of some of them.
“Anything is better than not going at all!”
“Maybe so. But I had tutors--queer people that came to teach me French and German. That was odious, most odious.”
“I’m sure you know a lot. You can’t help knowing a lot.”
“I don’t know a thing,--not a single blessed thing. And if you won’t tell any one--if you will let this be an awful secret between you and me, a compact to end only with death,--I’ll confide to you that I don’t care! I’m very, very wicked, Cousin Olive. I always want to do things I’m told not to. When my dear charming father--he’s perfectly dear and lovely--talks to me about politics and tells me that the Republicans stand for the holy principles on which this glorious republic was founded, I decide at once that I’m a Democrat. George Washington must have been an awful bore. If the English weren’t the dullest and stupidest people in the world they would have whipped him out of his boots. Now, don’t you see what an impossible person I am? My father’s the kindest, best man in the world,--he’s always so thoughtful,--always doing things for me, and yet sometimes his very goodness makes this same kind of wickedness rise up in me! Some day, some day, Cousin Olive, I’m going to be good myself; but just now goodness,--goodness makes me very tired. And now,” she went on with a change of manner and waiting for no comment from her intent and puzzled listener, “would you mind telling me how you get white woodwork like this? Do you have to get the plumber or whatever-his-name-is to do that?”