II

Even before I was born the richer people of New York did not inhabit

that city the year round, but their holiday excursions were far shorter

than now, both in distance and duration. To escape the intenser heats

of summer the moneyed citizen of those days sent his family to the

seaside for six weeks or to the mountains. Later his family began to

insist that it must also be spared the seasons of intense cold. And

nowadays there are families (and the number of these increases by leaps

and bounds) who if they are not allowed to escape from everything which

seems to them disagreeable or difficult, get very down in the mouth

about it. Even the laboring classes are affected. The rich man wishes

to live without any discomfort whatever, and the poor man wishes to

live without doing any work whatever. That, I think, is at the root of

their most bloody differences of opinion, for the poor man thinks that

the rich man ought to be uncomfortable, and the rich man thinks that

the poor man ought to work. And they will never be in agreement.

Given enough money it becomes easier and easier to run from one

difficulty or discomfort into another. And even the laborer finds it

continually easier to make a living without earning it.

When I was a little boy, Newport and Bar Harbor were a long way from

New York. To Europe was a real voyage; while such places as Palm Beach

and Aiken were never mentioned in polite society, for the simple reason

that polite society had never heard of them. But nowadays it is not

uncommon for a man to have visited all these places (and some of them

more than once) in the course of a year. Europe which was once a

foreign country is now but as a suburb of New York. And I myself, I am

happy to say, have been far oftener in Paris than in Brooklyn.

The modern butterfly thinks little of flying out to Pittsburg or

Cleveland or St. Louis for a dance or a mere wedding. He attends

athletic events thousands of miles apart, and knows his way from the

front door to the bar and card room of every important club between the

Jockey Club in Paris and the Pacific Union in San Francisco, excepting,

of course, those clubs in his own city to which he does not happen to

belong.

My father, because of my little sister's fragility, was one of the

first men I know to make a practice of going South for the winter, and

to Long Island for the spring and autumn. In summer we went to Europe

or Bar Harbor, for with justice he preferred the climate of the latter

to that of Newport or Southampton. We were less and less in our town

house, and indeed so jumped about from place to place, that although my

mother succeeded in making her other houses easy and indeed charming to

live in, I have never known what it was to have a home. And indeed I

cannot at this moment call to mind a single New York family of the

upper class that lives in a home.

My mother is old-fashioned. She would have preferred to live in one

place the year around, to beautify and to ennoble that place; to be

buried from it as she had been married into it, and to leave upon it

the stamp of her character, incessant industry and good taste; to fill

it gradually with the things she loved best or admired most, and to be

always there, ready for the children or the grandchildren to come home.

But she gave up this ambition at a hint of delicacy in a child's face,

and a note of anxiety in a husband's voice, and took to packing trunks

to go somewhere, and unpacking them when they arrived. Of course she

couldn't do this to all of them, for we moved with very many, but there

were certain ones to which she would let nobody put hand but

herself--my father's, my sister's, mine, and her own. And you always

knew that if you had accidentally left letters and notes in your

pockets that you didn't want seen, they wouldn't be.

My father would almost abuse her for doing so much work with her own

hands, and for always being up so early, but in secret he was very

proud of her; and to see her dressed for the dance or the opera, eager

and gay as a girl, slender and beautiful, her head very high and

fearless, you would have thought that she had never done anything in

all her life, but be pampered and groomed and sheltered.

Upon one good old-fashioned custom they were in firm agreement. They

always slept in the same bed; they do still. And they will lie in the

same grave.

Whichever home it was that we happened to be inhabiting, unless out of

season because of my sister, it was always pretty well filled with

people. My father loved people, and my mother got to love them for his

sake. For my part, until very recently, I have always hated to be

alone. Flint is a gloomy solitary, but when he meets with Steel there

are sparks.

I suppose there are brooding lovers of knowledge in this world who are

fonder of their own than of any other company. But most people can

only think half thoughts and need other people to complete them. It is

amusing enough to knock a ball against a wall, and a wonderful help in

the perfection of strokes, but it is far more amusing to face somebody

across a net and play lawn tennis.

My father and mother always hoped that I would be a great man, and even

now they hope that I may one day turn over a new leaf. Unfortunately

there was no greatness in me, and as for those leaves of my life which

I have not yet read, they are uncut, and I am always mislaying the

paper knife. And whether the matter on the next leaf or the one after

will be new or not, is for the future to know. You cannot, I think,

teach a child to grow great.

But you can teach a child to dance and swim and shoot and sail, and to

ride and to be polite, and to keep clean, and by example rather than

precept, to be natural and unaffected! It was hoped then that I would

be a great man; in the event, however, of my turning out to be nothing

but a butterfly, I was brought up to be as ornamental a butterfly as

possible. I cannot remember when I wasn't being prepared and groomed

to take, without awkwardness, a place in society.

Well-bred grown-ups talk to children, without affectation or

condescension, as if they too were grown-ups. My parents were always

entertaining people, and it was assumed without comment that I too was

host no less than they. Twice a day I had to be in evidence: at tea

time, face and hands shining clean, hair carefully brushed, my small

body covered with crisp white duck, black silk stockings, on my legs,

and patent leather pumps on my feet. No conversation was required of

me, but if I had forgotten a name and the face that went with it, I was

allowed to feel uncomfortable; allowed to feel as a grown man feels

when he has accidentally said something that would better have been

left unsaid. It was my duty to go accurately from guest to guest, to

shake hands, and to say perfectly naturally not "Hunh!" as so many

modern children do, but "How do you do, Mrs. Lessing," or "How do you

do, Mrs. Green," and not to stare and fidget or be awkward. Then I had

my tea, discolored hot water with sugar and cream, my buttered toast,

and a bit of cake. After that my mother would make it exceedingly easy

for me to get away. My second public appearance was just before

dinner. Then, dressed once more in white and patent leather, I came to

the drawing-room to wish and be wished good night.

To obey my mother, when there was no real temptation to disobey her,

was very easy, and nobody ever saw me look sulky or balky when I was

told to do this or that. It was easy to obey her, because from the

first, she took it absolutely for granted that she was going to be

obeyed. Of course it was different with general orders designed to

cover long periods of time, for here the tempter had his chance at me,

and I was forever falling. "Stop kicking the table leg, Archie," is an

order easily and instantly obeyed. For "Never kick a table," I cannot

say the same. I used to divide her orders into two classes: The now

nows and the never nevers. The latter were mostly beyond me. Though

you may halt one sinner in the act of throwing a stone at another,

there is little reason to believe that he will not soon be trying his

aim again.

I like children when they are polite and a little reticent, when they

are not too much in evidence, and when the whole household is not made

to revolve about them.

Fulton once said to me, in that shy yet eager way of his: "If only I

could arrest my babies' development; keep them exactly as they are; on

tap when I wanted them, and hibernated like a couple of little bears

when I was busy and mustn't be disturbed! They should never change,

while I lived, if I had my way. And I'd promise not to abuse my

privileges. I'd only take 'em out of the ice box when I absolutely

needed them and couldn't do without them."

It was the first time that I ever was in the Fulton house that he said

that. The two babies, a boy and a girl, Jock and "Hurry," two

roly-polies, with their mother's eyes and mischievous smile, had been

brought in to the tea table to be polite and share a lump of sugar.

And they had been very polite, and had shown the proper command over

their shyness, and had shaken me decorously by the hand, and made their

funny grave little bows and asked me how I did. And I had said

something in praise of the little girl to her face, and Fulton had

reproached me a little for doing so.

"In India," he had said, "it is very bad luck to praise a child to its

face, very bad luck indeed."

"I'm so sorry," I said, when the children had gone. "I ought to have

remembered that even very little babies in the cradle understand

everything that's said to them. May I praise them now? Because they

are the two most delicious babies in the world. I'd like to eat them."

"When I'm tired or worried," said Fulton, his eyes lighting with

tenderness, "Hurry always knows. And she comes and climbs into my lap

and leans against me without saying a word, and she keeps creepy-mouse

still until she knows that I'm feeling better. Then she chuckles, and

I hug her. Sometimes I wish that she was made like a tennis ball; then

I could hug her as hard as I wanted to without hurting her."

While he was speaking, Mrs. Fulton looked all the time at her husband's

face. I remember thinking, "God! If ever some woman should look at me

like that!" Her mouth smiled mischievously, just the way little

Hurry's smiled, and her eyes--I won't try to describe the love and

tenderness that was in them, nor the dog-like faithfulness--were eyes

that prayed. And they were the deepest, most brilliant blue--like

those Rheims windows that the Beast smashed the other day. She laughed

and said: "Hurry and her father don't care about each other--not _at_

all."

Fulton lifted his eyes to hers and it was as if "I _love_ you" flashed

from each to the other in that crumb of time. His face reddened a

little, and hers became more rosy. They weren't a bit ashamed of being

obviously in love with each other. I think they rather prided

themselves on it.

"Why _Hurry_?" I asked. "Is it a real name? Of course I remember

Hurry Harry in Cooper----"

"Her real name is Lucy," said Fulton, "same as her Mumsey, but they

look so ridiculously alike that I was afraid I'd get 'em mixed up. And

so we call her Hurry, because she always hurries; she hurries like mad.

Same as her Mumsey."

"Do you," I asked, "hurry like mad?"

She gave a comical hurried nod that made me laugh right out, and Fulton

said:

"She has smashed the more haste the less speed fallacy all to pieces."

You could see that the man was glowing with pride. And he began to

boast about her, and though she tried to stop him, she couldn't help

looking perfectly delighted with herself, like some radiant child in

the new dress for the party.

When Fulton had finished his eulogy, a long one, filled with humor,

character drawing, and tenderness--something in his voice rather than

his words, perhaps, always gave people the feeling that he had a

wonderfully light touch, and a point of view at once sentimental and

humorous--I reproached him, in turn, for praising a child to her face.

"In India," I said, "it's considered beastly unlucky."

Mrs. Fulton sprang to his defense. "I'm not a child," she defied me,

"I'm a married woman."

They took me to the front door themselves, and watched me as far as the

gate. I know this, because although I did not look back, it was when I

reached the gate that I heard the door close, and I thought: "Now if I

looked back, and the door was transparent, I'd see a pretty picture.

It's a thousand to one shot that he's caught her in his arms and is

kissing her and that she's perfectly delighted."