Alexina Blair, at twenty, returned from school to her uncle's home
with but small emotion, as, at fourteen, she had left with little
regret, yet the shady streets, the open front doors, the welcomes
called from up-stairs windows as she passed--evidences that she was
back among her own people in the South--all at once made her glad to
be here.
How could she have felt emotion over a mere return to Uncle Austen's
house? She might have felt enthusiasm over Nelly, but Nelly was
married to the gardener at her old asylum and a Katy had taken her
place. The house was the same. If only its stone facade might be
allowed to mellow, to grey a little! But, newly cleaned, it stood
coldly immaculate in its yard of shaven lawn set about with clipped
shrubberies. As for her uncle, Alexina found herself applying the same
adjectives to him, shaven, immaculate, cold.
She wondered what he thought of her, but Uncle Austen never made
personal remarks.
Aunt Harriet, on joining her niece in the East early in the summer,
had looked at her consideringly. She seemed pleased.
"Why," she said, "Alexina, you are a Tennyson young person, tall and
most divinely--you are a little more intense in your colouring than is
usual with a Blair. I'm glad."
The somewhat doubtful smile on the girl's face deepened as if a sudden
radiance leaped into it. She seized her aunt's hand. "Oh," she said,
"you're very nice, Aunt Harriet."
Harriet laughed, rather pleased than not, but she still was studying
the girl. "She is impulsive and she doesn't look set," the aunt was
telling herself--was it gratefully? "perhaps she is less Blair than I
thought."
Austen Blair too, in fact, now viewed his niece with complacency--she
fulfilled the Blair requirements--but he talked of other things.
"It is the intention of your aunt and myself," he told her promptly,
"to introduce you at once to what will be your social world, for it is
well for everyone to have local attachment."
As the matter progressed it appeared that social introduction, as
Uncle Austen understood it, was largely a matter of expenditure. In
all investment it is the expected thing to place where there is
likeliest return. Therefore he scanned the invitation list earnestly.
"She can afford to do the thing as it should be done," he remarked to
Harriet.
"She? But Austen--" Harriet hesitated. "I supposed it was ours, this
affair; it seems the least--"
Austen looked at her. At first he did not comprehend, then he replied
with some asperity. "I have so far kept sentiment and business apart
in managing Alexina's affairs."
Harriet was silenced. It was becoming less and less wise to oppose
Austen. He had his own ideas about the matter. "The thing is to be
done handsomely," he set forth, "but," as qualification,
"judiciously."
Therefore he stopped an acquaintance on the street a day or two
before the affair. "Are we to have the pleasure of seeing you on
Tuesday?" he asked, even a little ostentatiously, for the young man
had neglected to accept or decline.
Austen reported the result to Harriet. "For there is no use ordering a
supper for five hundred if but four hundred and ninety-nine are
coming," he told her.
"No?" said Harriet.
"Exactly," said her brother.
Alexina, present at the conversation, looked from the one to the
other. Uncle Austen was Uncle Austen; there was a slight lift of the
girlish shoulders as she admitted this. But Aunt Harriet--
For Harriet had changed. She had been changing these past two summers.
She was absent, forgetful, absorbed, even irritable. Aunt Harriet! And
recalled, she would colour and look about in startled fashion.
Alexina and Harriet had been always on terms friendly and pleasant,
but scarcely to be called intimate; terms that, after a cordial
good-night, closed the door between their rooms, and while the girl
had been conscious of a fondness for her serene and capable aunt,
there were times too, when, met by that same serenity, she had felt
she must rebel, and in secret had thrown her young arms out in
impotent, passionate protest.
But now Aunt Harriet forgot and neglected and grew cross like any one,
and the sententious utterances of Uncle Austen irritated her. Alexina,
going into her room one day, found her with her head bowed on the
desk. Was she crying? The girl slipped out.
Was Aunt Harriet unhappy? The heart of Alexina warmed to her.
The evening of Alexina's return home Harriet had come to her door. To
twenty years thirty-eight seems pitiably far along in life, yet
Harriet called up no such feeling in Alexina. No passion of living
writ itself on Galatea's check while she was in marble, and Alexina,
opening the door to the tap, thought her aunt beautiful.
"If there are callers to-night," Harriet said, "I want you to come
down. My friends are not too elderly," she smiled in the old,
good-humoured way, "to be nice to you this winter."
So later Alexina went down to the library, a room long unfurnished,
now the only really cheerful room in the house. Was it because Harriet
had furnished it?
The girl always had realized in an indefinite way that Harriet was a
personage; later, in their summers away together, she discovered that
men liked her handsome aunt.
In the library she found a group who, from the conversation, seemed to
be accustomed to dropping in thus in casual fashion. They were men of
capacity and presence, one felt that, even in the case of that long
avowed person of fashion, Mr. Marriot Bland, who was getting
dangerously near to that time of life when he would be designated an
old beau. He was a personage, too, of his type. Alexina shook hands
with him gaily; she had been used to his coming since she first came
to live with Aunt Harriet and Uncle Austen. Harriet introduced the
others. The girl's spirits rose; she felt it was nice that she should
be knowing them.
And they? What does middle-age feel, looking upon youth, eager-eyed,
buoyant, flushed with the first glow from that unknown about to dawn?
Oh, it was a charming evening. The girl showed she thought it so and
smiled, and the men smiled too, as they joined Harriet in making her
the young centre. Perhaps there was a tender something in the smiles.
Was it for their own gone youth?
One, a Major Rathbone, stayed after the others left. He sat building
little breastworks on the centre-table out of matches taken from the
bronze stand by the lamp, and as he talked he looked over every now
and then at Harriet on the other side.
In the soberer reaction following the breaking up of the group,
Alexina, too, found time to look at Harriet. It was an Aunt Harriet
that she had never seen before. The colour was richly dyeing this
Harriet's cheeks, and the jewel pendant at her throat rose and
trembled and fell, and her white lids fell, too, though she had
laughed when her eyes met laughter and something else in the brown
eyes of the Major fixed on her.
It was of Mr. Marriot Bland the Major was speaking, his smooth, brown
hand caressing his clean-shaven chin.
"So cruelly confident are you cold Dianas," he was saying. "Now, even
a Penelope must hold out the lure of her web to an old suitor, but you
Dianas--"
Alexina laughed. She had jumped promptly into a liking for this lean,
brown man with the keen, humorous eyes and the deliberate yet quick
movements, and now absorbed in her thoughts, was unconscious of her
steadfast gaze fixed on him, until he suddenly brought his eyes to
bear on hers with humorous inquiry.
"Well?" he inquired.
Now Alexina, being fair, showed blushes most embarrassingly, but she
could laugh too.
"What's the conclusion?" he demanded; "or would it be wiser not to
press inquiry?"
Alexina laughed again. She knew she liked this Major.
"I was wondering," she confessed. "You are so different from what I
expected. I heard Aunt Harriet and Uncle Austen discussing one of your
editorials, so I read it. I thought you would be different--fiercer
maybe, and--er--more aggressive."
Alexina began to blush again, for the Major was so edified at
something that his enjoyment was suspicious.
"But no man is expected to live down to his editorials, Miss Alexina;
I write 'em for a living."
He stroked his chin as he regarded her, but there was laughter too
out of the tail of his eye across at Aunt Harriet, who was laughing
also, though she looked teased.
Later Alexina learned more about this Major Rathbone. It was Emily
Carringford who told her. Emily came over promptly the day after
Alexina's return and, admitted by Katy, ran up as of old.
Alexina, hearing her name called, turned from a melee of unpacking as
the other reached the open doorway.
"Oh, Emily," she said, and stood and gazed.
Emily stood, too, archly, and, meeting Alexina's look, laughed. Her
blush was an acknowledgment; she did not even pretend to misunderstand
Alexina's meaning.
"Aunt Harriet told me how--how lovely you were, and Uncle Austen told
me last night that my friend, Miss Emily, he considered an 'unusually
good-looking woman--a handsome woman, in fact.'" The niece had her
uncle's every conciseness of tone as she quoted. "But somehow with it
all, I wasn't prepared--"
She came forward with hands out.