#cora millay

Cora hauled her suitcase up the stairs at 25 Charlton. She peered through her wire-rimmed spectacles at Norma's bobbed hair, sighed deeply over the loss of the precious blond locks, called for scissors, and bobbed her own. She became as bohemian as the rest of them—writing poetry and stories for the Village magazines, singing and acting in the Provincetown Playhouse, sewing costumes—while serving as den mother to these rowdy children and their parade of suitors.

But it was the mother who was most extraordinary. She was a little old woman with spectacles, who, although she had evidently been through a good deal, had managed to remain very brisk and bright. She sat up straight and smoked cigarettes and quizzically followed the conversation. She looked not unlike a New England schoolteacher, yet there was something almost raffish about her. She had anticipated the Bohemianism of her daughters; and she sometimes made remarks that were startling from the lips of a little old lady. But there was nothing sordid about her: you felt even more than with Edna that she had passed beyond good and evil, beyond the power of hardship to worry her, and that she had attained there a certain gaiety.