and had said to Elizabeth more than once that she “couldn’t understand how the Bell heritage proved so strong, considering that the Bells themselves are short and pale, though sturdy enough.” Both the Branscomb heritage (hers) and the Gentry-Mayfield heritage had been overwhelmed—or “Perhaps the word is ‘drowned’”—in the Bell heritage. Elizabeth and Margaret laughed and laughed. “What every mother needs is a nice cradle,” opined Mrs. Bell, “so that she may rock her child and appreciate him, but not have to endure any suffocating personal contact.” She supplied Beatrice not only with a beautiful hand-carved family cradle, but also with a nurse. In other words, she occupied herself by taking care of all of them according to her notions of kindness.
That summer, Mrs. Bell and Lavinia put their heads together and decided to do the easiest thing first, which was to take Elizabeth in hand, since she was almost nineteen. According to Mrs. Bell, there were plenty of up-and-coming young men in St. Louis, who, if not involved in manufacturing, were associated with the May Company, or perhaps the beer brewers, or were lawyers who had gone to school with the scions of wealthy St. Louis families and would be useful in some business or other. By the end of the summer, Elizabeth was betrothed to a man from New Jersey, a lawyer named Mercer Hart, who had come to St. Louis to assume a position with Mr. Danforth’s livestock-feed company. Mrs. Danforth and Mrs. Bell belonged to a fashionable ladies’ club, where once a month they listened to speeches about humane improvements to the lives of the lower orders, or other equally edifying topics. Margaret went along once. The speaker, a man from Wisconsin, discussed interior ceiling heights and their effect on the mind’s tendency to think either in concrete particulars or in accordance with more transcendental spiritual ideas. Another one, which Mrs. Bell reported over the supper table, concerned the writings of Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, which proposed that no modern person could be said, objectively, to be “fit enough” to reproduce and that, in fact, excessive human reproduction would certainly destroy the world as they knew it. Mrs. Bell talked about these ideas with approbation for several weeks.
Mercer Hart was a fairly young man, and had gone to Kenyon College. Dora and Margaret were eager for a look at him, but when they met him, they found him to be excessively polite—though, at least, taller than Elizabeth. They briefly perked up when Mrs. Bell reported that Mercer’s grandfather had been a Jew, but (they fell again into indifference) the grandfather had converted, and upon coming to St. Louis, Mercer had joined her very own Methodist church. Anyway, the unusual and estimable thing about St. Louis, according to Mrs. Bell, was that people of all faiths lived there side by side, and many of the best families were Catholic—you couldn’t avoid that, given that the city was founded by the French, with the Irish, the Italians, and the Germans “hot on their tail,” as Mr. Bell said. All the best women’s clubs had all types of women in them (“as long as they’re rich,” said Lavinia).
Mrs. Bell was a more lackadaisical chaperone than Lavinia. The streetcars had been the scene and occasion of a great strike only a year before—track had been blown up, electrical lines cut, and any number of men killed on both sides. Dora clung to the view that the policemen had committed tremendous crimes against the strikers. Whenever Mr. Bell fumed that the strikers had gotten off “scot-free,” Dora’s rejoinder was “Only a little starvation and destitution here and there,” but she said it under her breath, and out of the hearing of her father. But no one stopped them when, one day, Margaret followed Dora out of the house on Kingshighway and they took the streetcar to Stix, Baer & Fuller. They ended up riding it to the end of the line and back, staying out for most of the day. Their excuse was that it was raining, and that they had to stay on the streetcar so as not to get their shoes wet, but no one asked them for an excuse.
As delightful as it was to go to Stix and look at the floors and the counters and the shelves of goods (lawns, organdies, mousselines, dimities, silks, velvets, laces of all kinds), Margaret enjoyed the streetcar itself more, for the power with which it surged away from every stop, for