“No, the others; the old people we’re bidding good-by to. Roman
Republic! Simple lives, gallant deeds, and one great uniting
inspiration. Liberty winning her spurs. They were moulded under that,
and they are our true American classics. Nothing like them will happen
again.”
“Perhaps,” I suggested, “our generation is uneasily living in a ‘bad
quarter-of-an-hour’--good old childhood gone, good new manhood not yet
come, and a state of chicken-pox between whiles.” And on this I made to
him a much-used and consoling quotation about the old order changing.
“Who says that?” he inquired; and upon my telling him, “I hope so,” he
said, “I hope so. But just now Uncle Sam ‘aspires to descend.’”
I laughed at his counter-quotation. “You know your classics, if you
don’t know Tennyson.”
He, too, laughed. “Don’t tell Aunt Eliza!”
“Tell her what?”
“That I didn’t recognize Tennyson. My Aunt Eliza educated me--and she
thinks Tennyson about the only poet worth reading since--well, since
Byron and Sir Walter at the very latest!”
“Neither she nor Sir Walter come down to modern poetry--or to alcoholic
girls.” His tone, on these last words, changed.
Again, as when he had said “an urgent matter,” I seemed to feel hovering
above us what must be his ceaseless preoccupation; and I wondered if he
had found, upon visiting Newport, Miss Hortense sitting and calling for
“high-balls.”
I gave him a lead. “The worst of it is that a girl who would like
to behave herself decently finds that propriety puts her out of the
running. The men flock off to the other kind.”
He was following me with watching eyes.
“And you know,” I continued, “what an anxious Newport parent does on
finding her girl on the brink of being a failure.”
“I can imagine,” he answered, “that she scolds her like the dickens.”
“Oh, nothing so ineffectual! She makes her keep up with the others, you
know. Makes her do things she’d rather not do.”
“High-balls, you mean?”
“Anything, my friend; anything to keep up.”
He had a comic suggestion. “Driven to drink by her mother! Well,
it’s, at any rate, a new cause for old effects.” He paused. It seemed
strangely to bring to him some sort of relief. “That would explain a
great deal,” he said.
Was he thus explaining to himself his lady-love, or rather certain
Newport aspects of her which had, so to speak, jarred upon his Kings
Port notions of what a lady might properly do? I sat on my gravestone
with my wonder, and my now-dawning desire to help him (if improbably I
could), to get him out of it, if he were really in it; and he sat on his
gravestone opposite, with the path between us, and the little noiseless
breeze rustling the white irises, and bearing hither and thither the
soft perfume of the roses. His boy face, lean, high-strung, brooding,
was full of suppressed contentions. I made myself, during our silence,
state his possible problem: “He doesn’t love her any more, he won’t
admit this to himself; he intends to go through with it, and he’s
catching at any justification of what he has seen in her that has
chilled him, so that he may, poor wretch! coax back his lost illusion.”
Well, if that was it, what in the world could I, or anybody, do about
it?
His next remark was transparent enough. “Do you approve of young ladies
smoking?”