Everybody in San Francisco knew of the Ravises and always made it a
point to speak of them as one of the best families of the city. They
were not new and they were not particularly rich. They had lived in the
same house on California Street for nearly twenty years and had always
been comfortably well off. As things go in San Francisco, they were
old-fashioned. They had family traditions and usages and time-worn
customs. Their library had been in process of collection for the past
half century and the pictures on the walls were oil paintings of steel
engravings and genuine old-fashioned chromos, beyond price to-day.
Their furniture and ornaments were of the preceding generation, solid,
conservative. They were not chosen with reference to any one style, nor
all bought at the same time. Each separate piece had an individuality of
its own. The Ravises kept their old things, long after the fashion had
gone out, preferring them to the smarter "art" objects on account of
their associations.
There were six in the family, Mr. and Mrs. Ravis, Turner, and her older
brother, Stanley, Yale '88, a very serious young gentleman of
twenty-seven, continually professing an interest in economics and
finance. Besides these were the two children, Howard, nine years old,
and his sister, aged fourteen, who had been christened Virginia.
They were a home-loving race. Mr. Ravis, senior, belonged to the
Bohemian Club, but was seldom seen there. Stanley was absorbed in his
law business, and Turner went out but little. They much preferred each
other's society to that of three fourths of their acquaintances, most of
their friends being "friends of the family," who came to dinner three or
four times a year.
It was a custom of theirs to spend the evenings in the big dining-room
at the back of the house, after the table had been cleared away, Mr.
Ravis and Stanley reading the papers, the one smoking his cigar, the
other his pipe; Mrs. Ravis, with the magazines and Turner with the
_Chautauquan_. Howard and Virginia appropriated the table to themselves
where they played with their soldiers and backgammon board.
The family kept two servants, June the "China boy," who had been with
them since the beginning of things, and Delphine the cook, a more recent
acquisition. June was, in a way, butler and second boy combined; he did
all the downstairs work and the heavy sweeping, but it was another
time-worn custom for Mrs. Ravis and Turner to spend part of every
morning in putting the bedrooms to rights, dusting and making up the
beds. Besides this, Turner exercised a sort of supervision over Howard
and Virginia, who were too old for a nurse but too young to take care of
themselves. She had them to bed at nine, mended some of their clothes,
made them take their baths regularly, reëstablished peace between them
in their hourly quarrels, and, most arduous task of all, saw that Howard
properly washed himself every morning, and on Wednesday and Saturday
afternoons that he was suitably dressed in time for dancing school.
It was Sunday afternoon. Mrs. Ravis was reading to her husband, who lay
on the sofa in the back-parlour smoking a cigar. Stanley had gone out to
make a call, while Howard and Virginia had forgathered in the bathroom
to sail their boats and cigar boxes in the tub. Toward half-past three,
as Turner was in her room writing letters, the door-bell rang. She
stopped, with her pen in the air, wondering if it might be Vandover. It
was June's afternoon out. In a few minutes the bell rang again, and
Turner ran down to answer it herself, intercepting Delphine, who took
June's place on these occasions, but who was hopelessly stupid.
Mrs. Ravis had peered out through the curtains of the parlour window to
see who it was, and Turner met her and Mr. Ravis coming upstairs,
abandoning the parlour to Turner's caller.
"Mamma and I are going upstairs to read," explained Mr. Ravis. "It's
some one of your young men. You can bring him right in the parlour."
"I think it's Mr. Haight," said Turner's mother. "Ask him to stay to
tea."
"Well," said Turner doubtfully, as she paused at the foot of the stairs,
"I will, but you know we never have anything to speak of for Sunday
evening tea. June is out, and you know how clumsy and stupid Delphine is
when she waits on the table."
It _was_ young Haight. Turner was very glad to see him, for next to
Vandover she liked him better than any of the others. She was never
bored by being obliged to entertain him, and he always had something to
say and some clever way of saying it.
About half-past five, as they were talking about amateur photography,
Mrs. Ravis came in and called them to tea.
Tea with the Ravises was the old-fashioned tea of twenty years ago. One
never saw any of the modern "delicacies" on their Sunday evening table,
no enticing cold lunch, no spices, not even catsups or pepper sauces.
The turkey or chicken they had had for dinner was served cold in slices;
there was canned fruit, preserves, tea, crackers, bread and butter, a
large dish of cold pork and beans, and a huge glass pitcher of
ice-water.
In the absence of June, Delphine the cook went through the agony of
waiting on the table, very nervous and embarrassed in her clean calico
gown and starched apron. Her hands were red and knotty, smelling of
soap, and they touched the chinaware with an over-zealous and
constraining tenderness as if the plates and dishes had been delicate
glass butterflies. She stood off at a distance from the table making
sudden and awkward dabs at it. When it came to passing the plates, she
passed them on the wrong side and remembered herself at the wrong moment
with a stammering apology. In her excess of politeness she kept up a
constant murmur as she attended to their wants. Another fork? Yes, sir.
She'd get it right away, sir. Did Mrs. Ravis want another cuppa tea? No?
No more tea? Well, she'd pass the bread. Some bread, Master Howard? Nice
French bread, he always liked that. Some more preserved pears, Miss
Ravis? Yes, miss, she'd get them right away; they were just over here on
the sideboard. Yes, here they were. No more? Now she'd go and put them
back. And at last when she had set the nerves of all of them in a
jangle, was dismissed to the kitchen and retired with a gasp of
unspeakable relief.
Somewhat later in the evening young Haight was alone with Turner, and
their conversation had taken a very unusual and personal turn. All at
once Turner exclaimed:
"I often wonder what good I am in the world to anybody. I don't _know_ a
thing, I can't _do_ a thing. I couldn't cook the plainest kind of a meal
to _save_ me, and it took me all of two hours yesterday to do just a
little buttonhole stitching. I'm not good for anything. I'm not a help
to anybody."
Young Haight looked into the blue flame of the gas-log, almost the only
modern innovation throughout the entire house, and was silent for a
moment; then he leaned his elbows on his knees and, still looking at the
flame, replied:
"I don't know about that. You have been a considerable help to _me_."
"To _you_!" exclaimed Turner, surprised. "A help to _you_? Why, how do
you mean?"
"Well," he answered, still without looking at her, "one always has one's
influence, you know."
"Ah, lots of influence _I_ have over anybody," retorted Turner,
incredulously.
"Yes, you have," he insisted. "You have plenty of influence over the
people that care for you. You have plenty of influence over me."
Turner, very much embarrassed, and not knowing how to answer, bent down
to the side of the mantelpiece and turned up the flame of the gas-log a
little. Young Haight continued, almost as embarrassed as she:
"I suppose I'm a bad lot, perhaps a little worse than most others, but I
think--I hope--there's some good in me. I know all this sounds absurd
and affected, but _really_ I'm not posing; you won't mind if I speak
just as I think, for this once. I promise," he went on with a half
smile, "not to do it again. You know my mother died when I was little
and I have lived mostly with men. You have been to me what the society
of women has been to other fellows. You see, you are the only girl I
ever knew very well--the only one I ever wanted to know. I have cared
for you the way other men have cared for the different women that come
into their lives; as they have cared for their mothers, their
sisters--and their wives. You have already influenced me as a mother or
sister should have done; what if I should ever ask you to be--to be the
_other_ to me, the one that's best of all?"
Young Haight turned toward her as he finished and looked at her for the
first time. Turner was still very much embarrassed.
"Oh, I'm very glad if I've been a help to--to anybody--to you," she
said, confusedly. "But I never knew that you cared--that you thought
about me--in that way. But you mustn't, you know, you mustn't care for
me in that way. I ought to tell you right away that I never could care
for you more than--I always have done; I mean care for you only as a
very, very good friend. You don't know, Dolly," she went on eagerly,
"how it hurts me to tell you so, because I care so much for you in every
other way that I wouldn't hurt your feelings for anything; but then you
know at the same time it would hurt you a great deal more if I
_shouldn't_ tell you, but encourage you, and let you go on thinking that
perhaps I liked you more than any one else, when I _didn't_. Now
wouldn't that be wrong? You don't know how glad it makes me feel that I
have been of some good to you, and that is just why I want to be sincere
_now_ and not make you think any less of me--think any worse of me."
"Oh, I know," answered young Haight. "I know I shouldn't have said
anything about it. I knew beforehand, or thought I knew, that you didn't
care in that way."
"Maybe I have been wrong," she replied, "in not seeing that you cared so
much, and have given you a wrong impression. I thought you knew how it
was all the time."
"Knew how what was?" he asked, looking up.
"Why," she said, "knew how Van and I were."
"I knew that Van cared for you a great deal."
"Yes, but you know," she went on, hesitating and confused, "you know we
are engaged. We have been engaged for nearly two years."
"But _he_ don't consider himself as engaged!" The words were almost out
of Haight's mouth, but he shut his teeth against them and kept
silence--he hardly knew why.
"Suppose Vandover were out of the question," he said, getting up and
smiling in order not to seem as serious as he really was.
"Ah," she said, smiling back at him. "I don't know; that's a hard
question to answer. I've never _asked_ myself _that_ question."
"Well, I'm saving you the trouble, you see," he answered, still smiling.
"I am asking it _for_ you."
"But I don't want to answer such a question off-hand like that; how can
I tell? It would only be _perhaps_, just now."
Young Haight answered quickly that "just now" he would be contented with
that "perhaps"; but Turner did not hear this. She had spoken at the same
time as he, exclaiming, "But what is the good of talking of that?
Because no matter what happened I feel as though I could not break my
promise to Van, even if I should want to. Because I have talked like
this, Dolly," she went on more seriously, "you must not be deceived or
get a wrong impression. You understand how things are, don't you?"
"Oh, yes," he answered, still trying to carry it off with a laugh. "I
know, I know. But now I hope you won't let anything I have said bother
you, and that things will go on just as if I hadn't spoken, just as if
nothing had happened."
"Why, of course," she said, laughing with him again. "Of _course_, why
shouldn't they?"
They were both at their ease again by the time young Haight stood at the
door with his hat in his hand ready to go.
He raised his free hand over her head, and said, with burlesque,
dramatic effect, trying to keep down a smile:
"Bless you both; go, go marry Vandover and be happy; I forgive you."
"Ah--don't be so _utterly_ absurd," she cried, beginning to laugh.