I am so often at a loss for the connection in Mrs. Makely's ideas that I
am more patient with her incoherent jargon than you will be, I am afraid.
It went on to much the effect that I have tried to report until the
moment she took the hand of the guest who came next. They arrived, until
there were eight of us in all, Mrs. Strange coming last, with excuses for
being late. I had somehow figured her as a person rather mystical and
recluse in appearance, perhaps on account of her name, and I had imagined
her tall and superb. But she was, really, rather small, though not below
the woman's average, and she had a face more round than otherwise, with a
sort of business-like earnestness, but a very charming smile, and
presently, as I saw, an American sense of humor. She had brown hair and
gray eyes, and teeth not too regular to be monotonous; her mouth was very
sweet, whether she laughed or sat gravely silent. She at once affected me
like a person who had been sobered beyond her nature by responsibilities,
and had steadily strengthened under the experiences of life. She was
dressed with a sort of personal taste, in a rich gown of black lace,
which came up to her throat; and she did not subject me to that
embarrassment I always feel in the presence of a lady who is much
décolletée, when I sit next her or face to face with her: I cannot always
look at her without a sense of taking an immodest advantage. Sometimes I
find a kind of pathos in this sacrifice of fashion, which affects me as
if the poor lady were wearing that sort of gown because she thought she
really ought, and then I keep my eyes firmly on hers, or avert them
altogether; but there are other cases which have not this appealing
quality. Yet in the very worst of the cases it would be a mistake to
suppose that there was a display personally meant of the display
personally made. Even then it would be found that the gown was worn so
because the dressmaker had made it so, and, whether she had made it
in this country or in Europe, that she had made it in compliance with a
European custom. In fact, all the society customs of the Americans follow
some European original, and usually some English original; and it is only
fair to say that in this particular custom they do not go to the English
extreme.
We did not go out to dinner at Mrs. Makely's by the rules of English
precedence, because there are nominally no ranks here, and we could not;
but I am sure it will not be long before the Americans will begin playing
at precedence just as they now play at the other forms of aristocratic
society. For the present, however, there was nothing for us to do but to
proceed, when dinner was served, in such order as offered itself, after
Mr. Makely gave his arm to Mrs. Strange; though, of course, the white
shoulders of the other ladies went gleaming out before the white
shoulders of Mrs. Makely shone beside my black ones. I have now become so
used to these observances that they no longer affect me as they once did,
and as I suppose my account of them must affect you, painfully,
comically. But I have always the sense of having a part in amateur
theatricals, and I do not see how the Americans can fail to have the same
sense, for there is nothing spontaneous in them, and nothing that has
grown even dramatically out of their own life.
Often when I admire the perfection of the stage-setting, it is with a
vague feeling that I am derelict in not offering it an explicit applause.
In fact, this is permitted in some sort and measure, as now when we sat
down at Mrs. Makely's exquisite table, and the ladies frankly recognized
her touch in it. One of them found a phrase for it at once, and
pronounced it a symphony in chrysanthemums; for the color and the
character of these flowers played through all the appointments of the
table, and rose to a magnificent finale in the vast group in the middle
of the board, infinite in their caprices of tint and design. Another lady
said that it was a dream, and then Mrs. Makely said, “No, a memory,” and
confessed that she had studied the effect from her recollection of some
tables at a chrysanthemum show held here year before last, which seemed
failures because they were so simply and crudely adapted in the china and
napery to merely one kind and color of the flower.
“Then,” she added, “I wanted to do something very chrysanthemummy,
because it seems to me the Thanksgiving flower, and belongs to
Thanksgiving quite as much as holly belongs to Christmas.”
Everybody applauded her intention, and they hungrily fell to upon the
excellent oysters, with her warning that we had better make the most of
everything in its turn, for she had conformed her dinner to the brevity
of the notice she had given her guests.