"Yes; the older nations grow, the more self-conscious they become."
"I don't believe, for all you say, Mr. King, the French have any more conscience than we have."
"Nor do I, Mrs. Benson. I was only trying to say that they pay more attention to appearances."
"Well, I was brought up to think it's one thing to appear, and another thing to be," said Mrs. Benson, as dismissing the subject. "So your friend's an artist? Does he paint? Does he take portraits? There was an artist at Cyrusville last winter who painted portraits, but Irene wouldn't let him do hers. I'm glad we've met Mr. Forbes. I've always wanted to have—"
"Oh, mother," exclaimed Irene, who always appeared to keep one ear for her mother's conversation, "I was just saying to Mr. Forbes that he ought to see the art exhibitions down at the other end of the promenade, and the pictures of the people who come here in August. Are you rested?"
The party moved along, and Mr. King, by a movement that seemed to him more natural than it did to Mr. Forbes, walked with Irene, and the two fell to talking about the last spring's trip in the South.
"Yes, we enjoyed the exhibition, but I am not sure but I should have enjoyed New Orleans more without the exhibition. That took so much time. There is nothing so wearisome as an exhibition. But New Orleans was charming. I don't know why, for it's the flattest, dirtiest, dampest city in the world; but it is charming. Perhaps it's the people, or the Frenchiness of it, or the tumble-down, picturesque old creole quarter, or the roses; I didn't suppose there were in the world so many roses; the town was just wreathed and smothered with them. And you did not see it?"
"No; I have been to exhibitions, and I thought I should prefer to takeNew Orleans by itself some other time. You found the people hospitable?"
"Well, they were not simply hospitable; they were that, to be sure, for father had letters to some of the leading men; but it was the general air of friendliness and good-nature everywhere, of agreeableness—it went along with the roses and the easy-going life. You didn't feel all the time on a strain. I don't suppose they are any better than our people, and I've no doubt I should miss a good deal there after a while—a certain tonic and purpose in life. But, do you know, it is pleasant sometimes to be with people who haven't so many corners as our people have. But you went south from Fortress Monroe?"
"Yes; I went to Florida."
"Oh, that must be a delightful country!"
"Yes, it's a very delightful land, or will be when it is finished. It needs advertising now. It needs somebody to call attention to it. The modest Northerners who have got hold of it, and staked it all out into city lots, seem to want to keep it all to themselves."
"How do you mean 'finished'?"
"Why, the State is big enough, and a considerable portion of it has a good foundation. What it wants is building up. There's plenty of water and sand, and palmetto roots and palmetto trees, and swamps, and a perfectly wonderful vegetation of vines and plants and flowers. What it needs is land—at least what the Yankees call land. But it is coming on. A good deal of the State below Jacksonville is already ten to fifteen feet above the ocean."
"But it's such a place for invalids!"
"Yes, it is a place for invalids. There are two kinds of people there —invalids and speculators. Thousands of people in the bleak North, and especially in the Northwest, cannot live in the winter anywhere else than in Florida. It's a great blessing to this country to have such a sanitarium. As I said, all it needs is building up, and then it wouldn't be so monotonous and malarious."
"But I had such a different idea of it!"
"Well, your idea is probably right. You cannot do justice to a place by describing it literally. Most people are fascinated by Florida: the fact is that anything is preferable to our Northern climate from February to May."
"And you didn't buy an orange plantation, or a town?"
"No; I was discouraged. Almost any one can have a town who will take a boat and go off somewhere with a surveyor, and make a map."
The truth is—the present writer had it from Major Blifill, who runs a little steamboat upon one of the inland creeks where the alligator is still numerous enough to be an entertainment—that Mr. King was no doubt malarious himself when he sailed over Florida. Blifill says he offended a whole boatfull one day when they were sailing up the St. John's. Probably he was tired of water, and swamp and water, and scraggy trees and water. The captain was on the bow, expatiating to a crowd of listeners on the fertility of the soil and the salubrity of the climate. He had himself bought a piece of ground away up there somewhere for two hundred dollars, cleared it up, and put in orange-trees, and thousands wouldn't buy it now. And Mr. King, who listened attentively, finally joined in with the questioners, and said, "Captain, what is the average price of land down in this part of Florida by the—gallon?"
They had come down to the booths, and Mrs. Benson was showing the artist the shells, piles of conchs, and other outlandish sea-fabrications in which it is said the roar of the ocean can be heard when they are hundreds of miles away from the sea. It was a pretty thought, Mr. Forbes said, and he admired the open shells that were painted on the inside —painted in bright blues and greens, with dabs of white sails and a lighthouse, or a boat with a bare-armed, resolute young woman in it, sending her bark spinning over waves mountain-high.
"Yes," said the artist, "what cheerfulness those works of art will give to the little parlors up in the country, when they are set up with other shells on the what-not in the corner! These shells always used to remind me of missionaries and the cause of the heathen; but when I see them now I shall think of Atlantic City."
"But the representative things here," interrupted Irene, "are the photographs, the tintypes. To see them is just as good as staying here to see the people when they come."
"Yes," responded Mr. King, "I think art cannot go much further in this direction."
If there were not miles of these show-cases of tintypes, there were at least acres of them. Occasionally an instantaneous photograph gave a lively picture of the beach, when the water was full of bathers-men, women, children, in the most extraordinary costumes for revealing or deforming the human figure—all tossing about in the surf. But most of the pictures were taken on dry land, of single persons, couples, and groups in their bathing suits. Perhaps such an extraordinary collection of humanity cannot be seen elsewhere in the world, such a uniformity of one depressing type reduced to its last analysis by the sea-toilet. Sometimes it was a young man and a maiden, handed down to posterity in dresses that would have caused their arrest in the street, sentimentally reclining on a canvas rock. Again it was a maiden with flowing hair, raised hands clasped, eyes upturned, on top of a crag, at the base of which the waves were breaking in foam. Or it was the same stalwart maiden, or another as good, in a boat which stood on end, pulling through the surf with one oar, and dragging a drowning man (in a bathing suit also) into the boat with her free hand. The legend was, "Saved." There never was such heroism exhibited by young women before, with such raiment, as was shown in these rare works of art.
As they walked back to the hotel through a sandy avenue lined with jig-saw architecture, Miss Benson pointed out to them some things that she said had touched her a good deal. In the patches of sand before each house there was generally an oblong little mound set about with a rim of stones, or, when something more artistic could be afforded, with shells. On each of these little graves was a flower, a sickly geranium, or a humble marigold, or some other floral token of affection.
Mr. Forbes said he never was at a watering-place before where they buried the summer boarders in the front yard. Mrs. Benson didn't like joking on such subjects, and Mr. King turned the direction of the conversation by remarking that these seeming trifles were really of much account in these days, and he took from his pocket a copy of the city newspaper, 'The Summer Sea-Song,' and read some of the leading items: "S., our eye is on you." "The Slopers have come to their cottage on Q Street, and come to stay." "Mr. E. P. Borum has painted his front steps." "Mr. Diffendorfer's marigold is on the blow." And so on, and so on. This was probably the marigold mentioned that they were looking at.
The most vivid impression, however, made upon the visitor in this walk was that of paint. It seemed unreal that there could be so much paint in the world and so many swearing colors. But it ceased to be a dream, and they were taken back into the hard, practical world, when, as they turned the corner, Irene pointed out her favorite sign:
Silas Lapham, mineral paint.Branch Office.
The artist said, a couple of days after this morning, that he had enough of it. "Of course," he added, "it is a great pleasure to me to sit and talk with Mrs. Benson, while you and that pretty girl walk up and down the piazza all the evening; but I'm easily satisfied, and two evenings did for me."
So that, much as Mr. King was charmed with Atlantic City, and much as he regretted not awaiting the arrival of the originals of the tintypes, he gave in to the restlessness of the artist for other scenes; but not before he had impressed Mrs. Benson with a notion of the delights of Newport in July.
The view of the Catskills from a certain hospitable mansion on the east side of the Hudson is better than any mew from those delectable hills. The artist said so one morning late in June, and Mr. King agreed with him, as a matter of fact, but would have no philosophizing about it, as that anticipation is always better than realization; and when Mr. Forbes went on to say that climbing a mountain was a good deal like marriage —the world was likely to look a little flat once that cerulean height was attained—Mr. King only remarked that that was a low view to take of the subject, but he would confess that it was unreasonable to expect that any rational object could fulfill, or even approach, the promise held out by such an exquisite prospect as that before them.
The friends were standing where the Catskill hills lay before them in echelon towards the river, the ridges lapping over each other and receding in the distance, a gradation of lines most artistically drawn, still further refined by shades of violet, which always have the effect upon the contemplative mind of either religious exaltation or the kindling of a sentiment which is in the young akin to the emotion of love. While the artist was making some memoranda of these outlines, and Mr. King was drawing I know not what auguries of hope from these purple heights, a young lady seated upon a rock near by—a young lady just stepping over the border-line of womanhood—had her eyes also fixed upon those dreamy distances, with that look we all know so well, betraying that shy expectancy of life which is unconfessed, that tendency to maidenly reverie which it were cruel to interpret literally. At the moment she is more interesting than the Catskills—the brown hair, the large eyes unconscious of anything but the most natural emotion, the shapely waist just beginning to respond to the call of the future—it is a pity that we shall never see her again, and that she has nothing whatever to do with our journey. She also will have her romance; fate will meet her in the way some day, and set her pure heart wildly beating, and she will know what those purple distances mean. Happiness, tragedy, anguish—who can tell what is in store for her? I cannot but feel profound sadness at meeting her in this casual way and never seeing her again. Who says that the world is not full of romance and pathos and regret as we go our daily way in it? You meet her at a railway station; there is the flutter of a veil, the gleam of a scarlet bird, the lifting of a pair of eyes—she is gone; she is entering a drawing-room, and stops a moment and turns away; she is looking from a window as you pass—it is only a glance out of eternity; she stands for a second upon a rock looking seaward; she passes you at the church door—is that all? It is discovered that instantaneous photographs can be taken. They are taken all the time; some of them are never developed, but I suppose these impressions are all there on the sensitive plate, and that the plate is permanently affected by the impressions. The pity of it is that the world is so full of these undeveloped knowledges of people worth knowing and friendships worth making.
The comfort of leaving same things to the imagination was impressed upon our travelers when they left the narrow-gauge railway at the mountain station, and identified themselves with other tourists by entering a two-horse wagon to be dragged wearily up the hill through the woods. The ascent would be more tolerable if any vistas were cut in the forest to give views by the way; as it was, the monotony of the pull upward was only relieved by the society of the passengers. There were two bright little girls off for a holiday with their Western uncle, a big, good-natured man with a diamond breast-pin, and his voluble son, a lad about the age of his little cousins, whom he constantly pestered by his rude and dominating behavior. The boy was a product which it is the despair of all Europe to produce, and our travelers had great delight in him as an epitome of American "smartness." He led all the conversation, had confident opinions about everything, easily put down his deferential papa, and pleased the other passengers by his self-sufficient, know-it-all air. To a boy who had traveled in California and seen the Alps it was not to be expected that this humble mountain could afford much entertainment, and he did not attempt to conceal his contempt for it. When the stage reached the Rip Van Winkle House, half-way, the shy schoolgirls were for indulging a little sentiment over the old legend, but the boy, who concealed his ignorance of the Irving romance until his cousins had prattled the outlines of it, was not to be taken in by any such chaff, and though he was a little staggered by Rip's own cottage, and by the sight of the cave above it which is labeled as the very spot where the vagabond took his long nap, he attempted to bully the attendant and drink-mixer in the hut, and openly flaunted his incredulity until the bar-tender showed him a long bunch of Rip's hair, which hung like a scalp on a nail, and the rusty barrel and stock of the musket. The cabin is, indeed, full of old guns, pistols, locks of hair, buttons, cartridge-boxes, bullets, knives, and other undoubted relics of Rip and the Revolution. This cabin, with its facilities for slaking thirst on a hot day, which Rip would have appreciated, over a hundred years old according to information to be obtained on the spot, is really of unknown antiquity, the old boards and timber of which it is constructed having been brought down from the Mountain House some forty years ago.
The old Mountain House, standing upon its ledge of rock, from which one looks down upon a map of a considerable portion of New York and New England, with the lake in the rear, and heights on each side that offer charming walks to those who have in contemplation views of nature or of matrimony, has somewhat lost its importance since the vast Catskill region has come to the knowledge of the world. A generation ago it was the centre of attraction, and it was understood that going to the Catskills was going there. Generations of searchers after immortality have chiseled their names in the rock platform, and one who sits there now falls to musing on the vanity of human nature and the transitoriness of fashion. Now New York has found that it has very convenient to it a great mountain pleasure-ground; railways and excellent roads have pierced it, the varied beauties of rocks, ravines, and charming retreats are revealed, excellent hotels capable of entertaining a thousand guests are planted on heights and slopes commanding mountain as well as lowland prospects, great and small boarding-houses cluster in the high valleys and on the hillsides, and cottages more thickly every year dot the wild region. Year by year these accommodations will increase, new roads around the gorges will open more enchanting views, and it is not improbable that the species of American known as the "summer boarder" will have his highest development and apotheosis in these mountains.
Nevertheless Mr. King was not uninterested in renewing his memories of the old house. He could recall without difficulty, and also without emotion now, a scene on this upper veranda and a moonlight night long ago, and he had no doubt he could find her name carved on a beech-tree in the wood near by; but it was useless to look for it, for her name had been changed. The place was, indeed, full of memories, but all chastened and subdued by the indoor atmosphere, which impressed him as that of a faded Sunday. He was very careful not to disturb the decorum by any frivolity of demeanor, and he cautioned the artist on this point; but Mr. Forbes declared that the dining-room fare kept his spirits at a proper level. There was an old-time satisfaction in wandering into the parlor, and resting on the haircloth sofa, and looking at the hair-cloth chairs, and pensively imagining a meeting there, with songs out of the Moody and Sankey book; and he did not tire of dropping into the reposeful reception-room, where he never by any chance met anybody, and sitting with the melodeon and big Bible Society edition of the Scriptures, and a chance copy of the Christian at Play. These amusements were varied by sympathetic listening to the complaints of the proprietor about the vandalism of visitors who wrote with diamonds on the window-panes, so that the glass had to be renewed, or scratched their names on the pillars of the piazza, so that the whole front had to be repainted, or broke off the azalea blossoms, or in other ways desecrated the premises. In order to fit himself for a sojourn here, Mr. King tried to commit to memory a placard that was neatly framed and hung on the veranda, wherein it was stated that the owner cheerfully submits to all necessary use of the premises, "but will not permit any unnecessary use, or the exercise of a depraved taste or vandalism." There were not as yet many guests, and those who were there seemed to have conned this placard to their improvement, for there was not much exercise of any sort of taste. Of course there were two or three brides, and there was the inevitable English nice middle-class tourist with his wife, the latter ram-roddy and uncompromising, in big boots and botanical, who, in response to a gentleman who was giving her information about travel, constantly ejaculated, in broad English, "Yas, yas; ow, ow, ow, really!"
And there was the young bride from Kankazoo, who frightened Mr. King back into his chamber one morning when he opened his door and beheld the vision of a woman going towards the breakfast-room in what he took to be a robe de nuit, but which turned out to be one of the "Mother-Hubbards" which have had a certain celebrity as street dresses in some parts of the West. But these gayeties palled after a time, and one afternoon our travelers, with their vandalism all subdued, walked a mile over the rocks to the Kaaterskill House, and took up their abode there to watch the opening of the season. Naturally they expected some difficulty in transferring their two trunks round by the road, where there had been nothing but a wilderness forty years ago; but their change of base was facilitated by the obliging hotelkeeper in the most friendly manner, and when he insisted on charging only four dollars for moving the trunks, the two friends said that, considering the wear and tear of the mountain involved, they did not see how he could afford to do it for such a sum, and they went away, as they said, well pleased.
It happened to be at the Kaaterskill House—it might have been at the Grand, or the Overlook—that the young gentlemen in search of information saw the Catskill season get under way. The phase of American life is much the same at all these great caravansaries. It seems to the writer, who has the greatest admiration for the military genius that can feed and fight an army in the field, that not enough account is made of the greater genius that can organize and carry on a great American hotel, with a thousand or fifteen hundred guests, in a short, sharp, and decisive campaign of two months, at the end of which the substantial fruits of victory are in the hands of the landlord, and the guests are allowed to depart with only their personal baggage and side-arms, but so well pleased that they are inclined to renew the contest next year. This is a triumph of mind over mind. It is not merely the organization and the management of the army under the immediate command of the landlord, the accumulation and distribution of supplies upon this mountain-top, in the uncertainty whether the garrison on a given day will be one hundred or one thousand, not merely the lodging, rationing and amusing of this shifting host, but the satisfying of as many whims and prejudices as there are people who leave home on purpose to grumble and enjoy themselves in the exercise of a criticism they dare not indulge in their own houses. Our friends had an opportunity of seeing the machinery set in motion in one of these great establishments. Here was a vast balloon structure, founded on a rock, but built in the air, and anchored with cables, with towers and a high pillared veranda, capable, with its annex, of lodging fifteen hundred people. The army of waiters and chamber-maids, of bellboys, and scullions and porters and laundry-folk, was arriving; the stalwart scrubbers were at work, the store-rooms were filled, the big kitchen shone with its burnished coppers, and an array of white-capped and aproned cooks stood in line under their chef; the telegraph operator was waiting at her desk, the drug clerk was arranging his bottles, the newspaper stand was furnished, the post-office was open for letters. It needed but the arrival of a guest to set the machinery in motion. And as soon as the guest came the band would be there to launch him into the maddening gayety of the season. It would welcome his arrival in triumphant strains; it would pursue him at dinner, and drown his conversation; it will fill his siesta with martial dreams, and it would seize his legs in the evening, and entreat him to caper in the parlor. Everything was ready. And this was what happened. It was the evening of the opening day. The train wagons might be expected any moment. The electric lights were blazing. All the clerks stood expectant, the porters were by the door, the trim, uniformed bell-boys were all in waiting line, the register clerk stood fingering the leaves of the register with a gracious air. A noise is heard outside, the big door opens, there is a rush forward, and four people flock in a man in a linen duster, a stout woman, a lad of ten, a smartly dressed young lady, and a dog. Movement, welcome, ringing of bells, tramping of feet—the whole machinery has started. It was adjusted to crack an egg-shell or smash an iron-bound trunk. The few drops presaged a shower. The next day there were a hundred on the register; the day after, two hundred; and the day following, an excursion.
With increasing arrivals opportunity was offered for the study of character. Away from his occupation, away from the cares of the household and the demands of society, what is the self-sustaining capacity of the ordinary American man or woman? It was interesting to note the enthusiasm of the first arrival, the delight in the view—Round Top, the deep gorges, the charming vista of the lowlands, a world and wilderness of beauty; the inspiration of the air, the alertness to explore in all directions, to see the lake, the falls, the mountain paths. But is a mountain sooner found out than a valley, or is there a want of internal resources, away from business, that the men presently become rather listless, take perfunctory walks for exercise, and are so eager for meal-time and mail-time? Why do they depend so much upon the newspapers, when they all despise the newspapers? Mr. King used to listen of an evening to the commonplace talk about the fire, all of which was a dilution of what they had just got out of the newspapers, but what a lively assent there was to a glib talker who wound up his remarks with a denunciation of the newspapers! The man was no doubt quite right, but did he reflect on the public loss of his valuable conversation the next night if his newspaper should chance to fail? And the women, after their first feeling of relief, did they fall presently into petty gossip, complaints about the table, criticisms of each other's dress, small discontents with nearly everything? Not all of them.
An excursion is always resented by the regular occupants of a summer resort, who look down upon the excursionists, while they condescend to be amused by them. It is perhaps only the common attitude of the wholesale to the retail dealer, although it is undeniable that a person seems temporarily to change his nature when he becomes part of an excursion; whether it is from the elation at the purchase of a day of gayety below the market price, or the escape from personal responsibility under a conductor, or the love of being conspicuous as a part of a sort of organization, the excursionist is not on his ordinary behavior.
An excursion numbering several hundreds, gathered along the river towns by the benevolent enterprise of railway officials, came up to the mountain one day. The officials seemed to have run a drag-net through factories, workshops, Sunday-schools, and churches, and scooped in the weary workers at homes and in shops unaccustomed to a holiday. Our friends formed a part of a group on the hotel piazza who watched the straggling arrival of this band of pleasure. For by this time our two friends had found a circle of acquaintances, with the facility of watering-place life, which in its way represented certain phases of American life as well as the excursion. A great many writers have sought to classify and label and put into a paragraph a description of the American girl. She is not to be disposed of by any such easy process. Undoubtedly she has some common marks of nationality that distinguish her from the English girl, but in variety she is practically infinite, and likely to assume almost any form, and the characteristics of a dozen nationalities. No one type represents her. What, indeed, would one say of this little group on the hotel piazza, making its comments upon the excursionists? Here is a young lady of, say, twenty-three years, inclining already to stoutness, domestic, placid, with matron written on every line of her unselfish face, capable of being, if necessity were, a notable housekeeper, learned in preserves and jellies and cordials, sure to have her closets in order, and a place for every remnant, piece of twine, and all odds and ends. Not a person to read Browning with, but to call on if one needed a nurse, or a good dinner, or a charitable deed. Beside her, in an invalid's chair, a young girl, scarcely eighteen, of quite another sort, pale, slight, delicate, with a lovely face and large sentimental eyes, all nerves, the product, perhaps, of a fashionable school, who in one season in New York, her first, had utterly broken down into what is called nervous prostration. In striking contrast was Miss Nettie Sumner, perhaps twenty-one, who corresponded more nearly to what the internationalists call the American type; had evidently taken school education as a duck takes water, and danced along in society into apparent robustness of person and knowledge of the world. A handsome girl, she would be a comely woman, good-natured, quick at repartee, confining her knowledge of books to popular novels, too natural and frank to be a flirt, an adept in all the nice slang current in fashionable life, caught up from collegians and brokers, accustomed to meet men in public life, in hotels, a very "jolly" companion, with a fund of good sense that made her entirely capable of managing her own affairs. Mr. King was at the moment conversing with still another young lady, who had more years than the last-named-short, compact figure, round girlish face, good, strong, dark eyes, modest in bearing, self-possessed in manner, sensible-who made ready and incisive comments, and seemed to have thought deeply on a large range of topics, but had a sort of downright practicality and cool independence, with all her femininity of bearing, that rather, puzzled her interlocutor. It occurred to Mr. King to guess that Miss Selina Morton might be from Boston, which she was not, but it was with a sort of shock of surprise that he learned later that this young girl, moving about in society in the innocent panoply of girlhood, was a young doctor, who had no doubt looked through and through him with her keen eyes, studied him in the light of heredity, constitutional tendencies, habits, and environment, as a possible patient. It almost made him ill to think of it. Here were types enough for one morning; but there was still another.
The artist had seated himself on a rock a little distance from the house, and was trying to catch some of the figures as they appeared up the path, and a young girl was looking over his shoulder with an amused face, just as he was getting an elderly man in a long flowing duster, straggling gray hair, hat on the back of his head, large iron-rimmed spectacles, with a baggy umbrella, who stopped breathless at the summit, with a wild glare of astonishment at the view. This young girl, whom the careless observer might pass without a second glance, was discovered on better acquaintance to express in her face and the lines of her figure some subtle intellectual quality not easily interpreted. Marion Lamont, let us say at once, was of Southern origin, born in London during the temporary residence of her parents there, and while very young deprived by death of her natural protectors. She had a small, low voice, fine hair of a light color, which contrasted with dark eyes, waved back from her forehead, delicate, sensitive features—indeed, her face, especially in conversation with any one, almost always had a wistful, appealing look; in figure short and very slight, lithe and graceful, full of unconscious artistic poses, fearless and sure-footed as a gazelle in climbing about the rocks, leaping from stone to stone, and even making her way up a tree that had convenient branches, if the whim took her, using her hands and arms like a gymnast, and performing whatever feat of. daring or dexterity as if the exquisitely molded form was all instinct with her indomitable will, and obeyed it, and always with an air of refinement and spirited breeding. A child of nature in seeming, but yet a woman who was not to be fathomed by a chance acquaintance.
The old man with the spectacles was presently overtaken by a stout, elderly woman, who landed in the exhausted condition of a porpoise that has come ashore, and stood regardless of everything but her own weight, while member after member of the party straggled up. No sooner did this group espy the artist than they moved in his direction. "There's a painter." "I wonder what he's painting." "Maybe he'll paint us." "Let's see what he's doing." "I should like to see a man paint." And the crowd flowed on, getting in front of the sketcher, and creeping round behind him for a peep over his shoulder. The artist closed his sketch-book and retreated, and the stout woman, balked of that prey, turned round a moment to the view, exclaimed, "Ain't that elegant!" and then waddled off to the hotel.
"I wonder," Mr. King was saying, "if these excursionists are representative of general American life?"
"If they are," said the artist, "there's little here for my purpose. A good many of them seem to be foreigners, or of foreign origin. Just as soon as these people get naturalized, they lose the picturesqueness they had abroad."
"Did it never occur to your highness that they may prefer to be comfortable rather than picturesque, and that they may be ignorant that they were born for artistic purposes?" It was the low voice of Miss Lamont, and that demure person looked up as if she really wanted information.
"I doubt about the comfort," the artist began to reply.
"And so do I," said Miss Sumner. "What on earth do you suppose made those girls come up here in white dresses, blowing about in the wind, and already drabbled? Did you ever see such a lot of cheap millinery? I haven't seen a woman yet with the least bit of style."
"Poor things, they look as if they'd never had a holiday before in their lives, and didn't exactly know what to do with it," apologized Miss Lamont.
"Don't you believe it. They've been to more church and Sunday-school picnics than you ever attended. Look over there!"
It was a group seated about their lunch-baskets. A young gentleman, the comedian of the patty, the life of the church sociable, had put on the hat of one of the girls, and was making himself so irresistibly funny in it that all the girls tittered, and their mothers looked a little shamefaced and pleased.
"Well," said Mr. King, "that's the only festive sign I've seen. It's more like a funeral procession than a pleasure excursion. What impresses me is the extreme gravity of these people—no fun, no hilarity, no letting themselves loose for a good time, as they say. Probably they like it, but they seem to have no capacity for enjoying themselves; they have no vivacity, no gayety—what a contrast to a party in France or Germany off for a day's pleasure—no devices, no resources."
"Yes, it's all sad, respectable, confoundedly uninteresting. What does the doctor say?" asked the artist.
"I know what the doctor will say," put in Miss Summer, "but I tell you that what this crowd needs is missionary dressmakers and tailors. If I were dressed that way I should feel and act just as they do. Well, Selina?"
"It's pretty melancholy. The trouble is constant grinding work and bad food. I've been studying these people. The women are all—"
"Ugly," suggested the artist.
"Well, ill-favored, scrimped; that means ill-nurtured simply. Out of the three hundred there are not half a dozen well-conditioned, filled out physically in comfortable proportions. Most of the women look as if they had been dragged out with indoor work and little intellectual life, but the real cause of physical degeneration is bad cooking. If they lived more out-of-doors, as women do in Italy, the food might not make so much difference, but in our climate it is the prime thing. This poor physical state accounts for the want of gayety and the lack of beauty. The men, on the whole, are better than the women, that is, the young men. I don't know as these people are overworked, as the world goes. I dare say, Nettie, there's not a girl in this crowd who could dance with you through a season. They need to be better fed, and to have more elevating recreations-something to educate their taste."
"I've been educating the taste of one excursionist this morning, a good-faced workman, who was prying about everywhere with a curious air, and said he never'd been on an excursion before. He came up to me in the office, deferentially asked me if I would go into the parlor with him, and, pointing to something hanging on the wall, asked, 'What is that?' 'That,' I said, 'is a view from Sunset Rock, and a very good one.' 'Yes,' he continued, walking close up to it, 'but what is it?' 'Why, it's a painting.' 'Oh, it isn't the place?' 'No, no; it's a painting in oil, done with a brush on a piece of canvas—don't you see—,made to look like the view over there from the rock, colors and all.' 'Yes, I thought, perhaps—you can see a good ways in it. It's pooty.' 'There's another one,' I said—'falls, water coming down, and trees.' 'Well, I declare, so it is! And that's jest a make-believe? I s'pose I can go round and look?' 'Certainly.' And the old fellow tiptoed round the parlor, peering at all the pictures in a confused state of mind, and with a guilty look of enjoyment. It seems incredible that a person should attain his age with such freshness of mind. But I think he is the only one of the party who even looked at the paintings."
"I think it's just pathetic," said Miss Lamont. "Don't you, Mr. Forbes?"
"No; I think it's encouraging. It's a sign of an art appreciation in this country. That man will know a painting next time he sees one, and then he won't rest till he has bought a chromo, and so he will go on."
"And if he lives long enough, he will buy one of Mr. Forbes's paintings."
"But not the one that Miss Lamont is going to sit for."
When Mr. King met the party at the dinner-table, the places of Miss Lamont and Mr. Forbes were still vacant. The other ladies looked significantly at them, and one of them said, "Don't you think there's something in it? don't you think they are interested in each other?" Mr. King put down his soup-spoon, too much amazed to reply. Do women never think of anything but mating people who happen to be thrown together? Here were this young lady and his friend, who had known each other for three days, perhaps, in the most casual way, and her friends had her already as good as married to him and off on a wedding journey. All that Mr. King said, after apparent deep cogitation, was, "I suppose if it were here it would have to be in a traveling-dress," which the women thought frivolous.
Yet it was undeniable that the artist and Marion had a common taste for hunting out picturesque places in the wood-paths, among the rocks, and on the edges of precipices, and they dragged the rest of the party many a mile through wildernesses of beauty. Sketching was the object of all these expeditions, but it always happened—there seemed a fatality in it that whenever they halted anywhere for a rest or a view, the Lamont girl was sure to take an artistic pose, which the artist couldn't resist, and his whole occupation seemed to be drawing her, with the Catskills for a background. "There," he would say, "stay just as you are; yes, leaning a little so"—it was wonderful how the lithe figure adapted itself to any background—"and turn your head this way, looking at me." The artist began to draw, and every time he gave a quick glance upwards from his book, there were the wistful face and those eyes. "Confound it! I beg your pardon-the light. Will you please turn your eyes a little off, that way-so." There was no reason why the artist should be nervous, the face was perfectly demure; but the fact is that art will have only one mistress. So the drawing limped on from day to day, and the excursions became a matter of course. Sometimes the party drove, extending their explorations miles among the hills, exhilarated by the sparkling air, excited by the succession of lovely changing prospects, bestowing their compassion upon the summer boarders in the smartly painted boarding-houses, and comparing the other big hotels with their own. They couldn't help looking down on the summer boarders, any more than cottagers at other places can help a feeling of superiority to people in hotels. It is a natural desire to make an aristocratic line somewhere. Of course they saw the Kaaterskill Falls, and bought twenty-five cents' worth of water to pour over them, and they came very near seeing the Haines Falls, but were a little too late.
"Have the falls been taken in today?" asked Marion, seriously.
"I'm real sorry, miss," said the proprietor, "but there's just been a party here and taken the water. But you can go down and look if you want to, and it won't cost you a cent."
They went down, and saw where the falls ought to be. The artist said it was a sort of dry-plate process, to be developed in the mind afterwards; Mr. King likened it to a dry smoke without lighting the cigar; and the doctor said it certainly had the sanitary advantage of not being damp. The party even penetrated the Platerskill Cove, and were well rewarded by its exceeding beauty, as is every one who goes there. There are sketches of all these lovely places in a certain artist's book, all looking, however, very much alike, and consisting principally of a graceful figure in a great variety of unstudied attitudes.
"Isn't this a nervous sort of a place?" the artist asked his friend, as they sat in his chamber overlooking the world.
"Perhaps it is. I have a fancy that some people are born to enjoy the valley, and some the mountains."
"I think it makes a person nervous to live on a high place. This feeling of constant elevation tires one; it gives a fellow no such sense of bodily repose as he has in a valley. And the wind, it's constantly nagging, rattling the windows and banging the doors. I can't escape the unrest of it." The artist was turning the leaves and contemplating the poverty of his sketch-book. "The fact is, I get better subjects on the seashore."
"Probably the sea would suit us better. By the way, did I tell you that Miss Lamont's uncle came last night from Richmond? Mr. De Long, uncle on the mother's side. I thought there was French blood in her."
"What is he like?"
"Oh, a comfortable bachelor, past middle age; business man; Southern; just a little touch of the 'cyar' for 'car.' Said he was going to take his niece to Newport next week. Has Miss Lamont said anything about going there?"
"Well, she did mention it the other day."
The house was filling up, and, King thought, losing its family aspect. He had taken quite a liking for the society of the pretty invalid girl, and was fond of sitting by her, seeing the delicate color come back to her cheeks, and listening to her shrewd little society comments. He thought she took pleasure in having him push her wheel-chair up and down the piazza at least she rewarded him by grateful looks, and complimented him by asking his advice about reading and about being useful to others. Like most young girls whose career of gayety is arrested as hers was, she felt an inclination to coquet a little with the serious side of life. All this had been pleasant to Mr. King, but now that so many more guests had come, he found himself most of the time out of business. The girl's chariot was always surrounded by admirers and sympathizers. All the young men were anxious to wheel her up and down by the hour; there was always a strife for this sweet office; and at night, when the vehicle had been lifted up the first flight, it was beautiful to see the eagerness of sacrifice exhibited by these young fellows to wheel her down the long corridor to her chamber. After all, it is a kindly, unselfish world, full of tenderness for women, and especially for invalid women who are pretty. There was all day long a competition of dudes and elderly widowers and bachelors to wait on her. One thought she needed a little more wheeling; another volunteered to bring her a glass of water; there was always some one to pick up her fan, to recover her handkerchief (why is it that the fans and handkerchiefs of ugly women seldom go astray?), to fetch her shawl—was there anything they could do? The charming little heiress accepted all the attentions with most engaging sweetness. Say what you will, men have good hearts.
Yes, they were going to Newport. King and Forbes, who had not had a Fourth of July for some time, wanted to see what it was like at Newport. Mr. De Long would like their company. But before they went the artist must make one more trial at a sketch-must get the local color. It was a large party that went one morning to see it done under the famous ledge of rocks on the Red Path. It is a fascinating spot, with its coolness, sense of seclusion, mosses, wild flowers, and ferns. In a small grotto under the frowning wall of the precipice is said to be a spring, but it is difficult to find, and lovers need to go a great many times in search of it. People not in love can sometimes find a damp place in the sand. The question was where Miss Lamont should pose. Should she nestle under the great ledge, or sit on a projecting rock with her figure against the sky? The artist could not satisfy himself, and the girl, always adventurous, kept shifting her position, climbing about on the jutting ledge, until she stood at last on the top of the precipice, which was some thirty or forty feet high. Against the top leaned a dead balsam, just as some tempest had cast it, its dead branches bleached and scraggy. Down this impossible ladder the girl announced her intention of coming. "No, no," shouted a chorus of voices; "go round; it's unsafe; the limbs will break; you can't get through them; you'll break your neck." The girl stood calculating the possibility. The more difficult the feat seemed, the more she longed to try it.
"For Heaven's sake don't try it, Miss Lamont," cried the artist.
"But I want to. I think I must. You can sketch me in the act. It will be something new."
And before any one could interpose, the resolute girl caught hold of the balsam and swung off. A boy or a squirrel would have made nothing of the feat. But for a young lady in long skirts to make her way down that balsam, squirming about and through the stubs and dead limbs, testing each one before she trusted her weight to it, was another affair. It needed a very cool head and the skill of a gymnast. To transfer her hold from one limb to another, and work downward, keeping her skirts neatly gathered about her feet, was an achievement that the spectators could appreciate; the presence of spectators made it much more difficult. And the lookers-on were a good deal more excited than the girl. The artist had his book ready, and when the little figure was half-way down, clinging in a position at once artistic and painful, he began. "Work fast," said the girl. "It's hard hanging on." But the pencil wouldn't work. The artist made a lot of wild marks. He would have given the world to sketch in that exquisite figure, but every time he cast his eye upward the peril was so evident that his hand shook. It was no use. The danger increased as she descended, and with it the excitement of the spectators. All the young gentlemen declared they would catch her if she fell, and some of them seemed to hope she might drop into their arms. Swing off she certainly must when the lowest limb was reached. But that was ten feet above the ground and the alighting-place was sharp rock and broken bowlders. The artist kept up a pretense of drawing. He felt every movement of her supple figure and the strain upon the slender arms, but this could not be transferred to the book. It was nervous work. The girl was evidently getting weary, but not losing her pluck. The young fellows were very anxious that the artist should keep at his work; they would catch her. There was a pause; the girl had come to the last limb; she was warily meditating a slide or a leap; the young men were quite ready to sacrifice themselves; but somehow, no one could tell exactly how, the girl swung low, held herself suspended by her hands for an instant, and then dropped into the right place—trust a woman for that; and the artist, his face flushed, set her down upon the nearest flat rock. Chorus from the party, "She is saved!"
"And my sketch is gone up again."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Forbes." The girl looked full of innocent regret. "But when I was up there I had to come down that tree. I couldn't help it, really."
On the Fourth of July, at five o'clock in the morning, the porters called the sleepers out of their berths at Wickford Junction. Modern civilization offers no such test to the temper and to personal appearance as this early preparation to meet the inspection of society after a night in the stuffy and luxuriously upholstered tombs of a sleeping-car. To get into them at night one must sacrifice dignity; to get out of them in the morning, clad for the day, gives the proprietors a hard rub. It is wonderful, however, considering the twisting and scrambling in the berth and the miscellaneous and ludicrous presentation of humanity in the washroom at the end of the car, how presentable people make themselves in a short space of time. One realizes the debt of the ordinary man to clothes, and how fortunate it is for society that commonly people do not see each other in the morning until art has done its best for them. To meet the public eye, cross and tousled and disarranged, requires either indifference or courage. It is disenchanting to some of our cherished ideals. Even the trig, irreproachable commercial drummer actually looks banged-up, and nothing of a man; but after a few moments, boot-blacked and paper-collared, he comes out as fresh as a daisy, and all ready to drum.
Our travelers came out quite as well as could be expected, the artist sleepy and a trifle disorganized, Mr. King in a sort of facetious humor that is more dangerous than grumbling, Mr. De Long yawning and stretching and declaring that he had not slept a wink, while Marion alighted upon the platform unruffled in plumage, greeting the morning like a bird. There were the usual early loafers at the station, hands deep in pockets, ruminant, listlessly observant. No matter at what hour of day or night a train may arrive or depart at a country station in America, the loafers are so invariably there in waiting that they seem to be a part of our railway system. There is something in the life and movement that seems to satisfy all the desire for activity they have.
Even the most sleepy tourist could not fail to be impressed with the exquisite beauty of the scene at Wickford Harbor, where the boat was taken for Newport. The slow awaking of morning life scarcely disturbed its tranquillity. Sky and sea and land blended in a tone of refined gray. The shores were silvery, a silvery light came out of the east, streamed through the entrance of the harbor, and lay molten and glowing on the water. The steamer's deck and chairs and benches were wet with dew, the noises in transferring the baggage and getting the boat under way were all muffled and echoed in the surrounding silence. The sail-boats that lay at anchor on the still silver surface sent down long shadows, and the slim masts seemed driven down into the water to hold the boats in place. The little village was still asleep. It was such a contrast; the artist was saying to Marion, as they leaned over the taffrail, to the new raw villages in the Catskills. The houses were large, and looked solid and respectable, many of them were shingled on the sides, a spire peeped out over the green trees, and the hamlet was at once homelike and picturesque. Refinement is the note of the landscape. Even the old warehouses dropping into the water, and the decaying piles of the wharves, have a certain grace. How graciously the water makes into the land, following the indentations, and flowing in little streams, going in and withdrawing gently and regretfully, and how the shore puts itself out in low points, wooing the embrace of the sea—a lovely union. There is no haze, but all outlines are softened in the silver light. It is like a dream, and there is no disturbance of the repose when a family party, a woman, a child, and a man come down to the shore, slip into a boat, and scull away out by the lighthouse and the rocky entrance of the harbor, off, perhaps, for a day's pleasure. The artist has whipped out his sketch-book to take some outlines of the view, and his comrade, looking that way, thinks this group a pleasing part of the scene, and notes how the salt, dewy morning air has brought the color into the sensitive face of the girl. There are not many such hours in a lifetime, he is also thinking, when nature can be seen in such a charming mood, and for the moment it compensates for the night ride.
The party indulged this feeling when they landed, still early, at the Newport wharf, and decided to walk through the old town up to the hotel, perfectly well aware that after this no money would hire them to leave their beds and enjoy this novel sensation at such an hour. They had the street to themselves, and the promenade was one of discovery, and had much the interest of a landing in a foreign city.
"It is so English," said the artist.
"It is so colonial," said Mr. King, "though I've no doubt that any one of the sleeping occupants of these houses would be wide-awake instantly, and come out and ask you to breakfast, if they heard you say it is so English."
"If they were not restrained," Marion suggested, "by the feeling that that would not be English. How fine the shade trees, and what brilliant banks of flowers!"
"And such lawns! We cannot make this turf in Virginia," was the reflection of Mr. De Long.
"Well, colonial if you like," the artist replied to Mr. King. "What is best is in the colonial style; but you notice that all the new houses are built to look old, and that they have had Queen Anne pretty bad, though the colors are good."
"That's the way with some towns. Queen Anne seems to strike them all of a sudden, and become epidemic. The only way to prevent it is to vaccinate, so to speak, with two or three houses, and wait; then it is not so likely to spread."
Laughing and criticising and admiring, the party strolled along the shaded avenue to the Ocean House. There were as yet no signs of life at the Club, or the Library, or the Casino; but the shops were getting open, and the richness and elegance of the goods displayed in the windows were the best evidence of the wealth and refinement of the expected customers —culture and taste always show themselves in the shops of a town. The long gray-brown front of the Casino, with its shingled sides and hooded balconies and galleries, added to the already strong foreign impression of the place. But the artist was dissatisfied. It was not at all his idea of Independence Day; it was like Sunday, and Sunday without any foreign gayety. He had expected firing of cannon and ringing of bells—there was not even a flag out anywhere; the celebration of the Fourth seemed to have shrunk into a dull and decorous avoidance of all excitement. "Perhaps," suggested Miss Lamont, "if the New-Englanders keep the Fourth of July like Sunday, they will by and by keep Sunday like the Fourth of July. I hear it is the day for excursions on this coast."
Mr. King was perfectly well aware that in going to a hotel in Newport he was putting himself out of the pale of the best society; but he had a fancy for viewing this society from the outside, having often enough seen it from the inside. And perhaps he had other reasons for this eccentric conduct. He had, at any rate, declined the invitation of his cousin, Mrs. Bartlett Glow, to her cottage on the Point of Rocks. It was not without regret that he did this, for his cousin was a very charming woman, and devoted exclusively to the most exclusive social life. Her husband had been something in the oil line in New York, and King had watched with interest his evolution from the business man into the full-blown existence of a man of fashion. The process is perfectly charted. Success in business, membership in a good club, tandem in the Park, introduction to a good house, marriage to a pretty girl of family and not much money, a yacht, a four-in-hand, a Newport villa. His name had undergone a like evolution. It used to be written on his business card, Jacob B. Glow. It was entered at the club as J. Bartlett Glow. On the wedding invitations it was Mr. Bartlett Glow, and the dashing pair were always spoken of at Newport as the Bartlett-Glows.
When Mr. King descended from his room at the Ocean House, although it was not yet eight o'clock, he was not surprised to see Mr. Benson tilted back in one of the chairs on the long piazza, out of the way of the scrubbers, with his air of patient waiting and observation. Irene used to say that her father ought to write a book—"Life as Seen from Hotel Piazzas." His only idea of recreation when away from business seemed to be sitting about on them.
"The women-folks," he explained to Mr. King, who took a chair beside him, "won't be down for an hour yet. I like, myself, to see the show open."
"Are there many people here?"
"I guess the house is full enough. But I can't find out that anybody is actually stopping here, except ourselves and a lot of schoolmarms come to attend a convention. They seem to enjoy it. The rest, those I've talked with, just happen to be here for a day or so, never have been to a hotel in Newport before, always stayed in a cottage, merely put up here now to visit friends in cottages. You'll see that none of them act like they belonged to the hotel. Folks are queer."
At a place we were last summer all the summer boarders, in boarding-houses round, tried to act like they were staying at the big hotel, and the hotel people swelled about on the fact of being at a hotel. Here you're nobody. I hired a carriage by the week, driver in buttons, and all that. It don't make any difference. I'll bet a gold dollar every cottager knows it's hired, and probably they think by the drive."
"It's rather stupid, then, for you and the ladies."
"Not a bit of it. It's the nicest place in America: such grass, such horses, such women, and the drive round the island—there's nothing like it in the country. We take it every day. Yes, it would be a little lonesome but for the ocean. It's a good deal like a funeral procession, nobody ever recognizes you, not even the hotel people who are in hired hacks. If I were to come again, Mr. King, I'd come in a yacht, drive up from it in a box on two wheels, with a man clinging on behind with his back to me, and have a cottage with an English gardener. That would fetch 'em. Money won't do it, not at a hotel. But I'm not sure but I like this way best. It's an occupation for a man to keep up a cottage."
"And so you do not find it dull?"
"No. When we aren't out riding, she and Irene go on to the cliffs, and I sit here and talk real estate. It's about all there is to talk of."
There was an awkward moment or two when the two parties met in the lobby and were introduced before going in to breakfast. There was a little putting up of guards on the part of the ladies. Between Irene and Marion passed that rapid glance of inspection, that one glance which includes a study and the passing of judgment upon family, manners, and dress, down to the least detail. It seemed to be satisfactory, for after a few words of civility the two girls walked in together, Irene a little dignified, to be sure, and Marion with her wistful, half-inquisitive expression. Mr. King could not be mistaken in thinking Irene's manner a little constrained and distant to him, and less cordial than it was to Mr. Forbes, but the mother righted the family balance.
"I'm right glad you've come, Mr. King. It's like seeing somebody from home. I told Irene that when you came I guess we should know somebody. It's an awful fashionable place."
"And you have no acquaintances here?"
"No, not really. There's Mrs. Peabody has a cottage here, what they call a cottage, but there no such house in Cyrusville. We drove past it. Her daughter was to school with Irene. We've met 'em out riding several times, and Sally (Miss Peabody) bowed to Irene, and pa and I bowed to everybody, but they haven't called. Pa says it's because we are at a hotel, but I guess it's been company or something. They were real good friends at school."
Mr. King laughed. "Oh, Mrs. Benson, the Peabodys were nobodys only a few years ago. I remember when they used to stay at one of the smaller hotels."
"Well, they seem nice, stylish people, and I'm sorry on Irene's account."
At breakfast the party had topics enough in common to make conversation lively. The artist was sure he should be delighted with the beauty and finish of Newport. Miss Lamont doubted if she should enjoy it as much as the freedom and freshness of the Catskills. Mr. King amused himself with drawing out Miss Benson on the contrast with Atlantic City. The dining-room was full of members of the Institute, in attendance upon the annual meeting, graybearded, long-faced educators, devotees of theories and systems, known at a glance by a certain earnestness of manner and intensity of expression, middle-aged women of a resolute, intellectual countenance, and a great crowd of youthful schoolmistresses, just on the dividing line between domestic life and self-sacrifice, still full of sentiment, and still leaning perhaps more to Tennyson and Lowell than to mathematics and Old English.
"They have a curious, mingled air of primness and gayety, as if gayety were not quite proper," the artist began. "Some of them look downright interesting, and I've no doubt they are all excellent women."
"I've no doubt they are all good as gold," put in Mr. King. "These women are the salt of New England." (Irene looked up quickly and appreciatively at the speaker.) "No fashionable nonsense about them. What's in you, Forbes, to shy so at a good woman?"
"I don't shy at a good woman—but three hundred of them! I don't want all my salt in one place. And see here—I appeal to you, Miss Lamont —why didn't these girls dress simply, as they do at home, and not attempt a sort of ill-fitting finery that is in greater contrast to Newport than simplicity would be?"
"If you were a woman," said Marion, looking demurely, not at Mr. Forbes, but at Irene, "I could explain it to you. You don't allow anything for sentiment and the natural desire to please, and it ought to be just pathetic to you that these girls, obeying a natural instinct, missed the expression of it a little."
"Men are such critics," and Irene addressed the remark to Marion, "they pretend to like intellectual women, but they can pardon anything better than an ill-fitting gown. Better be frivolous than badly dressed."
"Well," stoutly insisted Forbes, "I'll take my chance with the well-dressed ones always; I don't believe the frumpy are the most sensible."
"No; but you make out a prima facie case against a woman for want of taste in dress, just as you jump at the conclusion that because a woman dresses in such a way as to show she gives her mind to it she is of the right sort. I think it's a relief to see a convention of women devoted to other things who are not thinking of their clothes."
"Pardon me; the point I made was that they are thinking of their clothes, and thinking erroneously."
"Why don't you ask leave to read a paper, Forbes, on the relation of dress to education?" asked Mr. King.
They rose from the table just as Mrs. Benson was saying that for her part she liked these girls, they were so homelike; she loved to hear them sing college songs and hymns in the parlor. To sing the songs of the students is a wild, reckless dissipation for girls in the country.
When Mr. King and Irene walked up and down the corridor after breakfast the girl's constraint seemed to have vanished, and she let it be seen that she had sincere pleasure in renewing the acquaintance. King himself began to realize how large a place the girl's image had occupied in his mind. He was not in love—that would be absurd on such short acquaintance—but a thought dropped into the mind ripens without consciousness, and he found that he had anticipated seeing Irene again with decided interest. He remembered exactly how she looked at Fortress Monroe, especially one day when she entered the parlor, bowing right and left to persons she knew, stopping to chat with one and another, tall, slender waist swelling upwards in symmetrical lines, brown hair, dark-gray eyes—he recalled every detail, the high-bred air (which was certainly not inherited), the unconscious perfect carriage, and his thinking in a vague way that such ease and grace meant good living and leisure and a sound body. This, at any rate, was the image in his mind —a sufficiently distracting thing for a young man to carry about with him; and now as he walked beside her he was conscious that there was something much finer in her than the image he had carried with him, that there was a charm of speech and voice and expression that made her different from any other woman he had ever seen. Who can define this charm, this difference? Some women have it for the universal man—they are desired of every man who sees them; their way to marriage (which is commonly unfortunate) is over a causeway of prostrate forms, if not of cracked hearts; a few such women light up and make the romance of history. The majority of women fortunately have it for one man only, and sometimes he never appears on the scene at all! Yet every man thinks his choice belongs to the first class; even King began to wonder that all Newport was not raving over Irene's beauty. The present writer saw her one day as she alighted from a carriage at the Ocean House, her face flushed with the sea air, and he remembers that he thought her a fine girl. "By George, that's a fine woman!" exclaimed a New York bachelor, who prided himself on knowing horses and women and all that; but the country is full of fine women—this to him was only one of a thousand.
What were this couple talking about as they promenaded, basking in each other's presence? It does not matter. They were getting to know each other, quite as much by what they did not say as by what they did say, by the thousand little exchanges of feeling and sentiment which are all-important, and never appear even in a stenographer's report of a conversation. Only one thing is certain about it, that the girl could recall every word that Mr. King said, even his accent and look, long after he had forgotten even the theme of the talk. One thing, however, he did carry away with him, which set him thinking. The girl had been reading the "Life of Carlyle," and she took up the cudgels for the old curmudgeon, as King called him, and declared that, when all was said, Mrs. Carlyle was happier with him than she would have been with any other man in England. "What woman of spirit wouldn't rather mate with an eagle, and quarrel half the time, than with a humdrum barn-yard fowl?" And Mr. Stanhope King, when he went away, reflected that he who had fitted himself for the bar, and traveled extensively, and had a moderate competence, hadn't settled down to any sort of career. He had always an intention of doing something in a vague way; but now the thought that he was idle made him for the first time decidedly uneasy, for he had an indistinct notion that Irene couldn't approve of such a life.
This feeling haunted him as he was making a round of calls that day. He did not return to lunch or dinner—if he had done so he would have found that lunch was dinner and that dinner was supper—another vital distinction between the hotel and the cottage. The rest of the party had gone to the cliffs with the artist, the girls on a pretense of learning to sketch from nature. Mr. King dined with his cousin.
"You are a bad boy, Stanhope," was the greeting of Mrs. Bartlett Glow, "not to come to me. Why did you go to the hotel?"
"Oh, I thought I'd see life; I had an unaccountable feeling of independence. Besides, I've a friend with me, a very clever artist, who is re-seeing his country after an absence of some years. And there are some other people."
"Oh, yes. What is her name?"
"Why, there is quite a party. We met them at different places. There'sa very bright New York girl, Miss Lamont, and her uncle from Richmond."("Never heard of her," interpolated Mrs. Glow.) "And a Mr. and Mrs.Benson and their daughter, from Ohio. Mr. Benson has made money; Mrs.Benson, good-hearted old lady, rather plain and—"
"Yes, I know the sort; had a falling-out with Lindley Murray in her youth and never made it up. But what I want to know is about the girl. What makes you beat about the bush so? What's her name?"
"Irene. She is an uncommonly clever girl; educated; been abroad a good deal, studying in Germany; had all advantages; and she has cultivated tastes; and the fact is that out in Cyrusville—that is where they live —You know how it is here in America when the girl is educated and the old people are not—"
"The long and short of it is, you want me to invite them here. I suppose the girl is plain, too—takes after her mother?"
"Not exactly. Mr. Forbes—that's my friend—says she's a beauty. But if you don't mind, Penelope, I was going to ask you to be a little civil to them."
"Well, I'll admit she is handsome—a very striking-looking girl. I've seen them driving on the Avenue day after day. Now, Stanhope, I don't mind asking them here to a five o'clock; I suppose the mother will have to come. If she was staying with somebody here it would be easier. Yes, I'll do it to oblige you, if you will make yourself useful while you are here. There are some girls I want you to know, and mind, my young friend, that you don't go and fall in love with a country girl whom nobody knows, out of the set. It won't be comfortable."
"You are always giving me good advice, Penelope, and I should be a different man if I had profited by it."
"Don't be satirical, because you've coaxed me to do you a favor."
Late in the evening the gentlemen of the hotel party looked in at the skating-rink, a great American institution that has for a large class taken the place of the ball, the social circle, the evening meeting. It seemed a little incongruous to find a great rink at Newport, but an epidemic is stronger than fashion, and even the most exclusive summer resort must have its rink. Roller-skating is said to be fine exercise, but the benefit of it as exercise would cease to be apparent if there were a separate rink for each sex. There is a certain exhilaration in the lights and music and the lively crowd, and always an attraction in the freedom of intercourse offered. The rink has its world as the opera has, its romances and its heroes. The frequenters of the rink know the young women and the young men who have a national reputation as adepts, and their exhibitions are advertised and talked about as are the appearances of celebrated 'prime donne' and 'tenori' at the opera. The visitors had an opportunity to see one of these exhibitions. After a weary watching of the monotonous and clattering round and round of the swinging couples or the stumbling single skaters, the floor was cleared, and the darling of the rink glided upon the scene. He was a slender, handsome fellow, graceful and expert to the nicest perfection in his profession. He seemed not so much to skate as to float about the floor, with no effort except volition. His rhythmic movements were followed with pleasure, but it was his feats of dexterity, which were more wonderful than graceful, that brought down the house. It was evident that he was a hero to the female part of the spectators, and no doubt his charming image continued to float round and round in the brain of many a girl when she put her, head on the pillow that night. It is said that a good many matches which are not projected or registered in heaven are made at the rink.
At the breakfast-table it appeared that the sketching-party had been a great success—for everybody except the artist, who had only some rough memoranda, like notes for a speech, to show. The amateurs had made finished pictures.
Miss Benson had done some rocks, and had got their hardness very well. Miss Lamont's effort was more ambitious; her picture took in no less than miles of coast, as much sea as there was room for on the paper, a navy of sail-boats, and all the rocks and figures that were in the foreground, and it was done with a great deal of naivete and conscientiousness. When it was passed round the table, the comments were very flattering.
"It looks just like it," said Mr. Benson.
"It's very comprehensive," remarked Mr. Forbes.
"What I like, Marion," said Mr. De Long, holding it out at arm's-length, "is the perspective; it isn't an easy thing to put ships up in the sky."
"Of course," explained Irene, "it was a kind of hazy day."
"But I think Miss Lamont deserves credit for keeping the haze out of it." King was critically examining it, turning his head from side to side. "I like it; but I tell you what I think it lacks: it lacks atmosphere. Why don't you cut a hole in it, Miss Lamont, and let the air in?"
"Mr. King," replied Miss Lamont, quite seriously, "you are a real friend,I can only repay you by taking you to church this morning."
"You didn't make much that time, King," said Forbes, as he lounged out of the room.
After church King accepted a seat in the Benson carriage for a drive on the Ocean Road. He who takes this drive for the first time is enchanted with the scene, and it has so much variety, deliciousness in curve and winding, such graciousness in the union of sea and shore, such charm of color, that increased acquaintance only makes one more in love with it. A good part of its attraction lies in the fickleness of its aspect. Its serene and soft appearance might pall if it were not now and then, and often suddenly, and with little warning, transformed into a wild coast, swept by a tearing wind, enveloped in a thick fog, roaring with the noise of the angry sea slapping the rocks and breaking in foam on the fragments its rage has cast down. This elementary mystery and terror is always present, with one familiar with the coast, to qualify the gentleness of its lovelier aspects. It has all moods. Perhaps the most exhilarating is that on a brilliant day, when shore and sea sparkle in the sun, and the waves leap high above the cliffs, and fall in diamond showers.