Thurley had been exceptionally spared the grind and slow advancement of the average artist. On the other hand, she had experienced both grind and decidedly depressing experiences during her travels in the box-car. She was now placed, as it were, in the front ranks of the artistic world and allowed to gaze about, investigate, presume, acquire knowledge, as much as her own possibilities would permit. Her possibilities being above the average, Thurley, inside of the few months in New York, had come to the settled conviction that folks were really just folks no matter how they were dressed, and the artists quite the same as the population of Birge’s Corners, only in a different setting and with a different set of values.
It was rather disappointing to come to the conclusion, not at all romantic and stimulating or in keeping with the conclusions Caleb Patmore’s “Victorious Victoria” had arrived at in an amazingly short space of time. It was like a child’s suddenly being put on everyday relations With Santa Claus himself and finding out, besides his ability to ride reindeer skyward, and, toy-laden, shoot down narrow chimneys, that he had a gouty foot the same as Oyster Jim’s, was rather caustic if his eggs were overdone, was a Republican, body, boots and breeches, the same as Ali Baba, and, if he lost three games of cribbage straight running, was distinctly “peeved.”
So Thurley advanced beyond the illusions of the uninitiated. Before she came into Bliss Hobart’s dominion she had been one of the public, the sort of public who believe newspaper reports of opera singers having frolicsome boa-constrictors as family pets, to welcome them when they stagger home under van-loads of orchids from the evening’s work! She saw now with the clear, innocent eyes of youth, which is so often wiser than dictatorial and narrow middle age, that the common lot was the universal lot and that in the sum total of all things the famous ones were spared no more nor less nor given greater qualities of endurance or supreme power.
Had the invitation to the “family” dinner come a week ago, Thurley would have hesitated before accepting. But Ernestine Christian’s personality—as yet it was not Ernestine Christian’s real self since she betrayed that to no one—had woven a big-sister armor about Thurley’s wild-rose self. She was eager to become one of the family, unconscious of the honor for which many had sighed and bribed for in vain. She showed the note to Miss Clergy and became very flapperlike on the subject of her costume.