U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [227]
-112-she burst out crying and wouldn't answer any of her sis-ters' questions; that made them madder than ever. That June after school was over, they al went out to Santa Fé to see her mother. She was awful y depressed out at Santa Fé, the sun was so hot and the eroded hil s were so dry and dusty and Mother had gotten so washedout looking and was reading theosophy and talking about God and the beauty of soul of the Indians and Mexicans in a way that made the children uncomfortable. Eveline read a great many books that summer and hated going out. She read Scott and Thackeray and W. J. Locke and Dumas and when she found an old copy of Trilby in the house she read it three times running. That started her seeing things in Du Maurier il ustrations instead of in knights and ladies. When she wasn't reading she was lying flat on her back dreaming out long stories about herself and Sal y Emer-son. She didn't feel wel most of the time and would drop into long successions of horrid thoughts about people's bodies that made her feel nauseated. Adelaide and Mar-garet told her what to do about her trouble every month but she didn't tel them how horrid it made her feel in-side. She read the Bible and looked up uterus and words like that in encyclopaedias and dictionaries. Then one night she decided she wouldn't stand it any more and went through the medicine chest in the bathroom til she found a bottle marked POISON that had some kind of laudanum compound in it. But she wanted to write a poem before she died, she felt so lovely musical y traurig about dying, but she couldn't seem to get the rhymes right and final y fel asleep with her head on the paper. When she woke up it was dawn and she was hunched up over the table by her window, stiff and chil y in her thin nightgown. She slipped into bed shivering. Anyway she promised herself that she'd keep the bottle and kil herself whenever things seemed too filthy and horrid. That made her feel better. That fal Margaret and Adelaide went to Vassar. Eve--113-line would have liked to go east too but everybody said she was too young though she'd passed most of her col ege board exams. She stayed in Chicago and went to artclasses and lectures of one sort or another and did churchwork. It was an unhappy winter. Sal y Emerson seemed to have forgotten her. The young people around the church were so stuffy and conventional. Eveline got to hate the eve-nings at Drexel Boulevard, and al the vague Emerson her father talked in his rich preacher's boom. What she liked best was the work she did at Hul House. Eric Eg-strom gave drawingclasses there in the evenings and she used to see him sometimes smoking a cigarette in the back passage, leaning against the wal , looking very Norse, she thought, in his grey smock ful of bright fresh dabs of paint. She'd sometimes smoke a cigarette with him ex-changing a few words about Manet or Claude Monet's in-numerable haystacks, al the time feeling uneasy because the conversation wasn't more interesting and clever and afraid somebody would come and find her smoking.
Miss Mathilda said it was bad for a girl to be so dreamy and wanted her to learn to sew. Al Eveline thought about that winter was going to the Art Institute and trying to paint pictures of the Lake Front that would be colored like Whistlers but be rich and ful like Mil et drawings. Eric didn't love her or else he wouldn't be so friendly and aloof. She'd had her great love; now her life was over and she must devote herself to art. She