When Slocum was scarcely a village Edward McAllister, after his
retirement from the Supreme Court, purchased sufficient land in the
State to establish a model farm. Here his children, Paul and Agnes,
were born, and before they had time to know they were Americans
McAllister accepted a foreign embassy and lived with his family abroad
until his death. His daughter, Agnes, had married in Rome, and after a
few years of wandering and continental life, with her husband, Mr. John
Bellamy, and her brother, Mr. Paul McAllister, she returned to Slocum.
They had come back in order that Mrs. Bellamy should see just how much
she could stand of American life and manners; in order that their
children might have enough of their native soil on their hands as they
played, and enough of its education in their heads, to entitle them to
the self-sufficiency of American citizens.
Little Bellamy was immured in Groton, hard at the American part of
it, and Mrs. Bellamy sat this morning in a charming room furnished in
Colonial style: continental taste and the accessories that make living
a luxury and pleasure combined to make her a charming environment. Mrs.
Bellamy was teaching her little daughter the gentle art of making a
long rope of useless wool by means of a spool and a row of pins.
The mother’s head bent close to the little girl’s was as golden as the
child’s. Her hands, with their flashing rings, played in and out among
the pins with a skill nothing short of miraculous in the eyes of the
little girl, who took up the spool between her own tiny fingers, the
worsted twisted hard around her thumb.
By the table, in a luxurious leather chair, the other occupant of the
room was almost lost to sight. His presence was, however, indicated by
the film of cigarette smoke that rose curlingly around his head. The
yellow cover of a French novel was just visible above the table.
“Paul,” his sister asked him, “how do you like America?”
“_America?_” he repeated, and, although he said no more, she knew by
his quizzical drawl what he meant.
“Well, Slocum, then, and the old place?”
“Immensely!”
“Absurd,” she laughed. “You have only been here a week, and except for
ridiculously caddying a couple of times for John at the Golf Club, you
have not been out of the house.”
“In which case, how could I fail to like it?” he said, with mock
politeness. “You’ve kept me company! _You_ don’t seem to be tempted to
explore the old scenes any more than I do! Perhaps, like me, you’re
afraid of the shock. You know how luxurious I am. If it were not for
the extremely swell gentleman and lady servants, I should feel very
much at ease.” He had not put down his book; he still smoked and
appeared to be reading what he said from it. “I was most amused the
other day as I stood on the piazza; did John tell you? I saw going
around the road two very attractive-looking girls--they recalled
the Gibson pictures as much as anything else. They wore, of course,
short skirts and those bodices that you see everywhere. They had a
bicycle, each of them, and they were walking along, their arms around
each other’s waists. I said to John: ‘By Jove, what a stunning pair
of girls! I should like to know them.’ And he said: ‘They are living
in the same house with you, my dear fellow--_they are my cook and my
laundress_.’”
Mrs. Bellamy laughed appreciatively. “Tell me, Paul, how _does_ America
strike you?”
McAllister reluctantly laid his book down, crossed his legs and
prepared to answer.
“I’ve been out more often than you think. I took a turtle view of the
town; I mean I sauntered up and down it and out of it, and it gave me
as complete a sensation as I have had in twenty-four years. A better
sensation, _ma chère_, and I am not likely to have another.”
Mrs. Bellamy listened, as she always did when her brother gave himself
the trouble to speak more than one sentence at a time to any woman with
whom he was not in love.
“It is all new-born, honorable, progressive and decent. Everybody seems
to have a certain disdain for me. I believe it is because, if you will
permit me to say so, I dress so well.”
His sister laughed.
“Not that _they_ do not dress well! They do--astoundingly well; but
they all dress alike, and you cannot tell, as in the case of your own
servant, a lady from her cook, or a butcher boy on a holiday from the
millionaire’s son, if he happens to come through town on foot or in a
motor. Let’s agree, then, that I do look different. ‘The drug-store
man’--that’s what you call him, isn’t it?--looked at me as if he hated
me and my clothes when he gave me some calisaya. He thought I was a
foreigner; they don’t like foreigners. If anything could put me on the
same footing with my country people, this town street did, as far as it
was able. By the time I got to the grocery I had forgotten that I had
not seen America for thirty years, and that I was so different. Nothing
remained but that _country school feeling_, that boy feeling. If you
ask what I mean: There was a barrel of apples outside of the grocer’s
door. I wanted to sneak one! I would have given fifty dollars for a
glass of cider--for anything, in short, to keep up the game. I went in
and asked him if he had such a thing as ‘sarsaparilla.’ He had it, and,
in spite of my ‘difference,’ he pulled his cork and I drank the whole
glass of that stuff. Pah! don’t ask me about it! It was all right, I
don’t doubt; but when I left the corner and started up the hill, that
wonderful sentimental feeling had entirely left me! There was only a
wretched nausea--a complete sense of how far away I had gone from the
simplicity of the whole thing, and I don’t say that I congratulated
myself. Now, will you let me read, Agnes?”
But Mrs. Bellamy had turned to a servant who entered with a card--with
two cards. “‘Mr. and Mrs. Warrener,’” she read aloud. “Oh, dear me,
have you let them in?”
It appeared there was only a lady: “Mrs. George Warrener.”
“Heavens! I suppose that a lot of these people will call, and I must
be more or less civil. Show Mrs. Warrener in--there is time to escape
for you, Paul, by way of the dining room.”