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April Hopes

by William Dean Howells · English · Gutenberg #3404 · 652,343 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: April Hopes

Author: William Dean Howells


        
Release date: October 24, 2004 [eBook #3404]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by David Widger and Pat Castevens


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK APRIL HOPES ***



Produced by David Widger and Pat Castevens





APRIL HOPES

1887

by William Dean Howells




I.

From his place on the floor of the Hemenway Gymnasium Mr. Elbridge G.
Mavering looked on at the Class Day gaiety with the advantage which his
stature, gave him over most people there. Hundreds of these were pretty
girls, in a great variety of charming costumes, such as the eclecticism
of modern fashion permits, and all sorts of ingenious compromises
between walking dress and ball dress. It struck him that the young men
on whose arms they hung, in promenading around the long oval within the
crowd of stationary spectators, were very much younger than students
used to be, whether they wore the dress-coats of the Seniors or the
cut-away of the Juniors and Sophomores; and the young girls themselves
did not look so old as he remembered them in his day. There was a band
playing somewhere, and the galleries were well filled with spectators
seated at their ease, and intent on the party-coloured turmoil of the
floor, where from time to time the younger promenaders broke away from
the ranks into a waltz, and after some turns drifted back, smiling and
controlling their quick breath, and resumed their promenade. The
place was intensely light, in the candour of a summer day which had no
reserves; and the brilliancy was not broken by the simple decorations.
Ropes of wild laurel twisted up the pine posts of the aisles, and swung
in festoons overhead; masses of tropical plants in pots were set along
between the posts on one side of the room; and on the other were the
lunch tables, where a great many people were standing about, eating
chicken and salmon salads, or strawberries and ice-cream, and drinking
claret-cup. From the whole rose that blended odour of viands, of
flowers, of stuff's, of toilet perfumes, which is the characteristic
expression of, all social festivities, and which exhilarates or
depresses--according as one is new or old to it.

Elbridge Mavering kept looking at the faces of the young men as if he
expected to see a certain one; then he turned his eyes patiently upon.
the faces around him. He had been introduced to a good many persons, but
he had come to that time of life when an introduction; unless charged
with some special interest, only adds the pain of doubt to the wearisome
encounter of unfamiliar people; and he had unconsciously put on the
severity of a man who finds himself without acquaintance where
others are meeting friends, when a small man, with a neatly trimmed
reddish-grey beard and prominent eyes, stepped in front of him, and
saluted him with the “Hello, Mavering!” of a contemporary.

His face, after a moment of question, relaxed into joyful recognition.
“Why, John Munt! is that you?” he said, and he took into his large moist
palm the dry little hand of his friend, while they both broke out into
the incoherencies of people meeting after a long time. Mr. Mavering
spoke in it voice soft yet firm, and with a certain thickness of tongue;
which gave a boyish charm to his slow, utterance, and Mr. Munt used the
sort of bronchial snuffle sometimes cultivated among us as a chest tone.
But they were cut short in their intersecting questions and exclamations
by the presence of the lady who detached herself from Mr. Munt's arm as
if to leave him the freer for his hand-shaking.

“Oh!” he said, suddenly recurring to her; “let me introduce you to
Mrs. Pasmer, Mr. Mavering,” and the latter made a bow that creased his
waistcoat at about the height of Mrs. Pasmer's pretty little nose.

His waistcoat had the curve which waistcoats often describe at his age;
and his heavy shoulders were thrown well back to balance this curve.
His coat hung carelessly open; the Panama hat in his hand suggested a
certain habitual informality of dress, but his smoothly shaven large
handsome face, with its jaws slowly ruminant upon nothing, intimated the
consequence of a man accustomed to supremacy in a subordinate place.

Mrs. Pasmer looked up to acknowledge the introduction with a sort of
pseudo-respectfulness which it would be hard otherwise to describe.
Whether she divined or not that she was in the presence of a magnate of
some sort, she was rather superfluously demure in the first two or three
things she said, and was all sympathy and interest in the meeting of
these old friends. They declared that they had not seen each other for
twenty years, or, at any rate, not since '59. She listened while they
disputed about the exact date, and looked from time to time at Mr. Munt,
as if for some explanation of Mr. Mavering; but Munt himself, when she
saw him last, had only just begun to commend himself to society, which
had since so fully accepted him, and she had so suddenly, the moment
before, found her self hand in glove with him that she might well have
appealed to a third person for some explanation of Munt. But she was not
a woman to be troubled much by this momentary mystification, and she
was not embarrassed at all when Munt said, as if it had all been
pre-arranged, “Well, now, Mrs. Pasmer, if you'll let me leave you with
Mr. Mavering a moment, I'll go off and bring that unnatural child to
you; no use dragging you round through this crowd longer.”

He made a gesture intended, in the American manner, to be at once polite
and jocose, and was gone, leaving Mrs. Pasmer a little surprised, and
Mr. Mavering in some misgiving, which he tried to overcome pressing his
jaws together two or three times without speaking. She had no trouble
in getting in the first remark. “Isn't all this charming, Mr. Mavering?”
 She spoke in a deep low voice, with a caressing manner, and stood
looking up, at Mr. Mavering with one shoulder shrugged and the
other drooped, and a tasteful composition of her fan and hands and
handkerchief at her waist.

“Yes, ma'am, it is,” said Mr. Mavering. He seemed to say ma'am to
her with a public or official accent, which sent Mrs. Primer's mind
fluttering forth to poise briefly at such conjectures as, “Congressman
from a country district? judge of the Common Pleas? bank president?
railroad superintendent? leading physician in a large town?--no, Mr.
Munt said Mister,” and then to return to her pretty blue eyes, and to
centre there in that pseudo-respectful attention under the arch of her
neat brows and her soberly crinkled grey-threaded brown hair and her
very appropriate bonnet. A bonnet, she said, was much more than half the
battle after forty, and it was now quite after forty with Mrs. Pasmer;
but she was very well dressed otherwise. Mr. Mavering went on to say,
with a deliberation that seemed an element of his unknown dignity,
whatever it might be, “A number of the young fellows together can give a
much finer spread, and make more of the day, in a place like this, than
we used to do in our rooms.”

“Ah, then you're a Harvard man too!” said Mrs. Primer to herself, with
surprise, which she kept to herself, and she said to Mavering: “Oh yes,
indeed! It's altogether better. Aren't they nice looking fellows?” she
said, putting up her glass to look at the promenaders.

“Yes,” Mr. Mavering assented. “I suppose,” he added, out of the
consciousness of his own relation to the affair--“I suppose you've a son
somewhere here?”

“Oh dear, no!” cried Mrs. Primer, with a mingling, superhuman, but
for her of ironical deprecation and derision. “Only a daughter, Mr.
Mavering.”

At this feat of Mrs. Pasmer's, Mr. Mavering looked at her with question
as to her precise intention, and ended by repeating, hopelessly, “Only a
daughter?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a sigh of the same irony, “only a poor,
despised young girl, Mr. Mavering.”

“You speak,” said Mr. Mavering, beginning to catch on a little, “as if
it were a misfortune,” and his, dignity broke up into a smile that had
its queer fascination.

“Why, isn't it?” asked Mrs. Pasmer.

“Well, I shouldn't have thought so.”

“Then you don't believe that all that old-fashioned chivalry and
devotion have gone out? You don't think the young men are all spoiled
nowadays, and expect the young ladies to offer them attentions?”

“No,” said Mr. Mavering slowly, as if recovering from the shock of the
novel ideas. “Do you?”

“Oh, I'm such a stranger in Boston--I've lived abroad so long--that I
don't know. One hears all kinds of things. But I'm so glad you're not
one of those--pessimists!”

“Well,” said Mr. Mavering, still thoughtfully, “I don't know that I can
speak by the card exactly. I can't say how it is now. I haven't been
at a Class Day spread since my own Class Day; I haven't even been at
Commencement more than once or twice. But in my time here we didn't
expect the young ladies to show us attentions; at any rate, we didn't
wait for them to do it. We were very glad, to be asked to meet them, and
we thought it an honour if the young ladies would let us talk or dance
with them, or take them to picnics. I don't think that any of them could
complain of want of attention.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, “that's what I preached, that's what I
prophesied, when I brought my daughter home from Europe. I told her that
a girl's life in America was one long triumph; but they say now that
girls have more attention in London even than in Cambridge. One hears
such dreadful things!”

“Like what?” asked Mr. Mavering, with the unserious interest which Mrs.
Primer made most people feel in her talk.

“Oh; it's too vast a subject. But they tell you about charming girls
moping the whole evening through at Boston parties, with no young men to
talk with, and sitting from the beginning to the end of an assembly and
not going on the floor once. They say that unless a girl fairly throws
herself at the young men's heads she isn't noticed. It's this terrible
disproportion of the sexes that's at the root of it, I suppose; it
reverses everything. There aren't enough young men to go half round, and
they know it, and take advantage of it. I suppose it began in the war.”

He laughed, and, “I should think,” he said, laying hold of a single
idea out of several which she had presented, “that there would always be
enough young men in Cambridge to go round.”

Mrs. Pasmer gave a little cry. “In Cambridge!”

“Yes; when I was in college our superiority was entirely numerical.”

“But that's all passed long ago, from what I hear,” retorted Mrs.
Pasmer. “I know very well that it used to be thought a great advantage
for a girl to be brought up in Cambridge, because it gave her
independence and ease of manner to have so many young men attentive
to her. But they say the students all go into Boston now, and if the
Cambridge girls want to meet them, they have to go there too. Oh, I
assure you that, from what I hear, they've changed all that since our
time, Mr. Mavering.”

Mrs. Pasmer was certainly letting herself go a little more than she
would have approved of in another. The result was apparent in the
jocosity of this heavy Mr. Mavering's reply.

“Well, then, I'm glad that I was of our time, and not of this wicked
generation. But I presume that unnatural supremacy of the young men is
brought low, so to speak, after marriage?”

Mrs. Primer let herself go a little further. “Oh, give us an equal
chance,” she laughed, “and we can always take care of ourselves, and
something more. They say,” she added, “that the young married women now
have all the attention that girls could wish.”

“H'm!” said Mr. Mavering, frowning. “I think I should be tempted to box
my boy's ears if I saw him paying another man's wife attention.”

“What a Roman father!” cried Mrs. Pasmer, greatly amused, and letting
herself go a little further yet. She said to herself that she really
must find out who this remarkable Mr. Mavering was, and she cast her eye
over the hall for some glimpse of the absent Munt, whose arm she meant
to take, and whose ear she meant to fill with questions. But she did not
see him, and something else suggested itself. “He probably wouldn't let
you see him, or if he did, you wouldn't know it.”

“How not know it?”

Mrs. Primer did not answer. “One hears such dreadful things. What do you
say--or you'll think I'm a terrible gossip--”

“Oh no;” said Mr. Mavering, impatient for the dreadful thing, whatever
it was.

Mrs. Primer resumed: “--to the young married women meeting last winter
just after a lot of pretty girls had came out, and magnanimously
resolving to give the Buds a chance in society?”

“The Buds?”

“Yes, the Rose-buds--the debutantes; it's an odious little word, but
everybody uses it. Don't you think that's a strange state of things
for America? But I can't believe all those things,” said Mrs. Pasmer,
flinging off the shadow of this lurid social condition. “Isn't this a
pretty scene?”

“Yes, it is,” Mr. Mavering admitted, withdrawing his mind gradually from
a consideration of Mrs. Pasmer's awful instances. “Yes!” he added, in
final self-possession. “The young fellows certainly do things in a great
deal better style nowadays than we used to.”

“Oh yes, indeed! And all those pretty girls do seem to be having such a
good time!”

“Yes; they don't have the despised and rejected appearance that you'd
like to have one believe.”

“Not in the least!” Mrs. Pasmer readily consented. “They look radiantly
happy. It shows that you can't trust anything that people say to you.”
 She abandoned the ground she had just been taking without apparent shame
for her inconsistency. “I fancy it's pretty much as it's always been: if
a girl is attractive, the young men find it out.”

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Mavering, unbending with dignity, “the young married
women have held another meeting, and resolved to give the Buds one more
chance.”

“Oh, there are some pretty mature Roses here,” said Mrs. Pasmer,
laughing evasively. “But I suppose Class Day can never be taken from the
young girls.”

“I hope not,” said Mr. Mavering. His wandering eye fell upon some
young men bringing refreshments across the nave toward them, and he was
reminded to ask Mrs. Pasmer, “Will you have something to eat?” He had
himself had a good deal to eat, before he took up his position at the
advantageous point where John Munt had found him.

“Why, yes, thank you,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “I ought to say, 'An ice,
please,' but I'm really hungry, and--”

“I'll get you some of the salad,” said Mr. Mavering, with the increased
liking a man feels for a woman when she owns to an appetite. “Sit down
here,” he added, and he caught a vacant chair toward her. When he turned
about from doing so, he confronted a young gentleman coming up to
Mrs. Pasmer with a young lady on his arm, and making a very low bow of
relinquishment.




II.

The men looked smilingly at each other without saying anything; and the
younger took in due form the introduction which the young lady gave him.

“My mother, Mr. Mavering.”

“Mr. Mavering!” cried Mrs. Pasmer, in a pure astonishment, before
she had time to colour it with a polite variety of more conventional
emotions. She glanced at the two men, and gave a little “Oh?” of inquiry
and resignation, and then said, demurely, “Let me introduce you to Mr.
Mavering, Alice,” while the young fellow laughed nervously, and pulled
out his handkerchief, partly to hide the play of his laughter, and
partly to wipe away the perspiration which a great deal more laughing
had already gathered on his forehead. He had a vein that showed
prominently down its centre, and large, mobile, girlish blue eyes under
good brows, an arched nose, and rather a long face and narrow chin. He
had beautiful white teeth; as he laughed these were seen set in a jaw
that contracted very much toward the front. He was tall and slim, and he
wore with elegance the evening dress which Class Day custom prescribes
for the Seniors; in his button-hole he had a club button.

“I shall not have to ask an introduction to Mr. Mavering; and you've
robbed me of the pleasure of giving him one to you, Mrs. Pasmer,” he
said.

She heard the young man in the course of a swift review of what she had
said to his father, and with a formless resentment of the father's not
having told her he had a son there; but she answered with the flattering
sympathy she had the use of, “Oh, but you won't miss one pleasure out
of so many to-day, Mr. Mavering; and think of the little dramatic
surprise!”

“Oh, perfect,” he said, with another laugh. “I told Miss Pasmer as we
came up.”

“Oh, then you were in the surprise, Alice!” said Mrs. Pasmer, searching
her daughter's eyes for confession or denial of this little community
of interest. The girl smiled slightly upon the young man, but not
disapprovingly, and made no other answer to her mother, who went on:
“Where in the world have you been? Did Mr. Munt find you? Who told you
where I was? Did you see me? How did you know I was here? Was there ever
anything so droll?” She did not mean her questions to be answered, or at
least not then; for, while her daughter continued to smile rather more
absently, and young Mavering broke out continuously in his nervous
laugh, and his father stood regarding him with visible satisfaction, she
hummed on, turning to the young man: “But I'm quite appalled at Alice's
having monopolised even for a few minutes a whole Senior--and probably
an official Senior at that,” she said, with a glance at the pink and
white club button in his coat lapel, “and I can't let you stay another
instant, Mr. Mavering. I know very well how many demands you have upon
you and you must go back directly to your sisters and your cousins and
your aunts, and all the rest of them; you must indeed.”

“Oh no! Don't drive me away, Mrs. Pasmer,” pleaded the young man,
laughing violently, and then wiping his face. “I assure you that I've
no encumbrances of any kind here except my father, and he seems to have
been taking very good care of himself.” They all laughed at this, and
the young fellow hurried on: “Don't be alarmed at my button; it only
means a love of personal decoration, if that's where you got the notion
of my being an official Senior. This isn't my spread; I shall hope to
welcome you at Beck Hall after the Tree; and I wish you'd let me be
of use to you. Wouldn't you like to go round to some of the smaller
spreads? I think it would amuse you. And have you got tickets to the
Tree, to see us make fools of ourselves? It's worth seeing, Mrs. Pasmer,
I assure you.”

He rattled on very rapidly but with such a frankness in his urgency,
such amiable kindliness, that Mrs. Pasmer could not feel that it was
pushing. She looked at her daughter, but she stood as passive in the
transaction as the elder Mavering. She was taller than her mother, and
as she waited, her supple figure described that fine lateral curve which
one sees in some Louis Quinze portraits; this effect was enhanced by the
fashion of her dress of pale sage green, with a wide stripe or sash of
white dropping down the front, from her delicate waist. The same simple
combination of colours was carried up into her hat, which surmounted
darker hair than Mrs. Pasmer's, and a complexion of wholesome pallor;
her eyes were grey and grave, with black brows, and her face, which was
rather narrow, had a pleasing irregularity in the sharp jut of the nose;
in profile the parting of the red lips showed well back into the cheek.

“I don't know,” said Mrs. Pasmer, in her own behalf; and she added in
his, “about letting you take so much trouble,” so smoothly that it
would have been quite impossible to detect the point of union in the two
utterances.

“Well, don't call it names, anyway, Mrs. Pasmer,” pleaded the young man.
“I thought it was nothing but a pleasure and a privilege--”

“The fact is,” she explained, neither consenting nor refusing, “that
we were expecting to meet some friends who had tickets for us”--young
Mavering's face fell--“and I can't imagine what's happened.”

“Oh, let's hope something dreadful,” he cried.

“Perhaps you know them,” she delayed further. “Professor Saintsbury!”

“Well, rather! Why, they were here about an hour ago--both of them. They
must have been looking for you.”

“Yes; we were to meet them here. We waited to come out with other
friends, and I was afraid we were late.” Mrs. Pasmer's face expressed a
tempered disappointment, and she looked at her daughter for indications
of her wishes in the circumstances; seeing in her eye a willingness to
accept young Mavering's invitation, she hesitated more decidedly than
she had yet done, for she was, other things being equal, quite willing
to accept it herself. But other things were not equal, and the whole
situation was very odd. All that she knew of Mr. Mavering the elder was
that he was the old friend of John Munt, and she knew far too little of
John Munt, except that he seemed to go everywhere, and to be welcome,
not to feel that his introduction was hardly a warrant for what looked
like an impending intimacy. She did not dislike Mr. Mavering; he was
evidently a country person of great self-respect, and no doubt of entire
respectability. He seemed very intelligent, too. He was a Harvard man;
he had rather a cultivated manner, or else naturally a clever way of
saying things. But all that was really nothing, if she knew no more
about him, and she certainly did not. If she could only have asked her
daughter who it was that presented young Mavering to her, that might
have formed some clew, but there was no earthly chance of asking this,
and, besides, it was probably one of those haphazard introductions that
people give on such occasions. Young Mavering's behaviour gave her still
greater question: his self-possession, his entire absence of anxiety;
or any expectation of rebuff or snub, might be the ease of unimpeachable
social acceptance, or it might be merely adventurous effrontery; only
something ingenuous and good in the young fellow's handsome face forbade
this conclusion. That his face was so handsome was another of the
complications. She recalled, in the dreamlike swiftness with which all
these things passed through her mind, what her friends had said to Alice
about her being sure to meet her fate on Class Day, and she looked at
her again to see if she had met it.

“Well, mamma?” said the girl, smiling at her mother's look.

Mrs. Pasmer thought she must have been keeping young Mavering waiting
a long time for his answer. “Why, of course, Alice. But I really don't
know what to do about the Saintsburys.” This was not in the least true,
but it instantly seemed so to Mrs. Pasmer, as a plausible excuse will
when we make it.

“Why, I'll tell you what, Mrs. Pasmer,” said young Mavering, with a
cordial unsuspicion that both won and reassured her, “we'll be sure to
find them at some of the spreads. Let me be of that much use, anyway;
you must.”

“We really oughtn't to let you,” said Mrs. Pasmer, making a last effort
to cling to her reluctance, but feeling it fail, with a sensation that
was not disagreeable. She could not help being pleased with the pleasure
that she saw in her daughter's face.

Young Mavering's was radiant. “I'll be back in just half a minute,” he
said, and he took a gay leave of them in running to speak to another
student at the opposite end of the hall.




III.

“You must allow me to get you something to eat first, Mrs. Pasmer,” said
the elder Mavering.

“Oh no, thank you,” Mrs. Pasmer began. But she changed her mind and
said, “Or, yes; I will, Mr. Mavering: a very little salad, please.” She
had really forgotten her hunger, as a woman will in the presence of any
social interest; but she suddenly thought his going would give her
a chance for two words with her daughter, and so she sent him. As
he creaked heavily across the smooth floor of the nave; “Alice,” she
whispered, “I don't know exactly what I've done: Who introduced this
young Mr. Mavering to you?”

“Mr. Munt.”

“Mr. Munt!”

“Yes; he came for me; he said you sent him. He introduced Mr. Mavering,
and he was very polite. Mr. Mavering said we ought to go up into the
gallery and see how it looked; and Mr. Munt said he'd been up, and Mr.
Mavering promised to bring me back to him, but he was not there when we
got back. Mr. Mavering got me some ice cream first, and then he found
you for me.”

“Really,” said Mrs. Pasmer to herself, “the combat thickens!” To her
daughter she said, “He's very handsome.”

“He laughs too much,” said the daughter. Her mother recognised her
uncandour with a glance. “But he waltzes well,” added the girl.

“Waltzes?” echoed the mother. “Did you waltz with him, Alice?”

“Everybody else was dancing. He asked me for a turn or two, and of
course I did it. What difference?”

“Oh, none--none. Only--I didn't see you.”

“Perhaps you weren't looking.”

“Yes, I was looking all the time.”

“What do you mean, mamma?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Pasmer, in a final despair, “we don't know anything
about them.”

“We're the only people here who don't, then,” said her daughter. “The
ladies were bowing right left to him all the time, and he kept asking if
I knew this one and that one, and all I could say was that some of them
were distant cousins, but I wasn't acquainted with them. I would think
he'd wonder who we were.”

“Yes,” said the mother thoughtfully.

“There! he's laughing with that other student. But don't look!”

Mrs. Pasmer saw well enough out of the corner of her eye the joking that
went on between Mavering and his friend, and it did not displease her
to think that it probably referred to Alice. While the young man came
hurrying back to them she glanced at the girl standing near her with
a keenly critical inspection, from which she was able to exclude all
maternal partiality, and justly decided that she was one of the most
effective girls in the place. That costume of hers was perfect. Mrs.
Pasmer wished now that she could have compared it more carefully with
other costumes; she had noticed some very pretty ones; and a feeling
of vexation that Alice should have prevented this by being away so long
just when the crowd was densest qualified her satisfaction. The people
were going very fast now. The line of the oval in the nave was broken
into groups of lingering talkers, who were conspicuous to each other,
and Mrs. Pasmer felt that she and her daughter were conspicuous to all
the rest where they stood apart, with the two Maverings converging upon
them from different points, the son nodding and laughing to friends of
both sexes as he came, the father wholly absorbed in not spilling the
glass of claret punch which he carried in one hand, and not falling
down on the slippery floor with the plate of salad which he bore in the
other. She had thoughts of feigning unconsciousness; she would have had
no scruple in practising this or any other social stratagem, for though
she kept a conscience in regard to certain matters--what she considered
essentials--she lived a thousand little lies every day, and taught her
daughter by precept and example to do the same. You must seem to be
looking one way when you were really looking another; you must say this
when you meant that; you must act as if you were thinking one thing when
you were thinking something quite different; and all to no end, for,
as she constantly said, people always know perfectly well what you were
about, whichever way you looked or whatever you said, or no matter
how well you acted the part of thinking what you did not think. Now,
although she seemed not to look, she saw all that has been described at
a glance, and at another she saw young Mavering slide easily up to his
father and relieve him of the plate and glass, with a laugh as pleasant
and a show of teeth as dazzling as he bestowed upon any of the ladies
he had passed. She owned to her recondite heart that she liked this in
young Mavering, though at the same time she asked herself what motive he
really had in being so polite to his father before people. But she had
no time to decide; she had only time to pack the question hurriedly away
for future consideration, when young Mavering arrived at her elbow, and
she turned with a little “Oh!” of surprise so perfectly acted that it
gave her the greatest pleasure.




IV.

“I don't think my father would have got here alive with these things,”
 said young Mavering. “Did you see how I came to his rescue?”

Mrs. Pasmer instantly threw away all pretext of not having seen. “Oh
yes! my heart was in my mouth when you bore down upon him, Mr. Mavering.
It was a beautiful instance of filial devotion.”

“Well, do sit down now, Mrs. Pasmer, and take it comfortably,” said the
young fellow; and he got her one of the many empty chairs, and would not
give her the things, which he put in another, till she sat down and let
him spread a napkin over her lap.

“Really,” she said, “I feel as if I were stopping all the wheels of
Class Day. Am I keeping them from closing the Gymnasium, Mr. Mavering?”

“Not quite,” said the young man, with one of his laughs. “I don't
believe they will turn us out, and I'll see that they don't lock us in.
Don't hurry, Mrs. Pasmer. I'm only sorry you hadn't something sooner.”

“Oh, your father proposed getting me something a good while ago.”

“Did he? Then I wonder you haven't had it. He's usually on time.”

“You're both very energetic, I think,” said Mrs. Pasmer.

“He's the father of his son,” said the young fellow, assuming the merit
with a bow of burlesque modesty.

It went to Mrs. Pasmer's heart. “Let's hope he'll never forget that,”
 she said, in an enjoyment of the excitement and the salad that was
beginning to leave her question of these Maverings a light, diaphanous
cloud on the verge of the horizon.

The elder Mavering had been trying, without success, to think of
something to say to Miss Pasmer, he had twice cleared his throat for
that purpose. But this comedy between his son and the young lady's
mother seemed so much lighter and brighter than anything he could have
said, that he said nothing, and looked on with his mouth set in its
queer smile, while the girl listened with the gravity of a daughter who
sees that her mother is losing her head. Mrs. Pasmer buzzed on in her
badinage with the young man, and allowed him to go for a cup of coffee
before she rose from her chair, and shook out her skirts with an air of
pleasant expectation of whatever should come next.

He came back without it. “The coffee urn has dried up here, Mrs. Pasmer.
But you can get some at the other spreads; they'd be inconsolable if you
didn't take something everywhere.”

They all started toward the door, but the elder Mavering said, holding
back a little, “Dan, I think I'll go and see--”

“Oh no, you mustn't, father,” cried the young man, laying his hand with
caressing entreaty on his father's coat sleeve. “I don't want you to go
anywhere till you've seen Professor Saintsbury. We shall be sure to meet
him at some of the spreads. I want you to have that talk with him--” He
corrected himself for the instant's deflection from the interests of his
guest, and added, “I want you to help me hunt him up for Mrs. Pasmer.
Now, Mrs. Pasmer, you're not to think it's the least trouble, or
anything but a boon, much less say it,” he cried, turning to the
deprecation in Mrs. Pasmer's face. He turned away from it to acknowledge
the smiles and bows of people going out of the place, and he returned
their salutations with charming heartiness.

In the vestibule they met the friends they were going in search of.




V.

“With Mr. Mavering, of course!” exclaimed Mrs. Saintsbury: “I might have
known it.” Mrs. Pasmer would have given anything she could think of to
be able to ask why her friend might have known it; but for the present
they could only fall upon each other with flashes of self-accusal and
explanation, and rejoicing for their deferred and now accomplished
meeting. The Professor stood by with the satirical smile with which men
witness the effusion of women. Young Mavering, after sharing the ladies'
excitement fully with them, rewarded himself by an exclusive moment with
Miss Pasmer.

“You must get Mrs. Pasmer to let me show you all of Class Day that a
Senior can. I didn't know what a perfect serpent's tooth it was to be
one before. Mrs. Saintsbury,” he broke off, “have you got tickets for
the Tree? Ah, she doesn't hear me!”

Mrs. Saintsbury was just then saying to the elder Mavering, “I'm so glad
you decided to come today. It would have been a shame if none of you
were here.” She made a feint of dropping her voice, with a glance at Dan
Mavering. “He's such a nice boy,” which made him laugh, and cry out--

“Oh, now? Don't poison my father's mind, Mrs. Saintsbury.”

“Oh, some one would be sure to tell him,” retorted the Professor's wife,
“and he'd better hear it from a friend.”

The young fellow laughed again, and then he shook hands with some
ladies going out, and asked were they going so soon, from an abstract
hospitality, apparently, for he was not one of the hosts; and so turned
once more to Miss Pasmer. “We must get away from here, or the afternoon
will get away from us, and leave us nothing to show for it. Suppose we
make a start, Miss Pasmer?”

He led the way with her out of the vestibule, banked round with pots
of palm and fern, and down the steps into the glare of the Cambridge
sunshine, blown full, as is the case on Class Day, of fine Cambridge
dust, which had drawn a delicate grey veil over the grass of the
Gymnasium lawn, and mounted in light clouds from the wheels powdering
it finer and finer in the street. Along the sidewalks dusty hacks and
carriages were ranged, and others were driving up to let people
dismount at the entrances to the college yard. Within the temporary
picket-fences, secluding a part of the grounds for the students and
their friends, were seen stretching from dormitory to dormitory long
lines of Chinese lanterns, to be lit after nightfall, swung between the
elms. Groups of ladies came and went, nearly always under the escort of
some student; the caterers' carts, disburdened of their ice-creams and
salads, were withdrawn under the shade in the street, and their
drivers lounged or drowsed upon the seats; now and then a black waiter,
brilliant as a bobolink in his white jacket and apron, appeared on some
errand; the large, mild Cambridge policemen kept the entrances to the
yard with a benevolent vigilance which was not harsh with the little
Irish children coming up from the Marsh in their best to enjoy the sight
of other people's pleasure.

“Isn't it a perfect Class Day?” cried young Mavering, as he crossed
Kirkland Street with Miss Pasmer, and glanced down its vaulted
perspective of elms, through which the sunlight broke, and lay in the
road in pools and washes as far as the eye reached. “Did you ever
see anything bluer than the sky to-day? I feel as if we'd ordered the
weather, with the rest of the things, and I had some credit for it as
host. Do make it a little compliment, Miss Pasmer; I assure you I'll be
very modest about it.”

“Ah, I think it's fully up to the occasion,” said the girl, catching the
spirit of his amiable satisfaction. “Is it the usual Class Day weather?”

“You spoil everything by asking that,” cried the young man; “it obliges
me to make a confession--it's always good weather on Class Day. There
haven't been more than a dozen bad Class Days in the century. But you'll
admit that there can't have been a better Class Day than this?”

“Oh yes; it's certainly the pleasantest Class Day I've seen;” said the
girl; and now when Mavering laughed she laughed too.

“Thank you so much for saying that! I hope it will pass off in unclouded
brilliancy; it will, if I can make it. Why, hallo! They're on the other
side of the street yet, and looking about as if they were lost.”

He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket, and waved it at the others
of their party.

They caught sight of it, and came hurrying over through the dust.

Mrs. Saintsbury said, apparently as the sum of her consultations with
Mrs. Pasmer: “The Tree is to be at half-past five; and after we've seen
a few spreads, I'm going to take the ladies hone for a little rest.”

“Oh no; don't do that,” pleaded the young man. After making this protest
he seemed not to have anything to say immediately in support of it. He
merely added: “This is Miss Pasmer's first Class Day, and I want her to
see it all.”

“But you'll have to leave us very soon to get yourself ready for the
Tree,” suggested the Professor's lady, with a motherly prevision.

“I shall want just fifteen minutes for that.”

“I know, better, Mr. Mavering,” said Mrs. Saintsbury, with finality.
“You will want a good three-quarters of an hour to make yourself as
disreputable as you'll look at the Tree; and you'll have to take time
for counsel and meditation. You may stay with us just half an hour, and
then we shall part inexorably. I've seen a great many more Class Days
than you have, and I know what they are in their demands upon the
Seniors.”

“Oh; well! Then we won't think about the time,” said the young man,
starting on with Miss Pasmer.

“Well, don't undertake too much,” said the lady. She came last in the
little procession, with the elder Mavering, and her husband and Mrs
Pasmer preceded her.

“What?” young Mavering called back, with his smiling face over his
shoulder.

“She says not to bite off more than you can chew,” the professor
answered for her.

Mavering broke into a conscious laugh, but full of delight, and with his
handkerchief to his face had almost missed the greeting of some ladies
who bowed to him. He had to turn round to acknowledge it, and he was
saluting and returning salutations pretty well all along the line of
their progress.

“I'm afraid you'll think I'm everybody's friend but my own, Miss Pasmer,
but I assure you all this is purely accidental. I don't know so
many people, after all; only all that I do know seem to be here this
morning.”

“I don't think it's a thing to be sorry for,” said the girl. “I wish we
knew more people. It's rather forlorn--”

“Oh, will you let me introduce some of the fellows to you? They'll be so
glad.”

“If you'll tell them how forlorn I said I was,” said the girl, with a
smile.

“Oh, no, no, no! I understand that. And I assure you that I didn't
suppose--But of course!” he arrested himself in the superfluous
reassurance he was offering, “All that goes without saying. Only there
are some of the fellows coming back to the law school, and if you'll
allow me--”

“We shall be very happy indeed, Mr. Mavering,” said Mrs. Pasmer, behind
him.

“Oh, thank you ever so much, Mrs. Pasmer.” This was occasion for another
burst of laughter with him. He seemed filled with the intoxication of
youth, whose spirit was in the bright air of the day and radiant in the
young faces everywhere. The paths intersecting one another between the
different dormitories under the drooping elms were thronged with
people coming and going in pairs and groups; and the academic fete, the
prettiest flower of our tough old Puritan stem, had that charm, at
once sylvan and elegant, which enraptures in the pictured fables of the
Renaissance. It falls at that moment of the year when the old university
town, often so commonplace and sometimes so ugly, becomes briefly and
almost pathetically beautiful under the leafage of her hovering elms and
in, the perfume of her syringas, and bathed in this joyful tide of youth
that overflows her heart. She seems fit then to be the home of the poets
who have loved her and sung her, and the regret of any friend of the
humanities who has left her.

“Alice,” said Mrs. Pasmer, leaning forward a little to speak to her
daughter, and ignoring a remark of the Professor's, “did you ever see so
many pretty costumes?”

“Never,” said the girl, with equal intensity.

“Well, it makes you feel that you have got a country, after all,” sighed
Mrs. Pasmer, in a sort of apostrophe to her European self. “You see
splendid dressing abroad, but it's mostly upon old people who ought to
be sick and ashamed of their pomps and vanities. But here it's the young
girls who dress; and how lovely they are! I thought they were charming
in the Gymnasium, but I see you must get them out-of-doors to have the
full effect. Mr. Mavering, are they always so prettily dressed on Class
Day?”

“Well, I'm beginning to feel as if it wouldn't be exactly modest for
me to say so, whatever I think. You'd better ask Mrs. Saintsbury; she
pretends to know all about it.”

“No, I'm bound to say they're not,” said the Professor's wife candidly.
“Your daughter,” she added, in a low tone for all to hear, “decides that
question.”

“I'm so glad you said that, Mrs. Saintsbury,” said the young man. He
looked at the girl; who blushed with a pleasure that seemed to thrill to
the last fibre of her pretty costume.

She could not say anything, but her mother asked, with an effort at
self-denial: “Do you think so really? It's one of those London things.
They have so much taste there now,” she added yielding to her own pride
in the dress.

“Yes; I supposed it must be,” said Mrs. Saintsbury, “We used to come in
muslins and tremendous hoops--don't you remember?”

“Did you look like your photographs?” asked young Mavering, over his
shoulder.

“Yes; but we didn't know it then,” said the Professor's wife.

“Neither did we,” said the Professor. “We supposed that there had never
been anything equal to those hoops and white muslins.”

“Thank you, my dear,” said his wife, tapping him between the shoulders
with her fan. “Now don't go any further.”

“Do you mean about our first meeting here on Class Day?” asked her
husband.

“They'll think so now,” said Mrs. Saintsbury patiently, with a playful
threat of consequences in her tone.

“When I first saw the present Mrs. Saintsbury,” pursued the
Professor--it was his joking way, of describing her, as if there had
been several other Mrs. Saintsburys--“she was dancing on the green
here.”

“Ah, they don't dance on the green any more, I hear,” sighed Mrs.
Pasmer.

“No, they don't,” said the other lady; “and I think it's just as well.
It was always a ridiculous affectation of simplicity.”

“It must have been rather public,” said young Mavering, in a low voice,
to Miss Pasmer.

“It doesn't seem as if it could ever have been in character quite,” she
answered.

“We're a thoroughly indoors people,” said the Professor. “And it seems
as if we hadn't really begun to get well as a race till we had come in
out of the weather.”

“How can you say that on a day like this?” cried Mrs. Pasmer. “I didn't
suppose any one could be so unromantic.”

“Don't flatter him,” cried his wife.

“Does he consider that a compliment?”

“Not personally,” he answered: “But it's the first duty of a Professor
of Comparative Literature to be unromantic.”

“I don't understand,” faltered Mrs. Pasmer.

“He will be happy to explain, at the greatest possible length,” said
Mrs. Saintsbury. “But you shan't spoil our pleasure now, John.”

They all laughed, and the Professor looked proud of the wit at his
expense; the American husband is so, and the public attitude of the
American husband and wife toward each other is apt to be amiably
satirical; their relation seems never to have lost its novelty, or to
lack droll and surprising contrasts for them.

Besides these passages with her husband, Mrs. Saintsbury kept up a full
flow of talk with the elder Mavering, which Mrs. Pasmer did her best to
overhear, for it related largely to his son, whom, it seemed, from the
father's expressions, the Saintsburys had been especially kind to.

“No, I assure you,” Mrs. Pasmer heard her protest, “Mr. Saintsbury has,
been very much interested in him. I hope he has not put any troublesome
ideas into his head. Of course he's very much interested in literature,
from his point of view, and he's glad to find any of the young men
interested in it, and that's apt to make him overdo matters a little.”

“Dan wished me to talk with him, and I shall certainly be glad to do
so,” said the father, but in a tone which conveyed to Mrs. Pasmer the
impression that though he was always open to conviction, his mind was
made up on this point, whatever it was.




VI.

The party went to half a dozen spreads, some of which were on a scale
of public grandeur approaching that of the Gymnasium, and others of
a subdued elegance befitting the more private hospitalities in the
students' rooms. Mrs. Pasmer was very much interested in these rooms,
whose luxurious appointments testified to the advance of riches and
of the taste to apply them since she used to visit students' rooms in
far-off Class Days. The deep window nooks and easy-chairs upholstered
in the leather that seems sacred alike to the seats and the shelves of
libraries; the aesthetic bookcases, low and topped with bric-a-brac; the
etchings and prints on the walls, which the elder Mavering went up to
look at with a mystifying air of understanding such things; the foils
crossed over the chimney, and the mantel with its pipes, and its
photographs of theatrical celebrities tilted about over it--spoke of
conditions mostly foreign to Mrs. Pasmer's memories of Harvard. The
photographed celebrities seemed to be chosen chiefly for their beauty,
and for as much of their beauty as possible, Mrs. Pasmer perceived, with
an obscure misgiving of the sort which an older generation always likes
to feel concerning the younger, but with a tolerance, too, which was
personal to herself; it was to be considered that the massive thought
and honest amiability of Salvini's face, and the deep and spiritualized
power of Booth's, varied the effect of these companies of posturing
nymphs.

At many places she either met old friends with whom she clamoured over
the wonder of their encounter there, or was made acquainted with new
people by the Saintsburys. She kept a mother's eye on her daughter, to
whom young Mavering presented everybody within hail or reach, and
whom she could see, whenever she looked at her, a radiant centre of
admiration. She could hear her talk sometimes, and she said to herself
that really Alice was coming out; she had never heard her say so many
good things before; she did not know it was in her. She was very
glad then that she had let her wear that dress; it was certainly
distinguished, and the girl carried it off, to her mother's amusement,
with the air of a superb lady of the period from which it dated. She
thought what a simple child Alice really was, all the time those other
children, the Seniors, were stealing their glances of bold or timid
worship at her, and doubtless thinking her a brilliant woman of the
world. But there could be no mistake that she was a success.

Part of her triumph was of course due to Mrs. Saintsbury; whose
chaperonage; Mrs. Pasmer could see, was everywhere of effect. But it
was also largely due to the vigilant politeness of young Mavering, who
seemed bent on making her have good time, and who let no chance slip
him. Mrs. Pasmer felt his kindness truly; and she did not feel it the
less because she knew that there was but one thing that could, at his
frankly selfish age, make a young fellow wish to make a girl have a
good time; except for that reason he must be bending the whole soul of
egotistic youth to making some other girl have a good time. But all the
same, it gave her pause when some one to whom she was introduced spoke
to her of her friends the Maverings, as if they were friends of the
oldest standing instead of acquaintances of very recent accident. She
did not think of disclaiming the intimacy, but “Really I shall die of
these Maverings,” she said to herself, “unless I find out something
about them pretty soon.”

“I'm not going to take you to the Omicron spread, Mrs. Pasmer,” said
young Mavering, coming up to her with such an effect of sympathetic
devotion that she had to ask herself, “Are they my friends, the
Maverings?” “The Saintsburys have been there already, and it is a little
too common.” The tone of superiority gave Mrs. Pasmer courage. “They're
good fellows; and all that, but I want you to see the best. I suppose
it will get back to giving the spreads all in the fellows' rooms again.
It's a good deal pleasanter, don't you think?”

“Oh yes, indeed,” assented Mrs. Pasmer, though she had really been
thinking the private spreads were not nearly so amusing as the large
spread she had seen at the Gymnasium. She had also wondered where all
Mr. Mavering's relations and friends were, and the people who had social
claims on him, that he could be giving up his Class Day in this reckless
fashion to strangers. Alice would account for a good deal, but she would
not account for everything. Mrs. Pasmer would have been willing to take
him from others, but if he were so anomalous as to have no one to be
taken from, of course it lessened his value as a trophy. These things
went in and out of her mind, with a final resolution to get a full
explanation from Mrs. Saintsbury, while she stood and smiled her winning
assent up into the young man's handsome face.

Mrs. Saintsbury, caught sight of them, and as if suddenly reminded of a
forgotten duty, rushed vividly upon him.

“Mr. Mavering, I shall not let you stay with us another minute. You must
go to your room now and get ready. You ought to have a little rest.”

He broke out in his laugh. “Do you think I want to go and lie down
awhile, like a lady before a party?”

“I'm sure you'd be the stronger for it,” said Mrs. Saintsbury. “But go,
upon any theory. Don't you see there isn't a Senior left?”

He would not look round. “They've gone to other spreads,” he said. “But
now I'll tell you: it is pretty, near time, and if you'll take me to my
room, I'll go.”

“You're a spoiled boy,” said Mrs. Saintsbury.

“But I want Mrs. Pasmer to see the room of a real student--a reading
man, and all that--and we'll come, to humour you.”

“Well, come upon any theory,” said young Mavering.

His father, and Professor Saintsbury, who had been instructed by his
wife not to lose sight of her, were at hand, and they crossed to that
old hall which keeps its favour with the students in spite of the
rivalry of the newer dormitories--it would be hard to say why.

Mrs. Pasmer willingly assented to its being much better, out of pure
complaisance, though the ceilings were low and the windows small, and it
did not seem to her that the Franklin stove and the aesthetic papering
and painting of young Mavering's room brought it up to the level of
those others that she had seen. But with her habit of saying some
friendly lying thing, no matter what her impressions were, she
exclaimed; “Oh, how cosy!” and glad of the word, she went about from one
to another, asking, “Isn't this cosy?”

Mrs. Saintsbury said: “It's supposed to be the cell of a recluse; but it
is cosy--yes.”

“It looks as if some hermit had been using it as a store-room,” said her
husband; for there were odds and ends of furniture and clothes and boxes
and handbags scattered about the floor.

“I forgot all about them when I asked you,” cried Mavering, laughing
out his delight. “They belong to some fellows that are giving spreads in
their rooms, and I let them put them in here.”

“Do you commonly let people put things in your room that they want to
get rid off?” asked Mrs. Pasmer.

“Well, not when I'm expecting company.”

“He couldn't refuse even then, if they pressed the matter,” said Mrs.
Saintsbury, lecturing upon him to her friend.

“I'm afraid you're too amiable altogether, Mr. Mavering. I'm sure you
let people impose upon you,” said the other lady. “You have been letting
us impose upon you.”

“Ah! now that proves you're all wrong, Mrs. Pasmer.”

“It proves that you know how to say things very prettily.”

“Oh, thank you. I know when I'm having a good time, and I do my best to
enjoy it.” He ended with the nervous laugh which seemed habitual with
him.

“He, does laugh a good deal;” thought Mrs. Pasmer, surveying him with
smiling steadiness. “I suppose it tires Alice. Some of his teeth are
filled at the sides. That vein in his forehead--they say that means
genius.” She said to him: “I hope you know when others are having a good
time too, Mr. Mavering? You ought to have that reward.”

They both looked at Alice. “Oh, I should be so happy to think you hadn't
been bored with it all, Mrs. Pasmer,” he returned;--with-deep feeling.

Alice was looking at one of the sketches which were pretty plentifully
pinned about the wall, and apparently seeing it and apparently listening
to what Professor Saintsbury was saying; but her mother believed from a
tremor of the ribbons on her hat that she was conscious of nothing but
young Mavering's gaze and the sound of his voice.

“We've been delighted, simply enchanted,” said Mrs. Pasmer. And she
thought; “Now if Alice were to turn round just as she stands, he could
see all the best points of her face. I wonder what she really thinks of
him? What is it you have there; Alice?” she asked aloud.

The girl turned her face over her shoulder so exactly in the way her
mother wished that Mrs. Pasmer could scarcely repress a cry of joy. “A
sketch of Mr. Mavering's.”

“Oh, how very interesting!” said Mrs. Pasmer. “Do you sketch, Mr.
Mavering? But of course.” She pressed forward, and studied the sketch
inattentively. “How very, very good!” she buzzed deep in her throat,
while, with a glance at her daughter, she thought, “How impassive Alice
is! But she behaves with great dignity. Yes. Perhaps that's best. And
are you going to be an artist?” she asked of Mavering.

“Not if it can be prevented,” he answered, laughing again.

“But his laugh is very pleasant,” reflected Mrs. Pasmer. “Does Alice
dislike it so much?” She repeated aloud, “If it can be prevented?”

“They think I might spoil a great lawyer in the attempt.”

“Oh, I see. And are you going to be a lawyer? But to be a great painter!
And America has so few of them.” She knew quite well that she was
talking nonsense, but she was aware, through her own indifference to
the topic that he was not minding what she said, but was trying to bring
himself into talk with Alice again. The girl persistently listened to
Professor Saintsbury.

“Is she punishing him for something?” her mother asked herself. “What
can it be for. Does she think he's a little too pushing? Perhaps, he is
a little pushing.” She reflected, with an inward sigh, that she would
know whether he was if she only knew more about him.

He did the honours of his room very simply and nicely, and he said
it was pretty rough to think this was the last of it. After which he
faltered, and something occurred to Mrs Saintsbury.

“Why, we're keeping you! It's time for you to dress for the Tree.
John”--she reproached her husband--“how could you let us do it?”

“Far be it from me to hurry ladies out of other people's
houses--especially ladies who have put themselves in charge of other
people.”

“No, don't hurry,” pleaded Mavering; “there's plenty of time.”

“How much time?” asked Mrs. Saintsbury.

He looked at his watch. “Well, a good quarter of an hour.”

“And I was to have taken Mrs. Pasmer and Alice home for a little rest
before the Tree!” cried Mrs Saintsbury. “And now we must go at once, or
we shall get no sort of places.”

In the civil and satirical parley which followed, no one answered
another, but young Mavering bore as full a part as the elder ladies, and
only his father and Alice were silent: his guests got themselves out of
his room. They met at the threshold a young fellow, short and dark and
stout, in an old tennis suit. He fell back at sight of them, and took
off his hat to Mrs. Saintsbury.

“Why, Mr. Boardman!”

“Don't be bashful, Boardman?” young Mavering called out. “Come in and
show them how I shall look in five minutes.”

Mr. Boardman took his introductions with a sort of main-force
self-possession, and then said, “You'll have to look it in less than
five minutes now, Mavering. You're come for.”

“What? Are they ready?”

“We must fly,” panted Mrs. Saintsbury, without waiting for the answer,
which was lost in the incoherencies of all sorts of au revoirs called
after and called back.




VII.

“That is one thing,” said Mrs. Saintsbury, looking swiftly round to see
that the elder Mavering was not within hearing, as she hurried ahead
with Mrs. Pasmer, “that I can't stand in Dan Mavering. Why couldn't he
have warned us that it was getting near the time? Why should he have
gone on pretending that there was no hurry? It isn't insincerity
exactly, but it isn't candour; no, it's uncandid. Oh, I suppose it's the
artistic temperament--never coming straight to the point.”

“What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Pasmer eagerly.

“I'll tell you sometime.” She looked round and halted a little for
Alice, who was walking detached and neglected by the preoccupation of
the two elderly men. “I'm afraid you're tired,” she said to the girl.

“Oh no.”

“Of course not, on Class Day. But I hope we shall get seats. What
weather!”

The sun had not been oppressive at any time during the day, though the
crowded building had been close and warm, and now it lay like a painted
light on the grass and paths over which they passed to the entrance of
the grounds around the Tree. Holden Chapel, which enclosed the space on
the right as they went in, shed back the sun from its brick-red flank,
rising unrelieved in its venerable ugliness by any touch of the festive
preparations; but to their left and diagonally across from them high
stagings supported tiers of seats along the equally unlovely red bulks
of Hollis and of Harvard. These seats, and the windows in the stories
above them, were densely packed with people, mostly young girls dressed
in a thousand enchanting shades and colours, and bonneted and hatted to
the last effect of fashion. They were like vast terraces of flowers to
the swift glance, and here and there some brilliant parasol, spread to
catch the sun on the higher ranks, was like a flaunting poppy, rising
to the light and lolling out above the blooms of lower stature. But the
parasols were few, for the two halls flung wide curtains of shade
over the greater part of the spectators, and across to the foot of the
chapel, while a piece of the carpentry whose simplicity seems part of
the Class Day tradition shut out the glare and the uninvited public,
striving to penetrate the enclosure next the street. In front of this
yellow pine wall; with its ranks of benches, stood the Class Day Tree,
girded at ten or fifteen feet from the ground with a wide band of
flowers.

Mrs. Pasmer and her friends found themselves so late that if some
gentlemen who knew Professor Saintsbury had not given up their places
they could have got no seats. But this happened, and the three ladies
had harmoniously blended their hues with those of the others in that
bank of bloom, and the gentlemen had somehow made away with their
obstructiveness in different crouching and stooping postures at their
feet, when the Junior Class filed into the green enclosure amidst the
'rahs of their friends; and sank in long ranks on the grass beside the
chapel. Then the Sophomores appeared, and were received with cheers
by the Juniors, with whom they joined, as soon as they were placed, in
heaping ignominy upon the freshmen. The Seniors came last, grotesque in
the variety of their old clothes, and a fierce uproar of 'rahs and
yells met them from the students squatted upon the grass as they loosely
grouped themselves in front of the Tree; the men of the younger classes
formed in three rings, and began circling in different directions around
them.

Mrs. Pasmer bent across Mrs. Saintsbury to her daughter: “Can you make
out Mr. Mavering among them, Alice?”

“No. Hush, mamma!” pleaded the girl.

With the subsidence of the tumult in the other classes, the Seniors had
broken from the stoical silence they kept through it, and were now
with an equally serious clamour applauding the first of a long list
of personages, beginning with the President, and ranging through their
favourites in the Faculty down to Billy the Postman. The leader who
invited them to this expression of good feeling exacted the full tale of
nine cheers for each person he named, and before he reached the last the
'rahs came in gasps from their dry throats.

In the midst of the tumult the marshal flung his hat at the elm; then
the rush upon the tree took place, and the scramble for the flowers. The
first who swarmed up the trunk were promptly plucked down by the legs
and flung upon the ground, as if to form a base there for the operations
of the rest; who surged and built themselves up around the elm in an
irregular mass. From time to time some one appeared clambering over
heads and shoulders to make a desperate lunge and snatch at the flowers,
and then fall back into the fluctuant heap again. Yells, cries, and
clappings of hands came from the other students, and the spectators in
the seats, involuntarily dying away almost to silence as some stronger
or wilfuler aspirant held his own on the heads and shoulders of the
others, or was stayed there by his friends among them till he could
make sure of a handful of the flowers. A rush was made upon him when
he reached the ground; if he could keep his flowers from the hands that
snatched at them, he staggered away with the fragments. The wreath began
to show wide patches of the bark under it; the surging and struggling
crowd below grew less dense; here and there one struggled out of it and
walked slowly about, panting pitiably.

“Oh, I wonder they don't kill each other!” cried Mrs. Pasmer. “Isn't it
terrible?” She would not have missed it on any account; but she liked to
get all she could out of her emotions.

“They never get hurt,” said Mrs. Saintsbury. “Oh, look! There's Dan
Mavering!”

The crowd at the foot of the tree had closed densely, and a wilder roar
went up from all the students. A tall, slim young fellow, lifted on the
shoulders of the mass below, and staying himself with one hand against
the tree, rapidly stripped away the remnants of the wreath, and flung
them into the crowd under him. A single tuft remained; the crowd was
melting away under him in a scramble for the fallen flowers; he made a
crooked leap, caught the tuft, and tumbled with it headlong.

“Oh!” breathed the ladies on the Benches, with a general suspiration
lost in the 'rahs and clappings, as Mavering reappeared with the bunch
of flowers in his hand. He looked dizzily about, as if not sure, of his
course; then his face, flushed and heated, with the hair pulled over
the eyes, brightened with recognition, and he advanced upon Mrs.
Saintsbury's party with rapid paces, each of which Mrs. Pasmer
commentated with inward conjecture.

“Is he bringing the flowers to Alice? Isn't it altogether too
conspicuous? Has he really the right to do it? What will people think?
Will he give them to me for her, or will he hand them directly to her?
Which should I prefer him to do? I wonder if I know?”

When she looked up with the air of surprise mixed with deprecation
and ironical disclaimer which she had prepared while these things were
passing through her mind, young Mavering had reached them, and had
paused in a moment's hesitation before his father. With a bow of
affectionate burlesque, from which he lifted his face to break into
laughter at the look in all their eyes, he handed the tattered nosegay
to his father.

“Oh, how delightful! how delicate! how perfect!” Mrs. Pasmer confided to
herself.

“I think this must be for you, Mrs. Pasmer,” said the elder Mavering,
offering her the bouquet, with a grave smile at his son's whim.

“Oh no, indeed!” said Mrs. Pasmer. “For Mrs. Saintsbury, of course.”

She gave it to her, and Mrs. Saintsbury at once transferred it to Miss
Pasmer.

“They wished me to pass this to you, Alice;” and at this consummation
Dan Mavering broke into another happy laugh.

“Mrs. Saintsbury, you always do the right thing at once,” he cried.

“That's more than I can say of you, Mr. Mavering,” she retorted.

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Mavering!” said the girl, receiving the flowers. It
was as if she had been too intent upon them and him to have noticed the
little comedy that had conveyed them to her.




VIII.

As soon after Class Day as Mrs. Pasmer's complaisant sense of the
decencies would let her, she went out from Boston to call on Mrs.
Saintsbury in Cambridge, and thank her for her kindness to Alice and
herself. “She will know well enough what I come for,” she said to
herself, and she felt it the more important to ignore Mrs. Saintsbury's
penetration by every polite futility; this was due to them both: and she
did not go till the second day after.

Mrs. Saintsbury came down into the darkened, syringa-scented library to
find her, and give her a fan.

“You still live, Jenny,” she said, kissing her gaily.

They called each other by their girl names, as is rather the custom
in Boston with ladies who are in the same set, whether they are great
friends or not. In the more changeful society of Cambridge, where so
many new people are constantly coming and going in connection with the
college, it is not so much the custom; but Mrs. Saintsbury was Boston
born, as well as Mrs. Pasmer, and was Cantabrigian by marriage--though
this is not saying that she was not also thoroughly so by convincement
and usage she now rarely went into Boston society.

“Yes, Etta--just. But I wasn't sure of it,” said Mrs. Pasmer, “when I
woke yesterday. I was a mere aching jelly!”

“And Alice?”

“Oh; I don't think she had any physical consciousness. She was a mere
rapturous memory!”

“She did have a good time, didn't she?” said Mrs. Saintsbury, in a
generous retrospect. “I think she was on her feet every moment in the
evening. It kept me from getting tired, to watch her.”

“I was afraid you'd be quite worn out. I'd no idea it was so late. It
must have been nearly half past seven before we got away from the
Beck Hall spread, and then by the time we had walked round the college
grounds--how extremely pretty the lanterns were, and how charming the
whole effect was!--it must have been nine before the dancing began.
Well, we owe it all to you, Etta.”

“I don't know what you mean by owing. I'm always glad of an excuse for
Class Day. And it was Dan Mavering who really managed the affair.”

“He was very kind,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a feeling which was chiefly
gratitude to her friend for bringing in his name so soon. Now that
it had been spoken, she felt it decorous to throw aside the outer
integument of pretense, which if it could have been entirely exfoliated
would have caused Mrs. Pasmer morally to disappear, like an onion
stripped of its successive laminae.

“What did you mean,” she asked, leaning forward, with, her face averted,
“about his having the artistic temperament? Is he going to be an artist?
I should hope not.” She remembered without shame that she had strongly
urged him to consider how much better it would be to be a painter than a
lawyer, in the dearth of great American painters.

“He could be a painter if he liked--up to a certain point,” said Mrs.
Saintsbury. “Or he could be any one of half-a-dozen other things--his
last craze was journalism; but you know what I mean by the artistic
temperament: it's that inability to be explicit; that habit of leaving
things vague and undefined, and hoping they'll somehow come out as you
want them of themselves; that way of taking the line of beauty to get
at what you wish to do or say, and of being very finicking about little
things and lag about essentials. That's what I mean by the artistic
temperament.”

“Yes; that's terrible,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer, with the abstractly severe
yet personally pitying perception of one whose every word and act was
sincere and direct. “I know just what you mean. But how does it apply to
Mr. Mavering?”

“It doesn't, exactly,” returned her friend. “And I'm always ashamed
when I say, or even think, anything against Dan Mavering. He's sweetness
itself. We've known him ever since he came to Harvard, and I must say
that a more constant and lovely follow I never saw. It wasn't merely
when he was a Freshman, and he had that home feeling hanging about him
still that makes all the Freshmen so appreciative of anything you do for
them; but all through the Sophomore and Junior years, when they're so
taken up with their athletics and their societies and their college life
generally that they haven't a moment for people that have been kind to
them, he was just as faithful as ever.”

“How nice!” cried Mrs. Pasmer.

“Yes, indeed! And all the allurements of Boston society haven't taken
him from us altogether. You can't imagine how much this means till
you've been at home a while and seen how the students are petted and
spoiled nowadays in the young society.”

“Oh, I've heard of it,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “And is it his versatility
and brilliancy, or his amiability, that makes him such a universal
favourite?”

“Universal favourite? I don't know that he's that.”

“Well, popular, then.”

“Oh, he's certainly very much liked. But, Jenny, there are no universal
favourites in Harvard now, if there ever were: the classes are
altogether too big. And it wouldn't be ability, and it wouldn't be
amiability alone, that would give a man any sort of leadership.”

“What in the world would it be?”

“That question, more than anything else, shows how long you've been
away, Jenny. It would be family--family, with a judicious mixture of the
others, and with money.”

“Is it possible? But of course--I remember! Only at their age one thinks
of students as being all hail-fellow-well-met with each other--”

“Yes; it's hard to realise how conventional they are--how very much
worldlier than the world--till one sees it as one does in Cambridge.
They pique themselves on it. And Mr. Saintsbury”--she was one of those
women whom everything reminds of their husbands “says that it isn't a
bad thing altogether. He says that Harvard is just like the world; and
even if it's a little more so, these boys have got to live in the world,
and they had better know what it is. You may not approve of the Harvard
spirit, and Mr. Saintsbury doesn't sympathise with it; he only says it's
the world's spirit. Harvard men--the swells--are far more exclusive
than Oxford men. A student, 'comme il faut', wouldn't at all like to
be supposed to know another student whom we valued for his brilliancy,
unless he was popular and well known in college.”

“Dear me!” cried Mrs. Pasmer. “But of course! It's perfectly natural,
with young people. And it's well enough that they should begin to
understand how things really are in the world early; it will save them
from a great many disappointments.”

“I assure you we have very little to teach Harvard men in those matters.
They could give any of us points. Those who are of good family and
station know how to protect themselves by reserves that the others
wouldn't dare to transgress. But a merely rich man couldn't rise in
their set any more than a merely gifted man. He could get on to a
certain point by toadying, and some do; but he would never get to be
popular, like Dan Mavering.”

“And what makes him popular?--to go back to the point we started from,”
 said Mrs. Pasmer.

“Ah, that's hard to say. It's--quality, I suppose. I don't mean social
quality, exactly; but personal charm. He never had a mean thought; of
course we're all full of mean thoughts, and Dan is too; but his first
impulse is always generous and sweet, and at his age people act a great
deal from impulse. I don't suppose he ever met a human being without
wanting to make him like him, and trying to do it.”

“Yes, he certainly makes you like him,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer. “But I
understand that he can't make people like him without family or money;
and I don't understand that he's one of those 'nouveaux riches' who are
giving Harvard such a reputation for extravagance nowadays.”

There was an inquiring note in Mrs. Pasmer's voice; and in the
syringa-scented obscurity, which protected the ladies from the
expression of each other's faces, Mrs. Saintsbury gave a little laugh
of intelligence, to which Mrs. Pasmer responded by a murmur of humorous
enjoyment at being understood.

“Oh no! He isn't one of those. But the Maverings have plenty of money,”
 said Mrs. Saintsbury, “and Dan's been very free with it, though not
lavish. And he came here with a reputation for popularity from a very
good school, and that always goes a very great way in college.”

“Yes?” said Mrs. Pasmer, feeling herself getting hopelessly adrift in
these unknown waters; but reposing a pious confidence in her pilot.

“Yes; if a sufficient number of his class said he was the best fellow in
the world, he would be pretty sure to be chosen one of the First Ten in
the 'Dickey'.”

“What mysteries!” gasped Mrs. Pasmer, disposed to make fun of them, but
a little overawed all the same. “What in the world is the 'Dickey'?”

“It's the society that the Freshmen are the most eager to get into.
They're chosen, ten at a time, by the old members, and to be one of the
first ten--the only Freshmen chosen--is something quite ineffable.”

“I see.” Mrs. Pasmer fanned herself, after taking a long breath. “And
when he had got into the------”

“Then it would depend upon himself, how he spent his money, and all
that, and what sort of society success he was in Boston. That has
a great deal to do with it from the first. Then another thing is
caution--discreetness; not saying anything censorious or critical of
other men, no matter what they do. And Dan Mavering is the perfection of
prudence, because he's the perfection of good-nature.”

Mrs. Pasmer had apparently got all of these facts that she could digest.
“And who are the Maverings?”

“Why, it's an old Boston name--”

“It's too old, isn't it? Like Pasmer. There are no Maverings in Boston
that I ever heard of.”

“No; the name's quite died out just here, I believe: but it's old, and
it bids fair to be replated at Ponkwasset Falls.”

“At Ponk--”

“That's where they have their mills, or factories, or shops, or whatever
institution they make wall-paper in.”

“Wall-paper!” cried Mrs. Pasmer, austerely. After a moment she asked:
“And is wall-paper the 'thing' now? I mean--” She tried to think of some
way of modifying the commonness of her phrase, but did not. After all,
it expressed her meaning.

“It isn't the extreme of fashion, of course. But it's manufacturing, and
it isn't disgraceful. And the Mavering papers are very pretty, and
you can live with them without becoming anaemic, or having your face
twitch.”

“Face twitch?” echoed Mrs. Pasmer.

“Yes; arsenical poisoning.”

“Oh! Conscientious as well as aesthetic. I see. And does Mr. Mavering
put his artistic temperament into them?”

“His father does. He's a very interesting man. He has the best taste in
certain things--he knows more about etchings, I suppose, than any one
else in Boston.”

“Is it possible! And does he live at Ponkwasset Falls? It's in Rhode
Island, isn't it?”

“New Hampshire. Yes; the whole family live there.”

“The whole family? Are there many of them? I'd fancied, somehow, that
Mr. Mavering was the only----Do tell me about them, Etta,” said Mrs.
Pasmer, leaning back in her chair, and fanning herself with an effect of
impartial interest, to which the dim light of the room lent itself.

“He's the only son. But there are daughters, of course--very cultivated
girls.”

“And is he--is the elder Mr. Mavering a--I don't know what made me think
so--a widower?”

“Well, no--not exactly.”

“Not exactly! He's not a grass-widower, I hope?”

“No, indeed. But his wife's a helpless invalid, and always has been.
He's perfectly devoted to her; and he hurried home yesterday, though
he wanted very much to stay for Commencement. He's never away from
her longer than he can help. She's bedridden; and you can see from the
moment you enter it that it's a man's house. Daughters can't change
that, you know.”

“Have you been there?” asked Mrs. Pasmer, surprised that she was getting
so much information, but eager for more. “Why, how long have you known
them, Etta?”

“Only since Dan came to Harvard. Mr. Saintsbury took a fancy to him
from the start, and the boy was so fond of him that they were always
insisting upon a visit; and last summer we stopped there on our way to
the mountains.”

“And the sisters--do they stay there the whole year round? Are they
countrified?”

“One doesn't live in the country without being countrified,” said Mrs.
Saintsbury. “They're rather quiet girls, though they've been about
a good deal--to Europe with friends, and to New York in the winter.
They're older than Dan; they're more like their father. Are you afraid
of that draught at the windows?”

“Oh no; it's delicious. And he's like the mother?”

“Yes.”

“Then it's the father who has the artistic taste--he gets that from him;
and the mother who has the--”

“Temperament--yes.”

“How extremely interesting! And so he's going to be a lawyer. Why
lawyer, if he's got the talent and the temperament of an artist? Does
his father wish him to be a lawyer?”

“His father wishes him to be a wall-paper maker.”

“And the young man compromises on the law. I see,” said Mrs. Pasmer.
“And you say he's been going into Boston a great deal? Where does he
go?”

The ladies entered into this social inquiry with a zest which it would
be hard to make the reader share, or perhaps to feel the importance of.
It is enough that it ended in the social vindication of Dan Mavering.
It would not have been enough for Mrs Pasmer that he was accepted in
the best Cambridge houses; she knew of old how people were accepted in
Cambridge for their intellectual brilliancy or solidity, their personal
worth, and all sorts of things, without consideration of the mystical
something which gives vogue in Boston.

“How superb Alice was!” Mrs. Saintsbury broke off abruptly. “She has
such a beautiful manner. Such repose.”

“Repose! Yes,” said her mother, thoughtfully. “But she's very intense.
And I don't see where she gets it. Her father has repose enough, but he
has no intensity; and I'm all intensity, and no repose. But I'm no more
like my mother than Alice is like me.”

“I think she has the Hibbins face,” said Mrs. Saintsbury.

“Oh! she's got the Hibbins face,” said Mrs Pasmer, with a disdain of
tone which she did not at all feel; the tone was mere absent-mindedness.

She was about to revert to the question of Mavering's family, when
the door-bell rang, and another visitor interrupted her talk with Mrs.
Saintsbury.




IX.

Mrs. Pasmer's husband looked a great deal older than herself, and, by
operation of a well-known law of compensation, he was lean and silent,
while she was plump and voluble. He had thick eyebrows, which remained
black after his hair and beard had become white, and which gave him an
aspect of fierceness, expressive of nothing in his character. It was
from him that their daughter got her height, and, as Mrs. Pasmer freely
owned, her distinction.

Soon after their marriage the Pasmers had gone to live in Paris, where
they remained faithful to the fortunes of the Second Empire till its
fall, with intervals of return to their own country of a year or two
years at a time. After the fall of the Empire they made their sojourn
in England, where they lived upon the edges and surfaces of things, as
Americans must in Europe everywhere, but had more permanency of feeling
than they had known in France, and something like a real social status.
At one time it seemed as if they might end their days there; but that
which makes Americans different from all other peoples, and which
finally claims their allegiance for their own land, made them wish to
come back to America, and to come back to Boston. After all, their place
in England was strictly inferior, and must be. They knew titles, and
consorted with them, but they had none themselves, and the English
constancy which kept their friends faithful to them after they had
become an old story, was correlated with the English honesty which
never permitted them to mistake themselves for even the lowest of the
nobility. They went out last, and they did not come in first, ever.

The invitations, upon these conditions, might have gone on indefinitely,
but they did not imply a future for the young girl in whom the interests
of her parents centred. After being so long a little girl, she had
become a great girl, and then all at once she had become a young
lady. They had to ask themselves, the mother definitely and the father
formlessly, whether they wished their daughter to marry an Englishman,
and their hearts answered them, like true Republican hearts, Not an
untitled Englishman, while they saw no prospect of her getting any
other. Mrs. Pasmer philosophised the case with a clearness and a courage
which gave her husband a series of twinges analogous to the toothache,
for a man naturally shrinks from such bold realisations. She said Alice
had the beauty of a beauty, and she had the distinction of a beauty, but
she had not the principles of a beauty; there was no use pretending that
she had. For this reason the Prince of Wales's set, so accessible to
American loveliness with the courage of its convictions, was beyond her;
and the question was whether there was money enough for a younger son,
or whether, if there was, a younger son was worth it.

However this might be, there was no question but there was now less
money than there had been, and a great deal less. The investments had
not turned out as they promised; not only had dividends been passed, but
there had been permanent shrinkages. What was once an amiable competency
from the pooling of their joint resources had dwindled to a sum that
needed a careful eye both to the income and the outgo. Alice's becoming
a young lady had increased their expenses by the suddenly mounting cost
of her dresses, and of the dresses which her mother must now buy for
the different role she had to sustain in society. They began to ask
themselves what it was for, and to question whether, if she could not
marry a noble Englishman, Alice had not better marry a good American.

Even with Mrs. Pasmer this question was tacit, and it need not be
explained to any one who knows our life that in her most worldly dreams
she intended at the bottom of her heart that her daughter should marry
for love. It is the rule that Americans marry for love, and the very
rare exception that they marry for anything else; and if our divorce
courts are so busy in spite of this fact, it is perhaps because the
Americans also unmarry for love, or perhaps because love is not so
sufficient in matters of the heart as has been represented in the
literature of people who have not been able to give it so fair a
trial. But whether it is all in all in marriage, or only a very marked
essential, it is certain that Mrs. Pasmer expected her daughter's
marriage to involve it. She would have shrunk from intimating anything
else to her as from a gross indecency; and she could not possibly, by
any finest insinuation, have made her a partner in her design for her
happiness. That, so far as Alice was concerned, was a thing which was to
fall to her as from heaven; for this also is part of the American plan.
We are the children of the poets, the devotees of the romancers, so far
as that goes; and however material and practical we are in other things,
in this we are a republic of shepherds and shepherdesses, and we live in
a golden age; which if it sometimes seems an age of inconvertible paper,
is certainly so through no want of faith in us.

Though the Pasmers said that they ought to go home for Alice's sake,
they both understood that they were going home experimentally, and not
with the intention of laying their bones in their native soil, unless
they liked it, or found they could afford it. Mrs. Pasmer had no
illusions in regard to it. She had learned from her former visits home
that it was frightfully expensive; and, during the fifteen years which
they had spent chiefly abroad, she had observed the decay of that
distinction which formerly attended returning sojourners from Europe.
She had seen them cease gradually from the romantic reverence which
once clothed them, and decline through a gathering indifference into
something like slight and compassion, as people who have not been
able to make their place or hold their own at home; and she had
taught herself so well how to pocket the superiority natural to
the Europeanised American before arriving at consciousness of this
disesteem, that she paid a ready tribute to people who had always stayed
at home.

In fact Mrs. Pasmer was a flatterer, and it cannot be claimed for her
that she flattered adroitly always. But adroitness in flattery is not
necessary for its successful use. There is no morsel of it too gross for
the condor gullet and the ostrich stomach of human vanity; there is
no society in which it does not give the utterer instant honour
and acceptance in greater or less degree. Mrs. Pasmer, who was very
good-natured, employed it because she liked it herself, and knowing how
absolutely worthless it was from her own tongue, prized it from others.
She could have rested perfectly safe without it in her social position,
which she found unchanged by years of absence. She had not been a
Hibbins for nothing, and she was not a Pasmer for nothing, though why
she should have been either for something it would not be easy to say.

But while confessing the foibles of Mrs. Pasmer, it would not be fair
to omit from the tale of her many virtues the final conscientiousness
of her openly involuted character. Not to mention other things, she
instituted and practised economies as alien to her nature as to her
husband's, and in their narrowing affairs she kept him out of debt. She
was prudent; she was alert; and while presenting to the world all the
outward effect of a butterfly, she possessed some of the best qualities
of the bee.

With his senatorial presence, his distinction of person and manner,
Mr. Pasmer was inveterately selfish in that province of small personal
things where his wife left him unmolested. In what related to his own
comfort and convenience he was undisputed lord of himself. It was she
who ordered their comings and goings, and decided in which hemisphere
they should sojourn from time to time, and in what city, street, and
house, but always with the understanding that the kitchen and all the
domestic appointments were to her husband's mind. He was sensitive to
degrees of heat and cold, and luxurious in the matter of lighting, and
he had a fine nose for plumbing. If he had not occupied himself so much
with these details, he was the sort of man to have thought Mrs. Pasmer,
with her buzz of activities and pretences, rather a tedious little
woman. He had some delicate tastes, if not refined interests, and was
expensively fond of certain sorts of bric-a-brac: he spent a great deal
of time in packing and unpacking it, and he had cases stored in Rome and
London and Paris; it had been one of his motives in consenting to come
home that he might get them out, and set up the various objects of
bronze and porcelain in cabinets. He had no vices, unless absolute
idleness ensuing uninterruptedly upon a remotely demonstrated unfitness
for business can be called a vice. Like other people who have always
been idle, he did not consider his idleness a vice. He rather plumed
himself upon it, for the man who has done nothing all his life naturally
looks down upon people who have done or are doing something. In Europe
he had not all the advantage of this superiority which such a man has
here; he was often thrown with other idle people, who had been useless
for so many generations that they had almost ceased to have any
consciousness of it. In their presence Pasmer felt that his uselessness
had not that passive elegance which only ancestral uselessness can give;
that it was positive, and to that degree vulgar.

A life like this was not one which would probably involve great passions
or affections, and it would be hard to describe exactly the feeling
with which he regarded his daughter. He liked her, of course, and he had
naturally expected certain things of her, as a ladylike intelligence,
behaviour, and appearance; but he had never shown any great tenderness
for her, or even pride in her. She had never given him any displeasure,
however, and he had not shared his wife's question of mind at a
temporary phase of Alice's development when she showed a decided
inclination for a religious life. He had apparently not observed that
the girl had a pensive temperament in spite of the effect of worldly
splendour which her mother contrived for her, and that this pensiveness
occasionally deepened to gloom. He had certainly never seen that in
a way of her own she was very romantic. Mrs. Pasmer had seen it, with
amusement sometimes, and sometimes with anxiety, but always with the
courage to believe that she could cope with it when it was necessary.

Whenever it was necessary she had all the moral courage she wanted; it
seemed as if she could have it or not as she liked; and in coming home
she had taken a flat instead of a house, though she had not talked with
her friends three minutes without perceiving that the moment when flats
had promised to assert their social equality with houses in Boston was
past for ever. There were, of course, cases in which there could be no
question of them; but for the most part they were plainly regarded as
makeshifts, the resorts of people of small means, or the defiances
or errors of people who had lived too much abroad. They stamped their
occupants as of transitory and fluctuant character; good people might
live in them, and did, as good people sometimes boarded; but they could
not be regarded as forming a social base, except in rare instances.
They presented peculiar difficulties in calling, and for any sort of
entertainment they were too--not public, perhaps, but--evident.

In spite of these objections Mrs. Pasmer took a flat in the Cavendish,
and she took it furnished from people who were going abroad for a year.




X.

Mrs. Pasmer stood at the drawing-room window of this apartment, the
morning after her call upon Mrs. Saintsbury, looking out on the passage
of an express-wagon load of trunks through Cavendish Square, and
commenting the fact with the tacit reflection that it was quite time
she should be getting away from Boston too, when her daughter, who was
looking out of the other window, started significantly back.

“What is it, Alice?”

“Nothing! Mr. Mavering, I think, and that friend of his----”

“Which friend? But where? Don't look! They will think we were watching
them. I can't see them at all. Which way were they going?” Mrs. Pasmer
dramatised a careless unconsciousness to the square, while vividly
betraying this anxiety to her daughter.

Alice walked away to the furthest part of the room. “They are coming
this way,” she said indifferently.

Before Mrs. Pasmer had time to prepare a conditional mood, adapted
either to their coming that way or going some other, she heard the
janitor below in colloquy with her maid in the kitchen, and then the
maid came in to ask if she should say the ladies were at home.
“Oh, certainly,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a caressing politeness that
anticipated the tone she meant to use with Mavering and his friend.
“Were you going, Alice? Better stay. It would be awkward sending out for
you. You look well enough.”

“Well!”

The young men came in, Mavering with his nervous laugh first, and
then Boardman with his twinkling black eyes, and his main-force
self-possession.

“We couldn't go away as far as New London without coming to see whether
you had really survived Class Day,” said the former, addressing his
solicitude to Mrs. Pasmer. “I tried to find out from, Mrs. Saintsbury,
but she was very noncommittal.” He laughed again, and shook hands with
Alice, whom he now included in his inquiry.

“I'm glad she was,” said Mrs. Pasmer--inwardly wondering what he meant
by going to New London--“if it sent you to ask in person.” She made them
sit down; and she made as little as possible of the young ceremony they
threw into the transaction. To be cosy, to be at ease instantly, was
Mrs. Pasmer's way. “We've not only survived, we've taken a new lease
of life from Class Day. I'd for gotten how charming it always was.
Or perhaps it didn't use to be so charming? I don't believe they have
anything like it in Europe. Is it always so brilliant?”

“I don't know,” said Mavering. “I really believe it was rather a nice
one.”

“Oh, we were both enraptured,” cried Mrs. Pasmer.

Alice added a quiet “Yes, indeed,” and her mother went on--

“And we thought the Beck Hall spread was the crowning glory of the whole
affair. We owe ever so much to your kindness.”

“Oh, not at all,” said Mavering.

“But we were talking afterward, Alice and I, about the sudden
transformation of all that disheveled crew around the Tree into the
imposing swells--may I say howling swells?--”

“Yes, do say 'howling,' Mrs. Pasmer!” implored the young man.

“--whom we met afterward at the spread,” she concluded. “How did you
manage it all? Mr. Irving in the 'Lyons Mail' was nothing to it. We
thought we had walked directly over from the Tree; and there you were,
all ready to receive us, in immaculate evening dress.”

“It was pretty quick work,” modestly admitted the young man. “Could you
recognise any one in that hurly-burly round the Tree?”

“We didn't till you rose, like a statue of Victory, and began grabbing
for the spoils from the heads and shoulders of your friends. Who was
your pedestal?”

Mavering put his hand on his friend's broad shoulder, and gave him a
playful push.

Boardman turned up his little black eyes at him, with a funny gleam in
them.

“Poor Mr. Boardman!” said Mrs. Pasmer.

“It didn't hurt him a bit,” said Mavering, pushing him. “He liked it.”

“Of course he did,” said Mrs. Pasmer, implying, in flattery of Mavering,
that Boardman might be glad of the distinction; and now Boardman looked
as if he were not. She began to get away in adding, “But I wonder you
don't kill each other.”

“Oh, we're not so easily killed,” said Mavering.

“And what a fairy scene it was at the spread!” said Mrs. Pasmer, turning
to Boardman. She had already talked its splendours over with Mavering
the same evening. “I thought we should never get out of the Hall; but
when we did get out of the window upon that tapestried platform, and
down on the tennis-ground, with Turkey rugs to hide the bare spots in
it--” She stopped as people do when it is better to leave the effect to
the listener's imagination.

“Yes, I think it was rather nice,” said Boardman.

“Nice?” repeated Mrs. Pasmer; and she looked at Mavering. “Is that the
famous Harvard Indifferentism?”

“No, no, Mrs. Pasmer! It's just his personal envy. He wasn't in the
spread, and of course he doesn't like to hear any one praise it. Go on!”
 They all laughed.

“Well, even Mr. Boardman will admit,” said Mrs. Pasmer; “that nothing
could have been prettier than that pavilion at the bottom of the lawn,
and the little tables scattered about over it, and all those charming
young creatures under that lovely evening sky.”

“Ah! Even Boardman can't deny that. We did have the nicest crowd; didn't
we?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Pasmer, playfully checking herself in a ready
adhesion, “that depends a good deal upon where Mr. Boardman's spread
was.”

“Thank you,” said Boardman.

“He wasn't spreading anywhere,” cried his friend. “Except himself--he
was spreading himself everywhere.”

“Then I think I should prefer to remain neutral,” said Mrs. Pasmer,
with a mock prudence which pleased the young men. In the midst of the
pleasure the was giving and feeling she was all the time aware that her
daughter had contributed but one remark to the conversation, and that
she must be seeming very stiff and cold. She wondered what that meant,
and whether she disliked this little Mr. Boardman, or whether she was
again trying to punish Mr. Mavering for something, and, if so, what it
was. Had he offended her in some way the other day? At any rate, she had
no right to show it. She longed for some chance to scold the girl,
and tell her that it would not do, and make her talk. Mr. Mavering
was merely a friendly acquaintance, and there could be no question
of anything personal. She forgot that between young people the social
affair is always trembling to the personal affair.

In the little pause which these reflections gave her mother, the girl
struck in, with the coolness that always astonished Mrs. Pasmer, and as
if she had been merely waiting till some phase of the talk interested
her.

“Are many of the students going to the race?” she asked Boardman.

“Yes; nearly everybody. That is--”

“The race?” queried Mrs. Pasmer.

“Yes, at New London,” Mavering broke in. “Don't you know? The University
race--Harvard and Yale.”

“Oh--oh yes,” cried Mrs. Pasmer, wondering how her daughter should know
about the race, and she not. “Had they talked it over together on Class
Day?” she asked herself. She felt herself, in spite of her efforts to
keep even with them; left behind and left out, as later age must be
distanced and excluded by youth. “Are you gentlemen going to row?” she
asked Mavering.

“No; they've ruled the tubs out this time; and we should send anything
else to the bottom.”

Mrs. Pasmer perceived that he was joking, but also that they were not of
the crew; and she said that if that was the case the should not go.

“Oh, don't let that keep you away! Aren't you going? I hoped you were
going,” continued the young man, speaking with his eyes on Mrs. Pasmer,
but with his mind, as she could see by his eyes, on her daughter.

“No, no.”

“Oh, do go, Mrs. Pasmer!” he urged: “I wish you'd go along to chaperon
us.”

Mrs. Pasmer accepted the notion with amusement. “I should think you
might look after each other. At any rate, I think I must trust you to
Mr. Boardman this time.”

“Yes; but he's going on business,” persisted Mavering, as if for the
pleasure he found in fencing with the air, “and he can't look after me.”

“On business?” said Mrs. Pasmer, dropping her outspread fan on her lap,
incredulously.

“Yes; he's going into journalism--he's gone into it,” laughed Mavering;
“and he's going down to report the race for the 'Events'.”

“Really!” asked Mrs. Pasmer, with a glance at Boardman, whose droll
embarrassment did not contradict his friend's words. “How splendid!”
 she cried. “I had, heard that a great many Harvard men were taking up
journalism. I'm so glad of it! It will do everything to elevate its
tone.”

Boardman seemed to suffer under these expectations a little, and he
stole a glance of comical menace at his friend.

“Yes,” said Mavering; “you'll see a very different tone about the fires,
and the fights, and the distressing accidents, in the 'Events' after
this.”

“What does he mean?” she asked Boardman, giving him unavoidably the
advantage of the caressing manner which was in her mind for Mavering.

“Well, you see,” said Boardman, “we have to begin pretty low down.”

“Oh, but all departments of our press need reforming, don't they?” she
inquired consolingly. “One hears such shocking things about our papers
abroad. I'm sure that the more Harvard men go into them the better. And
how splendid it is to have them going into politics the way they are!
They're going into politics too, aren't they?” She looked from one young
man to the other with an idea that she was perhaps shooting rather wild,
and an amiable willingness to be laughed at if she were. “Why don't you
go into politics, Mr. Mavering?”

“Well, the fact is--”

“So many of the young University men do in England,” said Mrs. Pasmer,
fortifying her position.

“Well, you see, they haven't got such a complete machine in England--”

“Oh yes, that dreadful machine!” sighed Mrs. Pasmer, who had heard of
it, but did not know in the least what it was.

“Do you think the Harvard crew will beat this time?” Alice asked of
Boardman.

“Well, to tell you the truth--”

“Oh, but you must never believe him when he begins that way!” cried
Mavering. “To be sure they will beat. And you ought to be there to see
it. Now, why won't you come, Mrs. Pasmer?” he pleaded, turning to her
mother.

“Oh, I'm afraid we must be getting away from Boston by that time. It's
very tiresome, but there seems to be nobody left; and one can't stay
quite alone, even if you're sick of moving about. Have you ever been--we
think of going there--to Campobello?”

“No; but I hear that it's charming, there. I had a friend who was there
last year, and he said it was charming. The only trouble is it's so far.
You're pretty well on the way to Europe when you get there. You know
it's all hotel life?”

“Yes. It's quite a new place, isn't it?”

“Well, it's been opened up several years. And they say it isn't like
the hotel life anywhere else; it's charming. And there's the very nicest
class of people.”

“Very nice Philadelphia people, I hear,” said Mrs. Pasmer; “and
Baltimore. Don't you think it's well;” she asked deferentially, and
under correction, if she were hazarding too much, “to see somebody
besides Boston people sometimes--if they're nice? That seems to be one
of the great advantages of living abroad.”

“Oh, I think there are nice people everywhere,” said the young man, with
the bold expansion of youth.

“Yes,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer. “We saw two such delightful young people
coming in and out of the hotel in Rome. We were sure they were English.
And they were from Chicago! But there are not many Western people at
Campobello, are there?”

“I really don't know,” said Mavering. “How is it, Boardman? Do many of
your people go there?”

“You know you do make it so frightfully expensive with your money,” said
Mrs. Pasmer, explaining with a prompt effect of having known all along
that Boardman was from the West, “You drive us poor people all away.”

“I don't think my money would do it,” said Boardman quietly.

“Oh, you wait till you're a Syndicate Correspondent,” said, Mavering,
putting his hand on his friend's shoulder, and rising by aid of it. He
left Mrs. Pasmer to fill the chasm that had so suddenly yawned between
her and Boardman; and while she tumbled into every sort of flowery
friendliness and compliment, telling him she should look out for his
account of the race with the greatest interest, and expressing the hope
that he would get as far as Campobello during the summer, Mavering found
some minutes for talk with Alice. He was graver with her--far graver
than with her mother--not only because she was a more serious nature,
but because they were both young, and youth is not free with youth
except by slow and cautious degrees. In that little space of time
they talked of pictures, 'a propos' of some on the wall, and of books,
because of those on the table.

“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer when they paused, and she felt that her piece
of difficult engineering had been quite successful, “Mrs. Saintsbury was
telling me what a wonderful connoisseur of etchings your father is.”

“I believe he does know something about them,” said the young man
modestly.

“And he's gone back already?”

“Oh yes. He never stays long away from my mother. I shall be going home
myself as soon as I get back from the race.”

“And shall you spend the summer there?”

“Part of it. I always like to do that.”

“Perhaps when you get away you'll come as far as Campobello--with Mr.
Boardman,” she added.

“Has Boardman promised to go?” laughed Mavering. “He will promise
anything. Well, I'll come to Campobello if you'll come to New London. Do
come, Mrs. Pasmer!”

The mother stood watching the two young men from the window as they made
their way across the square together. She had now, for some reason; no
apparent scruple in being seen to do so.

“How ridiculous that stout little Mr. Boardman is with him!” said Mrs.
Pasmer. “He hardly comes up to his shoulder. Why in the world should he
have brought him?”

“I thought he was very pleasant,” said the girl.

“Yes, yes, of course. And I suppose he'd have felt that it was rather
pointed coming alone.”

“Pointed?”

“Young men are so queer! Did you like that kind of collar he had on?”

“I didn't notice it.”

“So very, very high.”

“I suppose he has rather a long neck.”

“Well, what did you think of his urging us to go to the race? Do you
think he meant it? Do you think he intended it for an invitation?”

“I don't think he meant anything; or, if he did, I think he didn't know
what.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer vaguely; “that must be what Mrs. Saintsbury
meant by the artistic temperament.”

“I like people to be sincere, and not to say things they don't mean, or
don't know whether they mean or not,” said Alice.

“Yes, of course, that's the best way,” admitted Mrs. Pasmer. “It's the
only way,” she added, as if it were her own invariable practice. Then
she added further, “I wonder what he did mean?”

She began to yawn, for after her simulation of vivid interest in them
the visit of the young men had fatigued her. In the midst of her yawn
her daughter went out of the room, with an impatient gesture, and she
suspended the yawn long enough to smile, and then finished it.




XI.

After first going to the Owen, at Campobello, the Pasmers took rooms
at the Ty'n-y-Coed, which is so much gayer, even if it is not so
characteristic of the old Welsh Admiral's baronial possession of
the island. It is characteristic enough, and perched on its bluff
overlooking the bay, or whatever the body of water is, it sees a score
of pretty isles and long reaches of mainland coast, with a white marble
effect of white-painted wooden Eastport, nestled in the wide lap of the
shore, in apparent luxury and apparent innocence of smuggling and the
manufacture of herring sardines. The waters that wrap the island in
morning and evening fog temper the air of the latitude to a Newport
softness in summer, with a sort of inner coolness that is peculiarly
delicious, lulling the day with long calms and light breezes, and after
nightfall commonly sending a stiff gale to try the stops of the hotel's
gables and casements, and to make the cheerful blaze on its public
hearths acceptable. Once or twice a day the Eastport ferry-boat arrives,
with passengers from the southward, at a floating wharf that sinks or
swims half a hundred feet on the mighty tides of the Northeast; but all
night long the island is shut up to its own memories and devices. The
pretty romance of the old sailor who left England to become a sort
of feudal seigneur here, with a holding of the entire island, and its
fisher-folk for his villeins, forms a picturesque background for the
aesthetic leisure and society in the three hotels remembering him and
his language in their names, and housing with a few cottages all the
sojourners on the island. By day the broad hotel piazzas shelter such of
the guests as prefer to let others make their excursions into the heart
of the island, and around its rocky, sea-beaten borders; and at night,
when the falling mists have brought the early dark, and from lighthouse
to lighthouse the fog-horns moan and low to one another, the piazzas
cede to the corridors and the parlours and smoking-rooms. The life does
not greatly differ from other seaside hotel life on the surface, and
if one were to make distinctions one would perhaps begin by saying that
hotel society there has much of the tone of cottage society elsewhere,
with a little more accessibility. As the reader doubtless knows, the
great mass of Boston society, thoughtful of its own weight and bulk,
transports itself down the North Shore scarcely further than Manchester
at the furthest; but there are more courageous or more detachable
spirits who venture into more distant regions. These contribute
somewhat toward peopling Bar Harbour in the summer, but they scarcely
characterise it in any degree; while at Campobello they settle in little
daring colonies, whose self-reliance will enlist the admiration of the
sympathetic observer. They do not refuse the knowledge of other colonies
of other stirps and origins, and they even combine in temporary alliance
with them. But, after all, Boston speaks one language, and New York
another, and Washington a third, and though the several dialects have
only slight differences of inflection, their moral accents render each
a little difficult for the others. In fact every society is repellant
of strangers in the degree that it is sufficient to itself, and is
incurious concerning the rest of the world. If it has not the elements
of self-satisfaction in it, if it is uninformed and new and restless,
it is more hospitable than an older society which has a sense of merit
founded upon historical documents, and need no longer go out of itself
for comparisons of any sort, knowing that if it seeks anything better
it will probably be disappointed. The natural man, the savage, is
as indifferent to others as the exclusive, and those who accuse the
coldness of the Bostonians, and their reluctant or repellant behaviour
toward unknown people, accuse not only civilisation, but nature itself.

That love of independence which is notable in us even in our most
acquiescent phases at home is perhaps what brings these cultivated and
agreeable people so far away, where they can achieve a sort of sylvan
urbanity without responsibility, and without that measuring of purses
which attends the summer display elsewhere. At Campobello one might be
poor with almost as little shame as in Cambridge if one were cultivated.
Mrs. Pasmer, who seldom failed of doing just the right thing for
herself, had promptly divined the advantages of Campobello for her
family. She knew, by dint of a little inquiry, and from the volunteer
information of enthusiasts who had been there the summer before, just
who was likely to be there during the summer with which she now found
herself confronted. Campobello being yet a new thing, it was not open to
the objection that you were sure to meet such and such people, more
or less common or disagreeable, there; whatever happened, it could be
lightly handled in the retrospect as the adventure of a partial and
fragmentary summer when really she hardly cared where they went.

They did not get away from Boston before the middle of July, and after
the solitude they left behind them there, the Owen at first seemed very
gay. But when they had once or twice compared it with the Ty'n-y-Coed,
riding to and fro in the barge which formed the connecting link with
the Saturday evening hops of the latter hotel, Mrs. Pasmer decided that,
from Alice's point of view, they had made a mistake, and she repaired it
without delay. The young people were, in fact, all at the Ty'n-y-Coed,
and though she found the Owen perfectly satisfying for herself and Mr.
Pasmer, she was willing to make the sacrifice of going to a new place:
it was not a great sacrifice for one who had dwelt so long in tents.

There were scarcely any young girls at the Owen, and no young men, of
course. Even at the Ty'n-y-Coed, where young girls abounded, it would
not be right to pretend that there were young men enough. Nowhere,
perhaps, except at Bar Harbour, is the long-lost balance of the
sexes trimmed in New England; and even there the observer, abstractly
delighting in the young girls and their dresses at that grand
love-exchange of Rodick's, must question whether the adjustment is
perfectly accurate.

At Campobello there were not more than half enough young men, and there
was not enough flirtation to affect the prevailing social mood of the
place: an unfevered, expectationless tranquillity, in which to-day is
like yesterday, and to-morrow cannot be different. It is a quiet of
light reading, and slowly, brokenly murmured, contented gossip for the
ladies, of old newspapers and old stories and luxuriously meditated
cigars for the men, with occasional combinations for a steam-launch
cruise among the eddies and islands of the nearer waters, or a voyage
further off in the Bay of Fundy to the Grand Menan, and a return for the
late dinner which marks the high civilisation of Campobello, and then
an evening of more reading and gossip and cigars, while the night wind
whistles outside, and the brawl and crash of the balls among the tenpins
comes softened from the distant alleys. There are pleasant walks,
which people seldom take, in many directions, and there are drives and
bridle-paths all through the dense, sad, Northern woods which still
savagely clothe the greater part of the island to its further
shores, where there are shelves and plateaus of rock incomparable for
picnicking.

One need ask nothing better, in fact, than to stroll down the sylvan
road that leads to the Owen, past the little fishing-village with its
sheds for curing herring; and the pale blue smoke and appetising savour
escaping from them; and past the little chapel with which the old
Admiral attested his love of the Established rite. On this road you may
sometimes meet a little English bishop from the Provinces, in his apron
and knee-breeches; and there is a certain bridge over a narrow estuary,
where in the shallow land-locked pools of the deeply ebbing tide you may
throw stones at sculpin, and witness the admirable indifference of those
fish to human cruelty and folly. In the middle distance you will see
a group of herring weirs, which with their coronals of tufted saplings
form the very most picturesque aspect of any fishing industry. You may,
now and then find an artist at this point, who, crouched over his easel,
or hers, seems to agree with you about the village and the weirs.

But Alice Pasmer cared little more for such things than her mother did,
and Mrs. Pasmer regarded Nature in all her aspects simply as an adjunct
of society, or an occasional feature of the entourage. The girl had
no such worldly feeling about it, but she found slight sympathy in the
moods of earth and sky with her peculiar temperament. This temperament,
whose recondite origin had almost wholly broken up Mrs. Pasmer's faith
in heredity, was like other temperaments, not always in evidence, and
Alice was variously regarded as cold, of shy, or proud, or insipid, by
the various other temperaments brought in contact with her own. She
was apt to be liked because she was as careful of others as she was of
herself, and she never was childishly greedy about such admiration as
she won, as girls often are, perhaps because she did not care for it.
Up to this time it is doubtful if her heart had been touched even by the
fancies that shake the surface of the soul of youth, and perhaps it was
for this reason that her seriousness at first fretted Mrs. Pasmer with a
vague anxiety for her future.

Mrs. Pasmer herself remained inalienably Unitarian, but she was aware of
the prodigious-growth which the Church had been making in society, and
when Alice showed her inclination for it, she felt that it was not at
all as if she had developed a taste for orthodoxy; when finally it did
not seem likely to go too far, it amused Mrs. Pasmer that her daughter
should have taken so intensely to the Anglican rite.

In the hotel it attached to her by a common interest several of
the ladies who had seen her earnestly responsive at the little Owen
chapel--ladies left to that affectional solitude which awaits long
widowhood through the death or marriage of children; and other ladies,
younger, but yet beginning to grow old with touching courage. Alice
was especially a favourite with the three or four who represented their
class and condition at the Ty'n-y Coed, and who read the best books read
there, and had the gentlest manners. There was a tacit agreement
among these ladies, who could not help seeing the difference in the
temperaments of the mother and daughter, that Mrs. Pasmer did not
understand Alice; but probably there were very few people except herself
whom Mrs. Pasmer did not understand quite well. She understood these
ladies and their compassion for Alice, and she did not in the least
resent it. She was willing that people should like Alice for any reason
they chose, if they did not go too far. With her little flutter of
futile deceits, her irreverence for every form of human worth and her
trust in a providence which had seldom failed her, she smiled at the
cult of Alice's friends, as she did at the girl's seriousness, which
also she felt herself able to keep from going too far.

While she did not object to the sympathy of these ladies, whatever
inspired it, she encouraged another intimacy which grew up
contemporaneously with theirs, and which was frankly secular and
practical, though the girl who attached herself to Alice with one of
those instant passions of girlhood was also in every exterior observance
a strict and diligent Churchwoman. The difference was through the
difference of Boston and New York in everything: the difference between
idealising and the realising tendency. The elderly and middle-aged
Boston women who liked Alice had been touched by something high yet sad
in the beauty of her face at church; the New York girl promptly owned
that she had liked her effect the first Sunday she saw her there,
and she knew in a minute she never got those things on this side; her
obeisances and genuflections throughout the service, much more profound
and punctilious than those of any one else there, had apparently not
prevented her from making a thorough study of Alice's costume and a
correct conjecture as to its authorship.

Miss Anderson, who claimed a collateral Dutch ancestry by the Van Hook,
tucked in between her non-committal family name and the Julia given her
in christening, was of the ordinary slender make of American girlhood,
with dull blond hair, and a dull blond complexion, which would have left
her face uninteresting if it had not been for the caprice of her nose in
suddenly changing from the ordinary American regularity, after getting
over its bridge, and turning out distinctly 'retrousse'. This gave her
profile animation and character; you could not expect a girl with that
nose to be either irresolute or commonplace, and for good or for ill
Miss Anderson was decided and original. She carried her figure, which
was no great things of a figure as to height, with vigorous erectness;
she walked with long strides, knocking her skirts into fine eddies and
tangles as she went; and she spoke in a bold, deep voice, with tones
like a man in it, all the more amusing and fascinating because of the
perfectly feminine eyes with which she looked at you, and the nervous,
feminine gestures which she used while she spoke.

She took Mrs. Pasmer into her confidence with regard to Alice at
an early stage of their acquaintance, which from the first had a
patronising or rather protecting quality in it; if she owned herself
less fine, she knew herself shrewder, and more capable of coping with
actualities.

“I think she's moybid, Alice is,” she said. “She isn't moybid in the
usual sense of the word, but she expects more of herself and of the
woyld generally than anybody's going to get out of it. She thinks she's
going to get as much as she gives, and that's a great mistake, Mrs.
Pasmer,” she said, with that peculiar liquefaction of the canine letter
which the New-Yorkers alone have the trick of, and which it would be
tiresome and futile to try to represent throughout her talk.

“Oh yes, I quite agree with you,” said Mrs. Pasmer, deep in her throat,
and reserving deeper still her enjoyment of this early wisdom of Miss
Anderson's.

“Now, even at church--she carries the same spirit into the church. She
doesn't make allowance for human nature, and the church does.”

“Oh, certainly!” Mrs. Pasmer agreed.

“She isn't like a person that's been brought up in the church. It's more
like the old Puritan spirit.--Excuse me, Mrs. Pasmer!”

“Yes, indeed! Say anything you like about the Puritans!” said Mrs.
Pasmer, delighted that, as a Bostonian, she should be thought to care
for them.

“I always forget that you're a Bostonian,” Miss Anderson apologized.

“Oh, thank you!” cried Mrs. Pasmer.

“I'm going to try to make her like other girls,” continued Miss
Anderson.

“Do,” said Alice's mother, with the effect of wishing her joy of the
undertaking.

“If there were a few young men about, a little over seventeen and
a little under fifty, it would be easier,” said Miss Anderson
thoughtfully. “But how are you going to make a girl like other girls
when there are no young men?”

“That's very true,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with an interest which she of
course did her best to make impersonal. “Do you think there will be
more, later on?”

“They will have to Huey up if they are comin',” said Miss Anderson.
“It's the middle of August now, and the hotel closes the second week in
September.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, vaguely looking at Alice. She had just appeared
over the brow of the precipice, along whose face the arrivals and
departures by the ferry-boat at Campobello obliquely ascend and descend.

She came walking swiftly toward the hotel, and, for her, so excitedly
that Mrs. Pasmer involuntarily rose and went to meet her at the top of
the broad hotel steps.

“What is it, Alice?”

“Oh, nothing! I thought I saw Mr. Munt coming off the boat.”

“Mr. Munt?”

“Yes.” She would not stay for further question.

Her mother looked after her with the edge of her fan over her mouth till
she disappeared in the depths of the hotel corridor; then she sat down
near the steps, and chatted with some half-grown boys lounging on
the balustrade, and waited for Munt to come up over the brink of the
precipice. Dan Mavering came with him, running forward with a
polite eagerness at sight of Mrs. Pasmer. She distributed a skillful
astonishment equally between the two men she had equally expected to
see, and was extremely cordial with them, not only because she was
pleased with them, but because she was still more pleased with
her daughter's being, after all, like other girls, when it came to
essentials.




XII.

Alice came down to lunch in a dress which reconciled the seaside and the
drawing-room in an effect entirely satisfactory to her mother, and gave
her hand to both the gentlemen without the affectation of surprise at
seeing either.

“I saw Mr. Munt coning up from the boat,” she said in answer to
Mavering's demand for some sort of astonishment from her. “I wasn't
certain that it was you.”

Mrs. Pasmer, whose pretences had been all given away by this simple
confession, did not resent it, she was so much pleased with her
daughter's evident excitement at the young man's having come. Without
being conscious of it, perhaps, Alice prettily assumed the part of
hostess from the moment of their meeting, and did the honours of the
hotel with a tacit implication of knowing that he had come to see her
there. They had only met twice, but now, the third time, meeting after
a little separation, their manner toward each other was as if their
acquaintance had been making progress in the interval. She took him
about quite as if he had joined their family party, and introduced him
to Miss Anderson and to all her particular friends, for each of whom,
within five minutes after his presentation, he contrived to do some
winning service. She introduced him to her father, whom he treated with
deep respect and said “Sir” to. She showed him the bowling alley, and
began to play tennis with him.

Her mother, sitting with John Munt on the piazza, followed these polite
attentions to Mavering with humorous satisfaction, which was qualified
as they went on.

“Alice,” she said to her, at a chance which offered itself during the
evening, and then she hesitated for the right word.

“Well; mamma?” said the girl impatiently, stopping on her way to walk
up and down the piazza with Mavering; she had run in to get a wrap and a
Tam-o'-Shanter cap.

“Don't--overdo--the honours.”

“What do you mean, mamma?” asked the girl; dropping her arms before her,
and letting the shawl trail on the floor.

“Don't you think he was very kind to us on Class Day?”

Her mother laughed. “But every one mayn't know it's gratitude.”

Alice went out, but she came back in a little while, and went up to her
room without speaking to any one.

The fits of elation and depression with which this first day passed
for her succeeded one another during Mavering's stay. He did not need
Alice's chaperonage long. By the next morning he seemed to know and to
like everybody in the hotel, where he enjoyed a general favour which
at that moment had no exceptions. In the afternoon he began to organise
excursions and amusements with the help of Miss Anderson.

The plans all referred to Alice, who accepted and approved with an
authority which every one tacitly admitted, just as every one recognised
that Mavering had come to Campobello because she was there. Such a phase
is perhaps the prettiest in the history of a love affair. All is yet in
solution; nothing has been precipitated in word or fact. The parties to
it even reserve a final construction of what they themselves say or do;
they will not own to their hearts that they mean exactly this or that.
It is this phase which in its perfect freedom is the most American
of all; under other conditions it is an instant, perceptible or
imperceptible; under ours it is a distinct stage, unhurried by any
outside influences.

The nearest approach to a definition of the situation was in a walk
between Mavering and Mrs. Pasmer, and this talk, too, light and brief,
might have had no such intention as her fancy assigned his part of it.

She recurred to something that had been said on Class Day about his
taking up the law immediately, or going abroad first for a year.

“Oh, I've abandoned Europe altogether for the present,” he said
laughing. “And I don't know but I may go back on the law too.”

“Indeed! Then you are going to be an artist?”

“Oh no; not so bad as that. It isn't settled yet, and I'm off here
to think it over a while before the law school opens in September. My
father wants me to go into his business and turn my powers to account in
designing wall-papers.”

“Oh, how very interesting!” At the same time Mrs. Pasmer ran over the
whole field of her acquaintance without finding another wall-paper
maker in it. But she remembered what Mrs. Saintsbury had said: it was
manufacturing. This reminded her to ask if he had seen the Saintsburys
lately, and he said, No; he believed they were still in Cambridge,
though.

“And we shall actually see a young man,” she said finally, “in the act
of deciding his own destiny!”

He laughed for pleasure in her persiflage. “Yes; only don't give me
away. Nobody else knows it.”

“Oh no, indeed. Too much flattered, Mr. Mavering. Shall you let me
know when you've decided? I shall be dying to know, and I shall be too
high-minded to ask.”

It was not then too late to adapt 'Pinafore' to any exigency of life,
and Mavering said, “You will learn from the expression of my eyes.”




XIII.

The witnesses of Mavering's successful efforts to make everybody like
him were interested in his differentiation of the attentions he offered
every age and sex from those he paid Alice. But while they all agreed
that there never was a sweeter fellow, they would have been puzzled to
say in just what this difference consisted, and much as they liked
him, the ladies of her cult were not quite satisfied with him till
they decided that it was marked by an anxiety, a timidity, which was
perfectly fascinating in a man so far from bashfulness as he. That is,
he did nice things for others without asking; but with her there was
always an explicit pause, and an implicit prayer and permission, first.
Upon this condition they consented to the glamour which he had for her,
and which was evident to every one probably but him.

Once agreeing that no one was good enough for Alice Pasmer, whose
qualities they felt that only women could really appreciate, they were
interested to see how near Mavering could come to being good enough; and
as the drama played itself before their eyes, they pleased themselves in
analysing its hero.

“He is not bashful, certainly,” said one of a little group who sat
midway of the piazza while Alice and Mavering walked up and down
together. “But don't you think he's modest? There's that difference, you
know.”

The lady addressed waited so long before answering that the young couple
came abreast of the group, and then she had to wait till they were out
of hearing. “Yes,” she said then, with a tender, sighing thoughtfulness,
“I've felt that in him. And really think he is a very loveable nature.
The only question would be whether he wasn't too loveable.”

“Yes,” said the first lady, with the same kind of suspiration, “I know
what you mean. And I suppose they ought to be something more alike in
disposition.”

“Or sympathies?” suggested the other.

“Yes, or sympathies.”

A third lady laughed a little. “Mr. Mavering has so many sympathies that
he ought to be like her in some of them.”

“Do you mean that he's too sympathetic--that he isn't sincere?” asked
the first--a single lady of forty-nine, a Miss Cotton, who had a little
knot of conscience between her pretty eyebrows, tied there by the
unremitting effort of half a century to do and say exactly the truth,
and to find it out.

Mrs. Brinkley, whom she addressed, was of that obesity which seems often
to incline people to sarcasm. “No, I don't think he's insincere. I think
he always means what he says and does--Well, do you think a little more
concentration of good-will would hurt him for Miss Pasmer's purpose--if
she has it?”

“Yes, I see,” said Miss Cotton. She waited, with her kind eyes fixed
wistfully upon Alice, for the young people to approach and get by. “I
wonder what the men think of him?”

“You might ask Miss Anderson,” said Mrs. Brinkley.

“Oh, do you think they tell her?”

“Not that exactly,” said Mrs. Brinkley, shaking with good-humoured
pleasure in her joke.

“Her voice--oh yes. She and Alice are great friends, of course.”

“I should think,” said Mrs. Stamwell, the second speaker, “that Mr.
Mavering would be jealous sometimes--till he looked twice.”

“Yes,” said Miss Cotton, obliged to admit the force of the remark,
but feeling that Mr. Mavering had been carried out of the field of her
vision by the turn of the talk. “I suppose,” she continued, “that he
wouldn't be so well liked by other young men as she is by other girls,
do you think?”

“I don't think, as a rule,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “that men are half so
appreciative of one another as women are. It's most amusing to see the
open scorn with which two young fellows treat each other if a pretty
girl introduces them.”

All the ladies joined in the laugh with which Mrs. Brinkley herself led
off. But Miss Cotton stopped laughing first.

“Do you mean,”, she asked, “that if a gentleman were generally popular
with gentlemen it would be--”

“Because he wasn't generally so with women? Something like that--if
you'll leave Mr. Mavering out of the question. Oh, how very good of
them!” she broke off, and all the ladies glanced at Mavering and Alice
where they had stopped at the further end of the piazza, and were
looking off. “Now I can probably finish before they get back here again.
What I do mean, Miss Cotton, is that neither sex willingly accepts the
favourites of the other.”

“Yes,” said Miss Cotton admissively.

“And all that saves Miss Pasmer is that she has not only the qualities
that women like in women, but some of the qualities that men, like in
them. She's thoroughly human.”

A little sensation, almost a murmur, not wholly of assent, went round
that circle which had so nearly voted Alice a saint.

“In the first place, she likes to please men.”

“Oh!” came from the group.

“And that makes them like her--if it doesn't go too far, as her mother
says.”

The ladies all laughed, recognising a common turn of phrase in Mrs.
Pasmer.

“I should think,” said Mrs. Stamwell, “that she would believe a little
in heredity if she noticed that in her daughter;” and the ladies laughed
again.

“Then,” Mrs. Brinkley resumed concerning Alice, “she has a very pretty
face--an extremely pretty face; she has a tender voice, and she's very,
very graceful--in rather an odd way; perhaps it's only a fascinating
awkwardness. Then she dresses--or her mother dresses her--exquisitely.”
 The ladies, with another sensation, admitted the perfect accuracy with
which these points had been touched.

“That's what men like, what they fall in love with, what Mr. Mavering's
in love with this instant. It's no use women's flattering themselves
that they don't, for they do. The rest of the virtues and graces and
charms are for women. If that serious girl could only know the silly
things that that amiable simpleton is taken with in her, she'd--”

“Never speak to him again?” suggested Miss Cotton.

“No, I don't say that. But she would think twice before marrying him.”

“And then do it,” said Mrs. Stamwell pensively, with eyes that seemed
looking far into the past.

“Yes, and quite right to do it,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “I don't know that
we should be very proud ourselves if we confessed just what caught our
fancy in our husbands. For my part I shouldn't like to say how much a
light hat that Mr. Brinkley happened to be wearing had to do with the
matter.”

The ladies broke into another laugh, and then checked themselves,
so that Mrs. Pasmer, coming out of the corridor upon them, naturally
thought they were laughing at her. She reflected that if she had been
in their place she would have shown greater tact by not stopping just at
that instant.

But she did not mind. She knew that they talked her over, but having a
very good conscience, she simply talked them over in return. “Have you
seen my daughter within a few minutes?” she asked.

“She was with Mr. Mavering at the end of the piazza a moment ago,”
 said Mrs. Brinkley. “They must leave just gone round the corner of the
building.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Pasmer. She had a novel, with her finger between its
leaves, pressed against her heart, after the manner of ladies coming out
on hotel piazzas. She sat down and rested it on her knee, with her hand
over the top.

Miss Cotton bent forward, and Mrs. Pasmer lifted her fingers to let her
see the name of the book.

“Oh yes,” said Miss Cotton. “But he's so terribly pessimistic, don't you
think?”

“What is it?” asked Mrs. Brinkley.

“Fumee,” said Mrs. Pasmer, laying the book title upward on her lap for
every one to see.

“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley, fanning herself. “Tourguenief. That man
gave me the worst quarter of an hour with his 'Lisa' that I ever had.”

“That's the same as the 'Nichee des Gentilshommes', isn't it?” asked
Mrs. Pasmer, with the involuntary superiority of a woman who reads her
Tourguenief in French.

“I don't know. I had it in English. I don't build my ships to cross the
sea in, as Emerson says; I take those I find built.”

“Ah! I was already on the other side,” said Mrs. Pasmer softly. She
added: “I must get Lisa. I like a good heart-break; don't you? If that's
what gave you the bad moment.”

“Heart-break? Heart-crush! Where Lavretsky comes back old to the scene
of his love for Lisa, and strikes that chord on the piano--well, I
simply wonder that I'm alive to recommend the book to you.

“Do you know,” said Miss Cotton, very deferentially, “that your daughter
always made me think of Lisa?”

“Indeed!” cried Mrs. Pasmer, not wholly pleased, but gratified that she
was able to hide her displeasure. “You make me very curious.”

“Oh, I doubt if you'll see more than a mere likeness of temperament,”
 Mrs. Brinkley interfered bluntly. “All the conditions are so different.
There couldn't be an American Lisa. That's the charm of these Russian
tragedies. You feel that they're so perfectly true there, and so
perfectly impossible here. Lavretsky would simply have got himself
divorced from Varvara Pavlovna, and no clergyman could have objected to
marrying him to Lisa.”

“That's what I mean by his pessimism,” said Miss Cotton. “He leaves you
no hope. And I think that despair should never be used in a novel except
for some good purpose; don't you, Mrs. Brinkley?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “I was trying to think what good purpose
despair could be put to, in a book or out of it.”

“I don't think,” said Mrs. Pasmer, referring to the book in her lap,
“that he leaves you altogether in despair here, unless you'd rather he'd
run off with Irene than married Tatiana.”

“Oh, I certainly didn't wish that;” said Miss Cotton, in self-defence,
as if the shot had been aimed at her.

“The book ends with a marriage; there's no denying that,” said Mrs.
Brinkley, with a reserve in her tone which caused Mrs. Pasmer to
continue for her--

“And marriage means happiness--in a book.”

“I'm not sure that it does in this case. The time would come, after
Litvinof had told Tatiana everything, when she would have to ask
herself, and not once only, what sort of man it really was who was
willing to break his engagement and run off with another man's wife, and
whether he could ever repent enough for it. She could make excuses for
him, and would, but at the bottom of her heart--No, it seems to me
that there, almost for the only time, Tourguenief permitted himself an
amiable weakness. All that part of the book has the air of begging the
question.”

“But don't you see,” said Miss Cotton, leaning forward in the way she
had when very earnest, “that he means to show that her love is strong
enough for all that?”

“But he doesn't, because it isn't. Love isn't strong enough to save
people from unhappiness through each other's faults. Do you suppose that
so many married people are unhappy in each other because they don't love
each other? No; it's because they do love each other that their faults
are such a mutual torment. If they were indifferent, they wouldn't mind
each other's faults. Perhaps that's the reason why there are so many
American divorces; if they didn't care, like Europeans, who don't marry
for love, they could stand it.”

“Then the moral is,” said Mrs. Pasmer, at her lightest through the
surrounding gravity, “that as all Americans marry for love, only
Americans who have been very good ought to get married.”

“I'm not sure that the have-been goodness is enough either,” said Mrs.
Brinkley, willing to push it to the absurd. “You marry a man's future as
well as his past.”

“Dear me! You are terribly exigeante, Mrs. Brinkley,” said Mrs. Pasmer.

“One can afford to be so--in the abstract,” answered Mrs. Brinkley.

They all stopped talking and looked at John Munt, who was coming toward
them, and each felt a longing to lay the matter before him.

There was probably not a woman among them but had felt more, read more,
and thought more than John Munt, but he was a man, and the mind of a
man is the court of final appeal for the wisest women. Till some man has
pronounced upon their wisdom, they do not know whether it is wisdom or
not.

Munt drew up his chair, and addressed himself to the whole group through
Mrs. Pasmer: “We are thinking of getting up a little picnic to-morrow.”




XIV.

The day of the picnic struggled till ten o'clock to peer through the fog
that wrapt it with that remote damp and coolness and that nearer drouth
and warmth which some fogs have. The low pine groves hung full of it,
and it gave a silvery definition to the gossamer threads running from
one grass spear to another in spacious networks over the open levels of
the old fields that stretch back from the bluff to the woods. At last
it grew thinner, somewhere over the bay; then you could see the smooth
water through it; then it drifted off in ragged fringes before a light
breeze: when you looked landward again it was all gone there, and
seaward it had gathered itself in a low, dun bank along the horizon. It
was the kind of fog that people interested in Campobello admitted as apt
to be common there, but claimed as a kind of local virtue when it began
to break away. They said that it was a very dry fog, not like Newport,
and asked you to notice that it did not wet you at all.

Four or five carriages, driven by the gentlemen of the party, held the
picnic, which was destined for that beautiful cove on the Bay of Fundy
where the red granite ledges, smooth-washed by ages of storm and sun,
lend themselves to such festivities as if they had been artificially
fashioned into shelves and tables. The whole place is yet so new to men
that this haunt has not acquired that air of repulsive custom which the
egg shells and broken bottles and sardine boxes of many seasons give.
Or perhaps the winter tempests heap the tides of the bay over the ledge,
and wash it clean of these vulgar traces of human resort, and enable it
to offer as fresh a welcome to the picnics of each successive summer as
if there had never been a picnic in that place before.

This was the sense that Mavering professed to have received from it,
when he jumped out of the beach wagon in which he had preceded the other
carriages through the weird forest lying between the fringe of farm
fields and fishing-villages on the western shore of the island and
these lonely coasts of the bay. As far as the signs of settled human
habitation last, the road is the good hard country road of New England,
climbing steep little hills, and presently leading through long tracts
of woodland. But at a certain point beyond the furthest cottage
you leave it, and plunge deep into the heart of the forest, vaguely
traversed by the wheel-path carried through since the island was opened
to summer sojourn. Road you can hardly call it, remembering its curious
pauses and hesitations when confronted with stretches of marshy ground,
and its staggering progress over the thick stubble of saplings through
which it is cut. The progress of teams over it is slow, but there is
such joy of wildness in the solitudes it penetrates that; if the horses
had any gait slower than a walk, one might still wish to stay them. It
is a Northern forest, with the air of having sprang quickly up in the
fierce heat and haste of the Northern summers. The small firs are set
almost as dense as rye in a field, and in their struggle to the light
they have choked one another so that there is a strange blight of death
and defeat on all that vigour of life. Few of the trees have won any
lofty growth; they seem to have died and fallen when they were about
to outstrip the others in size, and from their decay a new sylvan
generation riots rankly upward. The surface of the ground is thinly
clothed with a deciduous undergrowth, above which are the bare, spare
stems of the evergreens, and then their limbs thrusting into one another
in a sombre tangle, with locks of long yellowish-white moss, like the
grey pendants of the Southern pines, dripping from them and draining
their brief life.

In such a place you must surrender yourself to its influences,
profoundly yet vaguely melancholy, or you must resist them with whatever
gaiety is in you, or may be conjured out of others. It was conceded
that Mavering was the life of the party, as the phrase goes. His
light-heartedness, as kindly and sympathetic as it was inexhaustible,
served to carry them over the worst places in the road of itself. He
jumped down and ran back, when he had passed a bad bit, to see if the
others were getting through safely; the least interesting of the party
had some proof of his impartial friendliness; he promised an early and
triumphant emergence from all difficulties; he started singing, and
sacrificed himself in several tunes, for he could not sing well; his
laugh seemed to be always coming back to Alice, where she rode late
in the little procession; several times, with the deference which he
delicately qualified for her, he came himself to see if he could not do
something for her.

“Miss Pasmer,” croaked her friend Miss Anderson, who always began in
that ceremonious way with her, and got to calling her Alice further
along in the conversation, “if you don't drop something for that poor
fellow to run back two or three miles and get, pretty soon, I'll do it
myself. It's peyfectly disheaytening to see his disappointment when you
tell him theye's nothing to be done.”

“He seems to get over it,” said Alice evasively. She smiled with
pleasure in Miss Anderson's impeachment, however.

“Oh, he keeps coming, if that's what you mean. But do drop an
umbrella, or a rubber, or something, next time, just to show a proper
appreciation.”

But Mavering did not come any more. Just before they got to the cove,
Miss Anderson leaned over again to whisper in Alice's ear, “I told you
he was huyt. Now you must be very good to him the rest of the time.”

Upon theory a girl of Alice Pasmer's reserve ought to have resented this
intervention, but it is not probable she did. She flushed a little, but
not with offence, apparently; and she was kinder to Mavering, and let
him do everything for her that he could invent in transferring the
things from the wagons to the rocks.

The party gave a gaiety to the wild place which accented its proper
charm, as they scattered themselves over the ledges on the bright shawls
spread upon the level spaces. On either hand craggy bluffs hemmed
the cove in, but below the ledge it had a pebbly beach strewn with
drift-wood, and the Bay of Fundy gloomed before it with small fishing
craft tipping and tilting on the swell in the foreground, and dim sail
melting into the dun fog bank at the horizon's edge.

The elder ladies of the party stood up, or stretched themselves on the
shawls, as they found this or that posture more restful after their long
drive; one, who was skilled in making coffee, had taken possession of
the pot, and was demanding fire and water for it. The men scattered
themselves over the beach, and brought her drift enough to roast an
ox; two of them fetched water from the spring at the back of the ledge,
whither they then carried the bottles of ale to cool in its thrilling
pool. Each after his or her fashion symbolised a return to nature by
some act or word of self-abandon.

“You ought to have brought heavier shoes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a
serious glance at her daughter's feet. “Well, never mind,” she added.
“It doesn't matter if you do spoil them.”

“Really,” cried Mrs Brinkley, casting her sandals from her, “I will not
be enslaved to rubbers in such a sylvan scene as this, at any rate.”

“Look at Mrs. Stamwell!” said Miss Cotton. “She's actually taken her hat
off.”

Mrs. Stamwell had not only gone to this extreme, but had tied a lightly
fluttering handkerchief round her hair. She said she should certainly
not put on that heavy thing again till she got in sight of civilisation.

At these words Miss Cotton boldly drew off her gloves, and put them in
her pocket.

The young girls, slim in their blues flannel skirts and their broad
white canvas belts, went and came over the rocks. There were some
children in the party, who were allowed to scream uninterruptedly in the
games which they began to play as soon as they found their feet after
getting out of the wagons.

Some of the gentlemen drove a stake into the beach, and threw stones at
it, to see which could knock off the pebble balanced on its top. Several
of the ladies joined them in the sport, and shrieked and laughed when
they made wild shots with the missiles the men politely gathered for
them.

Alice had remained with Mavering to help the hostess of the picnic
lay the tables, but her mother had followed those who went down to
the beach. At first Mrs. Pasmer looked on at the practice of the
stone-throwers with disapproval; but suddenly she let herself go in
this, as she did in other matters that her judgment condemned, and began
to throw stones herself; she became excited, and made the wildest shots
of any, accepting missiles right and left, and making herself dangerous
to everybody within a wide circle. A gentleman who had fallen a victim
to her skill said, “Just wait, Mrs. Pasmer, till I get in front of the
stake.”

The men became seriously interested, and worked themselves red and hot;
the ladies soon gave it up, and sat down on the sand and began to talk.
They all owned themselves hungry, and from time to time they looked
up anxiously at the preparations for lunch on the ledge, where white
napkins were spread, with bottles at the four corners to keep them from
blowing away. This use of the bottles was considered very amusing; the
ladies tried to make jokes about it, and the desire to be funny spread
to certain of the men who had quietly left off throwing at the stake
because they had wrenched their shoulders; they succeeded in being
merry. They said they thought that coffee took a long time to boil.

A lull of expectation fell upon all; even Mavering sat down on the rocks
near the fire, and was at rest a few minutes, by order of Miss Anderson,
who said that the sight of his activity tired her to death.

“I wonder why always boiled ham at a picnic!” said the lady who took a
final plate of it from a basket. “Under the ordinary conditions, few of
us can be persuaded to touch it.”

“It seems to be dear to nature, and to nature's children,” said Mrs.
Brinkley. “Perhaps because their digestions are strong.”

“Don't you wish that something could be substituted for it?” asked Miss.
Cotton.

“There have been efforts to replace it with chicken and tongue in
sandwiches;” said Mrs. Brinkley; “but I think they've only measurably
succeeded--about as temperance drinks have in place of the real strong
waters.”

“On the boat coming up,” said Mavering, “we had a troupe of genuine
darky minstrels. One of them sang a song about ham that rather took me--

“'Ham, good old ham! Ham is de best ob meat; It's always good and sweet;
You can bake it, you can boil it, You can fry it, you can broil it--Ham,
good old ham!'”

“Oh, how good!” sighed Mrs. Brinkley. “How sincere! How native! Go on,
Mr. Mavering, for ever.”

“I haven't the materials,” said Mavering, with his laugh. “The rest was
da capo. But there was another song, about a coloured lady--”

“'Six foot high and eight foot round, Holler ob her foot made a hole in
de ground.'”

“Ah, that's an old friend,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “I remember hearing
of that coloured lady when I was a girl. But it's a fine flight of the
imagination. What else did they sing?”

“I can't remember. But there was something they danced--to show how a
rheumatic old coloured uncle dances.”

He jumped nimbly up, and sketched the stiff and limping figure he had
seen. It was over in a flash. He dropped down again, laughing.

“Oh, how wonderfully good!” cried Mrs. Brinkley, with frank joy. “Do it
again.”

“Encore! Oh, encore!” came from the people on the beach.

Mavering jumped to his feet, and burlesqued the profuse bows of an actor
who refuses to repeat; he was about to drop down again amidst their
wails of protest.

“No, don't sit down, Mr. Mavering,” said the lady who had introduced the
subject of ham. “Get some of the young ladies, and go and gather some
blueberries for the dessert. There are all the necessaries of life here,
but none of the luxuries.”

“I'm at the service of the young ladies as an escort,” said Mavering
gallantly, with an infusion of joke. “Will you come and pick blueberries
under my watchful eyes, Miss Pasmer?”

“They've gone to pick blueberries,” called the lady through her tubed
hand to the people on the beach, and the younger among them scrambled up
the rocks for cups and bowls to follow them.

Mrs. Pasmer had an impulse to call her daughter back, and to make
some excuse to keep her from going. She was in an access of decorum,
naturally following upon her late outbreak, and it seemed a very
pronounced thing for Alice to be going off into the woods with the young
man; but it would have been a pronounced thing to prevent her, and so
Mrs. Pasmer submitted.

“Isn't it delightful,” asked Mrs. Brinkley, following them with her
eyes, “to see the charm that gay young fellow has for that serious girl?
She looked at him while he was dancing as if she couldn't take her eyes
off him, and she followed him as if he drew her by an invisible spell.
Not that spells are ever visible,” she added, saving herself. “Though
this one seems to be,” she added further, again saving herself.

“Do you really think so?” pleaded Miss Cotton.

“Well, I say so, whatever I think. And I'm not going to be caught up
on the tenter-hooks of conscience as to all my meanings, Miss Cotton. I
don't know them all. But I'm not one of the Aliceolaters, you know.”

“No; of course not. But shouldn't you--Don't you think it would be a
great pity--She's so superior, so very uncommon in every way, that it
hardly seems--Ah, I should so like to see some one really fine--not a
coarse fibre in him, don't you know. Not that Mr. Mavering's coarse. But
beside her he does seem so light!”

“Perhaps that's the reason she likes him.”

“No, no! I can't believe that. She must see more in him than we can.”

“I dare say she thinks she does. At any rate, it's a perfectly evident
case on both sides; and the frank way he's followed her up here, and
devoted himself to her, as if--well, not as if she were the only girl in
the world, but incomparably the best--is certainly not common.”

“No,” sighed Miss Cotton, glad to admit it; “that's beautiful.”




XV.

In the edge of the woods and the open spaces among the trees the
blueberries grew larger and sweeter in the late Northern summer than
a more southern sun seems to make them. They hung dense upon the low
bushes, and gave them their tint through the soft grey bloom that veiled
their blue. Sweet-fern in patches broke their mass here and there, and
exhaled its wild perfume to the foot or skirt brushing through it.

“I don't think there's anything much prettier than these clusters; do
you, Miss Pasmer?” asked Mavering, as he lifted a bunch pendent from the
little tree before he stripped it into the bowl he carried. “And see! it
spoils the bloom to gather them.” He held out a handful, and then tossed
them away. “It ought to be managed more aesthetically for an
occasion like this. I'll tell you what, Miss Pasmer: are you used to
blueberrying?”

“No,” she said; “I don't know that I ever went blueberrying before.
Why?” she asked.

“Because, if you haven't, you wouldn't be very efficient perhaps, and so
you might resign yourself to sitting on that log and holding the berries
in your lap, while I pick them.”

“But what about the bowls, then?”

“Oh, never mind them. I've got an idea. See here!” He clipped off a
bunch with his knife, and held it up before her, tilting it this way
and that. “Could anything be more graceful! My idea is to serve the
blueberry on its native stem at this picnic. What do you think? Sugar
would profane it, and of course they've only got milk enough for the
coffee.”

“Delightful!” Alice arranged herself on the log, and made a lap for the
bunch. He would not allow that the arrangement was perfect till he had
cushioned the seat and carpeted the ground for her feet with sweet-fern.

“Now you're something like a wood-nymph,” he laughed. “Only, wouldn't a
real wood-nymph have an apron?” he asked, looking down at her dress.

“Oh, it won't hurt the dress. You must begin now, or they'll be calling
us.”

He was standing and gazing at her with a distracted enjoyment of her
pose. “Oh yes, yes,” he answered, coming to himself, and he set about
his work.

He might have got on faster if he had not come to her with nearly every
bunch he cut at first, and when he began to deny himself this pleasure
he stopped to admire an idea of hers.

“Well, that's charming--making them into bouquets.”

“Yes, isn't it?” she cried delightedly, holding a bunch of the berries
up at arm's-length to get the effect.

“Ah, but you must have some of this fern and this tall grass to go with
it. Why, it's sweet-grass--the sweet-grass of the Indian baskets!”

“Is it?” She looked up at him. “And do you think that the mixture would
be better than the modest simplicity of the berries, with a few leaves
of the same?”

“No; you're right; it wouldn't,” he said, throwing away his ferns. “But
you'll want something to tie the stems with; you must use the grass.” He
left that with her, and went back to his bushes. He added, from beyond
a little thicket, as if what he said were part of the subject, “I was
afraid you wouldn't like my skipping about there on the rocks, doing the
coloured uncle.”

“Like it?”

“I mean--I--you thought it undignified--trivial--”

She said, after a moment: “It was very funny; and people do all sorts of
things at picnics. That's the pleasure of it, isn't it?”

“Yes, it is; but I know you don't always like that kind of thing.”

“Do I seem so very severe?” she asked.

“Oh no, not severe. I should be afraid of you if you were. I shouldn't
have dared to come to Campobello.”

He looked at her across the blueberry bushes. His gay speech meant
everything or nothing. She could parry it with a jest, and then it would
mean nothing. She let her head droop over her work, and made no answer.

“I wish you could have seen those fellows on the boat,” said Mavering.

“Hello, Mavering!” called the voice of John Munt, from another part of
the woods.

“Alice!--Miss Pasmer!” came that of Miss Anderson.

He was going to answer, when he looked at Alice. “We'll let them see if
they can find us,” he said, and smiled.

Alice said nothing at first; she smiled too. “You know more about the
woods than I do. I suppose if they keep looking--”

“Oh yes.” He came toward her with a mass of clusters which he had
clipped. “How fast you do them!” he said, standing and looking down at
her. “I wish you'd let me come and make up the withes for you when you
need them.”

“No, I couldn't allow that on any account,” she answered, twisting some
stems of the grass together.

“Well, will you let me hold the bunches while you tie them; or tie them
when you hold them?”

“No.”

“This once, then?”

“This once, perhaps.”

“How little you let me do for you!” he sighed.

“That gives you a chance to do more for other people,” she answered;
and then she dropped her eyes, as if she had been surprised into
that answer. She made haste to add: “That's what makes you so popular
with--everybody!”

“Ah, but I'd rather be popular with somebody!”

He laughed, and then they both laughed together consciously; and still
nothing or everything had been said. A little silly silence followed,
and he said, for escape from it, “I never saw such berries before, even
in September, on the top of Ponkwasset.”

“Why, is it a mountain?” she asked. “I thought it was a--falls.”

“It's both,” he said.

“I suppose it's very beautiful, isn't it! All America seems so lovely,
so large.”

“It's pretty in the summer. I don't know that I shall like it there in
the winter if I conclude to--Did your--did Mrs. Pasmer tell you what my
father wants me to do?”

“About going there to--manufacture?”

Mavering nodded. “He's given me three weeks to decide whether I would
like to do that or go in for law. That's what I came up here for.”

There was a little pause. She bent her head down over the clusters she
was grouping. “Is the light of Campobello particularly good on such
questions?” she asked.

“I don't mean that exactly, but I wish you could help me to some
conclusion.”

“Yes; why not?”

“It's the first time I've ever had a business question referred to me.”

“Well, then, you can bring a perfectly fresh mind to it.”

“Let me see,” she said, affecting to consider. “It's really a very
important matter?”

“It is to me.”

After a moment she looked up at him. “I should think that you wouldn't
mind living there if your business was there. I suppose it's being idle
in places that makes them dull. I thought it was dull in London. One
ought to be glad--oughtn't he?--to live in any place where there's
something to do.”

“Well, that isn't the way people usually feel,” said Mavering. “That's
the kind of a place most of them fight shy of.”

Alice laughed with an undercurrent of protest, perhaps because she had
seen her parents' whole life, so far as she knew it, passed in this sort
of struggle. “I mean that I hate my own life because there seems nothing
for me to do with it. I like to have people do something.”

“Do you really?” asked Mavering soberly, as if struck by the novelty of
the idea.

“Yes!” she said, with exaltation. “If I were a man--”

He burst into a ringing laugh. “Oh no; don't!”

“Why?” she demanded, with provisional indignation.

“Because then there wouldn't be any Miss Pasmer.”

It seemed to Alice that this joking was rather an unwarranted liberty.
Again she could not help joining in his light-heartedness; but she
checked herself so abruptly, and put on a look so austere, that he was
quelled by it.

“I mean,” he began--“that is to say--I mean that I don't understand why
ladies are always saying that. I am sure they can do what they like, as
it is.”

“Do you mean that everything is open to them now?” she asked,
disentangling a cluster of the berries from those in her lap, and
beginning a fresh bunch.

“Yes,” said Mavering. “Something like that--yes. They can do anything
they like. Lots of them do.”

“Oh yes, I know,” said the girl. “But people don't like them to.”

“Why, what would you like to be?” he asked.

She did not answer, but sorted over the clusters in her lap. “We've got
enough now, haven't we?” she said.

“Oh, not half,” he said. “But if you're tired you must let me make up
some of the bunches.”

“No, no! I want to do them all myself,” she said, gesturing his offered
hands away, with a little nether appeal in her laughing refusal.

“So as to feel that you've been of some use in the world?” he said,
dropping contentedly on the ground near her, and watching her industry.

“Do you think that would be very wrong?” she asked. “What made that
friend of yours--Mr. Boardman--go into journalism?”

“Oh, virtuous poverty. You're not thinking of becoming a newspaper
woman, Miss Pasmer!”

“Why not?” She put the final cluster into the bunch in hand, and began
to wind a withe of sweet-grass around the stems. He dropped forward on
his knees to help her, and together they managed the knot. They were
both flushed a little when it was tied, and were serious.

“Why shouldn't one be a newspaper woman, if Harvard graduates are to be
journalists?”

“Well, you know, only a certain kind are.”

“What kind?”

“Well, not exactly what you'd call the gentlemanly sort.”

“I thought Mr. Boardman was a great friend of yours?”

“He is. He is one of the best fellows in the world. But you must have
seen that he wasn't a swell.”

“I should think he'd be glad he was doing something at once. If I were
a--” She stopped, and they laughed together. “I mean that I should hate
to be so long getting ready to do something as men are.”

“Then you'd rather begin making wall-paper at once than studying law?”

“Oh, I don't say that. I'm not competent to advise. But I should like
to feel that I was doing something. I suppose it's hereditary.” Mavering
stared a little. “One of my father's sisters has gone into a sisterhood.
She's in England.”

“Is she a--Catholic?” asked Mavering.

“She isn't a Roman Catholic.”

“Oh yes!” He dropped forward on his knees again to help her tie the
bunch she had finished. It was not so easy as the first.

“Oh, thank you!” she said, with unnecessary fervour.

“But you shouldn't like to go into a sisterhood, I suppose?” said
Mavering, ready to laugh.

“Oh, I don't know. Why not?” She looked at him with a flying glance, and
dropped her eyes.

“Oh, no reason, if you have a fancy for that kind of thing.”

“That kind of thing?” repeated Alice severely.

“Oh, I don't mean anything disrespectful to it,” said Mavering, throwing
his anxiety off in the laugh he had been holding back. “And I beg your
pardon. But I don't suppose you're in earnest.”

“Oh no, I'm not in earnest,” said the girl, letting her wrists fall upon
her knees, and the clusters drop from her hands. “I'm not in earnest
about anything; that's the truth--that's the shame. Wouldn't you like,”
 she broke off, “to be a priest, and go round among these people up here
on their frozen islands in the winter?”

“No,” shouted Mavering, “I certainly shouldn't. I don't see how anybody
stands it. Ponkwasset Falls is bad enough in the winter, and compared to
this region Ponkwasset Falls is a metropolis. I believe in getting all
the good you can out of the world you were born in--of course without
hurting anybody else.” He stretched his legs out on the bed of
sweet-fern, where he had thrown himself, and rested his head on his
hand lifted on his elbow. “I think this is what this place is fit for--a
picnic; and I wish every one well out of it for nine months of the
year.”

“I don't,” said the girl, with a passionate regret in her voice. “It
would be heavenly here with--But you--no, you're different. You always
want to share your happiness.”

“I shouldn't call that happiness. But don't you?” asked Mavering.

“No. I'm selfish.”

“You don't expect me to be believe that, I suppose.”

“Yes,” she went on, “it must be selfishness. You don't believe I'm so,
because you can't imagine it. But it's true. If I were to be happy, I
should be very greedy about it; I couldn't endure to let any one else
have a part in it. So it's best for me to be wretched, don't you see--to
give myself up entirely to doing for others, and not expect any one to
do anything for me; then I can be of some use in the world. That's why I
should like to go into a sisterhood.”

Mavering treated it as the best kind of joke, and he was confirmed in
this view of it by her laughing with him, after a first glance of what
he thought mock piteousness.




XVI.

The clouds sailed across the irregular space of pale blue Northern sky
which the break in the woods opened for them overhead. It was so still
that they heard, and smiled to hear, the broken voices of the others,
who had gone to get berries in another direction--Miss Anderson's hoarse
murmur and Munt's artificial bass. Some words came from the party on the
rocks.

“Isn't it perfect?” cried the young fellow in utter content.

“Yes, too perfect,” answered the girl, rousing herself from the reverie
in which they had both lost themselves, she did not know how long.
“Shall you gather any more?”

“No; I guess there's enough. Let's count them.” He stooped over on his
hand's and knees, and made as much of counting the bunches as he could.
“There's about one bunch and a half a piece. How shall we carry them? We
ought to come into camp as impressively as possible.”

“Yes,” said Alice, looking into his face with dreamy absence. It was
going through her mind, from some romance she had read, What if he
were some sylvan creature, with that gaiety, that natural gladness and
sweetness of his, so far from any happiness that was possible to her?
Ought not she to be afraid of him? She was thinking she was not afraid.

“I'll tell you,” he said. “Tie the stems of all the bunches together,
and swing them over a pole, like grapes of Eshcol. Don't you know the
picture?”

“Oh yes.”

“Hold on! I'll get the pole.” He cut a white birch sapling, and swept
off its twigs and leaves, then he tied the bunches together, and slung
them over the middle of the pole.

“Well?” she asked.

“Now we must rest the ends on our shoulders.”

“Do you think so?” she asked, with the reluctance that complies.

“Yes, but not right away. I'll carry them out of the woods, and we'll
form the procession just before we come in sight.”

Every one on the ledge recognised the tableau when it appeared, and
saluted it with cheers and hand-clapping. Mrs. Pasmer bent a look on her
daughter which she faced impenetrably.

“Where have you been?” “We thought you were lost!” “We were just
organising a search expedition!” different ones shouted at them.

The lady with the coffee-pot was kneeling over it with her hand on it.
“Have some coffee, you poor things! You must be almost starved.”

“We looked about for you everywhere,” said Munt, “and shouted ourselves
dumb.”

Miss Anderson passed near Alice. “I knew where you were all the time!”

Then the whole party fell to praising the novel conception of the
bouquets of blueberries, and the talk began to flow away from Alice and
Mavering in various channels.

All that had happened a few minutes ago in the blueberry patch seemed a
far-off dream; the reality had died out of the looks and words.

He ran about from one to another, serving every one; in a little while
the whole affair was in his hospitable hands, and his laugh interspersed
and brightened the talk.

She got a little back of the others, and sat looking wistfully out over
the bay, with her hands in her lap.

“Hold on just half a minute, Miss Pasmer! don't move!” exclaimed the
amateur photographer, who is now of all excursions; he jumped to his
feet, and ran for his apparatus. She sat still, to please him; but when
he had developed his picture, in a dark corner of the rocks, roofed with
a waterproof, he accused her of having changed her position. “But it's
going to be splendid,” he said, with another look at it.

He took several pictures of the whole party, for which they fell into
various attitudes of consciousness. Then he shouted to a boat-load of
sailors who had beached their craft while they gathered some drift for
their galley fire. They had flung their arm-loads into the boat, and had
bent themselves to shove it into the water.

“Keep still! don't move!” he yelled at them, with the imperiousness of
the amateur photographer, and they obeyed with the helplessness of his
victims. But they looked round.

“Oh, idiots!” groaned the artist.

“I always wonder what that kind of people think of us kind of people,”
 said Mrs. Brinkley, with her eye on the photographer's subjects.

“Yes, I wonder what they do?” said Miss Cotton, pleased with the
speculative turn which the talk might take from this. “I suppose they
envy us?” she suggested.

“Well, not all of them; and those that do, not respectfully. They
view, us as the possessors of ill-gotten gains, who would be in a very
different place if we had our deserts.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Yes, I think so; but I don't know that I really think so. That's
another matter,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with the whimsical resentment which
Miss Cotton's conscientious pursuit seemed always to rouse in her.

“I supposed,” continued Miss Cotton, “that it was only among the poor
in the cities, who have begin misled by agitators, that the-well-to-do
classes were regarded with suspicion.”

“It seems to have begun a great while ago,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “and not
exactly with agitators. It was considered very difficult for us to get
into the kingdom of heaven, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” assented Miss Cotton.

“And there certainly are some things against us. Even when the chance
was given us to sell all we had and give it to the poor, we couldn't
bring our minds to it, and went away exceeding sorrowful.”

“I wonder,” said Miss Cotton, “whether those things were ever intended
to be taken literally?”

“Let's hope not,” said John Munt, seeing his chance to make a laugh.

Mrs. Stamwell said, “Well, I shall take another cup of coffee, at any
rate,” and her hardihood raised another laugh.

“That always seems to me the most pitiful thing in the whole Bible,”
 said Alice, from her place. “To see the right so clearly, and not to be
strong enough to do it.”

“My dear, it happens every day,” said Mrs. Brinkley.

“I always felt sorry for that poor fellow, too,” said Mavering. “He
seemed to be a good fellow, and it was pretty hard lines for him.”

Alice looked round at him with deepening gravity.

“Confound those fellows!” said the photographer, glancing at his hastily
developed plate. “They moved.”




XVII.

The picnic party gathered itself up after the lunch, and while some of
the men, emulous of Mavering's public spirit, helped some of the ladies
to pack the dishes and baskets away under the wagon seats, others threw
a corked bottle into the water, and threw stones at it. A few of the
ladies joined them, but nobody hit the bottle, which was finally left
bobbing about on the tide.

Mrs. Brinkley addressed the defeated group, of whom her husband was one,
as they came up the beach toward the wagons. “Do you think that display
was calculated to inspire the lower middle classes with respectful
envy?”

Her husband made himself spokesman for the rest: “No; but you can't tell
how they'd have felt if we'd hit it.”

They all now climbed to a higher level, grassy and smooth, on the bluff,
from which there was a particular view; and Mavering came, carrying the
wraps of Mrs. Pasmer and Alice, with which he associated his overcoat. A
book fell out of one of the pockets when he threw it down.

Miss Anderson picked the volume up. “Browning! He reads Browning!
Superior young man!”

“Oh, don't say that!” pleaded Mavering.

“Oh, read something aloud!” cried another of the young ladies.

“Isn't Browning rather serious for a picnic?” he asked, with a glance at
Alice; he still had a doubt of the effect of the rheumatic uncle's dance
upon her, and would have been glad to give her some other aesthetic
impression of him.

“Oh no!” said Mrs. Brinkley, “nothing is more appropriate to a picnic
than conundrums; they always have them. Choose a good tough one.”

“I don't know anything tougher than the 'Legend of Pernik'--or
lovelier,” he said, and he began to read, simply, and with a passionate
pleasure in the subtle study, feeling its control over his hearers.

The gentlemen lay smoking about at their ease; at the end a deep
sigh went up from the ladies, cut short by the question which they
immediately fell into.

They could not agree, but they said, one after another: “But you read
beautifully, Mr. Mavering!” “Beautifully!” “Yes, indeed!”

“Well, I'm glad there is one point clear,” he said, putting the book
away, and “I'm afraid you'll think I'm rather sentimental,” he added, in
a low voice to Alice, “carrying poetry around with me.”

“Oh no!” she replied intensely; “I thank you.”

“I thank you,” he retorted, and their eyes met in a deep look.

One of the outer circle of smokers came up with his watch in his hand,
and addressed the company, “Do you know what time it's got to be? It's
four o'clock.”

They all sprang up with a clamour of surprise.

Mrs. Pasmer, under cover of the noise, said, in a low tone, to her
daughter, “Alice, I think you'd better keep a little more with me now.”

“Yes,” said the girl, in a sympathy with her mother in which she did not
always find herself.

But when Mavering, whom their tacit treaty concerned, turned toward
them, and put himself in charge of Alice, Mrs. Pasmer found herself
dispossessed by the charm of his confidence, and relinquished her to
him. They were going to walk to the Castle Rocks by the path that
now loses and now finds itself among the fastnesses of the forest,
stretching to the loftiest outlook on the bay. The savage woodland is
penetrated only by this forgetful path, that passes now and then aver
the bridge of a ravine, and offers to the eye on either hand the mystery
deepening into wilder and weirder tracts of solitude. The party resolved
itself into twos and threes, and these straggled far apart, out of
conversational reach of one another. Mrs. Pasmer found herself walking
and talking with John Munt.

“Mr. Pasmer hasn't much interest in these excursions,” he suggested.

“No; he never goes,” she answered, and, by one of the agile intellectual
processes natural to women, she arrived at the question, “You and the
Maverings are old friends, Mr. Munt?”

“I can't say about the son, but I'm his father's friend, and I suppose
that I'm his friend too. Everybody seems to be so,” suggested Munt.

“Oh Yes,” Mrs. Pasmer assented; “he appears to be a universal
favourite.”

“We used to expect great things of Elbridge Mavering in college. We were
rather more romantic than the Harvard men are nowadays, and we believed
in one another more than they do. Perhaps we idealised one another. But,
anyway, our class thought Mavering could do anything. You know about his
taste for etchings?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a sigh of deep appreciation. “What gifted
people!”

“I understand that the son inherits all his father's talent.”

“He sketches delightfully.”

“And Mavering wrote. Why, he was our class poet!” cried Munt,
remembering the fact with surprise and gratification to himself. “He was
a tremendous satirist.”

“Really? And he seems so amiable now.”

“Oh, it was only on paper.”

“Perhaps he still keeps it up--on wall-paper?” suggested Mrs. Pasmer.

Munt laughed at the little joke with a good-will that flattered the
veteran flatterer. “I should like to ask him that some time. Will you
lend it to me?”

“Yes, if such a sayer of good things will deign to borrow--”

“Oh, Mrs. Pasmer!” cried Munt, otherwise speechless.

“And the mother? Do you know Mrs. Mavering?”

“Mrs. Mavering I've never seen.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a disappointment for which Munt tried to
console her.

“I've never even been at their place. He asked me once a great while
ago; but you know how those things are. I've heard that she used to be
very pretty and very gay. They went about a great deal, to Saratoga and
Cape May and such places--rather out of our beat.”

“And now?”

“And now she's been an invalid for a great many years. Bedridden, I
believe. Paralysis, I think.”

“Yes; Mrs. Saintsbury said something of the kind.”

“Well,” said Munt, anxious to add to the store of knowledge which this
remark let him understand he had not materially increased, “I think Mrs.
Mavering was the origin of the wall-paper--or her money. Mavering was
poor; her father had started it, and Mavering turned in his talent.”

“How very interesting! And is that the reason--its being ancestral--that
Mr. Mavering wishes his son to go into it?”

“Is he going into it?” asked Munt.

“He's come up here to think about it.”

“I should suppose it would be a very good thing,” said Munt.

“What a very remarkable forest!” said Mrs. Pasmer, examining it on
either side, and turning quite round. This gave her, from her place
in the van of the straggling procession, a glimpse of Alice and Dan
Mavering far in the rear.

“Don't you know,” he was saying to the girl at the same moment, “it's
like some of those Dore illustrations to the Inferno, or the Wandering
Jew.”

“Oh yes. I was trying to think what it was made me think I had seen it
before,” she answered. “It must be that. But how strange it is!” she
exclaimed, “that sensation of having been there before--in some place
before where you can't possibly have been.”

“And do you feel it here?” he asked, as vividly interested as if
they two had been the first to notice the phenomenon which has been a
psychical consolation to so many young observers.

“Yes,” she cried.

“I hope I was with you,” he said, with a sudden turn of levity, which
did not displease her, for there seemed to be a tender earnestness
lurking in it. “I couldn't bear to think of your being alone in such a
howling wilderness.”

“Oh, I was with a large picnic,” she retorted gaily. “You might have
been among the rest. I didn't notice.”

“Well, the next time, I wish you'd look closer. I don't like being left
out.” They were so far behind the rest that he devoted himself entirely
to her, and they had grown more and more confidential.

They came to a narrow foot-bridge over a deep gorge. The hand-rail had
fallen away. He sprang forward and gave her his hand for the passage.
“Who helped you over here?” he demanded. “Don't say I didn't.”

“Perhaps it was you,” she murmured, letting him keep the fingers to
which he clung a moment after they had crossed the bridge. Then she took
them away, and said: “But I can't be sure. There were so many others.”

“Other fellows?” he demanded, placing himself before her on the narrow
path, so that she could not get by. “Try to remember, Miss Pasmer. This
is very important. It would break my heart if it was really some one
else.” She stole a glance at his face, but it was smiling, though his
voice was so earnest. “I want to help you over all the bad places, and I
don't want any one else to have a hand in it.”

The voice and the face still belied each other, and between them the
girl chose to feel herself trifled with by the artistic temperament. “If
you'll please step out of the way, Mr. Mavering,” she said severely, “I
shall not need anybody's help just here.”

He instantly moved aside, and they were both silent, till she said, as
she quickened her pace to overtake the others in front, “I don't see how
you can help liking nature in such a place as this.”

“I can't--human nature,” he said. It was mere folly; and an abstract
folly at that; but the face that she held down and away from him flushed
with sweet consciousness as she laughed.

On the cliff beetling above the bay, where she sat to look out over the
sad northern sea, lit with the fishing sail they had seen before, and
the surge washed into the rocky coves far beneath them, he threw himself
at her feet, and made her alone in the company that came and went and
tried this view and that from the different points where the picnic
hostess insisted they should enjoy it. She left the young couple to
themselves, and Mrs. Pasmer seemed to have forgotten that she had bidden
Alice to be a little more with her.

Alice had forgotten it too. She sat listening to Mavering's talk with a
certain fascination, but not so much apparently because the meaning of
the words pleased her as the sound of his voice, the motion of his lips
in speaking, charmed her. At first he was serious, and even melancholy,
as if he were afraid he had offended her; but apparently he soon
believed that he had been forgiven, and began to burlesque his own mood,
but still with a deference and a watchful observance of her changes of
feeling which was delicately flattering in its way. Now and then when
she answered something it was not always to the purpose; he accused her
of not hearing what he said, but she would have it that she did, and
then he tried to test her by proofs and questions. It did not matter
for anything that was spoken or done; speech and action of whatever sort
were mere masks of their young joy in each other, so that when he said,
after he had quoted some lines befitting the scene they looked out on;
“Now was that from Tennyson or from Tupper?” and she answered, “Neither;
it was from Shakespeare,” they joined, in the same happy laugh, and they
laughed now and then without saying anything. Neither this nor that made
them more glad or less; they were in a trance, vulnerable to nothing but
the summons which must come to leave their dream behind, and issue into
the waking world.

In hope or in experience such a moment has come to all, and it is so
pretty to those who recognise it from the outside that no one has the
heart to hurry it away while it can be helped. The affair between Alice
and Mavering had evidently her mother's sanction, and all the rest were
eager to help it on. When the party had started to return, they called
to them, and let them come behind together. At the carriages they had
what Miss Anderson called a new deal, and Alice and Mavering found
themselves together in the rear seat of the last.

The fog began to come in from the sea, and followed them through the
woods. When they emerged upon the highway it wrapped them densely round,
and formed a little world, cosy, intimate, where they two dwelt alone
with these friends of theirs, each of whom they praised for delightful
qualities. The horses beat along through the mist, in which there seemed
no progress, and they lived in a blissful arrest of time. Miss Anderson
called back from the front seat, “My ear buyns; you're talkin' about
me.”

“Which ear?” cried Mavering.

“Oh, the left, of couyse.”

“Then it's merely habit, Julie. You ought to have heard the nice things
we were saying about you,” Alice called.

“I'd like to hear all the nice things you've been saying.”

This seemed the last effect of subtle wit. Mavering broke out in his
laugh, and Alice's laugh rang above it.

Mrs. Pasmer looked involuntarily round from the carriage ahead.

“They seem to be having a good time,” said Mrs. Brinkley at her side.

“Yes; I hope Alice isn't overdoing.”

“I'm afraid you're dreadfully tired,” said Mavering to the girl, in a
low voice, as he lifted her from her place when they reached the hotel
through the provisional darkness, and found that after all it was only
dinner-time.

“Oh no. I feel as if the picnic were just beginning.”

“Then you will come to-night?”

“I will see what mamma says.”

“Shall I ask her?”

“Oh, perhaps not,” said the girl, repressing his ardour, but not
severely.




XVIII.

They were going to have some theatricals at one of the cottages, and the
lady at whose house they were to be given made haste to invite all the
picnic party before it dispersed. Mrs. Pasmer accepted with a mental
reservation, meaning to send an excuse later if she chose; and before
she decided the point she kept her husband from going after dinner into
the reading-room, where he spent nearly all his time over a paper and a
cigar, or in sitting absolutely silent and unoccupied, and made him go
to their own room with her.

“There is something that I must speak to you about,” she said, closing
the door, “and you must decide for yourself whether you wish to let it
go any further.”

“What go any further?” asked Mr. Pasmer, sitting down and putting his
hand to the pocket that held his cigar-case with the same series of
motions.

“No, don't smoke,” she said, staying his hand impatiently. “I want you
to think.”

“How can I think if I don't smoke?”

“Very well; smoke, then. Do you want this affair with young Mavering to
go any farther?”

“Oh!” said Pasmer, “I thought you had been looking after that.” He had
in fact relegated that to the company of the great questions exterior to
his personal comfort which she always decided.

“I have been looking after it, but now the time has come when you must,
as a father, take some interest in it.”

Pasmer's noble mask of a face, from the point of his full white beard to
his fine forehead, crossed by his impressive black eyebrows, expressed
all the dignified concern which a father ought to feel in such an
affair; but what he was really feeling was a grave reluctance to have to
intervene in any way. “What do you want me to say to him?” he asked.

“Why, I don't know that he's going to ask you anything. I don't know
whether he's said anything to Alice yet,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with some
exasperation.

Her husband was silent, but his silence insinuated a degree of wonder
that she should approach him prematurely on such a point.

“They have been thrown together all day, and there is no use to conceal
from ourselves that they are very much taken with each other?”

“I thought,” Pasmer said, “that you said that from the beginning. Didn't
you want them to be taken with each other?”

“That is what you are to decide.”

Pasmer silently refused to assume the responsibility.

“Well?” demanded his wife, after waiting for him to speak.

“Well what?”

“What do you decide?”

“What is the use of deciding a thing when it is all over?”

“It isn't over at all. It can be broken off at any moment.”

“Well, break it off, then, if you like.”

Mrs. Pasmer resumed the responsibility with a sigh. She felt the burden,
the penalty, of power, after having so long enjoyed its sweets, and she
would willingly have abdicated the sovereignty which she had spent her
whole married life in establishing. But there was no one to take it up.
“No, I shall not break it off,” she said resentfully; “I shall let it go
on.” Then seeing that her husband was not shaken by her threat from his
long-confirmed subjection, she added: “It isn't an ideal affair, but I
think it will be a very good thing for Alice. He is not what I expected,
but he is thoroughly nice, and I should think his family was nice. I've
been talking with Mr. Munt about them to-day, and he confirms all
that Etta Saintsbury said. I don't think there can be any doubt of his
intentions in coming here. He isn't a particularly artless young man,
but he's been sufficiently frank about Alice since he's been here.” Her
husband smoked on. “His father seems to have taken up the business from
the artistic side, and Mr. Mavering won't be expected to enter into
the commercial part at once. If it wasn't for Alice, I don't believe he
would think of the business for a moment; he would study law. Of course
it's a little embarrassing to have her engaged at once before she's seen
anything of society here, but perhaps it's all for the best, after all:
the main thing is that she should be satisfied, and I can see that
she's only too much so. Yes, she's very much taken with him; and I don't
wonder. He is charming.”

It was not the first time that Mrs. Pasmer had reasoned in this round;
but the utterance of her thoughts seemed to throw a new light on them,
and she took a courage from them that they did not always impart. She
arrived at the final opinion expressed, with a throb of tenderness for
the young fellow whom she believed eager to take her daughter from her,
and now for the first time she experienced a desolation in the prospect,
as if it were an accomplished fact. She was morally a bundle of
finesses, but at the bottom of her heart her daughter was all the world
to her. She had made the girl her idol, and if, like some other heathen,
she had not always used her idol with the greatest deference, if she
had often expected the impossible from it, and made it pay for her
disappointment, still she had never swerved from her worship of it. She
suddenly asked herself, What if this young fellow, so charming and so
good, should so wholly monopolise her child that she should no longer
have any share in her? What if Alice, who had so long formed her first
care and chief object in life, should contentedly lose herself in the
love and care of another, and both should ignore her right to her? She
answered herself with a pang that this might happen with any one Alice
married, and that it would be no worse, at the worst, with Dan Mavering
than with another, while her husband remained impartially silent. Always
keeping within the lines to which his wife's supremacy had driven him,
he felt safe there, and was not to be easily coaxed out of them.

Mrs. Pasmer rose and left him, with his perfect acquiescence, and went
into her daughter's room. She found Alice there, with a pretty evening
dress laid out on her bed. Mrs. Pasmer was very fond of that dress, and
at the thought of Alice in it her spirits rose again.

“Oh, are you going, Alice?”

“Why, yes,” answered the girl. “Didn't you accept?”

“Why, yes,” Mrs. Pasmer admitted. “But aren't you tired?”

“Oh, not in the least. I feel as fresh as I did this morning. Don't you
want me to go?”

“Oh yes, certainly, I want you to go--if you think you'll enjoy it.”

“Enjoy it? Why, why shouldn't I enjoy it, mamma!”

“What are you thinking about? It's going to be the greatest kind of
fun.”

“But do you think you ought to look at everything simply as fun?” asked
the mother, with unwonted didacticism.

“How everything? What are you thinking about, mamma?”

“Oh, nothing! I'm so glad you're going to wear that dress.”

“Why, of course! It's my best. But what are you driving at, mamma?”

Mrs. Pasmer was really seeking in her daughter that comfort of a
distinct volition which she had failed to find in her husband, and she
wished to assure herself of it more and more, that she might share with
some one the responsibility which he had refused any part in.

“Nothing. But I'm glad you wish so much to go.” The girl dropped her
hands and stared. “You must have enjoyed yourself to-day,” she added, as
if that were an explanation.

“Of course I enjoyed myself! But what has that to do with my wanting to
go to-night?”

“Oh, nothing. But I hope, Alice, that there is one thing you have looked
fully in the face.”

“What thing?” faltered the girl, and now showed herself unable to
confront it by dropping her eyes.

“Well, whatever you may have heard or seen, nobody else is in doubt
about it. What do you suppose has brought Mr. Mavering here!”

“I don't know.” The denial not only confessed that she did know, but it
informed her mother that all was as yet tacit between the young people.

“Very well, then, I know,” said Mrs. Pasmer; “and there is one thing
that you must know before long, Alice.”

“What?” she asked faintly.

“Your own mind,” said her mother. “I don't ask you what it is, and I
shall wait till you tell me. Of course I shouldn't have let him stay
here if I had objected--”

“O mamma!” murmured the girl, dyed with shame to have the facts so
boldly touched, but not, probably, too deeply displeased.

“Yes. And I know that he would never have thought of going into that
business if he had not expected--hoped--”

“Mamma!”

“And you ought to consider--”

“Oh, don't! don't! don't!” implored the girl.

“That's all,” said her mother, turning from Alice, who had hidden her
face in her hands, to inspect the costume on the bed. She lifted one
piece of it after another, turned it over, looked at it, and laid it
down. “You can never get such a dress in this country.”

She went out of the room, as the girl dropped her face in the pillow.
An hour later they met equipped for the evening's pleasure. To the keen
glance that her mother gave her, the daughter's eyes had the brightness
of eyes that have been weeping, but they were also bright with that
knowledge of her own mind which Mrs. Pasmer had desired for her. She
met her mother's glance fearlessly, even proudly, and she carried her
stylish costume with a splendour to which only occasions could stimulate
her. They dramatised a perfect unconsciousness to each other, but Mrs.
Pasmer was by no means satisfied with the decision which she had read
in her daughter's looks. Somehow it did not relieve her of the
responsibility, and it did not change the nature of the case. It was
gratifying, of course, to see Alice the object of a passion so sincere
and so ardent; so far the triumph was complete, and there was really
nothing objectionable in the young man and his circumstances, though
there was nothing very distinguished. But the affair was altogether
different from anything that Mrs. Pasmer had imagined. She had supposed
and intended that Alice should meet some one in Boston, and go through
a course of society before reaching any decisive step. There was to be a
whole season in which to look the ground carefully over, and the ground
was to be all within certain well-ascertained and guarded precincts. But
this that had happened was outside of these precincts, of at least on
their mere outskirts. Class Day, of course, was all right; and she could
not say that the summer colony at Campobello was not thoroughly and
essentially Boston; and yet she felt that certain influences, certain
sanctions, were absent. To tell the truth, she would not have cared for
the feelings of Mavering's family in regard to the matter, except as
they might afterward concern Alice, and the time had not come when she
could recognise their existence in regard to the affair; and yet she
could have wished that even as it was his family could have seen and
approved it from the start. It would have been more regular.

With Alice it was a simpler matter, and of course deeper. For her it
was only a question of himself and herself; no one else existed to the
sublime egotism of her love. She did not call it by that name; she did
not permit it to assert itself by any name; it was a mere formless joy
in her soul, a trustful and blissful expectance, which she now no more
believed he could disappoint than that she could die within that hour.
All the rebellion that she had sometimes felt at the anomalous attitude
exacted of her sex in regard to such matters was gone. She no longer
thought it strange that a girl should be expected to ignore the
admiration of a young man till he explicitly declared it, and should
then be fully possessed of all the materials of a decision on the most
momentous question in life; for she knew that this state of ignorance
could never really exist; she had known from the first moment that he
had thought her beautiful. To-night she was radiant for him. Her eyes
shone with the look in which they should meet and give themselves to
each other before they spoke--the look in which they had met already, in
which they had lived that whole day.




XIX.

The evening's entertainment was something that must fail before an
audience which was not very kind. They were to present a burlesque of
classic fable, and the parts, with their general intention, had been
distributed to the different actors; but nothing had been written down,
and, beyond the situations and a few points of dialogue, all had to
be improvised. The costumes and properties had been invented from such
things as came to hand. Sheets sculpturesquely draped the deities who
took part; a fox-pelt from the hearth did duty as the leopard skin of
Bacchus; a feather duster served Neptune for a trident; the lyre of
Apollo was a dust-pan; a gull's breast furnished Jove with his grey
beard.

The fable was adapted to modern life, and the scene had been laid in
Campobello, the peculiarities of which were to be satirised throughout.
The principal situation was to be a passage between Jupiter, represented
by Mavering, and Juno, whom Miss Anderson personated; it was to be
a scene of conjugal reproaches and reprisals, and to end in
reconciliation, in which the father of the gods sacrificed himself
on the altar of domestic peace by promising to bring his family to
Campobello every year.

This was to be followed by a sketch of the Judgment of Paris, in
which Juno and Pallas were to be personated by two young men, and Miss
Anderson took the part of Venus.

The pretty drawing-room of the Trevors--young people from Albany, and
cousins of Miss Anderson--was curtained off at one end for a stage, and
beyond the sliding doors which divided it in half were set chairs for
the spectators. People had come in whatever dress they liked; the men
were mostly in morning coats; the ladies had generally made some attempt
at evening toilet, but they joined in admiring Alice Pasmer's costume,
and one of them said that they would let it represent them all, and
express what each might have done if she would. There was not much time
for their tributes; all the lamps were presently taken away and set
along the floor in front of the curtain as foot-lights, leaving the
company in a darkness which Mrs. Brinkley pronounced sepulchral. She
made her reproaches to the master of the house, who had effected this
transposition of the lamps. “I was just thinking some very pretty and
valuable things about your charming cottage, Mr. Trevor: a rug on a
bare floor, a trim of varnished pine, a wall with half a dozen simple
etchings on it, an open fire, and a mantelpiece without bric-a-brac,
how entirely satisfying it all is! And how it upbraids us for heaping up
upholstery as we do in town!”

“Go on,” said the host. “Those are beautiful thoughts.”

“But I can't go on in the dark,” retorted Mrs. Brinkley. “You can't
think in the dark, much less talk! Can you, Mrs. Pasmer?” Mrs. Pasmer,
with Alice next to her, sat just in front of Mrs. 

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