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MRS. FARRELL
BOOKS BY W. D. HOWELLS
Annie Kilburn.
April Hopes.
Between the Dark and Daylight. New Edition.
Boy Life. Illustrated.
Boy’s Town. Illustrated.
Certain Delightful English Towns. Illustrated. Traveler’s
Edition, Leather.
Christmas Every Day, and Other Stories. Holiday Edition. Illustrated.
Coast of Bohemia. Illustrated.
Criticism and Fiction. Portrait.
Daughter of the Storage.
Day of Their Wedding. Illustrated.
Familiar Spanish Travels. Illustrated.
Fennel and Rue. Illustrated. New Edition.
Flight of Pony Baker.
Hazard of New Fortunes. New Edition.
Heroines of Fiction. Illustrated. 2 vols.
Hither and Thither In Germany.
Imaginary Interviews.
Imperative Duty. Paper.
Impressions and Experiences. New Edition.
Kentons.
Landlord at Lion’s Head. Illustrated. New Edition.
Letters Home.
Literary Friends and Acquaintance. Illustrated.
Literature and Life.
Little Swiss Sojourn. Illustrated.
London Films. Illustrated. Traveler’s Edition, Leather.
Miss Bellard’s Inspiration.
Modern Italian Poets. Illustrated.
Mother and the Father. Illustrated. New Edition.
Mrs. Farrell.
My Literary Passions. New Edition.
My Mark Twain. Illustrated.
My Year in a Log Cabin. Illustrated.
Open-Eyed Conspiracy.
Pair of Patient Lovers.
Quality of Mercy. New Edition.
Questionable Shapes. Ill’d.
Ragged Lady. Illustrated. New Edition.
Roman Holidays. Illustrated. Traveler’s Edition, Leather.
Seen and Unseen at Stratford.
Seven English Cities. Illustrated. Traveler’s Edition, Leather.
Shadow of a Dream.
Son of Royal Langbrith.
Stops of Various Quills. Illustrated. Limited Edition.
Story of a Play.
The Vacation of the Kelwyns.
Their Silver Wedding Journey. Illustrated. 2 vols. In 1 vol.
New Edition.
Through the Eye of a Needle. New Edition.
Traveller from Altruria. New Edition.
World of Chance.
Years of My Youth. Illustrated Edition.
FARCES:
A Letter of Introduction. Illustrated.
A Likely Story. Illustrated.
A Previous Engagement. Paper.
Evening Dress. Illustrated.
Five-o’Clock Tea. Illustrated.
Parting Friends. Illustrated.
The Albany Depot. Illustrated.
The Garroters. Illustrated.
The Mouse-Trap. Illustrated.
The Unexpected Guests. Illustrated.
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK
ESTABLISHED 1817
MRS. FARRELL
A NOVEL BY
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
_With an Introduction by
Mildred Howells_
[Illustration: colophon]
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MRS. FARRELL
Copyright, 1921, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
L-V
INTRODUCTION
This story of my father’s was first printed under the title of _Private
Theatricals_ in the _Atlantic Monthly_ of 1875, while he was still
editor of the magazine. It appeared a few years after Henry James’s
_Gabrielle de Bergerac_, and neither of the two short novels was ever
republished by their authors. My father’s must have been written in the
Concord Avenue house in Cambridge which he and my mother had just built
and moved into. They were very proud of the new house, even of its
mansard roof such as every house of the period was obliged to have, and
which is reflected in the newly added French roofs of some of the houses
near the church in West Pekin; but their greatest pride was in the
library. My impressions of the house are those of rather extreme youth,
but I can remember that it was lined with bookshelves bordered by bands
of red, scalloped leather that were meant, as I now suppose, to keep the
dust from the book tops but which were then pleasantly mysterious to the
infant mind. There were very satisfactory tiles of Eastlake tendencies
over the fireplace, picturing the seasons in yellow and brown, and a
vast flat-topped desk in the middle of the room with rows of drawers on
either side that went down to the floor, leaving a dark hole between
them, which was useful as a doll’s house when not occupied by my
father’s feet. The room was at the back of the house, for greater quiet,
and looked out into a deep, grassy yard divided down the center by a
hedge of lilacs, and only invaded by birds and children.
The background of _Mrs. Farrell_ is the New England farm boarding house,
which was the only form of simple country sojourn before summer cottages
were imagined, and it is interesting to compare it with the farm
boarding in _The Vacation of the Kelwyns_, written so many years after
and giving a much fuller study of the country people. The farmhouse of
this story, kept by the finer type of New England farmers, must, I
think, have been the sort of summer place that my parents were always
seeking, and the Kelwyns’ experience a picture of what they more often
found. In the latter book the country people are of much poorer stuff
than the Woodwards, but one feels in his handling of them the greater
tenderness and understanding that age teaches, and youth, no matter how
sympathetic, cannot compass.
During the later summers, while we still lived in Cambridge, we tried
many different kinds of farm board, and I wish I could remember more of
them for comparison with those of Mrs. Farrell and the Kelwyns, but I
can only recall one of all our landladies, a good-natured farmer’s wife,
so stout that her apron strings only appeared where they were tied
behind her. I made many solemn journeys around her in search of them,
and I think it must have always been while she was frying doughnuts, for
that act is firmly associated in my mind with her invisible apron
strings. I was also vaguely conscious of a feud that raged between our
hosts and their relations, over a family Bible that had reversed the
squaring of the circle by having its corners worn off until it was quite
round. It had been borrowed and wrongfully detained by a younger branch
of the family, leaving hatred and uncharitableness behind. These
reflections, I am afraid, do not throw any great light on the practical
conditions of farm boarding, but they are all I have.
It is amusing to one who started life in the eighteen-seventies, to see
it again from their angle in these pages written not only about them,
but in them. One notes with surprise, after the feminine activity of the
present, the general resignation of even faintly middle-aged ladies to
headaches and invalidism, and the walks taken through woods and meadows
in trailing draperies. The painting of cat-tails emerges from a very
dead past, and even the more modern charcoal head of Blossom brings back
the day of William Hunt’s classes, when charcoal heads prevailed, and
every Boston young lady of artistic taste longed to be among his pupils.
Rachel Woodward’s little red schoolhouse must be deserted to-day and
quietly dropping apart on its country road, as so many others are doing
now that their scholars have been concentrated in big graded schools;
but her practical view of her own talent and her firmness in returning
what she thought more than her drawings worth to Mrs. Gilbert are of no
epoch, but still endure in the New England character, unalterable as its
native granite. Coming from southern Ohio, my father could, perhaps, see
the New England people more clearly than if he had been one of them, and
the Woodward family gives what he felt and valued in their stern
uprightness and self-restraint.
The echoes of the Civil War, in the injustice of Easton’s advancement in
military rank over the head of his friend, come strangely to us who have
just lived through another terrible conflict which has left this world
weary and discouraged. In speaking of the two wars, my father said that
a great difference lay in the spirit that came after them, for when the
Civil War was done people in the North felt that all the troubles of the
world were over, and that in the future everything was going to be
right. Easton’s ideas about hunting and fishing, and his desire to help
the helpless, are a reflection, I think, of the writer’s own feelings;
and in the scene where Easton stops the rearing horse one wonders
whether there survive faint traces of those early literary traditions
that made my father, as he once said, feel when he began writing novels
that he must have his hero do something to win the heroine, like
rescuing her from a wild bull, until he observed that in real life
nothing of the sort was necessary. His minute study of Easton’s emotions
as a lover makes one feel the sympathetic interest of a writer who was
young enough to go fully into them, and form a temptation to quote from
a letter written in his later middle age, in which he says, “I do not
think I can ever write of mating and marriage again.”
Mrs. Gilbert’s desire in her first talk with Mrs. Farrell of “a good
stupid wooing--at least a year of it” for her, shows an early distrust
of Romance as a foundation for life, but in their second talk together
Mrs. Farrell’s answer, “Nothing that’s wrong can be one’s own affair, I
suppose: it belongs to the whole world,” is of his latest, as well as
his earliest philosophy.
MILDRED HOWELLS.
MRS. FARRELL
Chapter I
West Pekin is one of those country places which have yielded to changing
conditions and have ceased to be the simple farming towns of a past
generation. The people are still farmers, but most of them are no longer
farmers only. In the summer they give up the habitable rooms of their
old square wooden houses to boarders from the cities, and lurk about in
the nooks and crannies of their L’s and lean-to’s; and, whatever their
guests may have to complain of, have hardly the best of the bargains
they drive with them. But in this way they eke out the living grudged
them by their neglected acres, and keep their houses in a repair that
contrasts with the decay of their farming. Each place has its grove of
maples, fantastically gnarled and misshapen from the wounds of many
sugar seasons; and an apple orchard, commonly almost past bearing with
age, stretches its knotted boughs over a slope near the house. Every
year the men-folk plow up an area of garden ground, and plant it with
those vegetables which, to the boarders still feeding in mid-July on
last year’s potatoes and tough, new-butchered beef, seem so reluctant in
ripening; but a furrow is hardly turned elsewhere on the farm. It yields
a crop of hay about the end of June, in which the boarders’ children
tumble, and a favorable season may coax from it a few tons of rowen
grass. The old stone walls straggle and fall down even along the
roadside; in the privacy of the wood lots and berry pastures they
abandon themselves to reckless dilapidation.
Many houses in the region stand empty, absently glaring on the passer
with their cold windows, as if striving in vain to recall the
households, long since gone West, to whom they were once homes. By and
by they will drop to ruin; or some shrewd Irishman, who has made four or
five hundred dollars in a Massachusetts suburb, will buy one of them,
and, stocking the farm with his stout boys and girls, will have the
best-looking place about. He thrives where the son of the soil starved;
and if the bitter truth must be owned, he seems to deserve his better
fortune. He has enterprise and energy and industry, and to the summer
boarder, used to the drive and strain of the city, the Yankee farmer
often seems to have none of these qualities. It may be that the summer
boarder judges him rashly; I dare say he would not be willing himself to
take his landlord’s farm as a gift, if he must live on those stony
hillsides the year round, and find himself at each year’s end a year
older but not a day nearer the competence to which all men look forward
as the just reward of long toil. I always fancied a dull discouragement
in the native farming race; an effect of the terrible winter that drowns
a good half of the months in drifts of snow, and of the dreary solitude
of the country life. Great men have come from the rural stock in our
nation before now; and perhaps the people of West Pekin have earned the
right to lie fallow; but whether this is so or not, it is certain that
they often evince an aptness to open the mouth and stand agape at
unusual encounters, which one cannot well dissociate from ideas of a
complete mental repose. If they have no thoughts, they have not the
irrelevance and superfluity of words. They are a signally silent race. I
have seen two of them, old neighbors, meet after an absence, and when
they had hornily rattled their callous palms together, stand staring at
each other, their dry, serrated lips falling apart, their jaws mutely
working up and down, their pale-blue eyes vacantly winking, and their
weather-beaten faces as wholly discharged of expression as the gable
ends of two barns confronting each other from opposite sides of the
road; no figure can portray the grotesqueness of their persons, with
their feet thrust into their heavy boots, and their clothes--originally
misshapen in a slop-shop after some bygone fashion, and now curiously
warped, outgrown, outworn--climbing up their legs and mounting upon
their stooping shoulders. But if they are silent they are not surly;
give them time and they are amiable enough, and they are first and last
honest. They do not ask too much for board, and they show some slow
willingness to act upon a boarder’s suggestions for his greater
comfort. But otherwise they remain unaffected by the contact. They learn
no greater glibness of tongue, or liveliness of mind, or grace of
manner; if their city guests bring with them the vices of wine or beer
at dinner and tobacco after it, the farmers keep themselves
uncontaminate. The only pipe you smell is that of the neighboring
Irishman as he passes with his ox-team; the gypsying French Canadians,
as they wander southward, tipsy by whole families, in their rickety open
buggies, lend the sole bacchanal charm to the prospect that it knows.
These are of a race whose indomitable light-heartedness no rigor of
climate has appalled, whereas our Anglo-Saxon stock in many country
neighborhoods of New England seems weather-beaten in mind as in face;
and this may account for the greater quick-wittedness of the women,
whose indoor life is more protected from the inclemency of our skies. It
is certain that they are far readier than the men, more intelligent,
gracious, and graceful, and with their able connivance the farmer stays
the adversity creeping upon his class, if he does not retrieve its old
prosperity. In the winter his daughters teach school, and in the summer
they help their mother through her enterprise of taking boarders. The
farm feeds them all, but from the women’s labor comes thrice the ready
money that the land ever yields, and it is they who keep alive the sense
of all higher and finer things, Heaven knows with what heroic patience
and devoted endeavor. The house shines, through them, with fresh paper
and paint; year by year they add to those comforts and meek aspirations
toward luxury which the summer guest accepts so lightly when he comes,
smiling askance at the parlor organ in the corner, and the
black-walnut-framed chromo-lithographs on the walls.
* * * * *
Nehemiah Woodward left West Pekin in his youth, after his preparation in
the academy, which still rests its classic pediment upon a pair of
fluted pine pillars above the village green, and went to Andover, where
he studied divinity and married his landlady’s daughter. She was a
still, somewhat austere girl, and she had spread no lures for the
affections of her lover, who was of tenderer years than herself; he was
not her first love; perhaps he was at last rather her duty, or her
importuning fate. In any case she did not deny him in the end; they were
married after his ordination and went away to the parish in New York
State over which he was settled, and she left behind her the grave in
which the hopes of her youth were buried. The young minister knew about
it; she told him everything when he first spoke to her of marriage; they
went together to bid farewell to the last resting place of the dead
rival whom he had never seen; and his sublime generosity touched her
heart with a lifelong gratitude.
It was his only inspiration, poor soul! he was a dreadfully dull
man--too dull even for the inarticulate suffering of country
congregations. Parish after parish shifted him from its aching
shoulders; they loved him for his goodness, but they could not endure
him, they hardly knew why; it was really because his sermons were of
lead, and finally none the lighter that they were beaten out so thin. He
had thus worn westward, leaving a deeply striated human surface behind
him, in the line of the New England emigration, as far as to the farther
border of Iowa, and he was an elderly man with a half-grown family, when
his father died and left the ancestral farm at West Pekin, to which none
of the other sons would return from their prosperity in the neighboring
towns or the new countries where they had settled. But it was not a
fortune that Nehemiah could refuse; possibly he had always had his own
secret yearnings for those barren pastures of his boyhood; at any rate,
he gladly parted from his last willing parish and went back to the farm.
Once returned, he seemed never to have been away; he looked as much a
fixture of the landscape as any outbuilding of the place. He quickly
shed whatever clerical dignity had belonged to his outward man, and
slouched into the rusty boots and scarecrow coats and hats that costume
our farmers at their work, as easily as if he had only laid them off
overnight. The physical shape of the farm was favorable to his luckless
gift of going downhill, but the energy of his wife now stayed his
further descent as effectually as if he had been a log propped on the
edge of a slope by some jutting point of granite. She had indeed always
done more than her half toward keeping her family’s souls and bodies
together; now, with a lasting basis to work upon, she took the share on
which Nehemiah’s lax hold had faltered. The house was built with the
substantial handsomeness which a farmer could afford who two generations
ago sent his boys to the academy. It was large and square, with ample
halls crossing each other from side to side, and dividing it into four
spacious rooms below and answering chambers overhead, some of which,
after a season or two of summer boarders, Mrs. Woodward was able to cut
in two and still leave large enough for single beds. In time a series of
very habitable chambers grew out over the one-story wing; a broad new
piazza invited the breeze and shade around two sides of the house, from
whose hilltop perch you could look out over a sea of rolling fields and
woods, steeply shored on the south by the long flank of Scatticong
Mountain. The air was a luxury, the water was delicious; the walks and
drives through the white-birch groves were lovely beyond compare; and
long before the summer of which I write, the fame of Mrs. Woodward’s
abundant table and educated kitchen had made it a privilege to be her
boarders for which people endeavored by engaging her rooms a year
beforehand. Whoever abode there reported it a house flowing with
unstinted cream and eggs; peas, beans, squash, and sweet corn in their
season, of a flavor that the green grocery never knew; blueberries,
raspberries, blackberries, after their kind; and bread with whose just
praise one must hesitate to tax the credulity of one’s hearer.
Mrs. Woodward not only knew how to serve her guests well, but how to
profit by serving them well. She made it her business, and mixed no
sentiment of any sort with it. She abolished herself socially and none
of her boarders offered her slight at the point to which she retreated
from association with them. She left them perfect freedom in the house,
but she kept them rigidly distinct from her own family, whom she devoted
each in his or her way to the enterprise she had undertaken. The family
ate at their own table, and never appeared in the guests’ quarter except
upon some affair connected with their comfort; but they were all willing
in serving. Even Nehemiah himself, under the discipline centering in his
wife, showed a sort of stiff-jointed readiness in hitching up the horse
for the ladies when the boys happened to be out of the way; and he had
thus late in life discovered a genius for gardening. It was to his skill
and industry that the table owed its luxury of vegetables; and he was
wont to walk out at twilight, and stand, bent-kneed and motionless,
among the potatoes, and look steadfastly upon the peas, in serene
emulation of the simulacrum posted in a like attitude in another part of
the patch. He was the most approachable member of the family, and would
willingly have talked with one, no doubt, if he could have found
anything in the world to say. The others were civil, but invisibly held
aloof by the mother’s theory of business, or secret pride, which,
whatever it was, interfered with no one’s rights or pleasures, and so
was generally accepted by amiable newcomers after a few good-natured
attempts to overcome it. There was only one of them who had succeeded
in breaking the circle of this reserve, and her intimacy with the
Woodwards seemed rather another of her oddities than anything
characteristic of them.
The household of the boarders displayed that disparity between the sexes
which is one of the sad problems of the New England civilization, and
perhaps enforced it a little more poignantly than was just. They were
not all single ladies; a good third of the fifteen were married; of the
rest, some were yet too young to think or to despair of marrying, and it
could not be confidently said of others that they wished to change their
state. Nevertheless, one’s first sense of their condition was vaguely
compassionate. It seemed a pity that for six days in the week they
should have to talk to one another and dress only for their own sex. Not
that their toilettes were elaborate; they all said that they liked to
come to the Woodwards’ because you did not have to dress there, but
could go about just as you pleased; yet, having the taste of all
American women in dress, they could not forbear making themselves look
charming, and were always appearing in some surprising freshness and
fragrance of linen, or some gayety of flannel walking costume. The same
number of men would have lapsed into unshaven chins and unblacked boots
in a single week; but these devoted women had their pretty looks on
their consciences, and never failed to honor them. Some of them even
wore flowers in their hair at dinner-- Heaven knows why; and the young
girls were always coming home from the woods with nodding plumes of
bracken in their hats, and walking out in the dusk with coquettish
headgear on, to be seen by no one more important than some barefooted,
half-grown, bashful farm boy driving home his cows. The mothers started
their children out every morning in clean, whole clothes, and patiently
put aside at night the grass-stained, battered, dusty, dishonored
fragments. Even one or two old ladies who were there for the country air
were zealous to be neatly capped. The common sentiment seemed to be that
as you never knew what might happen, you ought to be prepared for it.
What actually happened was the occasional arrival of the stage with an
express package for one of the boarders, and a passenger for some
farmhouse beyond, who at very rare and exciting intervals was a man.
Once a day the young ladies went down to the village after the mail, and
indulged themselves with the spectacle of gentlemen dismounting from the
stage at the hotel, which at such moments poured forth on piazza and
gallery a disheartening force of lady boarders. Regularly, also, at ten
o’clock on Saturday night, when everybody had gone to bed, this
conveyance drove up to the door of the farmhouse, and set down the five
husbands of five of the married ladies, for whom it called again on
Monday morning, before anybody was up. These husbands were almost as
unfailing as the fish-balls at the Sunday breakfast; and when any one of
them was kept in Boston it made a great talk; his wife had got word from
him why he could not come; or she had not got word: it was just as
exciting in either case. The ladies all made some attractive difference
in their dress, which the wives when they went to their rooms asked the
husbands if they had noticed, and which the husbands had not noticed, to
a man. After breakfast, each husband took by the hand the child or two
which his wife had scantly provided him (a family of four children was
thought pitiably large, and a marvel of responsibility to the mother),
and went off to the woods, whence he returned an hour before dinner, and
read the evening papers which he had brought up in his pocket. In the
afternoon he was reported asleep, being fatigued by the ride from town
the day before, or he sat and smoked, or sometimes went driving with his
family. His voice as the household heard it next morning at dawn had a
gayer note than at any other time in the last thirty-eight hours, and
his wife, coming down to breakfast, met the regulation jest about her
renewed widowhood with a cheerfulness that was apparently sincere.
It may not have been so dull a life for the ladies as men would flatter
themselves; they all seemed to like it, and not a woman among them was
eager to get back to her own house and its cares. Perhaps the
remembrance of these cares was the secret of her present content;
perhaps women, when remanded to a comparatively natural state, are more
easily satisfied then men. It is certain that they are always enduring
extremes of ennui that appear intolerable to the other sex. Here at
Woodward farm they had their own little world, which I dare say was all
the better and kindlier for being their own. They were very kind to one
another, but preferences and friendships necessarily formed themselves.
Certain ladies were habitually visiting, as they called it, in one
another’s rooms, and one lady on the ground floor was of a hospitable
genius that invited the other boarders to make her room the common
lounging and gossiping place. Whoever went in or out stopped there; and
the mail, when it was brought from the post-office, was distributed and
mostly read and talked over, there.
Till a bed was put into the parlor, one of the young ladies used to play
a very little on the organ after breakfast on rainy days. One of the
married ladies, who had no children, painted; she painted cat-tail
rushes, generally; not very like, and yet plainly recognizable. Another
embroidered; she sat with her work in the wide doorway, and those
passing her used to stop and take up one edge of it as it hung from her
fingers, and talk very seriously about it, and tell what they had seen
of the kind. Some of them were always writing letters; two or three had
a special gift of sleep, both before and after dinner, which
distinguished them from several nervous ladies, who _never_ could sleep
in the daytime. The young girls went up the mountain a good deal
whenever they could join a party; twice when one of their brothers came
from the city they camped out on the mountain; it was a great thing to
see their camp fire after dusk; once they came home in a rain, and that
was talk for two days, and always a joke afterward. They had a lot of
novels, not very new to our generation, which they read aloud to one
another sometimes; they began to write a novel of their own, each
contributing a chapter, but I believe they never finished it; the
youngest kept a journal, but she did not write in it much. She could
also drive; and her timid elders who rode out with her said they felt
almost as safe with her as with a man. All the ladies said that the air
was doing them a great deal of good, and, if not, that the complete rest
was everything; none of them had that wornout feeling with which she had
come; if any did not pick up at once, she was told that she would see
the change when she got home in the fall. Two or three, in the meantime,
were nearly always sick in bed, or kept from meals by headache. From
time to time the well ones had themselves weighed at the village store,
to know whether they had gained or lost. They all talked together a good
deal about their complaints, of which, whether they were sick or well,
they each had several.
These were the interests and occupations, this the life, at Woodward
farm, to the entire simplicity of which I am afraid I have not done
justice, when a thing happened that complicated the situation and for
the moment robbed it of its characteristic repose. It appears that while
Mrs. Stevenson was quietly multiplying cat-tail rushes in her cool,
airy, upstairs room, one of the Woodward girls, who taught school and in
vacation waited on the boarders at the table, had also been
employed--somewhere in the mysterious L part, where her family bestowed
itself--on a work of art, a head of the Alderney cow known to the whole
household as Blossom. Whether it was ever meant to be seen or not is
scarcely certain; that lady who alone had the intimacy of the Woodwards
came out with it from the kitchen one morning, as by violence, and
showed it to the boarders after breakfast, while they still loitered at
the table, none of the artist’s kindred appearing. They all recognized
Blossom in a moment, but the exhibitor let them suffer and guess awhile
who did it. Then she exploded the fact upon them, and the excitement
began to rise. They said that it was a real Rosa Bonheur; and Mrs.
Stevenson, who was indeed in another line of art and need feel no envy,
set her head on one side, held the picture at arm’s length in different
lights, and pronounced it perfect, simply perfect, for a charcoal
sketch. They had looked at it in a group; now they looked at it singly
and from a distance, cautioning one another that the least touch would
ruin it. Then they began to ask the exhibitress if she had known of Miss
Woodward’s gift before, the young girls listening to her replies with
something of the zeal and reverence they felt for the artist. At last
they said Mrs. Gilbert must see it, and followed it in procession to the
room of the public-spirited lady on the first floor. She had been having
her breakfast in bed, and now sat in a beruffled, sweet-scented
dishabille, which became her pale, middle-aged, invalid good looks--her
French-marquise effect, one young girl called it, Mrs. Gilbert’s hair
being quite gray, and her thick eyebrows dark, like those of a powdered
old-regime beauty. They set the drawing on her chimney-piece, and she
considered it a long while with her hands lying in her lap. “Yes,” she
sighed at last, “it’s very fair indeed, poor thing.”
“Blossom or Rachel, Mrs. Gilbert?” promptly demanded the lady who had
been chaperoning the picture, with a tremor of humorous appreciation at
the corners of her mouth, and a quick glance of her very dark-brown
eyes.
“Rachel,” answered Mrs. Gilbert. “Blossom is a blessed cow. But a woman
of genius in a New England farmhouse where they take summer boarders--oh
dear me! Yes, it’s quite as bad as that, I should say,” she added,
thoughtfully, after another stare at the picture.
“Quite.”
The company had settled and perched and poised upon the different pieces
of furniture, as if they expected Mrs. Gilbert to go on talking; but she
seemed to be out of the mood, and chose rather to listen to their
applauses of the picture. The sum of their kindly feeling appeared to be
that something must be done to encourage Miss Woodward, but they were
not certain how she ought to be encouraged, and they began to stray away
from the subject before anything was concluded. When the surprise had
been drained to the dregs, a natural reaction began, and they left Mrs.
Gilbert somewhat sooner than usual and with signs of fatigue. Presently
no one remained but the lady who had exhibited the picture; her, as she
made a movement to take it from the mantel, Mrs. Gilbert stopped, and
began to ask about the artistic history of Miss Woodward.