THE DYKMAN REPRIMAND.
While Hermia was sitting in the library the next day in a very
unenviable frame of mind, the door opened and Mrs. Dykman came in.
“Hermia,” she said, after she had disposed herself on one of the severe,
high-backed chairs, “it is quite time for you to adopt some slight
regard for the conventionalities. You are wealthy, and strong in your
family name; but there is a limit. The world is not a thing you can hold
in the hollow of your hand or crush under your foot. The manner in which
you left Mrs. Le Roy’s house last night was scandalous. What do you
suppose the consequences will be?” Her cold, even tones never varied,
but they had the ice-breath of the Arctic in them.
“Are people talking?” asked Hermia.
“Talking? They are shrieking! It is to be hoped, for your own sake, that
you are going to marry Grettan Quintard, and that you will let me
announce the engagement at once.”
Hermia sprang to her feet, overturning her chair. She had a book in her
hand, and she flung it across the room. Her eyes were blazing and her
face was livid. “Don’t ever dare mention that man’s name to me again!”
she cried. “I hate him! I hate him! And don’t bring me any more tales
about what people are saying. I don’t care what they say! I scorn them
all! What are they but a set of jibbering automatons? One year has made
me loathe the bloodless, pulseless, colorless, artificial thing you call
society. Those people whose names and position each bows down to in the
other are not human beings! they are but a handful of fungi on the great
plant of humanity! If they were wrenched from their roots and crushed
out of life to-morrow, their poor, little, miserable, self-satisfied
numbers would not be missed. Of what value are they in the scheme of
existence save to fatten and puff in the shade of a real world like the
mushroom and the toadstool under an oak? They are not _alive_ like the
great world of real men; not one of them ever had a strong, real,
healthy, animal impulse in his life. Even their little sins are
artificial, and owe their faint, evanescent promptings to vanity or
ennui. I hate their wretched little aims and ambitions, their well-bred
scuffling for power in the eyes of each other—_power_—Heaven save the
mark! They work as hard, those poor midgets, for recognition among the
few hundred people who have ever heard of them, as a statesman does for
the admiration of his country! And yet if the whole tribe were melted
down into one soul they would not make an ambition big enough to carry
its result to the next generation. A year and I shall have forgotten
every name on my visiting-list. Great God! that you should think I care
for them.”
Mrs. Dykman rose to her feet and drew her furs about her. “I do not
pretend to understand you,” she said. “Fortunately for myself, my lot
has been cast among ordinary women. And as I am a part of the world for
which you have so magnificent a contempt, one of the midgets for whom
you have so fine a scorn, I imagine you will care to see as little of me
in the future as I of you.”
She was walking majestically down the room when Hermia sprang forward,
and, throwing her arms about her, burst into a storm of tears. “Oh,
don’t be angry with me!” she cried. “Don’t! Don’t! I am so miserable
that I don’t know what I am saying. I believe I am half crazy.”
Mrs. Dykman drew her down on a sofa. “What is the trouble?” she asked.
“Tell me.”
“There is nothing in particular,” said Hermia. “I am just unstrung. I
feel like a raft in the middle of an ocean. I am disgusted with life. It
must be because I am not well. I am sure that is it. There is nothing
else. Oh, Aunt Frances, take me to Europe.”
“Very well,” said Mrs. Dykman; “we will go if you think that traveling
will cure you. But I cannot go for at least five weeks. Will that do?”
“Yes,” said Hermia; “I suppose it will have to.”
* * * * *