Page:The Yellow Book - 08.djvu/67

rosy-cheeked conception of the joie de vivre (if it set one wondering and shuddering, that was one's own concern), so insistent in exuberance and jollity, that it was no marvel if they had little time, or inclination to make it, for a dreamer of dreams, a seer of visions, a hearer of the music of the spheres. Not that any of those would have been their definition of Lucille: to them, she was a sentimentalist, a "mooney." Yet, apart from the unnaturalnesses into which she would pathetically force herself, she had her soft appealing wildnesses, her gay roguish outbreaks, her bright apologetic materialnesses. . . .

Seeing it written there—apologetic—it comes to me with a flash of annoyed divination that Lucille was an incarnate apology. . . . I knew we should arrive at something, you and I; and I am proved right before I have really posed you my enigma. We are coming to it now: Why could she not have had the courage of her genius? I'm sure we see it often enough, oftener than enough, perhaps—the cocksure type of young man or woman, who has the courage of his or her talent. The courage! The brazenness, more aptly; don't we know them? and they are clever—oh, clever! Then why couldn't she be something like them, instead of being one desperate, appealing clutch at the commonplace? She would do violence to her most delicate feelings, and look absolutely complacent over it. Sometimes it made me swear, sometimes—for it had its humorous side, of course—it wholly amused me.

Haven't I heard her twanging a banjo, and singing, in that ethereal voice of hers, the last banalities? Haven't I seen her playing at hockey? Seen her! the smile she wore, the nervous conciliatory smile; the runs she took—of all futilities; the hits she made, or didn't make! Lucille's hockey was a triumph of failure. And she would say she liked it, afterwards: it was hard,then,