She had
had a comfortable, spoiled feeling of gratitude for it
before she went to Philadelphia, which had developed in
the meantime into a shudder at the mere thought of what
it meant to be an ordinary person. "I could bear not to
be charming," said she sometimes to her Philadelphia
looking-glass, "but I could _not_ bear not to be clever."
She said "clever," but she meant more than that. Elfrida
Bell believed that something other than cleverness entered
into her personal equation. She looked sometimes into
her very soul to see what, but the writing there was in
strange characters that faded under her eyes, leaving
her uncomprehending but tranced. Meanwhile art spoke to
her from all sides, finding her responsive and more
responsive. Some books, some pictures, some music brought
her a curious exalted sense of double life. She could
not talk about it at all, but she could slip out into
the wet streets on a gusty October evening, and walk
miles exulting in it, and in the light on the puddles
and in the rain on her face, coming back, it must be
admitted, with red cheeks and an excellent appetite. It
led her into strange absent silences and ways of liking
to be alone, which gratified her mother and worried her
father.
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