Private Life Read Online Free Page B

their chests the household linens they
    would need one day. They embroidered.

    For some months when Margaret was sixteen, there was a lengthy discussion of
    whether they should purchase a loom. Lavinia had heard that there was an enterprising
    woman in Osage County who made beautiful carpets. Lavinia wondered if this woman
    might take one of the girls, perhaps Elizabeth, as a student, or even adopt her outright-Lavinia felt that you never knew what an enterprising woman would do, anything was
    possible. But John Gentry put his foot down, and so the girls learned a humbler craft that
    winter, braiding rugs from rags. As the rugs grew beneath the fingers of her mother and
    sisters, Margaret read aloud, as a novelty, a book that had been written by a famous
    woman from St. Louis named Kate O'Flaherty Chopin. Her grandfather told them how he
    remembered the very day back in 1855, when Lavinia was still an infant, that the first
    train belonging to the Pacific Railroad brought down the bridge over the Gasconade
    River. Many were killed, including Mr. O'Flaherty, Kate Chopin's father. John Gentry
    was interested in everything about the railroad, for it had been a great boon to him.
    Nevertheless, he and Lavinia agreed that the fact that Mrs. Chopin wrote novels for
    remuneration was an unfortunate outcome of her trials. Beatrice, Elizabeth, and Margaret
    were encouraged to pity rather than admire her. But books were books--the hoped-for
    suitors would require an appealing degree of cultivation. Beatrice, with her talents (and
    good looks), and Elizabeth, with her skills (and her thick mane of chestnut hair), might
    get as far as Chicago or even New York (in Mr. Alger's books, the best place to find
    yourself ending up was New York), but even Margaret could get to St. Louis.

    On the farm, talk of St. Louis was constant.

    At first, St. Louis came to her as a fall, like a light snow, of names: Chouteau.
    Vandeventer. Eads. Gratiot. Laclede. St. Charles. Lafayette. Even Grand, which was a
    boulevard. Shenandoah, Gravois, Soulard. If there was a street name in St. Louis as dull
    as Oak or Fourth, Margaret never heard it. And every good thing was from there--shoes
    and boots, silks and nainsooks and Saxony woollens, books, pianos, books of piano
    music, candy, sugar, chewing tobacco, her mother's mouton capelet, pearl buttons. There
    was a vast emporium in St. Louis called Carleton's which carried goods sent specially
    from Paris, France, and London, England, and from Japan and China and India (if only
    tea--Lavinia drank tea). John Gentry seemed to take personal credit for the way St. Louis
    blossomed just over the eastern horizon of Gentry Farm, and the fact that they could get
    to St. Louis any day they wanted, on the train from McKittrick, was a source of eternal
    joy to him (they should have seen the roads, if that was what you wanted to call them, in
    the Missouri of his youth!). Even so, he went there not more than once in two years.

    * * *

    AND then Beatrice was suddenly eighteen years old, a finished product. She
    could play any number of pieces on the piano, from "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair"
    and "Camptown Races" to "Rosalie, the Prairie Flower," and some more complex pieces
    without lyrics, such as "Annie and I," which had three sharps. She could sing if the song
    in question fell into her range. Her tone was rich and melodious. The time had come to
    put her on display. A lady Lavinia knew in town had a very nice piano, much nicer than
    the Gentry piano, which she herself could not play, so, on days when John Gentry had to
    take a wagon into town anyway for business, he would carry Beatrice along and leave her
    at Mrs. Larimer's house on Pennsylvania Street, and Beatrice would play for her.
    Sometimes, with enough notice, Mrs. Larimer would invite a few friends in to have tea
    while Beatrice was playing.

    The summer Beatrice was eighteen, the cousin of a friend of Mrs. Larimer, a man
    named Robert Bell, took over