Whereas—­though Elfrida would never have said “whereas” —­the days in Philadelphia had been long and full.  She had often lived a week in one of them, and there had been hours that stretched themselves over an infinity of life and feeling, as Elfrida saw it, looking back.  In reality, her experience had been usual enough and poor enough; but it had fed her in a way, and she enriched it with her imagination, and thought, with keen and sincere pity, that she had been starved till then.  The question that preoccupied her when she moved out of the Philadelphia station in the Chicago train was that of future sustenance.  It was under the surface of her thoughts when she kissed her father and mother and was made welcome home; it raised a mute remonstrance against Mr. Bell’s cheerful prophecy that she would be content to stay in Sparta for a while now, and get to know the young society; it neutralized the pleasure of the triumphs in the packing-box.  Besides, their real delight had all been exhaled at the students’ exhibition in Philadelphia, when Philadelphia looked at them.  The opinion of Sparta, Elfrida thought, was not a matter for anxiety.  Sparta would be pleased in advance.

Elfrida allowed one extenuating point in her indictment of Sparta:  the place had produced her as she was at eighteen, when they sent her to Philadelphia.  This was only half conscious—­she was able to formulate it later —­but it influenced her sincere and vigorous disdain of the town correctively, and we may believe that it operated to except her father and mother from the general wreck of her opinion to a greater extent than any more ordinary feeling did.  It was not in the least a sentiment of affection for her birthplace; if she could have chosen she would very much have preferred to be born somewhere else.  It was simply an important qualifying circumstance.  Her actual and her ideal self, her most mysterious and interesting self, had originated in the air and the opportunities of Sparta.  Sparta had even done her the service of showing her that she was unusual, by contrast, and Elfrida felt that she ought to be thankful to somebody or something for being as unusual as she was.  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