Society had to be taken into our confidence, and Mrs. Makely saw to it
that there were no reserves with society. Our engagement was not quite
like that of two young persons, but people found in our character and
circumstance an interest far transcending that felt in the engagement of
the most romantic lovers. Some note of the fact came to us by accident,
as one evening when we stood near a couple and heard them talking. “It
must be very weird,” the man said; “something like being engaged to a
materialization.” “Yes,” said the girl, “quite the Demon Lover business,
I should think.” She glanced round, as people do, in talking, and, at
sight of us, she involuntarily put her hand over her mouth. I looked at
Eveleth; there was nothing expressed in her face but a generous anxiety
for me. But so far as the open attitude of society towards us was
concerned, nothing could have been more flattering. We could hardly have
been more asked to meet each other than before; but now there were
entertainments in special recognition of our betrothal, which Eveleth
said could not be altogether refused, though she found the ordeal as
irksome as I did. In America, however, you get used to many things. I
do not know why it should have been done, but in the society columns of
several of the great newspapers our likenesses were printed, from
photographs procured I cannot guess how, with descriptions of our persons
as to those points of coloring and carriage and stature which the
pictures could not give, and with biographies such as could be
ascertained in her case and imagined in mine. In some of the society
papers, paragraphs of a surprising scurrility appeared, attacking me as
an impostor, and aspersing the motives of Eveleth in her former marriage,
and treating her as a foolish crank or an audacious flirt. The goodness
of her life, her self-sacrifice and works of benevolence, counted for no
more against these wanton attacks than the absolute inoffensiveness of my
own; the writers knew no harm of her, and they knew nothing at all of me;
but they devoted us to the execration of their readers simply because we
formed apt and ready themes for paragraphs. You may judge of how wild
they were in their aim when some of them denounced me as an Altrurian
plutocrat!
We could not escape this storm of notoriety; we had simply to let it
spend its fury. When it began, several reporters of both sexes came to
interview me, and questioned me, not only as to all the facts of my past
life, and all my purposes in the future, but as to my opinion of
hypnotism, eternal punishment, the Ibsen drama, and the tariff reform. I
did my best to answer them seriously, and certainly I answered them
civilly; but it seemed from what they printed that the answers I gave did
not concern them, for they gave others for me. They appeared to me for
the most part kindly and well-meaning young people, though vastly
ignorant of vital things. They had apparently visited me with minds made
up, or else their reports were revised by some controlling hand, and a
quality injected more in the taste of the special journals they
represented than in keeping with the facts. When I realized this, I
refused to see any more reporters, or to answer them, and then they
printed the questions they had prepared to ask me, in such form that my
silence was made of the same damaging effect as a full confession of
guilt upon the charges.
The experience was so strange and new to me that it affected me in a
degree I was unwilling to let Eveleth imagine. But she divined my
distress, and, when she divined that it was chiefly for her, she set
herself to console and reassure me. She told me that this was something
every one here expected, in coming willingly or unwillingly before the
public; and that I must not think of it at all, for certainly no one else
would think twice of it. This, I found, was really so, for when I
ventured to refer tentatively to some of these publications, I found that
people, if they had read them, had altogether forgotten them; and that
they were, with all the glare of print, of far less effect with our
acquaintance than something said under the breath in a corner. I found
that some of our friends had not known the effigies for ours which they
had seen in the papers; others made a joke of the whole affair, as the
Americans do with so many affairs, and said that they supposed the
pictures were those of people who had been cured by some patent medicine,
they looked so strong and handsome. This, I think, was a piece of Mr.
Makely's humor in the beginning; but it had a general vogue long after
the interviews and the illustrations were forgotten.