During his first year abroad he had dabbled a good deal in French fiction; this was at Geneva, before his long and intimate sojourn in Paris. His taste had been formed, in the first instance, by the more frivolous productions of the Romantic school—by "Mademoiselle de Maupin," in part; by the "Vie de Boheme," more largely; and this taste had taken a confirmed set through the perusal of other works of a like trend—more contemporaneous and therefore still more deleterious. At Geneva he had permitted himself various fond imaginings of Mimi and Musette as they might disclose themselves in Paris—it was useless, all, to expect the encounter in this strenuous little stronghold of Calvinism; but Mimi and Musette, the actual, the contemporaneous, once met at short range, were far, far from thegracieuseandmignonnecreations of Murger and of 1830. And if disappointing in Paris, how much more so in Chicago?—where impropriety was still wholly incapable of presenting itself in a guise that could enlist the sympathies of the fastidious. Truesdale, whether or no, found himself restricted within reasonable bounds by his own good taste. Nor was Paston permitted much greater latitude; whatever his taste, the condition of his finances would alone have checked him from straying too widely outside the beaten path.
Paston was less reticent about the worldly status of himself and his family than might have been expected; he treated the subject in a broad, free fashion, with a great pretense to openness. Few apprehended the general and essential cautiousness of his disclosures; most people fell easily enough into the notion that so much frank jocularity had no other object than to entertain them; the young man was doubtless exaggerating, possibly inventing.
"Absurd situation, isn't it?" he would set forth in his large and genial way. "Poor father! six girls to see married off; and five boys to start in life—quite as bad. One in the Army, one in the Navy, one in the Church, one in the Civil Service, and one—in America. No other way; somebody had to come to America—the youngest, naturally. And here he is."
"Fancy that, Bessie! Imagine that, Allie!" his hearers would cry. Then they would ask him about the fox-hunting in Bucks, and tease him for further particulars about his sister Edith, who had married Lord Such-a-one.
The subject of America he treated with some tact—with some forbearance, he himself may have thought. If asked point-blank whether he liked it, he would reply that his preference, naturally, must be for England. If asked further whether he liked Chicago—an inquiry which courtesy might well have withheld—he would answer promptly and plainly, No. And there the matter would end: he never gave detailed explanations. He was prepared, it came to be understood, to put the best face on a bad matter. He remained, however, a loyal subject of the Queen, and prayed for as speedy a sight of Boxton Park, Witham, Essex, as fortune would permit. And in the meantime he enjoyed such makeshift pleasures as came his way.
Among these was that of leaving his card at several good houses—the card of Arthur Gerald Scodd-Paston. People met him at functions as Mr. Scodd-Paston, but most of them found his name rather a large mouthful; after they had used it enough times to show that they had caught it and were not unable to wield it, they would dispense with the forepart and use the Paston alone. This usage received the approval of a certain few who had had the privilege of addressing royalty—or subroyalty—and who remembered that, after they had used the expression "Your Royal Highness" a few times, they were entitled to an occasional lapse into the simpler "you." At the office, where he was by no means a royal highness, he was always Paston, and Paston merely.
His father was a general in the British army, but lately retired. He never referred to this dignitary, as such, save twice. These early references, pointed but discreet he held to suffice; he estimated, properly enough, that his father's fame, once started, might be trusted to spread of itself; and it did—along with the son's modesty.
It was doubtless to his father's personal influence that he was indebted for his connection with a great mortgage and investment company, which extended, in a chain of many links, all the way from London to Colorado, and a foothold in whose Chicago office he had been fortunate enough to secure. The salary connected with the place was but so-so; yet the place itself, as agreed to among the Englishry of Chicago, was in no degree unsuited to a young man of good family, fair education, small resources, and limited prospects, and a desire to make a decorous and self-respecting figure in society—such society as Western conditions offered. They said the position was as good—socially—as any in one of the branch Canadian banks; some of the more intensely English (the Canadians themselves) were fain to acknowledge that it was even better.
So Paston did his "office work" of whatever kind during the day, and distributed his cards through the evening hours, and dined out with a good-will whenever occasion offered. This was often enough; he soon became known as one of the most persistent diners-out in town, and one of the most accomplished. His animal spirits were overflowing; his plump and ruddy person seemed to be at once grace, appetizer, and benediction; his fund of stories and anecdotes (constantly replenished from the most approved sources) was inexhaustible; he carried everything through almost single-handed, by reason of his abounding vitality and never-ending good-nature. Everybody wanted him who could get him; his presence lessened by half the rigors of entertaining. He therefore lodged quietly in a retired little house in the edge of a good neighborhood; they gave him his breakfast there, and warded off those who came to spy out the leanness of the land. He was thus seldom called upon to take thought for the morrow—having once passed, that is to say, the crucial hour of lunch.
He led germans and promoted other social industries. His vacations he could have spent six times over at all manner of desirable places. On Sundays, through the summer, he was possessed briefly of the freedom of the scattered suburban settlements along the North shore. He always got a hundred cents out of every dollar, and in many instances he got the hundred cents and kept the dollar too.
Truesdale was slow in making up his mind to introduce Paston into his own household. But Paston presently made his entrée there under other auspices; and within a month from that day Rosamund Marshall was studying Debrett and was taking hurdles at a riding-academy.
For a third new acquaintance Truesdale was indebted to his aunt Lydia; he had felt certain, all along, that some such indebtedness would befall. His aunt lived two or three miles due south from his father's, near the last brace of big hotels. Her house had a rather imposing but impassive front of gray-stone, with many neighbors, more or less varying the same type, to the right and to the left and over the way. The house had never the absolute effect of extending hospitality; but he understood the possibilities of the interior, and knew that a cup of tea late on a November afternoon was among them.
As he drew near he found this house and the other houses combined in a conspiracy of silence against the musical addresses of a swarthy foreigner who had a foothold a yard beyond the curbstone, and who was turning the crank of his instrument with all the rapid regularity of the thorough mechanician. The whole street rang. "'Ah, perchè non posso odiarti!'" hummed Truesdale in unison with the organ, as the performer, after an intricate cadenza, returned to the original theme. "That's the only recognizable thing I've heard these fellows play since I came over. I wonder who puts together all the shocking stuff they are loaded up with nowadays."
The melody, so plaintive and cloying as a vocal performance, leaped forward briskly enough under the rapid lashings to and fro of the crank; the elbow of the organist moved with a swift rhythm as his searching eye tried vainly to wring a penny or two from some one of all these opulent facades. "Good Heaven!" cried Truesdale; "how little feeling, how little expression! Here," he said to the man in Italian; "take this half lira and letmehave a chance. Bellini was never meant to go like that."
The man, with a cheerful grin, yielded up his instrument to this engaging youth who was able to address him so pointedly in his own language, and Truesdale, with his eye on his aunt's upper windows, proceeded to indulge himself in a realization of his ideal. His aunt was vastly susceptible to music, and he would heap upon her (in the absence of any other) all those passionate reproaches for cruelty and faithlessness proper to the rôle—welling crescendos and plaintive diminuendos and long, slow rallentandos, followed quickly by panting and impassioned accelerandos. In other words, he would show this music-cobbler the possibilities of his instrument and the emotional capacity of the human soul. Incidentally, he should earn his cup of tea.
"Why, oh why do I strive in vain to h-a-te thee,Cruel creature, as deeply as I would?"
began Truesdale, blithely, with his eye on the one window whose shade was not completely lowered. But at the third or fourth measure he paused disconcerted. He had adopted a varying rhythm to express each last fine shade of the text, and the air was already littered with abrupt and disjointed phrases which began with a quick snarl or with a prolonged nasal wail, leaving a sudden hiatus here, and giving there a long, lingering scream on some mere passing note.
"Dear me!" exclaimed Truesdale, "this won't do at all. Here, signor organista, just set that thing back, will you, and we'll start again."
"Why, oh why do I strive in vain to hate thee?"
More notes shattered themselves on the stone walls about him—singly, in bunches, in long, detached wails. The organ yelped and snarled as Truesdale, time routed and accent annihilated, abandoned himself to the expression and the phrasing of the true Italian school. Two or three passing children paused on the pavement; a park policeman, stationed on the next corner, walked his sedate iron-gray slowly along to the point of disturbance.
Presently the object of all this attention showed herself. Mrs. Rhodes appeared at the window with that expression of indignant protest which forecasts an appeal to the authorities. When she saw the offending cause her indignation did not greatly diminish; she refused to smile even when Truesdale extended his hat for the usual tribute. He saw her lips move, however, with a quick exclamation which brought a second person to the window. Then both immediately withdrew.
"Another niece, I swear!" said Truesdale; "and I've walked right into it." He gave the man a second dime. "I guess you understand it better than I do, after all," he said, magnanimously.
"What was your idea in making me ridiculous that way?" his aunt asked in severe reproach, as she advanced to meet him in the reception-hall. "Do you want to set me up as a laughingstock for all my friends and neighbors? After all I've told Bertie about your music, too! I don't know whether I shall let you know her or not."
"It was pretty rocky, wasn't it?" Truesdale admitted, with a cheery impartiality. "I'm afraid it takes more practice than I've ever had a chance to give it. And perhaps I don't understand the genius of the instrument. Where do you suppose they learn to do it? How long a course is necessary, do you fancy, to get a complete grip on the technique?"
His aunt's protest had been purely personal. With a broader outlook and a better understanding she might have protested on behalf of a slighted neighborhood, or, indeed, of a misprized town. A finer vision might have seen in Truesdale's prank a good-natured, half-contemptuous indifference alike to place and people. "I don't knowwhatthe Warners over the way will think," she emitted, as if that were all.
She presently relented as to the new inmate of her household. "Come,Bertie!" she called; "step up, like a good girl. This is my nephewTruesdale—you've heard all about him; Miss Bertie Patterson, ofMadison."
Miss Patterson of Madison was a shy, brown-eyed little girl who, at a guess, had been in long dresses but a year or two; as she faced Truesdale she seemed to be wondering if she might venture to smile. She had never before been south of the Wisconsin State line; but Mrs. Rhodes, having exhausted the ranks of her own nieces, was now giving a tardy recognition to the nieces of her late husband. Bertie Patterson had come for the winter, and she was finding a great deal of pleasure and interest (slightly tinctured with awe) in a town which for some years she had favored with a highly idealistic anticipation.
"Nice little thing," admitted Truesdale, inwardly; "but Aunt Lydia has got to leavemealone."
Mrs. Rhodes took him into the drawing-room, and had Bertie Patterson make him his tea. She did this very nicely; she helped rather than hindered the effect by her hesitancy and lack of complete confidence. She had never poured tea many times before for a young man—never at all for just such a young man as this.
"Now," said his aunt, presently. She emitted this monosyllable with a falling inflection, and followed it by a full stop. She took his teacup from him. "You know what little Tommy Tucker did." She placed her thumb on one of the upper black notes of the piano and waved her fingers over the remainder of the keyboard. "'Just a song at twilight,'" She quoted, with a coaxing smile.
"All right," said Truesdale, promptly. "Thanks for this chance to redeem myself. I'll show you now how it really ought to go."
And he did. At Milan he had seen reflected in his looking-glass not only Fernando, but Elvino, too, besides Edgardo and Manrico, and that whole romantic brotherhood. He resuscitated them all, with as much sentiment, romance, passion, drama, as each individual case required, while Bertie Patterson sat in the fading light behind the great three-cornered screen of the up-tilted cover and clasped her hands and brought her generous idealizing faculty into its fullest play.
Then he sang a few German lieder of a more contemporaneous cast. Then his aunt asked him for that last sweet little thing of his own. "I don't believe Bertie has ever heard a composer sing one of his own songs."
As he concluded, his aunt gave a long and appreciative sigh. "There!" she breathed. Then: "Why do you act like a crazy, when you can be so nice if you only will?"
"Drive on a little farther, Martin," Mrs. Bates directed her coachman; "I can never work my way through all that mess."
Beds of mortar and piles of brick half filled the roadway, and the posts of a kind of rough plank canopy, which formed a shelter for pedestrians, rose flush with the curbstone. Far above this improvised shelter bricklayers were adding the courses of a new story or two to the walls of a shabby and smoke-stained old structure, and immediately below it the march of traffic and the hubbub of trade proceeded upon the broad flag sidewalk as fully as contractors and their underlings would permit. "Right over there," Mrs. Bates indicated; "between that sand-pile and the row of flour-barrels."
Porters in blue overalls hurried boxes and tubs across the wide walk to the waiting carts of suburban grocers. Through the dingy windows there showed rows of shelves set with bottles of olives or cluttered with glass jars containing various grades of molasses. From the narrow window of a small, close pen, a few feet within the door, a shipping-clerk, wearing a battered straw hat of the past summer, thrust out bills of lading to draymen and issued directions to a gang of German and Swedish roustabouts.
"I have taken a great time to come," Mrs. Bates observed to herself. She rubbed a streak of lime from her fur coat, and stooped to pick a splinter from the hem of her skirt. "Who's the one to ask, I wonder?"
She secured the interest of a plump, round-shouldered young German, whose viscous hands had just left a syrup-cask, and whose wide blue eyes stared at this unaccustomed visitor with an honest wonder. He ventured to lead her as far as a door in a grimy glass partition which closed off a large room filled with desks, gas-shades, clerks, and account-books. Circles of teacups stood on the round tops of oak tables; little pasteboard trays of coffee were disposed on the wide window-ledges, and were also ranged on the top of a substantial balustrade that shut off two or three gentlemen in high silk hats from the other occupants of the place.
Mrs. Bates threw herself upon the guidance of a young office-hand—the sole person present who seemed sufficiently disengaged to notice her. He asked her, with a mixture of surprise and deference, what name he should give.
"Sue Lathrop, say," she responded, in an access of large and liberal recklessness.
She was led through another door, in another dingy glass partition, to a smaller room at one corner, and as she passed along she threw a general glance over her surroundings. "Sohe'shere, then!" she said, under her breath, as one of the gentlemen took off his hat and set it carefully on top of a desk. "I'd forgotten all about his being in business with David. It's just as well if he didn't see me. No love lost," she added, grimly.
She paused on the threshold of this last doorway; apparently she had fallen upon the final moments of some small conference. A tall, spare old man was delaying the resumption of his correspondence to call a last word after a younger one, who had just set his hat upon the back of his head and was now moving towards the exit.
"Try a summons—yes," said the elder; "that would have been the best thing to start with, wouldn't it?"
"I don't quite see it that way,' replied the other, in the tone of heated defence. "he took the goods, and must have had them on the premises."
"You didn't find them, though. I don't quite see the use of your having gone with a writ of replevin after goods that I were bought to be sold again as soon as might be."
"Such old stuff isn't worked off in any such haste as that. It's as I tell you—word was got around to her that the writ had been issued. The place was all turned upside down; the things had been hidden away."
"Who could have told her?"
"Who?" cried the other, with a scornful impatience. "Somebody connected with the court. Who else could? Who else knew? Well, I'll try the other thing; there is plenty yet to be learned about justice-court justice, no doubt." He passed out with snapping eyes and a curl on his lips, and the older man again bent himself over his desk.
It was a cramped little room with a breadth or two of worn oilcloth on the floor. Two or three shelves, set across the dingy window, supported a range of glass jars filled with nutmegs and orris-root. On the tilted flagging, outside, the tops of a row of blue gasoline barrels held each a half-pint of the past night's shower, and across the muddy street bunches of battered bananas hung from the rusty framework of several shabby old awnings.
"Poor David! twenty years and more ofthis!" Mrs. Bates stood within the doorway. It was easy enough to figure her as already forgotten—easier still when the old man's half-guilty start at length acknowledged her presence.
She stepped forward with an undaunted cordiality. "Well, David, here I am at last, you see. The mountain wouldn't come to Mohammed, so"—She tapped her foot smartly on the oilcloth. "Here stands Sue Lathrop, with a long memory and a disposition to meet the mountain half-way, or three-quarters, or seven-eighths, or to trudge the whole distance—even to the last yard. One, two, three!" she counted, as she stepped up to his desk and flung out her hand.
The old man rose with something like alacrity. He banished his slight frown of preoccupation and hastened to replace it by an expression of—so to speak—apologetic cordiality.
"Mrs. Bates," he murmured. "It's very kind of you to come here—very. My daughter—" he hesitated. He finished the sentence by drawing up a chair and clearing its seat of the ruck of morning papers.
"I take the chair," she said, as if in burlesque assumption of the guidance of some public meeting, "but not as any 'Mrs. Bates.' You know, David, that I haven't come here to be treated with any such formality as that."
He looked at her with a half-smiling wistfulness, as if he would be glad enough to take her tone, were the thing only possible. But for such a juncture as this he had little initiative and less momentum, and he realized it all too well.
Mrs. Bates seated herself and threw open her furs. Her affluence, her expansiveness, her easy mastery of the situation seemed to crowd this square and ineffective old man quite into a corner. She counted his wrinkles and his gray hairs; she noted the patient dulness of his eye and the slow deliberation of his movements. "Heisold," she thought; "older than I should have imagined. I might have bestirred myself and come before."
She turned on him with a flash of her own magnificent and abounding vitality. "I want you to assure me that I am not in the way—that I am not interrupting business. This is not the 'busy day,' I hope, that the little placards in the offices tell about." She must meet his unreadiness with the fluency over which she had such a fortunate and unfailing command. "This isn't the busy hour of the day, nor the busy day of the week, nor the busy week of the year?"
Marshall smiled slowly. He felt himself coming to a better adjustment with her mature and massive comeliness, her rich and elaborate attire, her full-toned and friendly fluency. "We are always busy, and are expecting to be busier still; but we are never too busy for a call like this." He considered that that was doing pretty fairly for an old man who was immersed in affairs and altogether alien to the amenities of the great world.
Mrs. Bates rubbed again at the lime-streak on her fur. "Expecting to be busier, yes; and preparing for it accordingly." But why "we"?—she was not calling on the firm. "I'm sure I broke in on something at the very start." She made him a determined tender of this handle—something or other, apparently, he must be offered to take hold of.
"Only a little matter with my son. It was ending as you came in."
"Your son?" Here was an opening, indeed. "Not the one just home from abroad?"
"Oh no. That's Truesdale. Roger, now, has stayed at home; and he has done the better for it, I think. He looks after my law business. He has never had any of the disadvantages of European travel," the old man concluded, with a kind of gentle grimness.
Mrs. Bates's eyes flashed; here, to her thinking, was a glimmer of the real David, after all.
"My boys haven't been over either," she responded. She cast aside any lingering fear that no "talk" could ensue; it must, it should. "No," she went on, "neither one of them; and I'm none too sure that they everwillgo. But as for college—well,thatI absolutely insisted upon. When my first boy was getting along to that age the question gave me a good deal of anxiety. Mr. Bates had his views and I had mine. Granger was for clapping him right into business; for a week I was positively alarmed. Up to that time my husband and I had staved forward abreast—neither had ever disappointed the other, nor lagged behind the other; but I was afraid that the point had been reached at last where I must drop him behind and go ahead alone. 'My dear husband,' I began—and when I begin like that he knows I mean business—'my dear husband, do you realize what the next twenty years are holding for this town? Do you know the promise they have for a young man of family who is properly qualified and started? Do we want our boys to get their manners from the daily hustle of La Salle Street? Do we want them to get their physique by doubling over books all day in a close, unwholesome office? What's the good of all our millions if we can't start our children in life with good health and good manners? Let them build up sound bodies and let them learn the usages of good society—how to associate on equal terms, in fact, with men of their own class. Give them a chance at tennis and baseball. As for their Latin and Greek, it won't do them any real harm—they'll forget it all in due season.' And so forth, and so forth," added Mrs. Bates, conscious of the growing length of her tirade. "Well, I had my way in the end—I usually do—besides the satisfaction of finding that Granger Bates was still capable of stepping right along with his wife. Billy came home—a big, handsome, gentlemanly fellow—and was put into the business on the very day he was twenty-one. He's doing well, and Jimmy will follow in due course. Your oldest boy is a lawyer, then. What's the other one?"
"He's a gentleman—so far," answered Marshall, rather ruefully. "I'm afraid he's almost too clever to be anything else."
"H'm," pondered Mrs. Bates, with a sympathetic thoughtfulness; "that's bad—bad. I'd sooner have a boy of mine dead than a mere gentleman. And I shouldn't want him too clever, either. My Billy, before we sent him off to college, showed signs of cleverness; it worried me a good deal. He wanted to write; and there was one time when he thought he wanted to paint. Of course we couldn't allow anything like that. I was willing enough that he should be posted on the best books, and be able to tell a good painting from a bad one—to be a patron of the arts, if so minded. But to do things of that sort himself—oh, really, you know, that was altogether out of the question. He's with his father now, as I say, and he's where he belongs. How old is your other boy—Roger? Twenty-eight? Twenty-nine?"
"Thirty. He went right from the High School to the Law School. No college, no Europe; yet for all that—"
"For all that, he's doing well, eh? He's got quite a practice, has he?He's a smart fellow? He's a good lawyer?"
Marshall hesitated. A week previous his affirmative would have come more promptly. "Yes," he said at length, "Roger is pretty good in his line. He does for himself; he never makes any demands on his father. He is practising right along, and—and learning. He does quite well—in some things." The old gentleman's tone and manner expressed a delicate and disappointed qualification; and his thought seemed gliding away to something in no wise connected with the present talk.
Mrs. Bates brought him back to the actualities of the moment; she had no idea of permitting her impromptu address on education (furthest of all things from her thoughts as she had entered) to be succeeded by an absolute hiatus. She therefore made inquiries of the customary civility about the other members of the Marshall family. She asked with a firm and ceremonial emphasis after Mrs. Marshall, and expressed herself as pleased at the prospect of renewed relations between the two families. "We are the old settlers, you know. There are only a few of us left, and we ought to hang together." She inquired further about his youngest daughter, whose social fortunes she seemed disposed to promote; she even made a civil reference to the remote dweller at Riverdale Park. And then, with every appearance of relish, she approached the subject of the other daughter who came between—"the girl who gave me an art course in my own house," she declared, with twinkling eyes.
Marshall smiled. "That's Jane, true enough. She has always been kind of literary and artistic, and lately she has become architectural too. She is down here once or twice a week to help Bingham put on these extra stories."
"Bingham? My Bingham? Tom Bingham? He's the one who built our house," she explained.
"That's the one. Jane held out, at first, for an architect and a design; she had an idea that here was the chance, finally, to make this old block an ornament to the city. But I thought differently. So I had Bingham's people take off the cornice and run up two stories like the others. To-morrow they'll put the cornice back again, and we shall be under cover before the snow flies."
"Well, between Jane and Tom Bingham you're in pretty good hands. Have you had him before for anything? He's a grand fellow. It'll do you lots of good to know him—as much good as it has done me to know your girl. David," she went on, with a little touch of solemnity, "she's a fine girl, she's a splendid girl; and she thinks everything of her father."
"So she does," admitted the old gentleman, with a guarded smile. His comments on his daughter's affection for him were never profuse.
"When she came to see me the other day," Mrs. Bates continued, "it was like a whiff of air from the old times. It was like one of the Old Settler receptions that the Calumet people used to give—only better. Why did they stop them, I wonder? Are the old settlers giving out? Or has the town become too proud and indifferent? Or what?"
"I'm afraid it's the fault of the old settlers themselves," respondedMarshall, with a grave and quiet smile. "They won't stay to be received."
"Yes, I know," said Mrs. Bates, with a soft little sigh. "They are dropping off one by one. David!" she exclaimed suddenly, leaning forward with a wistful smile, "we ought never to have drifted apart as we did. We ought not to have lost sight of each other for all these years. I'm sure"—in earnest questioning—"that we remember enough about the old times to care to see each other once in a while still?"
Marshall dropped his eyes to his desk, and his long, lean fingers picked out the border of its blue baize covering. He was half touched, half embarrassed. "I hope so," he said.
"What gay times we used to have!" she went on, still determined, despite his meagre response, upon an evocation of their youthful past. "Such dances and sleigh-rides, and everything! You were ever so good to me in those old days; I haven't forgotten how you took me to the Diorama and the Bell-Ringers and what all besides. And 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' too—I'm sure I should never have seen it but for you; certainly I haven't had much disposition to see it oflateyears—especially since they have put the blood-hounds in! And there was Topsy and Eva, too—oh, dear, I believe I should like to see it again, after all; don't they give it over on the West Side now and then? You must remember how they wore those tall pointed hats and those red petticoats and those black velvet bands across themselves in front—not the blood-hounds—and how they had the bells on different little tables according to their size—not Topsy and Eva; I'm talking about the Peake family, you understand. And there was Adelina Patti, too—a mere slip of a girl, in the quaintest little old clothes. I go every time she comes; I wouldn't miss one of her farewells for anything. You go, too, I suppose?"
"The same old Sue," he said, smiling. "I? No; I haven't seen her since that first time, so long ago."
"Yes," she cried, "Iamthe same old Sue; and I always shall be to the friends of those dear old days! But you, David—how is it with you yourself?"
She looked at him closely, earnestly, studiously. He felt that she was disappointed in him, and he felt almost disappointed in himself. She had come to him extending, as it were, an olive branch—living, lustrous, full-foliaged; and in return he seemed able to offer nothing beyond a mere splinter-like twig—dry, sapless, unpliant. He was conscious that he was not all she had expected to find him, nor all that she was entitled to expect to find him; he was even conscious, but more dimly, that he was not quite all that he had meant to be; no, nor all that, in her eyes, he should have liked to be. Yet, in the end, he was a successful man, and she must know it. True, he had not rolled up any such enormous fortune as that of Granger Bates, nor did he make in the public eye any such splendid and enviable figure. All the same, however, he could command the world to the extent of three million dollars; nor was he displeased that his caller should have come at a time when indications of future prosperity greater still were so patent all over the premises.
Mrs. Bates smoothed her gloves upon each other and cast her eye over the nutmegs and orris-root and the other furnishings of the apartment, and heaved a little sigh and rose to go.
"I am glad to have had these few minutes with you, David; but I feel that I have no right to take up any more of them. I am sure thisisyour busy day, after all."
She looked up into his face, which was coming once more to be overcast with its accustomed aspect of preoccupation, and gave him her hand. He took it kindly enough, and she bestowed on his a quiet little pressure. It was hardly cordial; it was far indeed from effusive. Yet she had hoped, half an hour before, to have it both.
"Ten years ago," she said, "I might have satisfied myself about you without coming here at all." She stood at the end of his desk, and stirred with an unconscious finger the loose memoranda in a wire basket on the corner of it. "The papers used to speak of you, and now and then something would come by word of mouth. But I am hearing less about you of late. Hold your own, David. Don't let the world forget you. You have done well, as I know, and you are entitled to your place in the public eye."
She looked him in the face, smilingly but very earnestly. "I had great hopes for you in the early days, and I find that I am jealous for you even yet. You have made a good deal of money, they tell me, and you are getting ready to make a good deal more—thatI see for myself. But doesn't it seem to you," she proceeded, carefully, "that things are beginning to be different?—that the man who enjoys the best position and the most consideration is not the man who is making money, but the man who is giving it away—not the man who is benefiting himself, but the man who is benefiting the community.Thereis an art to cultivate, David—the art of giving. Give liberally and rightly, and nothing can bring you more credit."
Marshall regarded her with a dubious smile. Nobody had ever before attempted to fit his head to such a cap as this.
"As I have said so many times to Mr. Bates, 'Make it something that people cansee.' Imagine a man disposed to devote two or three hundred thousand dollars to the public, and giving it to help pay off the municipal debt. How many people would consider themselves benefited by the gift, or would care a cent for the name of the giver? Or fancy his giving it to clean up the streets of the city. The whole affair would be forgotten with the coming of the next rain-storm. 'No,' said I to Granger, it must be something solid and something permanent; it must be a building.' And it'sgoingto be a building. You drive out with me to the University campus this time next year, David, and you'll see Bates Hall—four stories high, with dormers and gables and things, and the name carved in gray-stone over the doorway, to stay there for the next century or two. I think I shall name it Susan Lathrop Bates Hall (Granger is willing), and make it a girls' dormitory. They'll call the girls 'Susans,' I dare say; but I sha'n't mind, and I don't suppose they will either. Besides, boys would be sure to be called 'Grangers,' so what's the difference?" She smiled whimsically, and made a feint to depart.
"But there are plenty of other things," she paused to impart. "People are always running to us about schools and hospitals. A few loose thousands, for example, would help the Orchestra guarantee—Granger has contributed there, too. And lately he has been approached about an endowed theater. There are plenty of ways."
"Your husband is fond of music?"
"Oh, well, he doesn't object to it. He can sit out an evening in our box very comfortably. But a man of his position is naturally expected to support a great artistic enterprise. Besides, Granger thinks a good deal of the reputation of the city."
"Yes, there are plenty of ways, as you say," the old man rejoined, with his preoccupied smile. "The 'charity' page of our ledger shows that. No man in business is allowed to forget his obligations to the 'public.' I am just beginning to become acquainted with the public—our public. A justice-court is a good place for us to learn what it is and who compose it, and what their attitude is toward us—the public that we are expected to do so much for."
Mrs. Bates, with her hand on the door-knob, felt herself obliged to decline this theme so tardily introduced—though the old man's tart tone promised great possibilities. She would have thanked David Marshall for a prompter contribution of conversational material; she felt that her own efforts during this interview had been out of all proportion to his. She made no response, and he stepped forward to conduct her through the outer office to her carriage. "You needn't go through all those porters again," he said.
Just inside the outer doorway stood two gentlemen; their faces were turned towards the street as they watched the preparations for the upward trip of a great length of metallic cornice. "Why," said Mrs. Bates, as one of them turned half round, "isn't that Tom Bingham, now?"
"Yes," said Marshall; "he looks in occasionally."
"How do you do, Mr. Bingham?" she said, hastening up to him with a jocular cast in her eye. She knew the Bingham Construction Company as the builders of a score of handsome residences, and of as many of the vast structures which towered all over the business district. It seemed droll to her to find him here, giving personal heed to mere alterations and repairs. "What will be the next thing—building-blocks? Let me send you a box of them, I beg of you."
Bingham turned round altogether—a tall, stalwart man whose face was full of the serenity that comes from breadth and poise, but whose mind, as she herself knew well enough, was too habituated to the broad treatment of big matters to have any aptitude for repartee and chatter. She liked to disconcert him, and it was usually an easy thing to do. "And I wish, while you have your hand in, you would just come up and nail some weather-strips on my dining-room windows."
Bingham smiled slightly. "Send on your blocks," he said—"if you think they will help me anythere." He pointed towards the cornices of the building opposite. Above their broken skyline a tall steel frame (on the next street behind) rose some two hundred feet into the air; along the black lines which its upper stage etched against the sky a dozen men swarmed in spidery activity and sent down the sharp clang of metal on metal to the noisier world below.
"Mine, too," he said, shortly, as if the vast monument were its own sufficient spokesman. He seemed proud of himself and of the town where such things could be accomplished.
Mrs. Bates flashed forth a look full of admiration for both man and work. "I'll take that all back about the weather-strips; but if youcouldbring up your kit to-morrow morning and make us an extra coal-bin in the furnace-room—-Too proud for that, too? Well, then, just come up to dinner to-morrow evening—only the family. And bring your sister, if she'll accept on such short notice."
The other gentleman, whom Mrs. Bates had overlooked, and indeed forgotten, turned round. "You know Mr. Belden, Mrs. Bates?" was Marshall's introduction.
Belden was a man between forty-five and fifty. His costume and countenance were alike much more contemporaneous than his partner's. His dress was self-consciously fashionable, and he wore a carefully trained mustache, whose dark brown was beginning to show threads of gray. His cheeks and his forehead seemed in their smoothness as if coated with some impermeable and indestructible hard-finish. He had a resolute chin and a pair of hard, steel-gray eyes, which were set much too close together to leave great room for any attribution of an open-minded generosity. He and Mrs. Bates, under Marshall's promptings, bowed icily, and a cold and chilling silence immediately ensued.
"Just like me," said Mrs. Bates, as she effected a hurried departure, "to blunder up against him as I did. I wonder if he and David get along at all well together. And the idea of my extending invitations to dinner under his very nose! Well, it can't be helped now."
She thought this the only offence of which Belden might accuse her. But he was piqued by her apparent disparagement of their building, and he was still more incensed by her having called on his partner at their place of business. For Marshall must know—everybody must know—that the Beldens, though neighbors of the Bateses, had never been admitted, and never were to be admitted, into their house.
Belden stood behind the vast spread of dingy plate-glass, and watched Bingham putting Mrs. Bates into her carriage. He found additional offence in the gay nod which she sent to Marshall through the carriage window.
"In spite of you," he muttered; "we are moving up in spite of you.Prevent us, if you can!"
Susan Bates drove homeward, filled with a vague dissatisfaction. "I expected too much," she said to herself, as she half opened the door again to free the skirt that Bingham had fastened there. "I ought to have chosen a different time and place. I might have known that he would be deep in his business—I ought not to have taken him with the harness actually on his back."
She sighed as she thought of all the things she had meant to say, but had come away without saying—the thousand and one minor reminiscences of those early days in the straggling and struggling prairie town. She had imagined a mutual evocation of the past, and it had not been accomplished. But presently consolation came: she realized all at once that her present mood was but one of those early reminiscences made modern. She recalled now how many times he had taken his departure from that little parlor, leaving her to feel just as she felt now—piqued, balked, impatient over his slow, taciturn, unresponsive ways. But her impatience and her pique had always passed off in due time, and he had always returned, his same kindly and inscrutable self. "I believe he meant to do the best he could. Anyway, I shall follow things up, all the same," she declared to the opposite cushions. Her thought deflected in the direction of Belden. "I wonder how they get along together. He is not at all the man that I should think of David being associated with—as a matter of choice. I never heard how the partnership began. I never understood why it kept up so long as it has."
The partnership, as a matter of fact, dated back twenty years, and had originated through a kind of crisis in the affairs of Marshall & Co.—the only weak spot in the history of the firm. After several years of unbroken prosperity, David Marshall (with thousands of others) had been overtaken by fire. A year or two later fire was followed by panic, and Marshall felt himself crowded towards the brink of ruin. In a moment of weakness he permitted himself a course to which only so great an emergency could have prompted him. The situation was saved by a species of legerdemain—of card-shuffling, so to speak—which was quite outside the lines of mercantile morality, and barely inside the lines of legality itself. An instrument willing to lend itself to this feat of juggling was needed, and was found in a pushing young fellow who left a rival house to play discreetly and shrewdly the rôle of figure-head that the juncture required. Marshall had long ago made full amends to the men whose welfare he had temporarily sacrificed to his own salvation, but he had never shaken off Belden, who remained constantly as a reminder of his early and only lapse from rectitude. In moments when conscience became tender under the quickening touch of reminiscence, Belden was upon him not only as a punishment, but as an incubus.
Belden had never yielded a single inch of the foothold gained by his sudden intrusion upon the affairs of the concern. His first demand was for the headship of a department; he had required, next, an interest as a partner; he had exacted, more lately, the presence of his name in the style and title of the firm; and to-day he was moving towards the making of the firm over into a stock company. He was younger than Marshall, stronger, more aggressive, more ambitious, more adventuresome; nor was it difficult to imagine him as fundamentally insolent and selfish.
His standard of mercantile morality was never higher than at the beginning, and his standard of social propriety was felt to leave much to desire. His first entry into the firm seemed to have been accompanied by a clairvoyant confidence and assurance and ambition. He was understood to have divorced his first wife, an amiable, faithful, but limited little creature, under circumstances of some cruelty, and even barbarity, to form a second union more in harmony with his mounting ideas for the future. A subtle atmosphere of distaste and disapproval had enveloped him and his for many years, and the social advances of himself and his wife had been, however determined, but slow—almost imperceptible.
Finally, what could not be accomplished in the West was accomplished, to some extent, in the East. Statira Belden was of New England origin; her family had resided for years in a small town which the taste of a few Boston families of consideration was turning into a summer resort. They contrived their cottages, and she contrived hers. She discreetly renovated the old "homestead," as she called it, and arranged to reside in eastern Massachusetts through the summer season. She made a few careful acquaintances among her neighbors, and presently found it possible to spend a profitable and distinguished winter month in the Back Bay. One step more brought her to her goal. Social exchange between Boston and New York being practically at par, she passed from one town to the other with an unimpaired currency. In Manhattan she was received with sufficient frequency by people sufficiently distinguished, and announcements in correspondence with the facts were borne westward by various metropolitan dailies and weeklies. She herself followed, in due course; she had now conquered a certain foothold at home, and her progress there was distinctly perceptible.
The last stronghold of the opposition existed, much to her mortification, in her own immediate neighborhood, where a stubborn little clique (as she called it) continued, under the leadership of Susan Bates, to ignore her. The Belden carriage-block, measuring diagonally across the street, was three hundred feet from that of the Bateses, but the distance might as well have been three hundred miles. Mrs. Bates, who, on some occasion or other, had met her face to face, continued to hold sturdily the impression that her eyes were at once too furtive and too bold, and that her hair was too yellow for a woman of her age; "or, for that matter, too yellow for a woman ofanyage."
In view of these considerations and others, Mrs. Bates was the reverse of pleased when Jane, one morning, came up to her little room, sat down on the foot of the bed, and announced that Mrs. Belden, among others, was likely to be bidden to Rosy's coming-out.
"Ma doesn't like her so extra well," Jane admitted, candidly; "she thinks they might have done something for Rosy this past summer. But it would seem awful to pa if his own partner's wife wasn't asked; and, besides, we don't know so very many peopletoask, anyway."
Mrs. Bates had made her advances in due form to the women of the Marshall family. Throughout the call the talk had been frankly, inevitably personal, and Susan Bates had treated Eliza Marshall, whose difficult and captious character she at once apprehended, with the most elaborate and ingenious simplicity. Rosy was passed in review and then dexterously dispensed with, after having aroused the caller's interest and approval; and the subsequent talk ran along quite freely on the child's deserts and prospects. Mrs. Bates was quite direct and unadorned; and, though Rosy's future was the only common ground upon which the two women could meet, yet she handled this material with such a sympathetic persistence that Eliza Marshall was fain to believe that she and her caller had been knit in a close community of interests from time immemorial.
Mrs. Bates divined readily enough that nothing would be more galling to Eliza Marshall than a betrayal of her own social ignorance. "How glad we ought to be," she said, in an innocent, left-handed fashion, "that girls are no longer brought out at a crush. Imagine, once more, that crowd of people surging up and down your stairs, and trampling each other underfoot as they try to dance in a room not a quarter big enough, and ten times too many poor flowers wilting all over the house, and a big band of music going it for dear life, and fifty or a hundred carnages tangled up in a noisy crowd outside;—why go through all that for the sake of getting a new little girl acquainted with a few of her mother's friends?"
Eliza Marshall fastened her intent but inexpressive gaze upon her caller's face and said never a word. The function thus sketched by Mrs. Bates was the precise function that for the past fortnight she had been imagining and dreading. She had filled her secluded old parlors with the squeak and the blare of music; alien draperies in their swift gyrations had whisked her immemorial ornaments from her immemorial old "whatnot"; in the dining-room a squad of custard-colored waiters had opposed a firm front to the hungry hordes that assaulted the various viands on the table; and a thousand teasing points of form and usage had afflicted her with worry, uncertainty, and possible mortification and despair. She saw now that nothing like her imagined entertainment was desirable, or even tolerable, to-day, and she gave unconsciously a little sigh of relief.
Mrs. Bates divined further that, having instructed ignorance, she must now allay timidity. She must represent the coming function as a mere bagatelle for simplicity and informality.
"Isn't it pleasant to think that things are being made so much easier for us than they used to be? Otherwise, I should have been dead long before this. Nothing to do but for our little girl to stand up with her mother and two or three of her mother's friends in one room, and for two or three other people to look after the tea and other things in some other room off behind somewhere or other." Mrs. Bates waved her hand genially towards the rear rooms. "When Lottie came out I said to Mrs. Ingles, 'Now you must just take the tea part of it off my hands. Get some girls for me—you know about the ones I want—and see that their gowns are right; and then I shall be at peace, knowing that people are nibbling their biscuits'—or crackers" (this in a tone unconsciously expository)—"'dawdling with their spoons, as they ought to.' A few, of course, really drank tea; but the others—well, they had had tea somewhere half an hour before, or expected to have it somewhere half an hour after. How tired we all get of this old rigmarole, don't we?"
Eliza Marshall bowed gravely. For her this tiresome old rigmarole was a complete novelty. "Lyddy's niece," she said, turning to Jane; "that girl from Madison—she could pour for one, couldn't she?"
"Sure," assented Jane. "Ourniece, too—sort o'," she added, correctively; for Eliza Marshall made little of certain vague ties to a half-brother.
Mrs. Bates cast her eye round the dim, old-fashioned room. One might have fancied her as exploring for the portraits of two or three mature female relations of the Marshalls.
"I don't know whether I am right in asking it," she began, with a fetching pretence of hesitancy; "but I am an old friend of the family—in a sense—and so interested in Rosy, too. If I might help you receive—"
Mrs. Marshall heard this proposal with a second little sigh of relief, and accepted as a matter of course. Indeed, outside of Mrs. Rhodes—and possibly Mrs. Belden—she had absolutely no one to whom she could turn.
"And Aunt Lyddy for another," said Jane.
"Yes," assented Mrs. Bates, in the tone of indorsement. "Mrs. Rhodes and I are acquainted"—with a sly look towards Jane; "and there—with your other sister, perhaps—our little party is made up."
"And about the people to be invited," Eliza Marshall proceeded, with some little show of initiative. Her task was becoming less and less formidable; she felt herself approaching this supposed ordeal with something almost like buoyancy.
"Let's have it nice and little and cosey," suggested Mrs. Bates, with a cosey little air of her own. "Twenty-five or thirty at the outside." She wondered inwardly where even so small a number could be got. "Why,sixwould do—if they were the right six! And why should we want more than three carriages before the house at any one time?—not to have a man shouting numbers, I hope!"
She drew her wraps together and rose to go. "If I might ask for cards for one or two of my own friends?—nice, pleasant people, who would be glad to become acquainted among the old families," she added, diplomatically. "If she can only be kept from suspecting how swell they really are, till it's all over!" was the good creature's inner thought. "Of course Rosy's appearance here isn't public, nor any equivalent for it; that will come later. I myself shall want to do something for her on the South side, and there will be one or two good houses for her on the North side—oh, our little duck will swim, when once put into the pond, as you shall see. Afterthat, we shall want only a kind papa to pay the bills and a patient maid to sit up until three or four in the morning."
Mrs. Bates got herself away in great good-humor and kept that humor until the following day, when Jane came to announce the participation of Mrs. Belden.
"Have her pour tea!" cried Susan Bates, without a moment's hesitation. "Let her come early, and let her stay late, and pour and pour and pour until the last cup is drunk. I can't promise your mother that I shall be there throughout, but I will be there for half an hour—during the middle, perhaps. And tea—well, I never drink it, even at home."
Jane looked at her in some surprise.
"And don't let your mother change her rooms any," Mrs. Bates went on, rapidly. "They're right as they are—in perfect agreement. They have a quiet tone; and a low, quiet tone, after all, is the best thing—and the hardest thing to get. And not too many flowers."
"Never fear," said Jane, grimly. "She won't change anything."
"And don't let her have too much on the table. Give them tea and chocolate and sandwiches and Albert biscuits—that's plenty. And if your second girl shows, a cap would do no harm. Put a slice of lemon in every cup—that discourages lots of people."
Jane laughed. "But ma doesn't want to discourage her friends."
"My good girl," said Mrs. Bates, impressively, "this whole function has only one object. That object is to show your sister for five minutes to Cecilia Ingles."
"Oh, that's it?"
"That's it, and all of it."
Mrs. Bates's function came off on the appointed afternoon, and was so limited in size and so simple in character that Eliza Marshall would have reproached herself for slighting her own child, had not Susan Bates, before her early departure, whispered in the old lady's ear a word of complete approbation.
Rosy herself flashed and sparkled in the dim and depressing old parlor like a garnet set in dull gold. Indeed, it must be confessed that she showed some of the hard glitter of such a jewelled fabrication, as well as its splendor. Cecilia Ingles, who could not but admire her beauty and her readiness, thought that her tone was a little too hard, and that in her excess of aplomb she pushed self-possession to the verge of self-assertion. Rosy, in fact, entered society not with the tentative step and slow advance of one who cautiously feels an unaccustomed way, but by a single confident and intuitive leap. As she stood there beside her mother, dressed in a pale yellow gown and playing carelessly with her bunch of red roses, she shifted any embarrassment incident to the occasion from her own shoulders to those of her mother's friends—two or three of whom, retired and aging persons, withdrew feeling their own social rustiness quite keenly.
Jane, who had no definite rôle to play, but who did general utility all over the house, was enabled to observe various episodes from various points of view. When the actual test came she had little more aptitude for the social graces than her mother had, and she imitated her mother's own cautious reserve. She did not meet Mrs. Ingles at all, but she witnessed from a distant doorway the conjunction which Mrs. Bates effected between the leading luminary of the day and the newly-discovered asteroid. Jane ungrudgingly acknowledged Cecilia Ingles to be magnificently beautiful, and her dress to be a miracle of taste, and her advances to be most winningly gracious. "And she's just about my own age, too," thought poor Jane, in half-unconscious comparison. "And the way that little chit stands up there and talks to her! I couldn't, for a hundred worlds. Rosy acts as if she was just as pretty herself—well, I suppose she is; and of just as good position—h'm,that'sall right enough, I'm sure; and just as used to the ways of the world—well, so she will be, fast enough." And the dear girl gave a long slow sigh—partly that the family had at last such a champion, partly that she herself should have been doomed to such complete uselessness in so high a cause. She quite failed to realize that she alone and no other was the real motive-power of her family's tardy spurt.
As for Mrs. Bates, Jane caught quite another side of her. She showed herself profoundly formal and punctilious. She seemed to have dilated for the occasion, with the express determination of dominating it. "She acts mighty queer," said honest Jane, who was the same to one and all, to-day and tomorrow; "but I suppose she knows what tone to take. If she acts like that, though, the next time I see her, I shall want to stop knowing her. She calls it a 'function,' and I suppose she's trying to make it like one. But one's enough."
Jane observed, furthermore, that her aunt Lydia was inclined to neglect her own part in the ceremony in order to perform pirouettes and pigeon-wings (so to speak) before the backgammon-player of the tropics. "If Aunt Lyddy forgets, after all," said Jane, anxiously, "anddoesmention Florida, why, I've told a fib for nothing." Jane had informed Mrs. Rhodes that the Bateses had lost their youngest child at Jacksonville, and so could not bear the slightest mention of the South; though she knew perfectly well that the youngest child of the Bateses was a lusty youth of eighteen, with strong hopes of becoming one of the Yale football team next season.
In the midst of the ceremonial Truesdale sauntered in and passed through the rooms with a graceful indifference; he was the last to be disconcerted by an assemblage purely feminine. He had doffed for the hour most of his imported eccentricities in the way of dress, and had consented to appear, properly enough, in a double-breasted black frock-coat with extremely long skirts. He had an orchid in his button-hole—a large one, very vivid and flamboyant. Jane had looked, rather, for a chrysanthemum—one of those immeasurable blooms worn by the young men inLife. "But Dickwillbe individual," she acknowledged. "Thank goodness it wasn't a peony, or worse. Hedoeslook nice, if he is my brother; and he's the only young man I know with violet eyes."
Truesdale drifted into the tea-room, and Jane presently saw him lounging in a chair alongside Bertie Patterson. The table was officered after the fashion that Mrs. Bates had suggested—by Mrs. Belden, who, in the absence of her own daughter, kept away by illness, had brought, instead, another girl, her daughter's friend, a visitor from New York. Truesdale failed to catch her name.
Mrs. Belden herself was somewhat large and inclined to be a bit high-colored and full-blown. An excess of blond down lined her cheeks just below and before her ears, and her light-colored eyebrows spread themselves rather broadly and dispersedly on her forehead. A superfluity of straw-colored hair, of a shade essentially improbable waved about her ears and temples, and a high gold comb emphasized the loose knot into which it was drawn behind. "She would do better on the stage," Truesdale said to himself; "she has gotten herself up for the photographer. And if all those rings are her own, she has more than any one woman needs."
The girl with her, whose name presently came to him as Gladys—"Gladys what?" he wondered—let herself loose on him at once with a fusillade of ready familiarities. The field was clear, for Bertie Patterson, at his side, had few words to interpose. Her large brown eyes rested half appealingly upon him in the intervals of her constrained and halting little service, and he readily divined the poor child as in a lonely and uncomfortable minority.
"To-day is only my second time," she said to him, with a kind of appealing protest; "you mustn't watch me and criticise me." She had just finished her ministrations on a pair of old-time family friends whom Rosy, in the fulness of her social efflorescence, had banished for consolation and reassurance to the tea-room. Somehow, the guests that had fallen to her side of the table had all been of this character. "When was the first?"
"Why, don't you know? The day you—you—"
"Oh,thatday!" laughed Truesdale. "I didn't know you were there, of course. You must have thought me absurd."
"No; not—not—absurd. But on such a long, wide street, with so many handsome houses all around—"
Truesdale smiled. "Poor little thing! I believe she admires Michigan Avenue; I believe she's impressed by it." To him this thoroughfare was not completely innocent of the cheap and vulgar restlessness which is the dominant note of all American street architecture. "But let her admire it, if she can. Think what I expected to find Piccadilly!"
"I enjoy driving down it so much," she continued, confidentially, yet with a shy little look as if trying to learn whether her confidence was misplaced. "Aunt Lydia and I go shopping almost every day."
"Ten kilometres down and back," estimated Truesdale; "ten kilometres of luxury and grandeur—don't let it overpower you. And you are learning where the shops are, I suppose, and the theatres, and the post-office, perhaps, and the hotels, and what all besides."
"No," said Bertie Patterson, proudly; "I knew all that before I came.There are books, you know—and maps. I studied them at home beforehand."
Truesdale had never seen any of the books, but he thought their existence probable enough. He remembered, to, his own maps—how he had become familiar with the London clubs long before walking through Pall Mall, and how he knew where to find all the Paris theatres years previous to his first stroll along the Boulevard. "And you have been to all the high places, I suppose?"
"I've been to the top of the Masonic Temple."
"And to the places were they have the sun-dials, and the gates ajar, and the American flag made of—of—Heaven knows what?"
"The parks? Yes, we have been to one or two of them, but we were a little late for all those lovely things; most of them had been dug up."
"Lovely things!" groaned Truesdale. "Fancy them in the Bois or along the Row—or anywhere but here!" Yet he felt sure that she had his own fondness for pleasure-grounds and points of view. She had doubtless anticipated the Masonic Temple and Washington Park, just as he had anticipated the Pincian and the Tower of the Capitol. His fellow-feeling forgave her this crudity; after all, she was praising what she had never seen.
"I've been to your parks myself," the other girl broke in, as she glanced round the vase of chrysanthemums from the other side of the table. "But if you want to see a park, come to New York." She was rather abrupt and boisterous; Truesdale wondered if she had not at one time been a tomboy.
"And I know where ever so many of the society people live," Bertie went on in a low tone, which implored him not to repeat, and above all not to laugh. "I saw a book once with all their addresses, and I marked the places on the map."
Truesdale did smile here—crumbling, the while, a biscuit on the corner of the table. He smiled, not because she had seemed to refer to society people as a distinct and unique order of beings, but from pure sympathy. He himself had placed Stafford House and Bridgewater House and all the other town residences of the English aristocracy in those same days when he had found sites for the Pall Mall clubs.
"Yes," she went on, "I know where Mrs. Bates lives, and Mrs. Ingles, and lots of other prominent people."
"Upon my word!" cried Truesdale, in generous emulation. "Just what I did in Paris. I went all up and down the Rue de Crenelle and the Rue St. Dominique trying to select the right sort of hotels—houses, you know—for the Viscountess of Beauseant and the Duchess of Langeais and the Princess Galathionne, and all those great ladies in Balzac—in Balzac's novels," he added, considerately.
"But Mrs. Bates isn't in a novel?"
"Oh no; she's real, I hope. So you have covered the North side and theSouth side and all? You know us through and through?"
"This talk about 'sides'!" the girl opposite broke in again. She took the other way round the chrysanthemums. "We have 'sides' in New York, but nobody you know lives on them. Fancy nice people scattered in squads all over a city and having their shops and clubs and theatres all jumbled up in the middle along with everything else! It's horrid."
Truesdale nodded across to the girl and smiled brightly. He wondered if she were really quite second-rate.
"Where do you suppose I went night before last with Aunt Lydia?" Bertie resumed, as she fingered the remaining two or three of a row of shining teaspoons. "To the opera"—in an awe-struck undertone; "toRig-o-letto. Aunt Lydia couldn't get a box—she said they were all taken for the season; but we had seats close to one side, just below the boxes. Such a grand place! Ever since the Auditorium was opened I've been hoping to see it, and now I have."
"Congratulations!" cried Truesdale, heartily, and Mrs. Belden turned round to see the reason for it. He remembered how he himself had panted for the Scala, and for the Apollo at Rome—that poor Apollo, razed to the ground before ever he could behold its historic stage.
"I've been to your opera myself," the other girl proclaimed. "What was the matter with all the box people, anyway? They seemed afraid to assert themselves. I never saw a lot of rich people so cowed-like."
"Do you mean that they kept quiet during the performance?" asked Truesdale. "The effectwasrather primitive, wasn't it? WheneverIsing I always ask the whole room to shout-especially if somebody shows any sign of listening."
"And I thought they looked pretty plain, too," the girl volunteered further. "If you want to see style and display, take the Metropolitan on a real gala night. I didn't see half a dozen necklaces among your people—and not a single tiara."
"You should have worn yours," declared Truesdale, genially. "Every one would have helped." Yes, she seemed second-rate, truly, and the worst type of a second-rate person at that—the second-rate person away from home. "Letherhave them," he whispered to Bertie, as a brace of new-comers crossed the threshold.
"She'll take them anyway," said Bertie, ruefully. She did not at all seem to realize the greater triumph of completely monopolizing the one man present.
"I wanted to walk in the foy—in the place where they promenade," Bertie went on; "such a lovely place, and such a grand crush under all those yellow arches! But we didn't have any gentleman," she concluded, lamely.
"Never mind; you'll have one next time," responded Truesdale; gallantly. "I'm awfully fond of that place, already—the whole of it. It's one of the few good things they've got here. It's the only place in town where you can see any number of nice people together."
"Oh, really," protested Mrs. Belden, speaking to him for the first time. She had decided that he was worth talking to, as well as concluded that his attentions had been given too exclusively to one side of the table. "Oh, really, now!" Her voice was thickly, sweetly sibilant. "I shall hope to show you that you are wrong. Gladys, child, remind me to send this young man a card for a week from Wednesday."
"Very well," answered Truesdale; "I'm perfectly willing to be convinced. Only don't ask me to a dinner—I can't sit through a dinner. A little bit of a tea—well, that's different." And he turned his friendly eyes in the direction of Bertie Patterson.
"It isn't a dinner," said Mrs. Belden, as brusquely as her vocalization would allow. "It's—" But a new-comer advanced, and she turned to manipulate her teapot with her large, fair, plump hands.
Bertie Patterson smiled at Truesdale in return. She seemed to consider herself indebted to him not only for that vague promise of future festivities, but for a certain degree of moral support at a juncture which might have brought her mortification, if not actual tears.
"What a downright nice little soul she is, anyway!" thought Truesdale. "There are nice good girls in this world, after all, and some of them are right here. And how she idealizes this brutal and ugly town! If only she doesn't idealizeme!"
Truesdale had been idealized more than once before. Sometimes the result had been merely embarrassing, sometimes disastrous.