Miss Adgate received calls for a month; paid them--was dined--was
less wined than vastly cocktailed,--in simple or elaborate New England
fashion. She returned these hospitalities and she discovered that
Oldbridge New and Oldbridge Old held agreeable people. If they treated
her a little as an Egeria she accepted the rôle without fuss and gave to
modesty its due.
Some of these new acquaintances, of a pretty taste in letters, on far
more than nodding terms with art, had, after years spent abroad--fallen
like herself alack, upon a day! Alack the day on which we come to the
disputably sage conclusion that East,--West.... We know, we learn--too
late, sometimes alas, the fatal rest! And they had cast behind them the
dust of the East, and they had turned Westward with a very lively
sense of the superior enchantments of Europe. But once at home a
devout appreciation of the sweet repose ('tis the just phrase), an
imperceptible abandonment to that soothing peace which hovers insidious
over a New England homestead, ah, ye rewards of Virtue! these had
quietly engulfed in sodden well-being, the finer European impressions.
Miss Adgate a little later, perceived that these wise people--settled
ere long unblushingly to New Englandism, never again intended to budge.
They had accepted, deliberately, the prose of life. And Miss Adgate,
enamoured of New England, still kept her head enough to wonder, with
some dismay, whether she, too, if she stayed here, she, too, would
end by looking upon Oldbridge New and Oldbridge Old as the be-all and
end-all of existence! So many things spoke here to her heart. Her tender
spirit basked here, all day, in good will. But wasn't Oldbridge just a
trifle lacking in effervescence? And yes--didn't Oldbridge take itself
a bit solemnly? Ah, yes! And--yes--it had a distressing tendency to be
very serious about everything. To none of these states of mind had Ruth
been initiated, and every good Catholic knows that mirth is from God,
dullness from the Devil.
Miss Adgate, who had hitherto lived on the plane of an impersonal, if
somewhat facetious consideration of public matters,--of wit, persiflage;
Miss Adgate found when it came to small gossip that she was an irritated
listener. Carping criticism made her yawn, she became dumb, had
nothing to say. It is indeed a stupid trade! Moreover her soul had ever
disported in innocent folly, in gaiety and witty conversation. She soon
attracted those who cared for the same light stuff and Barracks
Hill became, ere long, the centre of a coterie of frolic, music, and
laughter, where personalities except in the ways of honest chaff were
tabooed--and no one's affairs, wonder of wonders! were commented upon
behind his back.