it was a drowning or a tree falling or a horse that run off with the wagon and it tipped over. My own mother had herself fourteen babies, and toward the end of her life, she wouldn’t answer the door at all.” Agatha was forty-five, not twice as old as Margaret, but she looked seventy. She had no teeth, and she walked with a limp. Margaret was a little sad when, having taught Elizabeth everything she knew, the woman left.
Dora was now twenty, though no taller and no prettier. She wore mannish boots and coats. She never wore gloves or any kind of a hat that other women were wearing. “The only reason to wear a hat,” she told Margaret, “is to keep your hair from falling in your face.” And though her parents were wealthy and prominent, and Dora herself would have a considerable inheritance, everyone seemed to have given up utterly on the idea of getting her married. No one spoke to Margaret about her own future as an old maid, but if Dora didn’t perennially hear about hers, it was simply because she was never present when everyone was talking about it. Mr. Bell’s attitude was one of resignation. Mrs. Bell’s attitude was one of grievance against Dora for, in the first place, having no feminine assets and, in the second place, making nothing of those she had. Elizabeth was more philosophical—maybe Dora would enjoy her condition, or else convert to Catholicism and become a nun. St. Louis had any number of convents, including one “where the nun takes a French name and lives in a tiny cell for her entire life, sometimes seventy years, and never sees a soul and gets her tray of food once a day through the wall and prays eternally.” You could see this convent from the streetcar, when it went from Kirkwood north and then east into St. Louis. Dora was writing things, but no one knew what they were. She was sending them to magazines such as McClure’s, but nothing, as far as anyone knew, had seen print yet.
Dora’s behavior was attributed, by Mrs. Bell, to how famous St. Louis was. Even Lincoln Steffens, that terrifying man, was in St. Louis to report on the arrest of Boss Butler. Lincoln Steffens, said Mr. Bell, was trying to see to it that all the best people would have their money taken away from them and be sent in rags upon the streets to beg. That Dora would consort, even in the privacy of her own mind, with such an unprincipled man indicated to Mrs. Bell that Dora was some kind of changeling. The sum of all of this was that St. Louis was the world’s most exciting and modern city, and such a thing could be either good or bad, morally, but there was no denying that the city was better to live in than it had been when Mrs. Bell was growing up as Miss Branscomb down near Tower Grove Park: you couldn’t get really good silk foulard to save your life, and everyone ate catfish right out of the river. “And it’s not so hot as it was, either. Is it, Mr. Bell?”
“Of course it is” (not looking up from his paper).
“He doesn’t remember. Truly, Margaret, the weather has moderated in a very nice way. There hasn’t been a typhoid epidemic in twenty-five years.”
“Twenty-four,” said Mr. Bell.
Shortly after this, Margaret happened to overhear Mercer and Elizabeth chatting. Elizabeth said, “It makes no sense. I think she’s pretty.” (This was where she divined that she was the subject.) “Prettier than Beatrice. And nice, too. But she’s never had even a beau. She would have told me.” Margaret smiled to herself even as she stilled her movements, instantly curious to hear her brother-in-law’s reply. He said, “Pretty enough. But forbidding. You’ll allow that, won’t you, Lizzie?”
Elizabeth laughed. “That’s silly.”
“But she never looks at a fellow, and if she makes a mistake and lets him catch her eye, she glares like fury. I don’t know anyone who can stand up to that sort of thing, at least at the beginning. I love her now, as your sister, and she’s sweet as a peach with Lucy May. It’s like she’s a different person when you know her. But the average fellow doesn’t get a chance to know her unless he happens to marry her sister.”
“That can’t be …”
“And then you don’t know what she means half the time. I ask myself once a