"Notice the girl on your right, Elsie. That is the thing! You have to see
it to understand. Do you understand, dear? Do you see the difference?"
A middle-aged little mother, with a sensitive, care-worn face, leaned
across the Pullman section and laid a hand upon her daughter's by way of
emphasis--needless, for her voice and manner conveyed all, and much more
than the words could possibly carry. Volumes of argument, demonstration,
expostulation were implied.
"Can you see her? Do you see what I mean? What, dear?"
The questions followed one another like beads running down a string.
Elsie's silence was the knot at the end. She opened her eyes and turned
them languidly as directed, but without raising her head from the back of
the car-seat.
"I will look presently, mother. I can't see much of anything now."
"Oh, never mind. Forgive me, dear. How is your head? Lie still; don't try
to talk."
Elsie smiled, patted her mother's hand, and closed her narrow, sweet,
sleepy blue eyes. Mrs. Valentin never looked at them, when her mind was at
rest, without wishing they were a trifle larger--wider open, rather. The
eyes were large enough, but the lazy lids shut them in. They saw a good
deal, however. She also wished, in moments of contemplation, that she could
have laid on a little heavier the brush that traced Elsie's eyebrows, and
continued them a little longer at the temples. Then, her upper lip was, if
anything, the least bit too short. Yet what a sweet, concentrated little
mouth it was,--reticent and pure, and not over-ready with smiles, though
the hidden teeth were small, flawless, and of baby whiteness! Yes, the
mother sighed, just a touch or two,--and she knew just where to put those
touches,--and the girl had been a beauty. If nature would only consult the
mothers at the proper time, instead of going on in her blindfold fashion!
But, after all, did they want a beauty in the family? On theory, no: the
few beauties Mrs. Valentin had known in her life had not been the happiest
of women. What they did want was an Elsie--their own Elsie--perfectly
trained without losing her naturalness, perfectly educated without losing
her health, perfectly dressed without thinking of clothes, perfectly
accomplished without wasting her time, and, finally, an Elsie perfectly
happy. All that parents, situated on the wrong side of the continent for
art and culture, and not over-burdened with money, could do to that end,
Mrs. Valentin was resolved should be done. Needless to say, very little was
to be left to God.
Mrs. Valentin was born in the East, some forty-odd years before this
educational pilgrimage began, of good Unitarian stock,--born with a great
sense of personal accountability. She could not have thrown it off and been
joyful in the words, "It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves."
Elsie had got a headache from the early start and the suppressed agitation
of parting from her home and her father. Suppression was as natural to her
as expression was to her mother. The father and daughter had held each
other silently a moment; both had smiled, and both were ill for hours
afterward.
But Mrs. Valentin thought that in Elsie's case it was because she had not
sent the girl to bed earlier the night before, and insisted on her eating
something at breakfast.
Herself--she had lain sleepless for the greater part of that night and many
nights previous. She had anticipated in its difficulties every stage of
the getting off, the subsequent journey, the arrival, their reception by
Eastern relatives not seen for years, the introduction of her grown-up
daughter, the impression she would make, the beginning of life all over
again in a strange city. (She had known her Boston once, but that was
twenty years ago.) She foresaw the mistakes she would inevitably make in
her choice of means to the desired ends--dressmakers, doctors, specialists
of all sorts; the horrible way in which school expenses mount up; the
trivial yet poignant comparisons of school life, from which, if Elsie
suffered, she would be sure to suffer in silence.
After this fatiguing mental rehearsal she had risen at six, while the
electric lights were still burning and the city was cloaked in fog. It was
San Francisco of a midsummer morning; fog whistles groaning, sidewalks
slippery with wet, and the gray-green trees and tinted flower-beds of the
city gardens emerging like the first broad washes of a water-color laid in
with a full brush.
She had taken a last survey of her dismantled home, given the last
directions to the old Chinese servant left in charge, presided haggardly at
the last home breakfast----what a ghastly little ceremony it was! Then Mr.
Valentin had gone across the Oakland ferry with them and put them aboard
the train, muffled up as for winter. They had looked into each other's
pale faces and parted for two years, all for Elsie's sake. But what Elsie
thought about it--whether she understood or cared for what this sacrifice
of home and treasure was to purchase--it was impossible to learn. Still
more what her father thought. What he had always said was, "You had better
go."
"But do you truly think it _is_ the best thing for the child?"
"I think that, whatever we do, there will be times when we'll wish we had
done something different; and there will be other times when we shall be
glad we did not. All we can do is the best we know up to date."
"But do you think it is the best?"
"I think, Emmy, that you will never be satisfied until you have tried it,
and it's worth the money to me to have you feel that you have done your
best."
Mrs. Valentin sighed. "Sometimes I wonder why we do cling to that old
fetich of the East. Why can't we accept the fact that we are Western
people? The question is, Shall we be the self-satisfied kind or the
unsatisfied kind? Shall we be contented and limited, or discontented and
grow?"
"I guess we shall be limited enough, either way," Mr. Valentin retorted
easily. He had no hankering for the East and no grudge against fate for
making him a Western man _malgré lui_. "I've known kickers who didn't
appear to grow much, except to grow cranky," he said.
Up to the moment of actual departure, Mrs. Valentin had continued to review
her decision and to agonize over its possibilities of disaster; but now
that the journey had begun, she was experiencing the rest of change and
movement. She was as responsive as a child to fresh outward impressions,
and the hyperbolical imagination that caused her such torture when it
wrought in the dark hours on the teased fabric of her own life, could
give her compensating pleasures by daylight, on the open roads of the
world. There was as yet nothing outside the car windows which they had
not known of old,--the marsh-meadows of the Lower Sacramento, tide-rivers
reflecting the sky, cattle and wild fowl, with an occasional windmill
or a duck-hunter's lodge breaking the long sweeps of low-toned color.
The morning sun was drinking up the fog, the temperature in the Pullman
steadily rising. Jackets were coming off and shirt-waists blooming out in
summer colors, giving the car a homelike appearance.
It was a saying that summer, "By their belts ye shall know them."
Shirt-waists no longer counted, since the ready-made ones for two dollars
and a half were almost as chic as the tailor-made for ten. But the belts,
the real belts, were inimitable. Sir Lancelot might have used them for his
bridle--
"Like to some branch of stars we see
Hung in the golden galaxy."
Mrs. Valentin had looked with distinct approval on a mother and daughter
who occupied the section opposite. Their impedimenta and belongings were
"all right," arguing persons with cultivated tastes, abroad for a summer
spent in divers climates, who knew what they should have and where to
get it. A similarity of judgment on questions of clothes and shops is no
doubt a bond between strange women everywhere; but it was the daughter's
belt-buckle before which Mrs. Valentin bowed down and humbled herself in
silence. The like of that comes only by inheritance or travel. Antique,
pale gold--Cellini might have designed it. There was probably not another
buckle like that one in existence. An imitation? No more than its wearer, a
girl as white as a white camellia, with gray eyes and thin black eyebrows,
and thick black lashes that darkened the eyes all round. There was nothing
noticeable in her dress except its freshness and a certain finish in lesser
details, understood by the sophisticated. "Swell" was too common a word
for her supreme and dainty elegance. Her resemblance to the ordinary
full-fleshed type of Pacific coast belle was that of a portrait by
Romney--possibly engraved by Cole--to a photograph of some _reina de la
fiesta_. This was Mrs. Valentin's exaggerated way of putting it to herself.
Such a passionate conservative as she was sure to be prejudiced.
The mother had a more pronounced individuality, as mothers are apt to
have, and looked quite fit for the ordinary uses of life. She was of
the benignant Roman-nosed Eastern type, daughter of generations of
philanthropists and workers in the public eye for the public good; a deep,
rich voice, an air of command, plain features, abundant gray hair, imported
clothes, wonderful, keen, dark eyes overlapped by a fold of the crumpled
eyelid,--a personage, a character, a life, full of complex energies and
domineering good sense. With gold eye-glasses astride her high-bridged
nose, knees crossed, one large, well-shod foot extended, this mother in
Israel sat absorbed like a man in the daily paper, and wroth like a man at
its contents. Occasionally she would emit an impatient protest in the deep,
maternal tones, and the graceful daughter would turn her head and read over
her shoulder in silent assent.
"How trivial, how self-centred we are!" Mrs. Valentin murmured, leaning
across to claim a look from Elsie. "I realize it the moment we get outside
our own little treadmill. We do nothing but take thought for what we shall
eat and drink and wherewithal we shall be clothed. I haven't thought of
the country once this morning. I've been wondering if all the good summer
things are gone at Hollander's. It may be very hot in Boston the first few
weeks. You will be wilted in your cloth suit."
"Oh, mammy, mammy! what a mammy!" purred Elsie, her pretty upper lip
curling in the smile her mother loved--with a reservation. Elsie had her
father's sense of humor, and had caught his half-caressing way of indulging
it at the "intense" little mother's expense.
"Elsie," she observed, "you know _I_ don't mind your way of speaking to
me,--as if I were the girl of sixteen and you the woman of forty,--but I
hope you won't use it before the aunts and cousins. I shall be sure to
lay myself open, but, dear, be careful. It isn't very good form to be too
amused with one's mother. Of course there's as much difference in mothers
as in girls," Mrs. Valentin acknowledged. "A certain sort of temperament
interferes with the profit one ought to get out of one's experience. If
you had my temperament I shouldn't waste this two years' experiment on
you; I should know that nothing could change your--spots. But _you_ will
learn--everything. How is your head, dear--what?"
Elsie had said nothing; she had not had the opportunity.
At a flag station where the train was halted (this overland train was a
"local" as far as Sacramento) Mrs. Valentin looked out and saw a colored
man in livery climb down from the back seat of a mail-cart and hasten
across the platform with a huge paper box. It proved to be filled with
magnificent roses, of which he was the bearer to the ladies opposite. A
glance at a card was followed by gracious acknowledgments, and the footman
retired beaming. He watched the train off, hat in hand, bowing to the
ladies at their window as only a well-raised colored servant can bow.
"The Coudert place lies over there," said Mrs. Valentin, pointing to a mass
of dark trees toward which the trap was speeding. "They have been staying
there," she whispered, "doing the west coast, I suppose, with invitations
to all the swell houses."
"Is your daughter not well?" the deep voice spoke across the car.
As Elsie could not ride backward, her mother, to give her room, and for
the pleasure of watching her, was seated with her own back to the engine,
facing most of the ladies in the car.
"She is a little train-sick; she could not eat this morning, and that
always gives her a headache."
Elsie raised her eyelashes in faint dissent.
"She should eat something, surely. Have you tried malted milk? I have some
of the lozenges; she can take one without raising her head."
Search was made in a distinguished-looking bag, Mrs. Valentin protesting
against the trouble, and beseeching Elsie with her eyes to accept one from
the little silver box of pastils that was passed across the aisle.
Elsie said she really could not--thanks very much.
The keen, dark eyes surveyed her with the look of a general inspecting raw
troops, and Mrs. Valentin felt as depressed as the company officer who has
been "working up" the troops. "Won't you try one, Elsie?" she pleaded.
"I'd rather not, mother," said Elsie.
She did not repeat her thanks to the great authority, but left her mother
to cover her retreat.
"The young girls nowadays do pretty much as they please about eating or not
eating," observed the Eastern matron, in her large, impersonal way. "They
can match our theories with quite as good ones of their own." She smiled
again at Elsie, and the overtures on that side ceased.
"_I_ would have eaten any imaginable thing she offered me," sighed Mrs.
Valentin, "but Elsie is so hard to impress. I cannot understand how a girl,
a baby, who has never been anywhere or seen anything, can be so fearfully
_posée_. It's the Valentin blood. It's the drop of Indian blood away, 'way
back. It's their impassiveness, but it's awfully good form--when she grows
up to it."
After this, Mrs. Valentin sat silent for such an unnatural length of time
that Elsie roused herself to say something encouraging.
"I shall be all right, mother, after Sacramento. We will take a walk. The
fresh air is all I need."
She was as good as her word. The cup of tea and the twenty minutes' stroll
made such a happy difference that Mrs. Valentin sent a telegram to her
husband to say that Elsie's head was better and that she had forgotten her
trunk keys, and would he express them to her at once.
So much refreshed was Elsie that her mother handed her the letters which
had come to her share of that morning's mail. There were four or five of
them, addressed in large, girlish hands, and exhibiting the latest and
most expensive fads in stationery. Over one of them Elsie gave a shriek of
delight, an outburst so unexpected and out of character with her former
self that their distinguished fellow travelers involuntarily looked
up,--and Mrs. Valentin blushed for her child.
"Oh, mammy, how rich! How just like Gladys! She kept it for a last
surprise! Mother, Gladys is going to Mrs. Barrington's herself."
The mother's face fell.
"Indeed!" she said, forcing a tone of pleasure. "Well, it's a
compliment--on both sides. Mrs. Barrington is very particular whom she
takes, and the Castants are sparing nothing that money can do for Gladys."
"Oh, what fun!" cried Elsie, her face transformed. "Poor Gladys! she'll
have a perfectly awful time too, and we can sympathize."
"Are you expecting to have an 'awful time,' Elsie,"--the mother looked
aghast,--"and are you going to throw yourself into the arms of Gladys
for sympathy? Then let me say, my daughter, that neither Mrs. Barrington
nor any one else can do much for your improvement, and all the money we
are spending will be thrown away. If you are going East to ally yourself
exclusively with Californian girls, to talk California and think California
and set yourself against everything that is not Californian, we might just
as well take the first train west at Colfax."
"But am I to be different to Gladys when we meet away from home?" Elsie's
sensitive eyes clouded. Her brows went up.
"Of course not. Gladys is a dear, delightful girl. I'm as fond of her as
you are. But you can have Gladys all the rest of your life, I hope. I'm
not a snob, dear, but I do think we should recognize the fact that some
acquaintances are more improving than others."
"And cultivate them for the sake of what they can do for us?"
In Elsie's voice there was an edge of resistance, hearing which her mother,
when she was wise, would let speech die and silence do its work. Her
influence with the girl was strongest when least insisted upon. She was not
wiser than usual that morning, but the noise of the train made niceties of
statement impossible. She abandoned the argument perforce, and Elsie, left
with her retort unanswered, acknowledged its cheapness in her own quick,
strong, wordless way.
The dining-car would not be attached to the train until they reached
Ogden. At twilight they stopped "twenty minutes for refreshment," and the
Valentins took the refreshment they needed most by pacing the platform up
and down,--the tall daughter, in her severely cut clothes, shortening her
boyish stride to match her mother's step; the mother, looking older than
she need, in a light-gray traveling-cap, with Elsie's golf cape thrown over
her silk waist.
The Eastern travelers were walking too. They had their tea out of an
English tea-basket, and bread and butter from the buffet, and were
independent of supper stations. With the Valentins it was sheer
improvidence and want of appetite.
"Please notice that girl's step," said Mrs. Valentin, pressing Elsie's arm.
"'Art is to conceal art.' It has taken years of the best of everything, and
eternal vigilance besides, to create such a walk as that; but _c'est fait_.
You don't see the entire sole of her foot every time she takes a step."
"Having a certain other person's soles in view, mammy?"
"I'm afraid I should have them in full view if you came to meet me. Not the
heel quite so pronounced, dearest."
"Oh, mother, please leave that to Mrs. Barrington! Let us be comrades for
these few days."
"Dearest, it would be the happiness of my life to be never anything but
a comrade. But who is to nag a girl if not her mother? I very much doubt
if Mrs. Barrington will condescend to speak of your boot-soles. She will
expect all that to have been attended to long ago."
"It has been--a thousand years ago. Sometimes I feel that I'm all
boot-soles."
"The moment I see some result, dear, I shall be satisfied. One doesn't
speak of such things for their own sake."
"Can't we get a paper?" asked Elsie. "What is that they are shouting?"
"I don't think it can be anything new. We brought these papers with us on
the train. But we can see. No; it's just what we had this morning. They are
preparing for a general assault. There will be heavy fighting to-morrow.
Why, that is to-day!" Mrs. Valentin held the newspaper at arm's length.
"Is there anything more? I can read only the head-lines."
The girl took the paper and looked at it with a certain reluctance,
narrowing her eyelids.
"Mother, there was something else in Gladys's letter. Billy Castant has
enlisted with the Rough Riders. He was in that fight at Las Guasimas, while
we were packing our trunks. He did badly again in his exams, and he--he
didn't go home; he just enlisted."
"The foolish fellow!" Mrs. Valentin exclaimed. A sharp intuition told
her there was trouble in the wind, and defensively she turned upon the
presumptive cause. "The foolish boy! What he needs is an education. But he
won't work for it. It's easier to go off mad and be a Rough Rider."
"I don't think it was easy at Las Guasimas," Elsie said, with a strained
little laugh. "You remember the last war, mother; did you belittle your
volunteers?"
Mrs. Valentin listened with a catch in her breath. What did this portend?
So slight a sign as that in Elsie meant tears and confessions from another
girl.
"And did you hear of this only just now, from Gladys's letter?"
"Yes, mother."
"You extraordinary child--your father all over again! I might have known by
the way you laughed over that letter that you had bad news to tell--or keep
to yourself."
"I don't call that bad news, do you, mother? He does need an education, but
he will never get it out of books."
"Well, it's a pretty severe sort of education for his parents--nineteen, an
only son, and to go without seeing them again. He might at least have come
home and enlisted from his own State."
They were at the far end of the platform, facing the dark of the pine-clad
ravines. Deep, odorous breaths of night wind came sighing up the slopes.
"Mother, there was something happened last winter that I never told you,"
Elsie began again, with pauses. "It was so silly, and there seemed no need
to speak of it. But I can't bear not to speak now. I don't know if it has
made any difference--with Billy's plans. It seems disloyal to tell you. But
you must forget it: he's forgotten, I am sure. He said--those silly things,
you know! I couldn't have told you then; it was too silly. And I said that
I didn't think it was for him or for me to talk about such things. It was
for men and women, not boys who couldn't even get their lessons."
"Elsie!" Mrs. Valentin gave a little choked laugh. "Did you say that? The
poor boy! Why, I thought you were such good friends!"
"He wasn't talking friendship, mother, and I was furious with him for
flunking his exams. He passed in only five out of seven. He ought to have
done better than that. He's not stupid; it's that fatal popularity. He's
captain of this and manager of that, and they give him such a lot of money.
And they pet him, too; they make excuses for him all the time. I told him
he must _do_ something before he began to have feelings. The only feeling
he had any right to have was shame for his miserable record."
"And that was all the encouragement you gave him?"
"If you call that 'encouragement,'" said Elsie.
"You did very well, my dear; but I suppose you know it was the most
intimate thing you could have said to him, the greatest compliment you
could pay him. If he ever does make any sort of a record, you have given
him the right to come back to you with it."
"He will never come back to me without it," said the girl. "But it was
nothing--nothing! All idleness and nonsense, and the music after supper
that went to his head."
"I hope it was nothing more than"--Mrs. Valentin checked herself. There
were things she said to her husband which sometimes threatened to slip out
inadvertently when his youthful copy was near. "Well, I see nothing to be
ashamed of, on your side. But such things are always a pity. They age a
girl in spite of herself. And the boys--they simply forget. The rebuke does
them good, but they forget to whom they owe it. It's just one of those
things that make my girlie older. But oh, how fast life comes!"
Elsie slipped her hand under her mother's cloak, and Mrs. Valentin pressed
her own down hard upon it.
"We must get aboard, dear. But I'm so glad you told me! And I didn't mean
quite what I said about Billy's 'going off mad.' He has given all he had to
give, poor boy; why he gave it is his own affair."
"I hope--what I told you--has made no difference about his coming home.
It's stupid of me to think it. But hard words come back, don't they,
mother? Hard words--to an old friend!"
"Billy is all right, dear; and it was so natural you should be tried with
him! 'For to be wroth with one we'"--Mrs. Valentin had another of her
narrow escapes. "Come, there is the porter waiting for us."
"Mother," said Elsie sternly, "please don't misunderstand. I should never
have spoken of this if I had been 'wroth' with him--in that way."
"Of course not, dear; I understand. And it would never do, anyway, for
father doesn't like the blood."
"Father doesn't like the--what, mother?"
Elsie asked the question half an hour later, as they sat in an adjoining
section, waiting for their berths to be made up.
"What, dear?"
"What did you say father doesn't like--in the Castants?"
"Oh, the blood, the family. This generation is all right--apparently. But
blood will tell. You are too young to know all the old histories that
fathers and mothers read young people by."
"I think we are what we are," said Elsie; "we are not our
great-grandfathers."
"In a measure we are, and it should teach us charity. Not as much can be
expected of Billy Castant, coming of the stock he does, as you might expect
of that ancestry," and Mrs. Valentin nodded toward the formidable Eastern
contingent. (Elsie was consciously hating them already.) "The fountain can
rise no higher than its source."
"I thought there was supposed to be a source a little higher than the
ground--unless we are no more than earth-born fountains."
"'Out of the mouth of babes,'" said Mrs. Valentin, laughing gently. "I own
it, dear. Middle age is suspicious and mean and unspiritual and troubled
about many things. A middle-aged mother is like an old hen when hawks are
sailing around; she can't see the sky."
"Yes," said Elsie, settling cosily against her mother's shoulder. "I always
know when mammy speaks as my official mother, and when she is talking
'straight talk.' I shall be so happy when she believes I am old enough to
hear only straight talk."
* * * * *
"I've got a surprise for you, Elsie," said Mrs. Valentin, a day and a night
eastward of the Sierras. They were on the Great Plains, at that stage of
an overland journey which suggests, in the words of a clever woman, the
advisability of "taking a tuck in the continent."
Elsie's eyebrows seemed to portend that surprises are not always pleasant.
"I've been talking with our Eastern lady, and imagine! her daughter is one
of Mrs. Barrington's girls too. This will be her second year. So there
is"--
"An offset to Gladys," Elsie interrupted.
"So there is a chance for you to know one girl, at least, of the type I've
always been holding up to you, always believed in, though the individuals
are so rare."
Elsie's sentiments, unexpressed, were that she wished they might be rarer.
Not that the flower of Eastern culture was not all her mother protested
she was; but there are crises of discouragement on the upward climb of
trying to realize a mother's ambitions for one's self, when one is only a
girl--the only girl, on whom the family experiments are all to be wreaked.
Elsie suffered in silence many a pang that her mother never dreamed
of--pangs of effort unavailing and unappreciated. She wished to conform to
her mother's exigent standard, but she could not, all at once, and be a
girl too--a girl of sixteen, a little off the key physically, not having
come to a woman's repose of movement; a little stridulous mentally, but
pulsing with life's dumb music of aspiration; as intense as her mother in
feeling, without her mother's power to throw off the strain in words.
"Well, mother?" she questioned.
"She is older than you, and she will be at home. The advances, of course,
must come from her, but I hope, dear, you will not be--you will try to be
responsive?"
"I never know, mother, when I am not responsive. It's like wrinkling my
forehead; it does itself."
Mrs. Valentin made a gesture expressive of the futility of argument under
certain not unfamiliar conditions.
"'You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.' I am
leading my Pegasus to the fountain of--what was the fountain?"
Elsie laughed. "Your Pegasus is pretty heavy on the wing, mammy. But I will
drink. I will gorge myself, truly I will. The money shall not be spent in
vain."
"Oh, the money! Who cares about the money?--if only there were more of it."
They stopped over night in Chicago, and Mrs. Valentin bought some
shirt-waists; for the heat had "doubled up on them," as a Kansas farmer on
the train remarked.
Elsie trailed about the shops with her mother, not greatly interested in
shirt-waists or bargains in French underclothing.
The war pressure seemed to close in upon them as they left the mid-West and
drew toward the coast once more. The lists from El Caney were throbbing
over the wires, and the country, so long immune from peril and suffering,
was awakening to the cost of victory. There was a terrible flippancy in the
irrepressible spirit of trade which had seized upon the nation's emblems,
freshly consecrated in the blood of her sons, and was turning them to
commercial account,--advertising, in symbols of death and priceless
devotion, that ribbons or soap or candy were for sale. The flag was, so to
speak, dirt-cheap. You could wear it in a hatband or a necktie; you could
deface it, or tear it in two, in opening an envelope addressed to you by
your bootmaker.
Elsie cast hunted eyes on the bulletin boards. She knew by heart that first
list after Las Guasimas. One glance had burned it in forever. It had become
one of the indelible scars of a lifetime. Yet those were the names of
strangers. If a whiff from an avalanche can fell trees a mile away, how if
the avalanche strike you?
They returned to their hotel, exhausted, yet excited, by the heat; and Mrs.
Valentin admonished herself of what our boys must be suffering in that
"unimaginable climate," and she entered into details, forgetting to spare
Elsie, till the girl turned a sickly white.
It was then the bishop's card was sent up--their own late bishop, much
mourned and deplored because he had been transferred to an Eastern diocese.
There could be no one so invariably welcome, who knew so well, without
effort, how to touch the right chord, whether in earnest or in jest that
sometimes hid a deeper earnest. His manner at first usually hovered between
the two, your own mood determining where the emphasis should rest. He had
brought with him the evening paper, but he kept it folded in his hand.
"So you are pilgrims to Mecca," he said, looking from mother to daughter
with his gentle, musing smile. "But are you not a little early for the
Eastern schools?"
"There are the home visits first, and the clothes," said Mrs. Valentin.
"And where do you stop, and for how long?"
"Boston, for one year, Bishop, and then we go abroad for a year, perhaps."
"Bless me! what has Elsie done that she should be banished from home for
two years?"
"She takes her mother with her."
"Yes; that is half of the home. Perhaps that's as much as one girl ought to
expect."
"The fathers are so busy, Bishop."
"Yes; the fathers do seem to be busy. So Elsie is going East to be
finished? And how old is she now? How does she presume to account for the
fact that she is taller than her mother and nearly as tall as her bishop?"
Elsie promptly placed herself at the bishop's side and "measured," glancing
over her shoulder at him in the glass. He turned and gravely placed his
hand upon her head.
"I thought of writing to you at one time," said Mrs. Valentin, "but of
course you cannot keep us all on your mind. We are a 'back number.'"
"She thought I would have forgotten who these Valentins were," said the
bishop, smiling.
"No; but you cannot keep the thread of all our troubles--the sheep of the
old flock and the lambs of the new. I have had a thousand minds lately
about Elsie, but this was the original plan, made years ago, when we were
young and sure about things. Don't you think young lives need room, Bishop?
Oughtn't we to seek to widen their mental horizons?"
"The horizons widen, they widen of themselves, Mrs. Valentin--very suddenly
sometimes, and beyond our ken." The bishop's voice had struck a deeper
note; he paused and looked at Elsie with eyes so kind and tender that the
girl choked and turned away. "This war is rather a widening business, and
California is getting her share. Our boys of the First, for instance,--you
see I still call them _our_ boys,--what were they doing a year ago, and
what are they doing now? I'll be bound half of them a year ago didn't know
how 'Philippines' was spelled."
Mrs. Valentin became restless.
"Is that the evening paper?" she asked.
The bishop glanced at the paper. "And who," said he, "is to open the gates
of sunrise for our Elsie? With whom do you intend to place her in Boston?"
"Oh, with Mrs. Barrington."
Mrs. Valentin was watching the bishop, whose eyes still rested upon Elsie.
"She is to be one of the chosen five, is she? The five wise virgins--of the
East? But they are all Western virgins this year, I believe."
"If you mean that they are all from the Western States, I think you are
mistaken, Bishop."
"Am I? Let us see. There is Elsie, and Gladys Castant, perhaps, and the
daughters of my friend Mr. Laws of West Dakota"--
"Bishop!"
"Of West Dakota; that makes four. And then the young lady who was on the
train with you, Miss Bigelow, from Los Angeles."
"Bishop! I am certain you are mistaken there. If those people are not
Eastern, then I'm from West Dakota myself!"
"We are all from West Dakota virtually, so far as Mecca is concerned.
But Mrs. Barrington offers her young ladies those exceptional social
opportunities which Western girls are supposed to need. If you want Elsie
to be with Eastern girls of the East, let her go to a good Boston Latin
school. Did you not go to one yourself, Mrs. Valentin?"
Mrs. Valentin laughed. "That was ages ago, and I was at home. I had the
environment--an education in itself. Won't you dine with us, Bishop? We
shall have dinner in half an hour."
"In half an hour I must be on the limited express. You seem to have made
different connections."
"'The error was, we started wrong,'" said Mrs. Valentin lightly. "We took
the morning instead of the evening train. But I was convinced we should be
left, and I preferred to get left by the wrong train and have the right one
to fall back on." She ceased her babble, as vain words die when there is a
sense of no one listening.
Elsie stood at the window looking back into the room. She thought, "Mother
doesn't know what she is saying. What is she worried about?"
The bishop was writing with a gold pencil on the margin of the newspaper.
He folded it with the writing on top.
"If you had consulted me about that child,"--he looked at Elsie,--"I should
have said, 'Do not hurry her--do not hurry her. Her education will come as
God sends it.' With experience, as with death, it is the prematureness that
hurts."
His beautiful voice and perfect accent filled the silence with heart-warmed
cadences.
"Well, good-by, Mrs. Valentin. Remember me to that busy husband."
Mrs. Valentin rose; the bishop took her hand. "Elsie will see me to the
elevator. This is the evening paper."
He offered it with the writing toward her. Mrs. Valentin read what he had
written: "Billy Castant was killed in the charge at San Juan. Every man in
that fight deserves the thanks of the nation."
"Come, Elsie, see me to my carriage," the bishop was saying. He placed the
girl's hand on his arm and led her out of the room. At the elevator grating
they waited a moment; the cold draft up the shaft fanned the hair back from
Elsie's forehead as she stood looking down, watching the ascent of the
cage.
"It would be a happy thing," said the bishop, "if parents could always go
with their children on these long roads of experience; but there are some
roads the boys and the girls will have to take alone. We shall all meet at
the other end, though--we shall all meet at the end."
Elsie walked up and down the hall awhile, dreading to go back to the room.
A band in the street below was playing an old war-song of the sixties,
revived this battle summer of '98,--a song that was sung when the cost of
that war was beginning to tell, "We shall meet, but we shall miss him."
Elsie knew the music; she had not yet learned the words.
Next morning Mr. Valentin received one of his wife's vague but thrifty
telegrams, dated at Chicago, on Sunday night, July 3:
"We cannot go through with it. Expect us home Wednesday."
Mrs. Valentin had spent hours, years, in explaining to Elsie's father
the many cogent and crying reasons for taking her East to be finished. It
needed not quite five minutes to explain why she had brought her back.
Strangely, none of the friends of the family asked for an explanation of
this sudden change of plan. But Elsie envies Gladys her black clothes, and
the privilege of crying in public when the bands play and the troops go by.
"Such children--such mere children!" Mrs. Valentin sighs.
But she no longer speaks to Elsie about wrinkling her forehead or showing
her boot-soles. It is eye to eye and heart to heart, and only straight talk
between them now, as between women who know.