for. I may not have the greatest rewards, but I have many that are
sweet if not great. If the best man sometimes sees the other fellow get
the best woman, he also sees him take the great risks,—also sees him
take the woman who is not best. If the stunning girls marry some one
else, they expect a great deal from the some one else, and if they stop
being stunning the burden of that is not too keenly on me. The new era
finds them immensely discriminating, hard to please. They have a wide
choice nowadays, and they exercise that choice with the austerity of a
sovereign. Just now they are a little tired of dukes. They like football
heroes better. And then there is always the trooper. He is in great
demand. Then, too, the girls are getting very tall. It is hard to pair
well with them. They are getting dreadfully clever, too, and that must
make it intellectually difficult continuously to live up to them. The
taste for violent contrasts seems to me degenerate. I hope the fashion
will go out. I met Miss Wainscott the other day with little Carew. I
tell you, they looked _wrong_. Then there is that little canary bird of
a Miss Prune just engaged to big Kane. I joked her about him and she
said she could say of him as Don Quixote said of Morgante, that though
of gigantic size he was most gentle in his manners. Of course, she will
subdue Kane,—I told her she would make sugar Kane of him,—these little
women are wonders. But that does not modify the spectacular absurdity of
it.”
[Illustration: And then
There is always the Trooper]
“It remains for you, Tranton, to set an example in this matter. You are
a good example as far as you go. You have not been called a nice man
without reason. But you pause before the ultimate example. You beg the
question.”
“Probably the trouble is that I have a fatal veneration for women
in general. I think of the individual only as epitomizing the sex.
I understand that to be a fatal attitude of mind. Yet I find a
corresponding attitude in many young women and women who are not young,
and you have no idea how interesting that view makes them.”
“Oh, yes I have! That is the trouble. It makes them as interesting as it
makes you.”
“Then what are you complaining about?”
“I am wondering what will become of you.”
“Become of me? There you are with your romantic, old-fashioned ideas
again. Why should I become? I tell you, life reminds me of one of
those boxes built to hold circulars or catalogues or free-distribution
periodicals. They are marked on the outside ‘Take one?’ But there is
nothing inside. Everything has been taken. We can’t all draw prizes,—we
can’t all _be_ prizes. ‘They also serve,’ you know.”
“You will be punished,” I said. “When Age has put you through the
inquisition, and you have been broken on the wheel—of Time—you will take
it all back, and will incur the aspersion of marrying to have some one
who will put out your slippers.”
“You forget, that in that grand climacteric I shall have some very sweet
memories.”
“It would be interesting to know what you will think of the American
girl—then.”
“I can think only one way of her,” said Tranton firmly, and he put away
his pipe as he might have taken off his hat. “She puzzles the foreigner,
but she need not puzzle us after all. I was reading the other day a
British officer’s estimate of our volunteers in Luzon. ‘They might be
described,’ he says, ‘as a great military paradox—a body of men of
magnificent physique, possessing perfect discipline, and yet without any
discipline at all.’ It occurred to me that much the same thing might be
said about the American girl. She doesn’t appear to have much discipline,
but she has as much as her brothers, and evidently she has all she needs
and the sort she needs.”
“If you had found her undisciplined, Tranton, you would have seen your
duty.”
“I have no doubt that she has acquired a certain discipline from me—from
her privilege of disciplining me. She will manage her husband better
because she has been able to practise on me. She has given us new ideals.
‘She never suggests an inferiority that makes her lovely.’ We can’t
imagine her lovely that way. She is never a ‘sad ungathered rose.’ She
isn’t gathered. Sometimes I wish she was a shade less practical; but
I generally attribute this wish to the wrong pipe or a streak of ugly
weather. She only reflects the spirit of the age. The other day, in a
moment of curiosity, I ran into one of those highly moral restaurants
that have Biblical texts on the walls, and there, under the gorgeously
lettered beatitude, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart,’ was the brutal
admonition in plain black and white, ‘Keep your eye on your hat.’ Under
the sign, ‘Blessed is the matchmaker,’ a man should be able to read,
‘Keep your eye on your head.’ The world knows its business, and I suppose
it is a better world than it ever was before. Yet it seems as if it must
be getting harder to write poetry about it. What should you say to that?”
“I should say that if the world is better than it was, and that if it
really is harder to write poetry about it, so much the worse for poetry.
The joke isn’t on the world. I certainly do not think there is less real
poetry in the world. Perhaps people live poetry more and write poetry
less. Your American girls will have to look into this matter. The other
day one of the magazinists discussed ‘The Passing of the Man Poet.’
Suppose this does happen, who is to celebrate the American girl as only
verse can celebrate her? Are her praises only to be sung in a frowsy,
pipish cave at eleven-thirty by two doting, sentimental men? Here we are
sliding into the night of the century. What a collection a century of her
gowns and bonnets would make!—those high-waisted, clinging things, and
the ‘pokes’ she wore in the morning of the century; the slope-shouldered,
balloon-skirted affairs she put on at noon; the heaped enigmas she
taunted the world with in the afternoon, and the modern _décolleté_
paradox which little Tony Atwell explained in calling it a ‘coming out’
dress. We have become very plain and unpoetical, Tranton, but they are
as picturesque as ever. They symbolize for us the eternal freshness, the
unconquerable youth of nature. They preserve and transmit the primitive
gayeties of art, the natural impulses of a younger world. The note of our
raiment is _blasé_; hers gives token of an unjaded joy in the beautiful.”
“Sentiment,” said Tranton, “is like a cigar. You see only the smoke by
daylight, the fire at night.”
“I don’t like that at all, for, by and by the cigar burns out.”
“Then you light another.”
“And if you do that too often you incur the smoker’s heart. Give heed to
that, Tranton. Don’t tempt Providence. The day will come when your magic
will wane of its power, when your ear will grow dull to the poetry of
life, unless—”
“I never wrote poetry but once,” said Tranton, in a voice that scarcely
explained whether he was speaking to the mandarin or to me. “Perhaps
that was because I never _lived_ poetry but once.” Then he stopped as
if he had said more than he should, and reaching for his pipe he began
filling it again, deliberately. When he had finished this labor and had
the smoke rising again, he reached down and drew out one of the drawers
of the desk and lifted a little ebony box. This he placed on the desk,
and opened casually with his left hand, pulling hard at the pipe and
staring straight before him. From out the velvet recesses of the box came
a miniature photograph framed in gold.
“I think I never showed you that,” said Tranton simply.
“You never did,” I answered.
I had seen the face if I had not seen the picture before. The picture
called up the breathing loveliness of a young girl with frank American
eyes, and lips that always seemed about to ask the question her eyes
answered; a girl with wonderful hair, and above all, with a manner which
the word “charm” seems but vaguely to suggest. Every one liked Celeste.
It was a great shock when suddenly they took her away to Colorado.... I
remember the wonderful glow of flowers when they carried her out of the
church....
Tranton said not a word. It was plain enough....
We sat there silently for a moment. I held the miniature in my hand.
“Tranton,” I said, not knowing what else to say, “I guess the women
understand you pretty well, after all.”
There was a moment of silence.
“I am very easy,” said Tranton, “—to them.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
IX
WITH AN ENGAGED GIRL
[Illustration]
_Miss Velrose and Rollington will be engaged within twenty-four hours._
In the sanctuary of love we find many who came to scoff and remain to
pray; and Cupid in the sacristy, tugging at his vestments, is guilty of a
purely voluntary and perhaps not wholly decorous drooping of one eyelid.
_Miss Velrose and Rollington have come back from the boathouse. They are
sitting on the stone bench under that maple._
Ah! Cupid has changed! Now he is reared in a kindergarten and is
object-taught rather than book-taught. Arrows have gone out. Anyway,
they sometimes were geared with a white feather. Cupid is now using a
repeater—and smokeless powder. You can’t locate him.
_It is not so much that there is any difference in Rollington. The
difference is in Miss Velrose. I have seen it coming on. They will be
engaged to-day._
A man might propose and give no sign. There may be nothing absurd in the
supposition that men ceased going on their knees when they abandoned
knee-breeches and began wearing trousers, to which such an attitude is
assumed to be an injustice. The theory has a chronological plausibility.
But doubtless we shall find that there are other, if less pictorial,
reasons for the change.
_Hello! they have left the bench under the maple! Where did they go? It
is a dangerously fine day. A proposal on such a day shouldn’t be binding._
Probably a general decadence in the habit of bending the knee has
something to do with the disappearance of this feature of the proposal.
Indeed, it is quite easy to see that the whole language of gesture is
undergoing a change. Witness the present simplicity of the hat-removing
gesture as compared with the highly circuitous symbolism of the
seventeenth century; and there is quite as great a change between the
bow of our day and that of the colonial era as between the kowtow of
the Japanese, and the elegant salutation of the first Empire. Emerson
complained of hand-shaking, though he was never stingy of his own
friendly grasp, and the most cordial of modern hand-shakes is a great
modification. As Perry says, the girls now give you only one joint. All
merely physical expressions of deference are perceptibly dwindling. There
is no telling where these changes may stop. Kissing, long condemned both
by science and by cynicism, survives variously and without apparent
abatement. But we can not doubt that it is doomed. It may be the last of
the inter-personal physical salutations to disappear; yet it must go. It
is enough that we think, or at most look, our cordiality, and a woman,
trained to these subtle readings, could not see a man physically kneel
without laughing. In a telepathic millennium, not, perhaps, so far away,
men will propose and be accepted without sign or sound, and the thought
of photographic, or even of phonographic, record will be a meaningless
joke.
_O! there they are, crossing the tennis court in the direction of the
arbor near the pine grove._
We learn from chemistry that not merely elements but sequences affect
final quality. A sentimental situation may be tritely made up in this
way: A woman; a man; a question; an answer. But how variously these may
be put together!
_Undoubtedly they are visible through the foliage of the arbor if any one
chose to look. Let them alone._
It takes talent to reject a man gracefully; genius gracefully to accept
him. Many a woman loses her last chance of supremacy, if she does not
imperil her equality, in the manner of her acceptance. I have heard
a woman say that she never forgave her husband the artistic order and
self-possession of his proposal. The brutality of such a thing lies
in the fact that she cannot effectively do the same thing, though he
might deserve it. Deny her surprise or confusion or some assumption of
unpreparedness and you deny her a sophistry which sentiment seems by no
means ready to give up.
[Illustration]
_Of course they are still in the arbor. Who builds arbors? What do they
build them for? Have those who build them prophetic souls?_
Why, it was Miss Velrose herself who once spoke to me about unfair
advantages. I can hear her very words: “And he took her away to sit out
a dance,—yes, on a romantic balcony where the moon gave everything a
theatrical color; where you could hear only the chirp of the piccolo, and
the chuckle of the ’cello, and sang to her the song of songs. It wasn’t
fair, of course. No girl could stand that. And a man who could live up to
such a proposal would be a miracle.” “Be patient,” I urged, “there are
new miracles.” “But they are not called men,” she said.
_I know they are in the arbor, for there is Mrs. Velrose standing
squarely in the middle of the coach road staring in that direction._
[Illustration]
When I asked Miss Velrose the other day who was in love with her now,
she looked at me quizzically and asked: “Do you mean, who is abusing
me now?” I presume that is the only abuse Miss Velrose ever has had to
suffer,—that of young men who have tried to scold her into being less
obdurate. Women are not likely to reward abuse unless it is accompanied
by tremendous persistency. In spite of time and change, persistency
remains the greatest of all factors in courtship. Courting is like
advertising—you must keep it up.
_Mrs. Velrose has taken the butterfly net from the Winkinson midget and
is chasing a papilio ajax—in the direction of the arbor. Mrs. Velrose is
late._
It has been droll to see Mrs. Velrose guarding, with maternal
persistency, her tall, white, sparkling daughter. No human partridge has
ever more energetically fluttered to detract attention from the presence
of her young. Mrs. Velrose is a prodigious talker. A mother who is a
prodigious talker occupies a very important place in a girl’s fortunes.
_Yes, Mrs. Velrose is too late. Rollington and his companion have emerged
from the bower into the path that skirts the pine grove. Probably they
are going down to that wooded point by the lake shore. There is a rustic
seat there.... Yes, that is where they are going._
Beyond doubt, the sweet inanities of courtship would be less sweet if not
threatened with observation and interruption. The side glances of the
world, the caution of parents, the inhibitions of society all play their
parts.
_Mrs. Velrose has abandoned the papilio ajax. She is coming back._
A daughter is a great responsibility. But so also is a mother. It is
wrong to suppose that children feel no sense of responsibility for
their progenitors. That larger education which so many women receive
vicariously when their daughters go to college is one enforcing nice
discrimination upon the educator as well as upon the educated. The
American does not object to being governed. He only asks to select the
machinery and the engineer. The American’s daughter expounds him. If
every husband contrives to let his wife know how he likes to be managed,
every daughter may find ways of making the yoke of her daughterhood
exceeding light. In the debated matter of authority the American mother
gives that she may receive. I don’t suppose there ever was a more perfect
partnership, taken at its best, than the partnership of an American
mother and her daughter, until marriage, which dissolves all other
partnerships, brings its great readjustments....
[Illustration]
Miss Velrose’s voice ... behind my chair. I must have dozed off for a
while there.... Yes, it is Miss Velrose.
“It was an interesting picture,” laughed Miss Velrose from beyond the
back of another chair, “‘Philosophy Asleep.’”
“Philosophy has been caught napping before this—and by Woman.”
“I should think Philosophy might need a good deal of sleep.”
“It learns more when it is awake.” I looked straight across into Miss
Velrose’s burning blue eyes. “Where is Rollington?”
Miss Velrose underwent a slight change of color. “A person who has just
awakened often asks such curious questions,” she said.
“I was awake a little while ago—when you were walking on the path leading
from the pine grove. I wish you would be seated. It has been dull here.
And you must be tired after walking from the Point.”
“I sha’n’t sit down unless you can explain why you are so well acquainted
with my movements. Were you _tracking_ me?”
“Dear me, no! I had been sitting here reading the diary of a Puritan
woman, Jonathan Edwards’ sister.”
“Prying into a woman’s diary.”
“That is what diaries are written for—to be pried into. What better luck
could sister Esther ask than so reverent a reader. You must let me read
you a few scraps of it. We shall let Rollington go for the present.”
She gave me a queer look and seated herself in profile. Few girls have a
profile like Miss Velrose’s. She would delight a cameo cutter. Her nose
is just right, and noses are important in profiles.
“You may see,” I said, “that even these Puritan girls had their troubles.
It is on the first of May that sister Esther writes: ‘The time draws
near when I must determine which of the two gentlemen to proceed
with.’ _Which of the two_ gentlemen. Even in those days girls met with
an embarrassment of riches. What strikes me is that they were very
grateful. Her ‘considerable sense of spiritual things,’ in September, is
followed by this declaration: ‘I was also in the evening stirred up to
thankfulness by a new garment.’ Probably I never shall see your diary,
Miss Velrose, but if I should it would be with no expectation of finding
any thankfulness for the new garment. You modern girls take things
dreadfully for granted.”
“I didn’t understand that you were to preach a sermon,” murmured Miss
Velrose.
“You have labelled me Philosophy, and Philosophy must expound. Listen
again: ‘Thanked the Lord for more than usual comeliness of countenance.’
Imagine your expressing thanks for gifts in that direction! You take
_them_ for granted, too. But here is an important point. I think I shall
pigeonhole it for an essay on ‘The Antiquity of Feminine Skepticism.’ It
was in 1739 that Miss Edwards wrote: ‘Mr. Hopkins praised me and I began
to think that I was a clever creature and was much elated, but rejected
all as coming from Satan.’ No flattery for sister Esther! Ah, Hopkins!
you were almost clever enough! She ‘began to think’! If you had been a
little more adroit she might have believed altogether,—and what a comfort
it might have been to her! Probably, Hopkins, you didn’t give sufficient
attention to the little accessories. Maybe there was no romantic balcony
handy,—or an arbor on the edge of a grove; perhaps not even a rustic seat
on a wooded point overlooking a lovely violet lake.”
“The trouble is,” said Miss Velrose, “that men are so poor in invention.
They are very dependent on accessories.”
“But their dependence on accessories, on a correct setting for the scene,
is the result, first, of a becoming diffidence; second, of an evolved
delicacy. Let us suppose, for a moment, that a fellow is proposing to a
girl.”
“How droll!” said Miss Velrose, still keeping her profile in position.
“In other words, fancy the most delicate situation in the processes of
civilization. He has a certain thing to ask; she has a certain thing to
answer. When it has gone so far, it is not so much what he asks as how he
asks it. It is like lighting a Welsbach lamp. Sometimes it blazes up in
a yellow, smoky flame. Then you have to turn it out and start again. You
never can tell why the flame acts so. The flame has its own reasons for
coquetting with the match.”
Miss Velrose gave a little snort.
“Of course the girl has the advantage. That is as it should be. It is
like one of those suits in court where the defendant has the affirmative.
She knows what he is going to ask. He doesn’t know what she is going
to answer—then. She doesn’t know how many times he can be made to
ask—whether there is more than one ask in him. There is a presumptive
limit to his persistency and to her discrimination. If a girl is far
enough gone, time, place and manner are of no importance. If she doesn’t
like him quite so well, she might waive time and place, perhaps. There
are infinite variations.”
“I was afraid you were going through them all,” said Miss Velrose.
“But above everything,” I pursued in defiance of Miss Velrose’s irony,
“he must be definite. I once heard a girl say, ‘I believe I was proposed
to last night, but I am not sure.’ Some men weakly dread to ask the old
question in the old way. They introduce dangerous artistic variations.”
“Generally,” declared Miss Velrose, “it isn’t art; it is caution. They
wish to be dead sure before they are quite definite. They are like
governments who throw out a hint of a proposed movement to see how much
and how many of the newspapers will howl.”
“You think he should plunge in with a gambler’s defiance. You justify
the gambling instinct when woman is the stakes.”
“It is cowardly to want to be sure.”
“It is worse than cowardly, for a man never can be sure. Yet a proposal
is a big investment to a sensitive man. He can’t afford as many proposals
as she can.”
[Illustration]
“How could you like him unless he dared to lose all? If he is sure, the
greater part of the compliment is absent. The greater the odds against
him, the more it will hurt him to lose, the finer the honor he pays her.”
“Yet because he wants to win he must attend to every point. I only wish
to defend him against your accessories imputation. There are kinds of
courage you wouldn’t wish him to have. He may look an enemy in the eye,
but he must not face the woman to whom he proposes if he wishes her to
believe that he has a spark of sensibility. I once heard a man say that
when he proposed he sat opposite a mirror. The brute!”
Miss Velrose’s cameo relaxed, and dissolved into a three-quarter view as
her burning blue eyes turned toward me.
“Don’t!” I cried. “Don’t look at me that way, or I shall have to stop
expounding! You prove that what I say is doubly true. Suppose she looked
at _him_ that way when he was in the middle of it?”
“Suppose that was part of her test?”
“Impossible! Not in that crisis. The presumption is that she has
inflicted that at an earlier stage. To be sure, if she wants to pile on
the agony there is no one to prevent her. Be honest—shouldn’t you be
afraid to live with a man who could look you in the eye when he proposed?
Should you expect him to anticipate composedly living with a girl who
could look him in the eye when she answered him?”
Miss Velrose laughed softly. “What do you suppose Lady Mary Montagu meant
when she said that women see men with their ears? Didn’t she mean that
they listen too much? Didn’t she mean that we should go into matrimony
with our eyes open?”
“I have not the presumption to analyze the cynicism of Lady Mary. She
said some rather mean things about men. But let that go. You never could
even imitate her. It isn’t at all in your line. I am sure of that or I
shouldn’t tease you.”
“Are you teasing me?” she asked, lifting her brows and lowering her
lashes.
[Illustration]
“Does that mean that no one ever has dared to tease you, and that you
don’t even know the signs? When Rollington teases you, is it very
different?”
“Rollington never teased me.”
“‘Never _teased_ me.’ _Teased_—past tense. Then I am right.”
Miss Velrose’s eyes were not as steady as she could have wished. She is
a good tease herself. I owed her a few grudges. “Right about what?” she
asked with a charming effect of indifference.
“Right about that rustic bench. Forgive me. A man so seldom is right
that you can’t expect him to be wholly composed when he blunders into
anything.”
“It is nice to see you so easily pleased. But just as a matter of
reasonableness,” added Miss Velrose, “a past tense might have two
meanings.”
“True,” I admitted. “It might. I admit that. But when one alternative
is supported by unmistakable signs why consider the other? Look at
Rollington.”
She bit her lip, and did not turn her head. Rollington was sauntering up
the path from the boathouse. He was endeavoring to look _ennuyé_.
“He is trying to look calm,” I said, “but it is a case of radiant
repression. Rollington is a fine fellow. Sometimes the right thing
happens. I am going to be more of an optimist than ever—even though you
may never speak to me again.”
“There are several things,” said Miss Velrose very steadily, but with a
little amused flutter of the lips, “which some one should say to you.”
“Oh, some one has!” I answered, getting up. “Don’t feel that you have to
discipline me merely from a sense of duty.”
“I abandon you to your own conscience.”
“What cruelty!—you knowing that it is a Scotch conscience!”
“Your sophistry will help you out,” said Miss Velrose, in a voice as if
she knew that Rollington was very near.
“I have at least one virtue,” I said. “I can keep a secret.”
A proposition which is perfectly apparent.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
X
WITH A BRIDE
[Illustration]