CHAPTER X.

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THE GALAXY.

VOL. XXIII.--MAY, 1877.--No. 5.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by SHELDON &

CO., in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

A PROGRESSIVE BABY.

OBER LAHNSTEIN, Jan. 16, 1875.

So much, Susie dear, for our small miseries between Blackwall and

Rotterdam. Nurse's sickness and the crowd of Cook's tourists (Cook-oos!)

aggravated matters; but it is always a tedious bit of way, though I

never minded it in my solitary artist days, when either Dresden and

happy work or home and happy rest were at end of the hard journey. What

it is to be young, gay, and heart-free! For then I went always second

class--when I didn't go third!--(except of course on the steamers, where

the cheaper accommodation is too rude, and rough companionship too

intimate)--and once managed the entire distance from Dresden to London

for fifty thalers!--taking it leisurely too; stopping en route to "do"

Frankfort, Weimar, Heidelberg, Lourain, Bruges, and Antwerp, and to pay

two or three visits at grand houses, where they didn't dream I was fresh

from the peasants' compartments!

And I'd no shillings and sixpences then to fee guards and porters, so

had to dodge them, look at them as if I didn't see them, lug about my

own parcels, and freeze without a foot-warmer!

Now the way is all padded. I always go first-class if Ronayne's along,

haven't to lift so much as a hand satchel, am fairly smothered in

comforts, as beseems the true English Philistine I'm become. I've the

delightfullest husband and baby the round world can show; a nurse fit to

command the channel fleet (if that meant wisdom in babies, and she

weren't such an outrageously bad sailor!); and I've about as much vim as

a syllabub; am so nervous that I weep if Ronayne gets out of my sight

when we go for a stroll, if too little toast comes up for my breakfast,

or the chocolate isn't frothed, or the trunk won't lock, and have

aphasia to that degree that I say cancel when I mean endorse, hair-brush

when I want a biscuit, and go stumping down to dinner in a boot and a

slipper, being incapable of the connected effort of memory and will that

would get both feet into fellow shoes.

But I'm blissfully happy all the same, and we've beheld a spectacle

lately that reconciles me perfectly with my own absurdity, and my

awkwardness with my precious tot.

Coming up the Rhine we had a pair of fellow voyagers, circumstanced

somewhat like ourselves: first baby, not over young (the couple, not the

baby, which was only six weeks old!), but travelling without a nurse.

This mighty functionary had struck almost at the moment of their

departure from London, and a charitable but inexperienced friend came to

their aid and set forth with them in charge of the baby.

We missed them on the Batavier, which wasn't strange, and first had our

attention drawn to them by the slow Dutch landlord's asking Ronayne, as

we stood looking idly out into the formal little garden of the new Bath

hotel at Rotterdam, if that was _his_ baby a young woman seated on one

of the garden benches was jerking up and down so violently? "Because it

was shaken about too much. Young babies couldn't be kept too quiet."

This young woman was the benevolent friend, and I suppose the parents

were off sight-seeing in the town; for every now and then the whole day

through one or another of us reported encountering the young woman

alone somewhere, always tossing the baby more or less about.

But next day, after we had embarked on the Rhine boat, and I had helped

nurse turn our tiny state-room into a tolerable nursery (that folding

bassinnette is just _invaluable_, and lulled by the motion and the

breezy air, my lammie slept better in it than in her own quarters at

home), I went upon deck to find Ronayne, and on the way came upon a

most piteous, persistent wail, and the wail's father and mother in

abject, helpless tendance upon it.

Of course my newly-found mother's heart took me straight to the

miserable group; and after a few sympathetic inquiries, I sat down

beside the mother, and took the querulous little creature in my arms,

where presently it hushed off to sleep. How proud I felt! for that's

more than my own baby often condescends to do for my clumsy soothing!

The father skulked away with an immensely relieved look, soon after I

sat down, and the mother grew quite confidential. She told me of the

perfidious nurse's behavior, of the friend's heroic offer, and that they

had not had a wink of sleep the night before at the hotel, for nursing

the baby had made the friend so ill that they had had to send her back

to London that morning. She didn't know but it would have been better if

she and baby had turned back with the overdone friend; but it was her

husband's holiday--six weeks he had--and he worked so hard the rest of

the year--her husband was an author, a journalist (at sight I had

guessed him a literary cus--tomer!--hair parted in the middle, crease--y

clothes, spectacles, a sparse, pointed beard, and narrow, sloping

shoulders, with a stoop in 'em)--and she thought his vacation oughtn't

to be spoiled or deferred by the child; and as he would enjoy it all a

great deal more with her than alone, she had "trusted to luck," and was

going off up the Rhine with him to make a long excursion, before

proceeding to some quiet little town on the Moselle, where another nurse

was in waiting for her. It was their first baby--yes; they had not been

married much over a year. She was fond of it, poor baby! but it was such

a pity it had come! They had not wanted children--children would utterly

interfere with their plan of life. Both its father and herself were busy

people. Oh, there was so much work to be done! and they had married to

help each other in toil for the world, and babies were a sad hindrance.

I suggested that the work of moulding an immortal soul, fashioning the

character and destinies of a little human creature, seemed to me labor

mighty enough for any one's energies and ambition. But she answered me a

little sharply, that there were souls enough in the world already; she

wanted to be responsible for no more mistakes and wretchedness. However,

she fortunately was well and strong, and if she got a good nurse, she

would be able to devote herself to work, and to help her husband as she

had done before the child came. Was I interested in the woman question?

I answered somewhat tamely, that I was very much interested in whatever

made women better; that I believed in women, and that this rather

wearisome planet wouldn't even be worth condemning without them.

Ah! Then she supposed I had attended the suffrage meetings in London?

Her marriage had brought her to London. Before that she had lived in

B----, and was secretary of the Woman's Suffrage Association there.

Perhaps I had seen her name--Alice Thorpe? Now it was Malise. Her

husband was Clement Malise of "The Aurora."

This was said a little proudly, but with the pretty pride a wife has a

right to show when she believes she has a clever husband. And a good

woman I am sure she was beside whom I sat--kindly, conscientious,

earnest, spirited, full of aspiration and zeal gone astray. Pleasant to

look upon, too, when I came to separate her from her disfiguring and

thoroughly British travelling costume--a hat like an inverted basin,

with a long white ostrich feather, dingy, uncurled, and forlornly

drooping; a violet stuff gown all bunchy and tormented with woollen

ruffles, ruches, and knobby rosettes, and a dark blue bag of a

waterproof garment which I took to be the feminine correspondent of that

masculine wrap, the Ulster coat--a covering that would turn Apollo

himself into a bagman. Not very tall, solidly rather than gracefully

made, with a rather driven-together face, the excessively bulging

forehead crowding down upon a nose curved like a bird's beak, and a pair

of deep-set eyes of wonderful beauty--clear, gray, intense, brilliant,

and shaded by long dark lashes. Add a delicate, rather sarcastic mouth,

a complexion of exquisite fairness, dark brown hair without any warmth

in its color, hanging in slender short curls down her neck, and that is

Mrs. Malise.

We had a great many conversations after this initial one, and I believe

I have promised to look them up this winter in London. They're not so

very far from us--going by the underground; Notting Hill Gate's their

station, and I really feel a call to look after that baby. He's a fine

child, but was generally so miserable and cross that almost nobody took

other than offensive notice of him. At first I pitied his poor mother

when passengers and crew, even, made much of my baby when she came up

all placid, white as a snowdrop, daintily fresh, and feathery, and soft,

with her lace frills, like a little queen in nurse's arms; but my pity

was thrown away, for Mrs. Malise only said, "I cannot spare the time to

keep my baby in white, so made that gray flannel dressing gown for him

to travel in. It's capital, and not showing the dirt, will last the

whole journey." And the little thing was so untidy! For he was treated

exactly like a parcel; his parents handled him like one, a rather

dangerous one, at arm's length, and like a parcel he was deposited

about, sometimes among rolls of carpeting on the deck, or on beer casks,

while his father and mother were hanging over the boat's rail staring at

castles and ruins, or reading up in the guide-book; sometimes happed up

in a shawl on the floor, or on a bed made up on chairs, his head on the

lowest one, his mother craning her head out at window to lose no bit of

river scenery. One day I nearly sat down upon him, as he was left, quite

by himself, lying across a camp-chair; wherever, in unexpected,

impossible corners, one stumbled upon a solitary gray object, it was

sure to be this poor mite, bemoaning himself for having come into a

place so full of cold, wet, sour smells and stomach-ache--a place where

he wasn't wanted, and nobody had time to look after him.

"Name's Malise, eh?" said Ronayne. "_Malaise_, if that poor little

beggar knows anything about it"; and "little Malaise" we always call

the child.

"Cries? What's he to do but cry?" burst out nurse one day in high

indignation. "There's that silly woman as thinks a young baby must only

have three meals a day like grown folks; and so she's off a-tramping

about the deck, and leaving him here a-sucking at an empty bottle, and

filling himself as full of wind as he can hold! And there's _them

things_ (nurse's favorite euphuism for an article of attire she

detests) as is hardly ever changed, and him sopping wet most of the

time! I should like to whip her!"

I think Mrs. Malise is a good deal drawn toward me for two or three

reasons. She has found out that I've been an artist--lived by myself,

had my studio, paid my way--and she accordingly respects me as a member

of the sisterhood who's at least tried to do something. Then I agree far

too closely with St. Paul, and she "don't altogether hold with Paul,"

and wants to convert me to whatever form of kaleidoscopic non-belief she

cherishes. Then I'm too luke-warm about the suffrage. I admit that I see

no reason why I shouldn't have it, but I don't and can't see in my

having it the panacea for all social ills. I'm asked what I think of

Hodge in England, and Terence and Scip in the United States getting

rights withheld educated women citizens; and I can only plead pitifully

that while Hodge and Terence and Scip are ignorant and boorish, I,

having already roughed it a good deal, would rather individually not

contest anything very closely with them--a plea which is most justly

scouted as a mere get-off--a bit of heartless fine-ladyism. Have I read

Mill? No. From the time my school days ended, at seventeen, for ten--no,

twelve years, until I married, two years ago, I had neither time nor

eyes for reading. Why, I could almost count upon my fingers the books I

had read--"after school-books, of course, and then some anatomical

reading which don't count; there's--let me see--'The Improvisatore,'

Vasari's 'Lives of Painters,' 'Charles Auchester,' Rio's 'Lectures on

Christian Art,' 'Christie Johnstone,' 'La Mare au Diable,' two or three

of Balzac's novels, and all of poetry and of Ruskin I could ever lay

hands on!"

She looked astonished for a moment; then her face brightened. "Here's

richness!" I'm sure her thought might have been translated. "Here's a

virgin soil with nothing to dispute the growth of good seed." And I feel

I'm to be taken in hand. I'm quite ready. It is even something to look

forward to in the horrible London winter. She told me "little Malaise"

is to be brought up after the most recently approved scientific manner,

by weight, measure, and clockwork. His birth, even, was a triumph of

principle, for on that occasion Mrs. Malise was attended by a young

woman who had been unsuccessful in her medical studies, and failed to

obtain her degree--"Because I believed it jealousy, you know, and I

wished to encourage her!"

When he is three or four years old (certainly as early as they take

them!) he is to be put in the kindergarten at Geneva, and left there for

some years. It's a consolation to think that he can't be anywhere more

desolate than he's sure to be at home.

Meanwhile, work for papa and mamma, and bouts of colic for him, poor

little chap!

Last night I assisted at a distance at his nightly bath. The combined

forces of father and mother were required for this process, and the

ceremony was so utterly whimsical that I should have enjoyed it without

a pang if the small object most concerned had only been a dog. The pair

had stationed themselves in a strong draught, and the child, cold,

unhappy, lay stripped and squirming on his mother's lap, while from a

cup full of water in a tiny basin she _dabbed_ him with a bit of

flannel precisely as if he were an ink splash which she was essaying to

soak up with blotting paper before it should spread about much!

The father's part was to try and present an available surface for the

dabbing, which he did by drawing out first an arm, then a leg of the

child at full length, just as one pulls an elastic cord to find how far

it will stretch, letting it go with a snap when at full tension--as he

dropped arm or leg when little Malaise resented such unwarrantable

experiments on his ductility by a sudden, louder-than-usual roar. It was

piteous! But to see that father and mother--he lanky, spectacled, grave

as an owl, she serious, abstracted, revolving doubtless some scheme of

work, mechanically getting through this piece of business, recognized as

necessary by their conscientiousness, but perplexing in its nature, and

unaccountable as having fallen to their lot--no propriety, no indignant

sympathy for the baby, could quite withstand the drollery of the scene.

But nothing could pacify nurse! "The idiots!" she almost screamed. "The

child will die, and I hope it will, for she's not fit to have it. I hope

it will die!"

BIEBRICH, 21st.

I have kept this open, thinking I could tell you definitely when we

shall get into our quarters at Schwalbach, but nothing is settled yet,

and we've been pottering about in these river towns. As Schlangenbad and

Wiesbaden are very full, I counsel my lord to stop here where we are

well off; for this is a very comfortable hotel, and I don't want to do

any more unpacking till we are finally bestowed in our rooms at the

Villa Authës.

There is an abandoned palace of the Grand Duke of Nassau here--one of

the ruins in King William's track of '66. It is so melancholy to see

these ruined principalities. Union's a very nice word, but forced union,

matrimonial or political, is not comfortable either to see or endure.

However, here's the palace, with its lovely neglected gardens, grass

uncut, wild flowers flaunting where should be trim velvet turf only,

fountains plashing in weedy ponds--and an admirable resort we find the

shaded avenues and deserted parterres for ourselves and our small queen.

We could scarce be better provided for.

To-day, watching from our windows the steamer coming down the river, we

spied, on its deck, our travelling companions again--Mr. and Mrs.

Malise--and, sure enough, the little gray parcel on the bench not far

from mamma! Going at last, I hope, toward that nurse on the Moselle.

Poor little Malaise!

Address your next as last year. And with fond love to the whole

household,

Your Lil.

* * * * *

18 STANFIELD GARDENS, }

SOUTH KENSINGTON, }

February 10, 1875 }

At last I've seen my "poor little Malaise" again. Your questions would

have kept him in my memory if there had been a chance of my forgetting

the woful baby; and so soon as we were warmly settled into house, home

habits, and friendly circle again (and O how charming even London in

winter is after seven mortal weeks in Ireland, where scarce anybody has

two pence, and everybody is lazy, and everything above the peasant rank

is saturated with conventionality and the poorest pride! For the Great

Mogul approves of his grandchild, and was pleased to insist on the

prolongation of our visit till I was nearly wild with having to behave

myself, and during the last week was a dozen times on the very brink of

"breaking out." Oh, that horrid life of buckram, inanity, and

do-nothing-ism! Even Ronayne, who knows pretty much the worst of me,

thought I had gone crazy when we were once fairly off in the train--a

carriage all to ourselves. I sang, I whistled, I gnawed chicken-bones, I

talked all the slang I could remember, I smoked a cigarette--I went

generally to the mischief. And when we had really got back to dear No.

18, and were cosy in the dining-room over our dessert, no speering

servant by, I put my elbows on the table; I made a tipsy after-dinner

speech, Ronayne applauding, and calling, "Hear! hear!" I rushed around

to his end of the table and hugged him, making a "cheese" on my way

back--in short, the Bohemian Lil Graham avenged liberally the

suffocations the Great Mogul's daughter-in-law had nearly died of. If

ever I stop one hour over a fortnight in the home of my husband's

fathers again! A fortnight is just supportable)--and to go back to my

first-page sentence, I set forth one morning to hunt up the little man.

I found my people easily enough--a good house in a good street--"A large

house, that must require much thought and care," I said to Mrs. Malise;

whereupon she told me the care did not fall upon her, as the house was,

after an imperfect fashion, conducted as a coöperative boarding-house--a

germ, she hoped, of a coöperative hotel or family club. Half a dozen or

so of their friends occupied the house with them, and they paid an

admirable housekeeper to manage for them. It was only a make-shift--not

what one liked to mention when speaking of future possibilities of

confederated homes--had I read the article in a late number of the

"Victoria Magazine" containing a magnificent picture of coöperative

living?--but better than dreary lodgings or isolated homes, especially

when a woman devoted her life to other than household duties. I replied

that I believed every ardent spirit at some time or another was

discontented with the beaten way, and dreamed of glorious possibilities

of associate life and labor, wherein all selfishness should be

suppressed, justice and all the beatitudes reign, and souls develop all

their capabilities scarce conscious of even the body's hampering; but

that practically the only successful lay experiment in communism I had

ever heard of was that early one of the Indians in Paraguay under the

care of the Jesuit missionaries--Phalansterians who wore their rosaries

around their necks because they had no pockets in which to carry them!

And I thought that people without bonds of kinship or close sympathy

would not happily bear being forced into incessant, intimate

companionship unless they were either saints or prodigies of

imperturbable courtesy.

Well, life was a choice of evils, she answered me, and their experiment

had so far succeeded very well. But I might judge for myself a little:

would I, with my husband, dine with them on either one of such and such

days the next week, to meet this confederate household assembled? This

was an advance I had not counted on. My especial interest was in the

child, and though I liked well enough for myself accepting an invitation

that promised to be something out of the common way in dinners, I was

hardly prepared to pledge Ronayne. He not only likes a good dinner, and

feels injured when he doesn't get it, but he is very particular as to

the society in which he eats it. He can be gloriously jolly and informal

when he likes; but he wouldn't be his father's son if he weren't what I

call just a bit snobbish about the people he will know in

England--London especially.

But if he was going in for the correct thing, why on earth did he

insist upon marrying me? Because I never was the correct thing, and

he fell it love with me when he was quite old enough to know better;

and after his friends had for years reckoned him as a fastidious,

foreordained bachelor; _he_ says because I was so wholly unlike the

young ladies of his generation that he was surprised out of himself.

And mamma told him all my faults that he didn't know already, and how

people had insisted before upon marrying me, and two or three times I

had been silly enough to half think I would let them, and then backed

out and vowed I would have no husband but Art--and was generally so

impressed with the risks he ran that I believe she even wept over

his prospective unhappiness. But he would have his way; he didn't

want a housekeeper; he didn't want a well informed young lady; his

shirt-buttons and stocking-darning weren't likely to depend upon his

wife; he should hate a patient Grizzle; he didn't marry for his

friends--you can imagine the rash arguments. But I gave him a last

chance of escape, for the night before we were married; when I'd given

away all my old clothes, and the license was bought, the ring in his

breast-pocket, and the wedding breakfast being laid in the next room, I

said to him before all of them in papa's study:

"Ronayne, don't you want one more chance of freedom? Are you frightened

about to-morrow morning, and the pell-mell household mamma promises you?

Because if you are, I'll let you off now. You may run away in the night.

I'll be a forsaken maiden, and papa shan't have the loch dragged, or

advertise a 'Mysterious and Heart-Rending Disappearance.'"

"Too late. It's a hopeless case. I'm much too far gone for that. And I'm

not going to help you to get rid of me, Mistress Lil."

I _was_ frightened rather, and then and there I made papa give me a

five-pound note to run away from Ronayne with in case I found, during

our wedding journey, that I'd made a mistake and Art was my only true

husband after all. Ronayne added five pounds more so that I could run

away first-class, and have something with which to bribe accomplices!

And that ten pounds is in my jewel-case now, and I think I shall keep it

for my daughter, and give it her on her wedding-day as a reserve fund,

in case she needs it as her mother once pretended to fear she herself

might do.

However, for once I was discreet, and answered Mrs. Malise that I should

like to come, but must see my husband before promising ourselves. Then I

asked to see my small friend; but his mother, consulting her watch,

begged me to excuse his non-appearance to-day, for this was just the

moment when his nurse would be laying him down for his nap; and though

often he would not sleep at all, yet system was everything, and he had

to lie in his little bed two hours, though his eyes were broad open all

the while.

"But will he lie there so long without crying?"

"Oh, two or three times he nearly cried himself into spasms because he

was not taken up; but once he found he could not conquer Johanna he

gave up trying, and now lies peaceably enough. He had to learn early

that there are things more important in the world than his little self.

Nothing do I object to more than a household revolving around children

as a centre. Marriage _ought_ to double powers--make people unselfish;

while, as a rule, it only enlarges the sphere of egotistic

concentration and absorption. If I gave up my time and thoughts to Mill

(we've named him for this generation's great English apostle of

liberty), as ordinary mothers do, it would seem to me a wickedness. But

I scarcely find him the least hindrance. I have begun to speak a little

in our suffrage meetings this winter, and have been away a good deal

from home for that purpose--once for three weeks at Liverpool and in

the north of Ireland."

"But you do not mean without your baby?"

"Oh, certainly. He is only a little animal as yet, requiring animal

cares which I can provide without making the sacrifice of ability for

higher work. Johanna attends to him far better than I could, and is not

above such uses. I believe in economizing forces. By and by, when his

intellect begins to develop, he will be far more interesting to me, and

I shall be of use to him."

"You weaned him, then, very early?"

"Oh, dear, yes. Since he was three months old, he's been brought up as

Pip was. But perhaps 'Great Expectations' was not among your books

read."

"No; but I suppose you mean your baby's brought up by hand? But I can't

think how you could bear to put him away from you if it wasn't actually

needful. Why, my heart's broken only to think that in a month or so more

my baby will not depend upon me, humanly, for all her little life."

"Ah, plainly you have a vocation to be a mother. I haven't; and if I had

to care for Mill in all things, it would be simple slavery to me. But it

must be a great step from art to the nursery too."

"That means a step _down_. I suppose I should have thought so once, but

never since I held my baby in my arms, and she's a far more wonderful

creation to me than any old master's cherub I ever copied. And not my

baby alone, but all babies. I never pass one in the street now, ever so

ugly or dirty, without a warm feeling for it, and no charity opens my

purse so quickly as a _crêche_, or a foundling, or orphan asylum. I

could have been very happy as an artist always. Art is full of the

noblest strength and compensations, and I own that the ordinary life of

the English Philistine is irksome to me to the last degree; but what

should I do now without a husband and child? And what would I not give

up or bear for them? You see I'm only a very humdrum woman, Mrs.

Malise."

"Whatever I see, I don't despair of winning you over to our side. I

think it only needs that this great movement for woman's freedom and

enlightenment, all that underlies it, all it implies, be fairly brought

before you, to receive your assent and coöperation. And, to be unwisely

frank, perhaps, it is such women as you we ought to gain, must

gain--women of sentiment, tenderness, tact, suave manner--sympathetic

women, to bring a gracious element into the contest. The workers already

in the field have fought so long, against such odds and obloquy, that it

is no wonder all the softness, conciliation are gone out of them, and

that their aspect and address suggest only warfare, aggressive and

unsparing."

And so on during the call. I wish I could photograph for you Mrs.

Malise's drawing-room. You will not suppose it cumbered with the

ordinary pretty feminine litter; but I can tell you Aunt Janet's

sewing-room couldn't begin to rival it in grim dead-in-earnestness:

straight up and down chairs that mean work; a writing-table big enough

for a board-room, and fitted with suitably mighty writing implements; a

slippery green leather couch upon which no laziness could be so

desperate as to court repose; books lining one wall, and papers, stacks

of papers everywhere--manuscripts and newspapers; no ornaments, unless a

clock, a Cleopatra's needle in black marble, a skull, a wild-eyed,

shock-headed oil portrait of a man I guessed to be the father of my

hostess, and photographs of Mill, Mazzini, and Swinbourne be considered

decorative.

Once at home again, I flew up stairs to Ronayne's dressing-room to run

over his engagement tablet. One of the days named by Mrs. Malise was

clear, so I said quietly at dinner, "Oh, Ronayne, don't make any

engagement for Friday, for we are to dine at the Coming Events New Era

Peep o'Day Associate Club."

"_Plaît-il, madame?_"

So I told him all about it. He groaned, made two or three pathetic

observations about grocer's wine, raw meat, greasy, peppered _entrées_,

and the cantankerous woman who would fall to his share at dinner, but

resigned himself like a lamb--or a well-trained husband, which is much

the same thing.

And once I had fairly sent off our acceptance to Mrs. Malise, I didn't

spare him one bit. I told him that for once in his life he was to part

company with his fossil world, and find himself in the vanguard of

civilization, breathing another atmosphere in the high fellowship of

the evangels of religious and social liberty. I besought him not to

mortify me by any expression of his limited ideas and convictions upon

the topics we should probably hear discussed, and above all not to

betray horror at any enunciation that seemed to his feeble apprehension

to strike at the root of all possible or endurable tarrying on this

planet. "Don't let it be known," I entreated, "what a clog you are upon

my soarings after the illimitable. I _am_ a victim, but the anguish and

humiliation of my lot are too recent and painful for publicity--as yet!

"Let them think you idiotic, dear--that goes without saying because

you're a man--but not that you're a tyrant to whom a poor-spirited wife

must succumb.

"And you'll see Americans, dear, who've come over to find out why these

effete regions and peoples still linger on the earth, and to them

you'll only be a 'blarsted Britisher,' and you're not to resent it if

they treat you accordin'. And there'll be Internationalists, to whom

you're a 'bloated aristocrat,' and they won't have, to say nice

manners. Then if you don't take Mrs. Malise down, you'll may be squire

some grand new light. I can't tell you how to behave, for I don't know

if the men of the future are to be deferential, or free and easy; but

you must take a hint from the behavior of the other men. She'll wear a

garnet-silk gown trimmed with white Yak lace, a pea-green ostrich

feather, and ribbons in her hair, and a profusion of jingling Berlin

steel ornaments, and she'll either trample you under foot and heap you

over with wisdom, or she'll find you're her affinity. And if that

happens, never mind me, love. If you _wish_ to go after affinities, go!

_I_ shall always be the same--the meek, forgiving woman who knows that

a wife's duty is to smile always--to upbraid never. Leave me and your

poor angel child if you will! We both believed in indissoluble marriage

once, but that needn't hinder you. Renounce----"

And about here, I think it was, my eloquence and pathos were suddenly

checked in their flow. Men, husbands especially, take such mean

advantages! And reasoning, and calm, intellectual conversation have,

somehow, so little charm for them! I tell you painful truths, my Susie,

but they're for your good and guidance. I know that long-legged,

yellow-haired laddie out in New Zealand is a demi-god. Of course he

is--they all are--but it's best not to marry 'em--if one can help it!

But the dinner. I was dreadfully puzzled what to wear--whether to get

myself up as a severe matron, or appear in the costume suited to me--a

frivolous woman, _jeune encore_, and with a mind not above

millinery--when a little note from Mrs. Malise, felicitating herself

and me that the day of our dinner was also their reception evening,

turned the scale against the brown silk in favor of a quite celestial

palest green-blue Irish poplin I got in Dublin this last visit. The

tint suits my pale dark face admirably, and with rather a profusion of

white lace, and pink coral ornaments that Ronayne's brother Gus, the

major, just home from India, gave me at Christmas--exquisite swinging

fuchsias, with golden stamens and leaves--the toilette was so effective

that I was quite ready to hear Ronayne's, "Oh, what a gorgeous swell!"

when I exhibited myself just before starting. And, "Ould Ireland for

ever!" as his eye fell on the gown he helped me to choose. "And are

these the laces my father gave you?" taking hold of one of my frills.

"Do they look like antimacassars? Because if they don't, they never

were fabricated in your tight little island, my Paddy. I'd do a deal

for you. You couldn't help being born there, poor boy; _mais toute

chose a son terme_, and even my devotion won't stretch to the

wearing Irish lace."

Our host and hostess received us in the confederate drawing-room, where

were three or four other guests already, and the greater number of the

associate household and the lacking members presented themselves before

dinner was announced. Fourteen or fifteen people in all, and not, to the

casual glance, differing strikingly from unassociate dwellers in

"isolate homes and dreary lodgings."

There were, first, a brusque-mannered but uncommonly handsome Lady ----

----. If there's a lord, or plain mister ---- ----, I don't know, but

certainly he's not _en evidence_. Lady ---- ---- is an authoress on the

woman question and on marriage, and is generally given to the most

forward of "advanced" opinions and ideas. Ronayne insultingly says they

won't harm me, for I should never get a notion of what they really

are--a speech which I treated with the oblivious contempt it deserved,

though inwardly tickled at the lucky shot; for it's quite true that,

attracted by her great beauty--the most singular combination you can

fancy--boldly cut features, softened by babyish roundness of curves,

and enchanting dimples, not a wrinkle or crow-foot to be traced, an

infantine complexion, all transparent and softly pink, and this grownup

baby's face surmounted by a mass of crisp-waved, snowy, but

glitteringly snowy hair!--I hovered around her for awhile during the

evening, and could make nothing whatsoever of the oracular sentences

she let fall. With her her son, a man of twenty-six to thirty,

priggish, argumentative, contrary-minded--altogether the most cub-like

young Briton I have lately encountered. Next, a widow with two

daughters--the mother what, of all things, but a Plymouth

sister!--given to hospital and prison work, tract distribution, and

mothers' meetings--a tall, spare, gentle-faced woman, dressed with

almost Quakerish simplicity. And run over and away with by her

daughters, no question--two monstrous girls of thirty, if a day; real

grenadiers, nearly six feet high; one painfully thin and large-eyed,

the other as stout as tall, and both overpowering in spirits and

flippant or cynic smartness of talk. One, the thin one, whom I liked

best, amused me during the evening by telling me how she got rid of

bores--young, feeble little society men, brief of stature and of wit.

"I endure the little creature as long as I can, and when he has buzzed

all his little buzzes about the weather, and subjects suited to his

size, there comes a pause--a long pause, for I don't help him. Then, if

he is too young to know that he should take himself off, and he begins

desperately upon some other threadbare topic, then I act. I am seated

on a low lounge or ottoman; I begin to rise as if I caught sight of

some one I knew at a distance; and I rise, rise, slowly, slowly, but

up, up, up I go, till sometimes I stand on tiptoe, or on a hassock, my

long skirts hiding all that, and the little man, who has watched me

first idly, then curiously, gradually gets horror-struck, and finally

bursts desperately away, absolutely tongue-tied with fright."

"And no wonder!" I couldn't help saying, for she had mounted and mounted

as she described the scene, until there really was something

supernatural and alarming in the slim, white-draped length of lady, and

the height from which the big blue eyes in their hollow orbits shone

down upon me.

Then an editor and his wife--the editor of "The Food Regenerator," if

you please--and a dark, unwholesome looking, wizened little man, who I

am sure would have been the better for a good rubbing with sand-paper

and emery powder. His wife was a plaintive, helpless, hapless,

washed-out woman, who, sidling apologetically about in a frowsy costume

of some yellow-white woollen stuff, made me think of a dirty white

cat--a likeness I was sorry to have forced on me when I had heard a bit

of her history; for the only wonder is how she's kept courage enough to

go on dressing or living at all. It seems that _M. le mari_ is by way

of being a social as well as dietetic regenerator, and is as full of

uncomfortable fads as man can be. They have no fortune, unless you

reckon as such seven small children, and over and over again he's

thrown up a good appointment or salary because he "must be free to

write his convictions--great truths the world needs." And to lighten

matters still further, he believes that service should be bartered, not

paid for in coin; so they could almost never have a servant, and when

they did get one it was of course some poor wretch who was glad to

shelter herself on any terms for the moment, but who could be trusted

no more than puss in the dairy. Besides carrying her own fardel, this

poor wife was expected to fold and direct wrappers for her husband's

precious journal, he finding "mechanical writing too exhausting and

stultifying."

Next--let me see--two gentlemen, bachelors, one a pugnacious

fellow-countryman to whose tremendous r-r's my heart warmed in this

lisping land of Cockaigne--a proof-reader at one of the great publishing

houses; the other as curious a specimen as I've encountered--a man of

sixty or so, of courtly manners, an ex-Anglican parson, an ex-Catholic

convert, a present "seeker after truth"--a man who knows something about

everything and believes the last thing--but sure of nothing save that

this world's a comfortable place, and loving nothing, one would swear,

but his pug dog, a superb creature, fairly uncanny for wisdom, but a

vilely ill-tempered beast, gurr-ing if one but looked at it.

And three ladies make up, I believe, the tale of the household: a

rather young widow, charming in an unearthly, seeress-like

fashion--finest porcelain to her finger-tips, but frail as a breath; a

handsome, solid blonde girl, with cold blue eyes, and no gold in her

fair hair, studying to be what she calls "a healer"--an earnest

advocate of the food-regenerating editor's views upon diet, but quite

out-Heroding Herod in her practice, for her fare seems only to lag a

pace behind Nebuchadnezzar's in simplicity; and last a witty

_Americaine_, an art student at the South Kensington school, with whom

I fraternized directly, and from whom I had all the information my own

eyes didn't glean. A girl twenty-four or five years old, I fancy, and

oh, so satisfyingly handsome--not tall, but majestic in proportions and

pose: a beautifully shaped head whose outlines were only revealed by

closely-pinned braids of fine dark hair, and a face like a lily for

calm and purity--too pale, indeed, for brilliant health, but the faint

shadows under the eyes, about the temples and mouth that she owes to

months in dimly-lighted rooms are really most effective aids to her

peculiar beauty. She captivated me quite; Ronayne, too, who is a great

conquest, for usually he dislikes Americans, finding them, he says, so

shallow and yet so cockahoop. And the other guests at dinner were a

lady lecturer, American, too, young, decidedly pretty, but pert as a

pigeon, an Englishwoman who's doing something very notable in

reformatories and kindergartens, a Liberal M.P. dancing attendance on

the young lady lecturer, and a grand old white-headed lion of a man, a

famous literary M.D.--heterodox to a frightful degree, I'm told, but

certainly one of the most delightful neighbors I ever had at a dinner

table.

And a very enjoyable dinner-party it was, altogether: a simple but

carefully arranged menu, the dishes thoroughly well cooked--two or

three foreign touches, _maccaroni aux tomates_, American-trimmed

peaches with cream, and little fairy cakes--cat tongues--do you know

them?--and roasted almonds in Spanish fashion, and as good claret

Sauterne and sparkling Mosel (for I know a good glass of wine when I

get it) as one need wish for.

The food-regenerator and his wife and the blonde "healer" had seats

together, and were helped only to vegetables and fruits--the girl,

indeed, taking only unbolted bread, of which an enormous supply in the

shape of hard little cakes was placed before her, together with a large

vegetable-dish full of stewed prunes; and the two mountains of bread and

fruit had disappeared when the meal was ended--how many pounds I don't

know, but then dinner is her sole meal in the twenty-four hours.

"Did you see that young woman's dinner?" burst out my liege that night

when we were discussing our late experiences. "Disgusting! It ought to

have been served in a trough! I looked every instant to see her fall

from her chair and have to be carried out. If one is to gorge oneself

like an anaconda once a day upon fruit and chopped straw in order to

live to a good old age, I think we'll elect to be cut off in our

youthful bloom."

But the talk at table was clever and gay, and thoroughly un-English in

that it was general instead of being broken up into a dozen depressing

_sotto-voce_ dialogues. The "healer," indeed, was too busy eating to

open her mouth much uselessly, and the white cat was too timid for

speech. But her editor made amends. He talked for three; not ill, but

with a flavor of bitterness, and not enough in the third person.

"Oh, women are the stronghold of superstition," he exclaimed apropos of

some passage between himself and the American art-student--"fettered

hard and fast by hoary prejudices," he went on with rather a confusion

of metaphors, "else the world might move."

"But we bind you, upon a man's testimony, but by a single hair,"

answered his opponent: "why not burst so slight a shackle?"

"And you to talk of freedom!" he went on as if unhearing. "Why do you

wear that emblem at your throat?" (A plain gold cross which came into

bold relief against her black velvet bodice.)

"Possibly because I'm a Christian." She answered without change of

voice, but stopping the conversation by addressing some one nearer her.

But the little porcelain widow, with a pretty upward movement, like the

flutter of a bird on her nest, caught at a floating thread, and said in

her tiny flute voice.

"But, Mr. Ridley, if he is interested in symbolism, will remember that

the cross is a very ancient symbol, typifying the active and passive

forces in nature--good and evil, light and darkness. And is it not very

curious how everywhere the sign is impressed on external nature--in the

heavens, in crystals, in flowers, in a bird's flight? In the arts too."

"And the legends, fables, and touching or droll superstitions concerning

it are endless," said the white-headed doctor beside me. "And yet I'm

often struck with the comparative newness of what may be termed

literature of the cross. This dwelling on apparition in so many forms of

the Story of the Cross is quite modern, and I fancy that a Good Friday

service, a following through the Three Hours' Agony with a colloquial

soliloquy, if one may use such an expression, upon the Seven Last Words,

would have seemed as novel to the early Christians as it does now to the

Low Church portion of our beautifully consistent Establishment."

"Though the symbol was always probably in private use among the early

Christians," struck in the truth-seeker, "I believe its first public

appearance would not date further back than its triumphant one upon the

Roman eagles. In the Catacombs, I'm told, the Virgin and Child appear in

the oldest work, or symbolism--the Cross never save as executed by late

hands."

"May there not be subjective reasons for that?" asked my porcelain

widow. "I mean for the modern adoration of the Cross? Do you not think

we are much softer hearted, much more keenly susceptible of all the

finer emotions than were those old Greek, Roman, and Jewish converts?

One feels the same thing, it seems to me, in mystic reading. The old

visions were triumphant, simple, or, so to say, material--the very A B C

of mysticism; while the visions of later mystics are complicated,

involved, like the soul-life of this time, often agonizing beyond

natural power of endurance. And the stigmatized saints are of these

later times."

"And then," said the art-student, "I think they didn't realize in those

early days how long time was going to be, and how tough and many-headed,

evil. The faith was but young then. Perhaps they couldn't have borne to

know the length and fluctuations of the fight--and they felt so sure of

speedy victory, that our Lord's resurrection and ascension appealed to

them more keenly than His passion."

"All reasonable theories," replied my neighbor. "But, apropos of some of

the legends concerning the Tragedy of the Cross, the weeping willow, the

trembling aspen, the robin redbreast, the red crossbill, the passion

flower, and so many more, I hardly know a more naïve example of the way

in which our forefathers pressed the exterior world into testimony for

their belief than occurs in an old picture in an Augustinian monastery

in Sussex.

"It is a fresco on the wall of a chamber--subject, the Nativity--and the

animals therein are made to publish the event in words supposed to

resemble their characteristic sounds and cries. A cock, crowing, is

perched at the top, and a label from out his mouth has the words,

'Christus natus est!' 'Quando, quando?' quacks the duck. Hoarsely the

raven, 'In hæ nocte.' 'Ubi? ubi?' inquires the cow. And, 'Bethlehem,'

bleats out the lamb."

"Oh, Mrs. Stainton, I beg your pardon," suddenly called out the

ex-Anglican parson from the foot of the table, and despatching a servant

with a plate to the little widow. "I quite forgot your predilection."

"But somebody else may like the _inner consciousness_ too," returned

she, transferring to her own plate the fowl's gizzard sent. "You make

me feel like a terrible old French aunt of mine--a _gourmande_ who

spent two or three hours every day in consultation with her cook, a

man, concerning her for the most part solitary dinner, and who was at

the last found dead with her cook-book lying open on her knee! My

oldest brother, when a little fellow, dined with her one day. In his

helping of fowl was included the inner consciousness. Childlike, he put

this tid-bit carefully aside as a delicious last morsel. But the old

lady eyed his plate with great discontent, growing every moment more

grim. Finally she could bear it no longer, and, poising her fork, she

dexterously harpooned the _bonne-bouche_, and triumphantly transferred

it to her own plate, remarking to the dreadfully disappointed child, 'I

see, my nephew, that you don't love this little portion. Now _I_ do, so

it is best I should have it.' We none of us could tolerate this aunt,

but my brother's feeling toward her ever after was really venomous in

its spitefulness."

"That reminds me," said the Scotchman, "that I saw a photograph of

Dixblanc to-day, and was astonished to find her not at all an

evil-looking person. I quite believe now that she murdered her mistress

in a fit of passion, as she says, and not at all for robbery. And there

must have been awful provocation. Fancy living with a disreputable,

avaricious, nagging old Frenchwoman!"

"But how worse than with an old Englishwoman of like characteristics?"

asked somebody.

"Oh, because the _Française_ is more _fine_, exasperating, and utterly

unrestrained by terrors of Mrs. Grundy and the _decent_," replied the

ex-Anglican, ex-things-in-general truth-seeker.

You will easily imagine that the talk, as it ran from one thing to

another, was now and then upon topics of which I haven't the faintest

gleam of knowledge--the doctrines of Swedenborg, the philosophizings of

Spinoza and Vaurenargues. (Ronayne as usual spells the hard names for

me, but you, as a wise and much-reading damsel, will know who was meant

and all about it.)

After the ladies had returned to the drawing-room (for even in this New

Light house the stupid fashion remains of gentlemen lingering alone, or

together, or however you like it--you know what I mean--over their

wine) I made a little tour of inspection of the public parts of the

establishment with Mrs. Malise. They've a common library and

reading-room, and most of the associates have their individual

sitting-rooms. Dinner is a fixed meal, and all the members meet

thereat, but breakfast and lunch may be taken at any time within

certain hours, to suit the convenience of each member. "We are too

small in number to make it possible to order our meals _à la carte_,

or to economize in general living expenses as it might suit us

individually to do. We can only reduce household costs in the mass, and

then share these pretty equally. But this is only a beginning. By and

by we shall have splendid confederate homes, under whose roofs the

simplest and the costliest fashions of living may go on side by side.

But to prove so much as we have done is a gain, and in separate homes

the same amount of comfort we have here would cost us at least double,

and would be, for some of us who have neither time nor talent for

domesticity, quite unattainable at any price. What, under my

administration, a little home would be upon our income of £500 a year,

I shouldn't like to experience. And Mrs. Stainton! (The little widow.)

Why, she comes of one of the oldest of the county families in Somerset;

was reared like an exotic, lived chiefly upon cream and forced fruit,

though now and then she trifled with something solid--an almond soup, a

clear jelly, a bit of game, or an intricate _entrée_! Never dreamed of

going beyond their pleasure gardens on her own feet, and knew how to do

no earthly thing save to read, write, talk. She read 'Alton Locke,' and

by way of comment married a national schoolmaster, the son of a

brickmaker on her father's estate! There was a grand hubbub, and before

she'd had time to be too much disgusted with her martyr rôle--martyrdom

to break down the barriers of caste--her husband left her a penniless

widow, and since then her father allows her a small income, but

sentences her to banishment from that decorous household whose

proprieties she outraged. She can endure nothing, knows nothing of any

practical matters. What would she do with £150 a year, in a dingy

parlor 'let,' with a flock bed, a burnt chop, a long-brewed cup of tea,

and a frowsy-haired, smutty-faced 'slavey' to open the door and attend

grudgingly and slatternly upon her?

"But we are not all chiefly moved by economic considerations. Some of

our members have very considerable incomes, and might live where and how

they pleased, but they seem not less satisfied with our experiment than

are the poorer associates. There is such relief from care, and we may

see as much or as little society as we choose without offence or

burden."

Something interrupted Mrs. Malise's argument here, and I asked to see

baby.

"Mill? Oh, certainly, if you like; but we shall find him asleep."

And asleep he was in one of those dreary back rooms that are sure to be

sunless--a room that is both day and night nursery, I suppose, for there

was a hot fire, a close smell, and the German nurse sat making lace

under a gas jet flaming away unshaded.

He was very pale, poor little man! and has grown very fat--a soft,

sagging flesh! I remarked upon his pallor to his mother, and she

answered that he had measles about the time he was weaned, and that he

had never had much color since. But he seemed well, and was he not a

great stout fellow?

What treatment had he in measles? I asked. Oh, none! They didn't believe

in doctors over much, and thought nature managed best unhindered. Mill

was scrubbed with carbolic soap, and that was all the special treatment

he had.

Returning to the drawing-rooms, we found them rapidly filling with the

evening guests, and a busy hum of conversation going on. A slender,

graceful, feeble-looking young man entered just before us. "That is

Dodge, the famous medium," whispered my companion; but the words were

hardly uttered before the young man gave a sharp cry, flung his arms

wildly out, then sank as if prostrated on a near-by lounge. "Oh, what is

it? what is it, Mr. Dodge?" cried several persons, rushing to him.

"She! she!" was the answer, with difficulty, and then he languidly

pointed to a group of eager talkers under the chandelier. At the moment

Lady ----, one of the group, her white hair startlingly gleaming under

the full blaze of light, turned, with some sense of the commotion, and

as she did so called out, "Why, Dodge! Is it my old friend Dodge?" and

came toward him. The young man rallied, rose, and gave her his hand. "It

was so sudden," he explained. "Four years ago Lady ----'s hair had not a

white thread in it; and when I first caught sight of her, crowned by

that mass of snow, I quite believed it was her spirit I saw."

"A great deal may happen in four years," answered Lady ----. "But how

are you in these days, Mr. Dodge?"

"Oh, wretchedly ill, as usual," he replied. "The Duc de ---- insisted

upon it that I must come over to England and try cold water again, and

the Emperor, when I left, engaged me to meet him next season at Ems on

condition that I had a more respectable body for my spirit to travel

about in. Here's a little souvenir he gave me at parting," showing a

magnificent diamond on his finger; and I moved on and lost the gorgeous

reminiscences. There was a crowd before the evening was over, and I was

introduced to a score or so of notables in the unorthodox world. But I

seemed destined to funny little dramatic surprises. I had drawn near the

piano to listen to Miss Hedges's "Drink to Me Only," etc., and was

sitting quietly when the song was ended, speaking to no one, not

consciously looking at any one, when a voice near me said, "That is my

wife!" and I woke up to find a roly-poly, little old fellow, all smiles,

insinuation, and plausibility, with a fringe of venerable white hair

around a head round as an apple, bald and shining, smooth, evidently

addressing himself to me. "Yes, that is my wife," he went on, and I

looked with some bewilderment at a young woman his gaze indicated--a

very young woman in a brilliant pink evening dress, the young woman

brilliantly colored herself in solid white and red, with black eyes,

black hair in rebellious tight curls, and a face with about as much

expression as a plate. "Looks rather young for me, don't she? But it's

all right, for the spirits give her to me!"

"And pray, Mr. Wardle, what did the spirits do for the old wife you left

in Terre Haute?" inquired Miss Hedges, wheeling about toward us. "I am

Anna Hedges, and two years ago I painted a portrait of your grandchild,

Benny Davis, for Mrs. Wardle in New York."

"Er--er--I was not aware--er--I remember, that is--er--I think I have

seen--er, er--yes! yes! A very worthy woman, the first Mrs. Wardle--very

worthy. But narrer, narrer! too undeveloped, in fact, to--er--receive

the new gospel, or to--er--make any use of the freedom I gave her to

find a more harmonious partner, as I have done," and the old creature

having floundered into a little more self-possession, smiled amiably,

and retreated in tolerable order.

"I _do_ beg your pardon," went on Miss Hedges to me impulsively; "but

that sleek old villain! I really couldn't help my outburst. His real

wife is one of the nicest, gentlest of simple old women, and dying of

shame, I heard the other day, for what has befallen herself and her

children through the delusions and misconduct of an infatuated man who

has grandchildren older than this 'harmonious partner' he introduces as

his wife here abroad. The 'first Mrs. Wardle!' It made me think of one

of our Jerseymen who begged that a certain hymn might be sung at his

wife's funeral 'because the corpse was particular fond of that hymn!'"

When I could speak for laughter, I inquired, "But is this then a

spiritualistic headquarters? Because Mrs. Malise pointed out Dodge, the

medium, to me early in the evening?"

"No, not more than of all other insanities, crudities, and

unconventionalities--conventionalities too; for with perhaps one

exception, all the members of the household, whatever their opinions,

are to the last degree rigid as to the proprieties. But at one time or

another one meets here all shades of belief and non-belief--much of the

orthodox and I should say all the heterodox London. Very curious I find

it, and though sometimes outraged, as to-night, I'm oftener amused with

my 'proper study of mankind.' But you, as an Englishwoman, would hardly

conceive how droll to me was my first experience of one of these

receptions. You know, of course, at once, as everybody does, that I'm a

Yankee? I came in rather late one evening with an English artist friend,

and found, enthroned in the other room, the centre of a throng of bowing

gentlemen, a woman as black as the chimney back, her neck and arms bare,

white gloves, a gilt comb and white ostrich feather in her woolly

hair--a genuine darkey! and Mme. V.--the artist, Mme. V.--hurried up to

me. 'Oh, do you know your accomplished countrywoman, Miss Symonds? No?

Then pray let me introduce you to her, we find her so charming!' And I

dare say she was charming, only it was very queer at first to encounter

Chloe _en reme_!"

Then we had a long talk, getting speedily away from persons and things

to the old familiar subject--art. How the girl is working! And how happy

and absorbed in her work she is.

"Oh, Ronayne," I said, as we settled back in the carriage for our drive

home, "do I smell of turpentine and paint rags? I had such a good time!

Miss Hedges and I talked shop for a whole hour."

And then, and later, we compared notes. He was critical, but had been

amused, and, trust me, I had the wit to hold my tongue about "the first

Mrs. Wardle!"

For over and above my interest in that poor baby, several things draw

me toward this associate household, and I should not like to pursue an

acquaintance there if Ronayne manifested any decided contempt or

hostility. He bursts out about the food-reforming trio, and the young

lady-lecturer's manners are not to his fancy--too free and easy. She

boasts of her superiority to hampered Englishwomen. _She_ lives here by

herself in lodgings, and has gentlemen visiting and dining with her

alone, or goes alone, in full dress, to dine, at 7 or 8 o'clock, with a

gentleman friend stopping at the Langham Hotel. These are American

fashions--innocent permitted freedoms of our republican sisters, she

says. She is a pretty little boaster, with ready wit and a sharp

tongue; but there are Americans and Americans, and I hardly think it

would occur to an English gentleman to stand flicking a heavy

curtain-tassel playfully into Miss Hedges's face while chatting with

her at a public reception, even if he were an _épris_ Liberal, M.P.--as

Ronayne says Mr. Vane did in the little orator's the other night.

* * * * *

But there! there! With love from each to all, not another word this time

of my little New Light baby or his expansive household, from

Your own Lil.

(To be continued.)

THE CLIMBING ROSE.

Climb, oh! climb the golden ladder,

Song of mine:

Climb till thou dost reach her heart

For whom I pine.

Cease not, lest thou lose the bliss

For which I sigh:

Climb till thou dost touch her heart--

Ah! why not I?

D. N. R.

MISS MISANTHROPE.

By JUSTIN MCCARTHY.

CHAPTER X.

"THE POET IN A GOLDEN AGE WAS BORN."

Victor Heron did not leave Mrs. Money's quite as soon as he had

intended. He had made a sort of engagement to meet some men in the

smoking-room of his club; men with whom he was to have had some talk

about the St. Xavier's Settlements. But he remained talking with Minola

for some time; and he talked with Lucy and with other women, young and

old, and asked many questions, and made himself very agreeable, and, as

was his wont, thought every one delightful, and enjoyed himself very

much. Then Mr. Money chanced to look in, and seeing Heron, bore him away

for a while to his study, to talk with him about something very, very

particular. Mr. Money saw Herbert Blanchet, and only performed with him

the ceremony which Hajja Baba describes as "the shake-elbows and the

fine weather," and then made no further account of him. Mr. Blanchet,

seeing Heron invited to the study, and knowing from his acquaintance

with the household what that meant, conceived himself slighted, and was

angry. Mr. Money always looked upon Blanchet as a sort of young man whom

only women were ever supposed to care about, and who would be as much

out of place in the private study of a politician and man of business as

a trimmed petticoat.

There was, however, some consolation for the poet in the fact that he

had Minola Grey nearly all to himself. He secured this advantage by a

dexterous stroke of policy, for he attached himself to his sister and

did his best to show and describe to her all the celebrities; and

Minola, only too glad, came and sat by Mary, and they made a very happy

trio. Herbert was inclined to look down upon his sister as a harmless,

old-fashioned little spinster, who would be much better if she did not

try to write poetry. He felt convinced for a while that Minola must have

the same opinion of her in her secret heart, and would not think the

less of him for showing it just a little. But when he found that Miss

Grey took the poetess quite seriously, and had a genuine affection for

her, his sister's value rose immensely in his eyes; he paid her great

attention, and, as has been said, he had his reward.

It grew late; the rooms were rapidly thinning. Minola and Miss Blanchet

were to remain at Mrs. Money's for the night. Blanchet could not stay

much longer, and had risen to go away, when Victor Heron entered. He

came up to speak to Minola, and Minola introduced him to her particular

friend and _camarade_, Miss Blanchet; and he sat beside Miss Blanchet

and talked to her for a few moments, while Blanchet took advantage of

the opportunity to talk again with Minola. Then Mr. Heron rose, and

Herbert rose, and Mary Blanchet, growing courageous, told Heron that

that was her brother and a great poet, and in a very formal,

old-fashioned way, begged permission to make them acquainted. Mr. Heron

was a passionate admirer of poetry, and occasionally, perhaps, tried

the patience of his friends by too lengthened citations from

Shakespeare and Milton; but in modern poetry he had not got much later

than "The Arab physician Karshish," which he could recite from end to

end; and "In Memoriam," of which he knew the greater part. He was,

however, modestly conscious that his administrative engagements in the

colonies had kept him a little behind the rest of the world in the

matter of poetry, and it did not surprise him in the least that a very

great poet, whose name had never before reached his ears, should be

there beside him in Mrs. Money's drawing-room. He felt delighted and

proud at meeting a poet and a poet's sister.

It so happened that after saying his friendly good night to his

hostess--a ceremony which, even had the rooms been crowded, Mr. Heron

would have thought it highly rude and unbecoming to omit--our fallen

ruler of men found himself in Victoria street with Mr. Blanchet.

"Are you going my way?" Heron asked him with irrepressible sociability.

"I am going up Pall Mall and into Piccadilly, and I shall be glad if you

are coming the same way. Are you going to walk? I always walk when I

can. May I offer you a cigar? I think you will find these good."

Herbert took a cigar, and agreed to walk Heron's way; which was, indeed,

so far as it went, his own. Heron was very proud to walk with a poet.

"Yours is a delightful calling, sir," he said. "Excuse me if I speak of

it. I remember reading somewhere that one should never talk to an author

about his works. But I couldn't help it; we don't meet poets in some of

our colonies; and your sister was kind enough to enlighten my ignorance,

and tell me that you were a poet. I always thought that a charming

anecdote of Wolfe reciting Gray's 'Elegy,' and telling his officers he

would rather have written that than take Quebec. Ay, by Jove, and so

would I!"

Mr. Blanchet had never heard of the anecdote, and had by no means any

clear idea as to the identity or exploits of Wolfe. But he was anxious

to know something about Heron, and therefore he was determined to be as

companionable as possible.

"You must not believe all my sister says about me. She has an

extravagant notion of my merits in every way."

"It must be delightful to have a sister!" Victor Heron said

enthusiastically. "Do you know that I can't imagine any greater

happiness for a man than to have a sister? I envy you, Mr. Blanchet."

Heron was in the peculiar position of one to whom all the family

relationships present themselves in idealized form. He had never had

sister or brother; and a sister now rose up in his imagination as a sort

of creature compounded of a simplified Flora MacIvor and a glorified

Ruth Pinch. His novel-reading in the colonies was a little

old-fashioned, like many of his ideas, and his habit of frequently using

the word "sir" in talking with men whom he did not know very familiarly.

Mr. Blanchet was not disposed, from his knowledge of Mary Blanchet, to

hold the possession of a sister as a gift of romantic or inestimable

value. To say the truth, when Victor spoke so warmly of the delight of

having a sister, he too was not setting up the poetess as an ideal. He

was thinking rather of Miss Grey, and what a sister she would be for a

man to confide in and have always with him.

Meanwhile Herbert, with all his self-conceit, had common sense enough to

know that it would not do to leave Heron to find out from others that

the great poet Blanchet had yet to make his fame.

"My sister and I have been a long time separated," he said. "She lived

in the country for the most part, and I had to come to London."

"Of course--the only place for a man of genius. A grand stage, Mr.

Blanchet--a grand stage."

"So of course Mary is all the more inclined to make a sort of hero of

me. You must not take her estimate of me, Mr. Heron. She fancies the

outer world must think just as she does of everything I do. I am not a

famous poet, Mr. Heron, and probably never shall be. I belong to a

school which does not cultivate fame, or even popularity."

"I admire you all the more for that. It always seems to me that the poet

degrades his art who hunts for popularity--the poet or anybody else for

that matter," added Victor, thinking of his own unpopular performances

in St. Xavier's Settlements. "I am delighted to meet you, Mr. Blanchet.

I have seen so much hunting after popularity in England that I honor any

man of genius who has the courage to set his face against it."

"My latest volume of poems," Blanchet said firmly, "I do not even mean

to publish. They shall be printed, I hope, and got out in a manner

becoming of them--becoming, at least, of what I think of them; but they

shall not be hawked about book shops and reviewed by self-conceited,

ignorant prigs."

"Quite right, Mr. Blanchet; just what I should like to do myself if I

could possibly imagine myself gifted like you. But still you must admit

that it is little to the credit of the age that a poet should be forced

thus to keep his treasures from the public eye. Besides, it may be all

very well, you know, in your case or mine; but think of a man of genius

who has to live by his poems! It's easy talking for men who have

enough--my enough, I confess, is a pretty modest sort of thing--but you

must know better than I that there are young men of genius--ay, of real

genius--trying to make a living in London by writings that perhaps their

own generation will never understand. There is what seems to me the hard

thing." Mr. Heron grew quite animated.

The words sent a keen pang through Blanchet's heart. His new

acquaintance, whom Blanchet assumed to be confoundedly wealthy,

evidently regarded him as a person equally favored by fortune, and

therefore only writing poetry to indulge the whim of his genius. Herbert

Blanchet had heard from the Money women, in a vague sort of way, that

Mr. Heron had been a governor of some place; it might have been Canada

or India for aught he knew to the contrary; and he assumed that he must

be a very aristocratic and self-conceited person. Blanchet would not for

the world have admitted at that moment that he was poor; and he

shuddered at the idea that Heron might somehow learn all about Mary

Blanchet's official position in the court-house of Duke's Keeton. For

all the dignity of poetry and high art, Mr. Blanchet was impressed with

a painful consciousness of being small somehow in the company of Mr.

Heron. It was not merely because he supposed Heron to be wealthy, for he

knew Mrs. Money was rich, and that Lucy would be an heiress; and yet he

was always quite at his ease with them, and accustomed to give himself

airs and to be made much of; but it occurred to him that Mr. Heron's

family, friends, and familiar surroundings would probably be very

different from his; and he always found himself at home in the society

of women, whom he knew that he could impress and impose on by his

handsome presence. Yes, he felt himself rather small in the society of

this pleasant, simple, unpretending young man, who was all the time

looking up to him as a poet and a child of genius.

Greatly pleased was the poet and child of genius when Victor Heron asked

him to come into his rooms and smoke a cigar before going to bed.

"You don't sleep much or keep early hours, I dare say, Mr. Blanchet;

literary men don't, I suppose; and I only sleep when I can't help it.

Let us smoke and have a talk for an hour or two."

"Night is my day," said Blanchet. "I don't think people who have minds

can talk well in the hours before midnight. When I have to work in the

day I sometimes close my shutters, light my gas, and fancy I am under

the influences of night."

"I got the way of sitting up half the night," said Victor simply, "from

living in places where one had best sleep in the day; but I am sure if I

were a poet, I should delight in the night for its own sake."

There was something curious in the feeling of deference with which Heron

regarded the young poet. He considered Blanchet as something not quite

mortal, or at all events, masculine; something entitled to the homage

one gives to a woman and the enthusiasm we feel to a spiritual teacher.

Blanchet did not seem to him exactly like a man; rather like one of

those creatures compounded of fire and dew whom we read of in legend and

mythology. The feeling was not that of awe, because Blanchet was young

and good-looking, and wore a dress coat and white tie, and it is

impossible to have a feeling of awe for a man with a white tie. It was a

feeling of delicate consideration and devotion. Had some rude person

jostled against or otherwise insulted the poet as they passed along,

Victor would have felt it his duty to interpose and resent the affront

as promptly as if Minola Grey or Lucy Money were the object of the

insult. To his unsophisticated colonial mind the poet was the sweet

feminine voice of the literary grammar.

Heron occupied two or three rooms on the drawing-room floor of one of

the streets running out of Piccadilly. He paid, perhaps, more for his

accommodation than a prudent young man beginning the world all over

again would have thought necessary; but Heron could not come down all at

one step from his dignity as a sort of colonial governor, and he

considered it, in a manner, due to the honor of England's administrative

system, that he should maintain a gentlemanlike appearance in London

while still engaged in fighting his battle--the battle which had not

begun yet. Besides, as he had himself told Minola Grey, his troubles

thus far were not money troubles. He had means enough to live like a

modest gentleman even in London, provided he did not run into

extravagant tastes of any kind, and he had saved, because he had had no

means of spending it, a good deal of his salary while in the St.

Xavier's his lodgings; and his condition seemed to Blanchet, when they

entered the drawing-room together, and the servant was seen to be

quietly busy in anticipating his master's wants, to be that of an easy

opulence whereof, in the case of young bachelors, he had little personal

knowledge. It was very impressive for the moment. Genius, and

originality, and the school quailed at first before respectability, West

End rooms, and a man servant.

The adornments of the rooms were, to Mr. Blanchet's thinking, atrocious.

They were, indeed, only of the better class London lodgings style:

mirrors, and gilt, and white, and damask. There were doors where there

ought to have been curtains, carpets where artistic feeling would have

prescribed mats or rugs; there were no fans, not to say on the ceiling,

but even on the walls. The only suggestion of art in the place was a

plaster cast of the Venus of the Louvre which Heron himself had bought,

and which in all simplicity he adored. Mr. Blanchet held, first, that

all casts were nefarious, and next, that the Venus of Milo as a work of

art was beneath contempt. One of the divinities of his school had done

the only Venus which art could acknowledge as her own. This was, to be

sure, a picture, not a statue; but in Mr. Blanchet's mind it had settled

the Venus question for ever. The Lady Venus was draped from chin to toes

in a snuff-colored gown, and was represented as seated on a rock biting

the nails of a lank, greenish hand; and she had sunken cheeks, livid

eyes, and a complexion like that of the prairie sage grass. Any other

Venus made Herbert Blanchet shudder.

The books scattered about were dispiriting. There were Shakespeare,

Byron, and Browning. Mr. Blanchet had never read Shakespeare, considered

Byron below criticism, and could hardly restrain himself on the subject

of Browning. There were histories, and Mr. Blanchet scorned history;

there were blue books, and the very shade of blue which their covers

displayed would have made his soul sicken. It will be seen, therefore,

how awful is the impressiveness of respectability when, with all these

evidences of the lack of artistic taste around him, Mr. Blanchet still

felt himself dwarfed somehow in the presence of the occupier of the

rooms. It ought to be said in vindication of Mr. Heron, that that poor

youth was in nowise responsible for the adornments of the rooms, except

in so far as his plaster cast and his books were concerned. He had

never, up to this moment, noticed anything about the lodgings, except

that the rooms were pretty large, and that the locality was convenient

for his purposes and pursuits.

The two young men had some soda and brandy, and smoked and talked.

Blanchet was the poorest hand possible at smoking and drinking; but he

swallowed soda and brandy in repeated doses, while his host's glass lay

still hardly touched before him. One consequence was that his humbled

feeling soon wore off, and he became eloquent on his own account, and

patronizing to Heron. He set our hero right upon every point connected

with modern literature and art, whereon it appeared that Heron had

hitherto possessed the crudest and most old-fashioned notions. Then he

declaimed some of his own shorter poems, and explained to Heron that

there was a conspiracy among all the popular and successful poets of the

day to shut him out from public notice, until Heron felt compelled, by a

sheer sense of fellow-feeling in grievance, to start up and grasp his

hand, and vow that his position was enviable in comparison with that of

those who had leagued themselves against him.

"But you must hear my last poem--you _shall_ hear it," Herbert said

magnanimously.

"I shall be delighted; I shall feel truly honored," murmured Victor in

perfect sincerity. "Only tell me when."

"The first reading--let me see; yes, the _first_ reading is pledged to

Miss Grey. No one," the poet grandly went on, "can hear it before she

hears it."

"Of course not--certainly not; I shouldn't think of it," the dethroned

ruler of St. Xavier's Settlements hastened to interpose. "What a noble

girl Miss Grey is! You know her very well, I suppose?"

"I look upon her," said the poet gravely, "as my patron saint." He threw

himself back in his chair, raised his eyes to the ceiling, murmured to

himself some words which sounded like a poetic prayer, and swallowed his

brandy and soda.

Victor thought he understood, and remained silent. His heart swelled

with admiration, sympathy, and an entirely innocent, unselfish envy.

"Still," the poet said, rising in his chair again, "there is no reason

why you should not hear the poem at the same time. I am going to-morrow

to read the poem to Minola--to Miss Grey and Mary. I am sure they will

both be delighted if you will come with me and hear it."

"I should like it of all things, of course; but I don't know whether I

ought to intrude on Miss Grey. I understood from her that she rather

prefers to live to herself--with her friends of course--and that she

does not desire to have visitors."

"You may safely come with me," the poet proudly said. "I'll call for you

to-morrow, if you like."

Victor assumed that he safely might accept the introduction of his new

acquaintance, and the appointment was made.

If Mr. Heron could, under any possible circumstances, be brought to

admit to himself that the society of a poet was a little tiresome, he

might perhaps have acknowledged it in the present instance. The

good-natured young man was quite content for the present to sink and

even to forget his own grievance in presence of the grievances of his

new acquaintance. His own trouble seemed to him but small in comparison.

What, after all, was the misprizing of the political services of an

individual in the face of a malign or stupid lack of appreciation, which

might deprive the world and all time of the outcome of a poet's genius?

Heron began now to infer that his new friend was poor, and the

conviction made him more and more devotedly sympathetic. He was already

dimly revolving in his mind a project for the publication of Blanchet's

poems at the risk or expense of a few private friends, of whom he was to

be the foremost. Some persons have a genius, a heaven-bestowed faculty,

for the transfer of their own responsibilities and cares to other minds

and shoulders. Already two sympathetic friends of a few hours' standing

are separately taking thought about the publication of Mr. Blanchet's

poems without risk or loss to Mr. Blanchet. Still, it must be owned that

Mr. Blanchet's company was growing a little of a strain on the attention

of his present host. Blanchet knew absolutely nothing of politics or

passing events of any kind in the outer world, and did not affect or

pretend to care anything about them. Indeed, had he been a man of large

and liberal information in contemporary history, he would in all

probability have concealed his treasures of knowledge, and affected an

absolute and complacent ignorance. Outside the realms of what he called

art, Mr. Blanchet thought it utterly beneath him to know anything; and

within his own realm he knew so much, and bore down with such a terrible

dogmatism, that the ordinary listener sank oppressed beneath it. Warmed

and animated by his own discourse, the poet poured out the streams of

his dogmatic eloquence over the patient Heron, who strained every nerve

in the effort to appreciate, and in the honest desire to acquire,

exalted information.

At last the talk came to an end, and even Blanchet got somehow the idea

that it was time to be going away. Victor accompanied him as far as the

doorway, and they stood for a moment looking into the silent street.

"You haven't far to go, I hope?"

"No, not far; not exactly far," the poet answered. "I'll find a cab, I

dare say. To-morrow, then, you'll come with me to Miss Grey's. You

needn't have any hesitation; you will be quite welcome, I assure you.

I'll call for you."

"Come to breakfast then at twelve."

"All right," the complacent Blanchet answered, his earlier awe having

given place to an easy familiarity; "I'll come."

He nodded and went his way. Victor Heron looked for a while after his

tall, slender, and graceful figure.

"He's a handsome fellow," Heron said to himself, "and a poet, and I can

easily imagine a girl being in love with him, or any number of girls.

She is a very fine girl, quite out of the common track. She must be very

happy. I almost envy him. No, I don't. What on earth have I to do with

such nonsense?"

He returned to his room and sat thinking for a while. All his political

worrying and grievance-mongering seemed to have lost character somehow,

and become prosaic, and unsatisfying, and vapid. It did not seem much to

look forward to, that sort of thing going on for ever.