Chapter 3. Ways and Means
The room into which Ashley shuffled her ill-clad form was filled with light. As opposed to the darker, more formal dining area, the living room featured a large picture window looking onto a lush front garden protected from the street by a high, dark green hedge. Yellow and green light from the flowers in the garden tinted the gauzy, translucent curtains. One end of the picture window was darkened by the shadow of an elm set to the side of the house.
The wallpaper in this room sported the same vases and vegetation motif used in the dining room, but the felt of the pattern was a yellow shade of green, lending the room a more open, summery air. Two large bookcases on the far wall flanked a large fireplace with an organically curved white marble lintel resembling the nacreous limbs of some creature half vegetable, half woman. Two deep, comfortable, striped damask chaises set away from the window were separated by a low round table heaped with books and newspapers heaped and a large vase from which cascaded a selection of white and purple flowers in a formal arrangement.
The floor was covered by a full, white, faux-fur carpet, extending almost to the edges of the room, leaving a wooden parquet border 3 feet wide on all sides. The long hairs of the carpet felt warm under Ashley's bare feet, the furry threads twining softly and comfortably between her toes.
Warmth permeated the room from the large, glowing logs in the fire grate, the palpably warm air soothing on Ashley's exposed legs.
An overstuffed, dark tan corduroy sofa was set on the edge of the carpet towards the wall adjacent to the door. The remaining wall was occupied by another bookcase containing a large television, as well as various shelves of books. Against this wall there was also leather armchair, larger than the other two chairs in the room, and an old, walnut, rolltop desk, its cover open.
The artwork on the walls in this room consisted of a pair of framed watercolors in bright washes of color applied over black ink, reminiscent of Dufy renderings. They both depicted the view from the privileged balcony of a hotel or villa, over the azure bay surrounding an old and established, wealthy, town. The amber shoreline in the painting was dotted with impressionistic black brushstrokes washed in emerald green, which managed, though merely a brief flick of ink and color, to perfectly conjure palm trees.
Above the fireplace hung the largest painting in the room, an early twentieth-century oil in a slim, silver, deco frame. Warm sunlight from above and beyond the confines of the canvas illuminated a sculptor and the statue of a naked and well-rounded nymph he had been carving until the moment when she'd evidently come to life, and bent her head to join her lips to those of her surprised creator. The process of her incarnation was clearly still incomplete as the warm skin tones of her cheeks, upper back, and the one visible side of a perfect breast, had not yet diffused to her full buttocks and thighs, which still evidenced the cool whiteness of her marble origins.
Edward walked over to the chair by the table and sank into it, crossing his legs in the boneless, feminine, European fashion impossible to American men. He gazed benignly at his niece, watching the girl look around the room. Examining the setting, she felt a renewed sense of what she'd first felt in her Uncle's perfectly-upholstered car, a sense of being an intruder in a wealthy, perfect, life containing no elements of disorder. Her current state of extreme dishevelment, both the torn rags barely covering her, and the emotions she felt, were the one incongruous element in the scene. The one part of the tableaux needing work and polishing.
Her Uncle began speaking softly. She stood in the center of the room, and Ralph watched from the vantage point of the sofa's arm on which he sat relaxed. Edward's words, she was surprised to note, focussed on precisely the feelings of inadequacy the girl was suffering.
"Ashley," began Edward sonorously, lecturing, "you are a lucky girl." He paused, while Ashley shifted her weight nervously on her naked legs and felt distinctly unlucky.
"I know," he continued, "that you don't yet know this. You are at this moment afraid; you are ashamed to be standing before us in your current deplorably attired state. You feel awkward and exposed.
"Your current outward situation mirrors, possibly for the first time in your young life, your own inner turmoil and lassitude. You are lucky--not insomuch as you are standing in a room displaying your tartish, next to and soon to be naked body to your relatives--but in that I am an expert in educating young people like yourself, adrift with no sense of their own balance and place in the world.
"Ralph," he motioned to the young man, "kindly fetch the camera and a notebook from the desk." As Ralph moved to the desk, crossing behind Ashley, Edward continued,
"Ralph is a very dedicated photographer. He shall document these training sessions for our future reference and your further education. Ralph, please take as many pictures of these proceedings as you can. I want to have an artistically compelling record of our youngster's progress."
"Look at me please while I speak, Ashley." Edward's voice was gentle, but there was no doubt in Ashley's mind of the seriousness of the orders they dictated, no matter how politely he might seem to be qualifying his demands.
"Why are you and so many young persons like you adrift and shiftless in this age? Why is it in your mind acceptable to entertain a low moral standard, to, for example, come to table dressed in rags. Lack of respect, Ashley. Lack of respect for others, and lack of respect for yourself."
"You don't care how you present yourself because you lack respect for yourself; you don't care how you are perceived because you lack respect for others."
"And, why is that? There is a very simple reason. It is easy to fall into the trap a little at a time. It is easy to relax ones standards for oneself a little each day, suffering only the most minor consequences for each slip of control over oneself. The effect over a short period may not even be noticeable. However, over time, ones standards and ones judgement are eroded to the point that one finds and even accepts oneself in situations which one would have been aghast to have envisioned at the outset of our journey."
"Having understood the process whereby someone like yourself, with no evil intent surely, falls into turpitude, it becomes simple to conceive a method for counteracting this tendency. And this, Ashley, is the cornerstone of the theory for my training program--of your training program for the next months, while you reside here, young lady.
"Instead of allowing the slow slip of standards caused by the normal consequence of small acts of lack of respect for oneself and others, we will magnify the gravity of the consequences, so that even minor acts of defiance, disrespect, dishonesty, and breaches of standards, place the subject in an exaggeratedly disadvantageous state. Rather than being unaware of the small toll exacted by a small loosening of standards, the excessive discomfort it will cause you will make you aware of the seriousness of that downward course."
