On the whole, the Saratoga expedition was not a success. Even on the
journey, coming up by the limited train, Miss Lee was not favorably
impressed by the appearance of her fellow-passengers. Nearly all of
the men in the car (most of whom immediately betook themselves to the
bar-room, euphoniously styled a buffet, at the head of the train) were
of a type that would have suggested to one accustomed to American life
that variety of it which is found seated in the high places of the
government of the city of New York; and the aggressively dressed and too
abundantly jewelled female companions of these men, heavily built,
heavy browed, with faces marked in hard lines, and with aggressive
eyes schooled to look out upon the world with a necessarily emphatic
self-assertion, were of a type that, without special knowledge of
American ways, was entirely recognizable. Albeit Miss Lee, having spent
much time in the mixed society of various European watering-places, was
not by any means an unsophisticated young person, and was not at all a
squeamish one, she was sensibly relieved by finding that the chair
next to hers was occupied by a silvery-haired old lady of the most
unquestionable respectability; and her composure was further restored,
presently, by the return to his chair, on the other side of her of Mr.
Port: who had betaken himself to what the conductor had told him was the
smoking-room, and who, finding himself in a bar-room, surrounded by a
throng of hard-drinking, foul-mouthed men, had sacrificed his
much-loved cigar in order to free himself from such distinctly offensive
surroundings.
At their hotel, and elsewhere, Miss Lee and her uncle encountered many
of their fellow-passengers by the limited train, together with others of
a like sort which previous trains had brought thither; and while, on the
whole, these were about balanced by a more desirable class of visitors,
they were in such force as to give to the life of the place a very
positive tone.
At the end of a week Dorothy avowed herself disappointed. “I never did
think much of poor dear mamma’s taste, you know, Uncle Hutchinson,” she
said, with her customary frankness, “and what she found to like in this
place I’m sure I can’t imagine. It’s tawdry and it’s vulgar; and as for
its morals, I think that it’s worse than Monte Carlo. I suppose that
there is a nice side to it, for I do see a few nice people; but,
somehow, they all seem to stand off from each other as though they were
afraid here to take any chances at all with strangers. And I don’t blame
them, Uncle Hutchinson, for I feel just that way myself. What you ought
to have done was to have hired a cottage, and then people would have
taken the trouble to find out about us; and when they’d found that we
were not all sorts of horrid things we should have got into the right
set, and no doubt, at least if we’d stayed here through August, we
should have had a very nice time.
“But we’re not having a nice time, here at this noisy hotel, Uncle
Hutchinson, where the band can’t keep quiet for half an hour at a time,
and where the only notion that people seem to have of amusement is to
overdress themselves and wear diamonds to dinner and sit in crowds on
the verandas and dance at night with any stranger who can get another
stranger to introduce him and to drive over on fine afternoons to that
place by the lake and drink mixed drinks until some of them actually get
tipsy. I really think that it all is positively horrid. And so I’m quite
willing now to go to the White Sulphur. It is stupid, I know, but I’ve
always heard that it is intensely respectable. I will get my packing all
done this afternoon, and we will start to-morrow morning; and I think
that you’d better go and telegraph for rooms right away.”
But to Dorothy’s surprise, and also to her chagrin, Mr. Port refused to
entertain her proposition. He fully agreed with her in her derogatory
estimate of Saratoga life as found at Saratoga hotels; and he cherished
also a private grief incident to his (mistaken) belief that the cooking
was not so good as he remembered it, bright in the glamour of his sound
digestion in his youthful past. On the other hand, however, the waters
certainly were having a most salutary effect upon his liver; and the
move to Virginia would involve spending two days of hot weather in
toilsome travel, sustained only by such food as railway restaurants
afford. Therefore Mr. Port declared decidedly that until the end of July
they would remain where they were--and so gave his niece the doubtful
pleasure of an entirely new experience by compelling her to do something
that she did not want to do at all. It was a comfort to Mr. Port, in
later years, to remember that he had got ahead of Dorothy once, anyhow.
Being a very charming young person, Miss Lee could not, of course, be
grumpy; yet grumpiness certainly would have been the proper word with
which to describe her mood during her last fortnight at Saratoga had she
not possessed such extraordinarily fine gray eyes and such an admirably
dimpled chin. The fact must be admitted that she contrived to make her
uncle’s life so much of a burden to him that his staying powers were
strained to the utmost Indeed, he admitted to himself that he could not
have held out against such tactics for another week; and he perceived
that he had done injustice to his departed sister in thinking--as he
certainly had thought, and even had expressed on more than one occasion
in writing--that in permitting her European movements to be shaped in
accordance with her daughter’s fancies she had exhibited an inexcusable
weakness.
It was a relief to Mr. Port’s mind, and also to his digestion--for
Dorothy’s grumpiness produced an effect distinctly bilious--when the end
of July arrived and his own and his charming ward’s views once more were
brought into harmony by the move to Narragansett Pier. Fortunately,
while somewhat disposed to stand upon her own rights, Miss Lee was not
a person who bore malice; a pleasing fact that became manifest on the
moment that she began to pack her trunks.
“I am afraid, Uncle Hutchinson,” she observed, on the morning that this
important step towards departure was taken--“I am afraid that during the
past week or so your angel may not have been quite as much of an angel
as usual.”
“No,” replied Mr. Port, with a colloquial disregard of grammatical
construction, and with perhaps unnecessary emphasis, “I don’t think she
has.”
“But from this moment onward,” Dorothy continued, courteously ignoring
her uncle’s not too courteous interpolation, and airily relegating into
oblivion the recent past, “she expects to manifest her angelic qualities
to an extent that will make her appear unfit for earth. Very possibly
she may even grow a pair of wings and fly quite away from you,
sir--right up among the clouds, where the other angels are! And how
would you like that, Uncle Hutchinson?”
In the sincere seclusion of his inner consciousness Mr. Port admitted
the thought that if Dorothy had resolved herself into an angelic
_vol-au-vent_ (a simile that came naturally to his mind) at any time
during the preceding fortnight he probably would have accepted the
situation with a commendable equanimity. But what he actually said was
that her departure in this aerated fashion would make him profoundly
miserable. Mr. Port was a little astonished at himself when he was
delivered of this gallant speech; for gallant speeches, as he very well
knew, were not at all in his line.
On the amicable basis thus established, Miss Lee and her guardian
resumed their travels; and, excepting only Mr. Port’s personal misery
incident to the alimentary exigencies of railway transportation, their
journey from the central region of New York to the seaboard of Rhode
Island was accomplished without misadventure.