AFTER dropping Bartley Hubbard at the Events building, Lapham drove on
down Washington Street to Nankeen Square at the South End, where he had
lived ever since the mistaken movement of society in that direction
ceased. He had not built, but had bought very cheap of a terrified
gentleman of good extraction who discovered too late that the South End
was not the thing, and who in the eagerness of his flight to the Back
Bay threw in his carpets and shades for almost nothing. Mrs. Lapham
was even better satisfied with their bargain than the Colonel himself,
and they had lived in Nankeen Square for twelve years. They had seen
the saplings planted in the pretty oval round which the houses were
built flourish up into sturdy young trees, and their two little girls
in the same period had grown into young ladies; the Colonel's tough
frame had expanded into the bulk which Bartley's interview indicated;
and Mrs. Lapham, while keeping a more youthful outline, showed the
sharp print of the crow's-foot at the corners of her motherly eyes, and
certain slight creases in her wholesome cheeks. The fact that they
lived in an unfashionable neighbourhood was something that they had
never been made to feel to their personal disadvantage, and they had
hardly known it till the summer before this story opens, when Mrs.
Lapham and her daughter Irene had met some other Bostonians far from
Boston, who made it memorable. They were people whom chance had
brought for the time under a singular obligation to the Lapham ladies,
and they were gratefully recognisant of it. They had ventured--a
mother and two daughters--as far as a rather wild little Canadian
watering-place on the St. Lawrence, below Quebec, and had arrived some
days before their son and brother was expected to join them. Two of
their trunks had gone astray, and on the night of their arrival the
mother was taken violently ill. Mrs. Lapham came to their help, with
her skill as nurse, and with the abundance of her own and her
daughter's wardrobe, and a profuse, single-hearted kindness. When a
doctor could be got at, he said that but for Mrs. Lapham's timely care,
the lady would hardly have lived. He was a very effusive little
Frenchman, and fancied he was saying something very pleasant to
everybody.
A certain intimacy inevitably followed, and when the son came he was
even more grateful than the others. Mrs. Lapham could not quite
understand why he should be as attentive to her as to Irene; but she
compared him with other young men about the place, and thought him
nicer than any of them. She had not the means of a wider comparison;
for in Boston, with all her husband's prosperity, they had not had a
social life. Their first years there were given to careful getting on
Lapham's part, and careful saving on his wife's. Suddenly the money
began to come so abundantly that she need not save; and then they did
not know what to do with it. A certain amount could be spent on
horses, and Lapham spent it; his wife spent on rich and rather ugly
clothes and a luxury of household appointments. Lapham had not yet
reached the picture-buying stage of the rich man's development, but
they decorated their house with the costliest and most abominable
frescoes; they went upon journeys, and lavished upon cars and hotels;
they gave with both hands to their church and to all the charities it
brought them acquainted with; but they did not know how to spend on
society. Up to a certain period Mrs. Lapham had the ladies of her
neighbourhood in to tea, as her mother had done in the country in her
younger days. Lapham's idea of hospitality was still to bring a
heavy-buying customer home to pot-luck; neither of them imagined
dinners.
Their two girls had gone to the public schools, where they had not got
on as fast as some of the other girls; so that they were a year behind
in graduating from the grammar-school, where Lapham thought that they
had got education enough. His wife was of a different mind; she would
have liked them to go to some private school for their finishing. But
Irene did not care for study; she preferred house-keeping, and both the
sisters were afraid of being snubbed by the other girls, who were of a
different sort from the girls of the grammar-school; these were mostly
from the parks and squares, like themselves. It ended in their going
part of a year. But the elder had an odd taste of her own for reading,
and she took some private lessons, and read books out of the
circulating library; the whole family were amazed at the number she
read, and rather proud of it.
They were not girls who embroidered or abandoned themselves to
needle-work. Irene spent her abundant leisure in shopping for herself
and her mother, of whom both daughters made a kind of idol, buying her
caps and laces out of their pin-money, and getting her dresses far
beyond her capacity to wear. Irene dressed herself very stylishly, and
spent hours on her toilet every day. Her sister had a simpler taste,
and, if she had done altogether as she liked, might even have slighted
dress. They all three took long naps every day, and sat hours together
minutely discussing what they saw out of the window. In her
self-guided search for self-improvement, the elder sister went to many
church lectures on a vast variety of secular subjects, and usually came
home with a comic account of them, and that made more matter of talk
for the whole family. She could make fun of nearly everything; Irene
complained that she scared away the young men whom they got acquainted
with at the dancing-school sociables. They were, perhaps, not the
wisest young men.
The girls had learned to dance at Papanti's; but they had not belonged
to the private classes. They did not even know of them, and a great
gulf divided them from those who did. Their father did not like
company, except such as came informally in their way; and their mother
had remained too rustic to know how to attract it in the sophisticated
city fashion. None of them had grasped the idea of European travel;
but they had gone about to mountain and sea-side resorts, the mother
and the two girls, where they witnessed the spectacle which such
resorts present throughout New England, of multitudes of girls, lovely,
accomplished, exquisitely dressed, humbly glad of the presence of any
sort of young man; but the Laphams had no skill or courage to make
themselves noticed, far less courted by the solitary invalid, or
clergyman, or artist. They lurked helplessly about in the hotel
parlours, looking on and not knowing how to put themselves forward.
Perhaps they did not care a great deal to do so. They had not a
conceit of themselves, but a sort of content in their own ways that one
may notice in certain families. The very strength of their mutual
affection was a barrier to worldly knowledge; they dressed for one
another; they equipped their house for their own satisfaction; they
lived richly to themselves, not because they were selfish, but because
they did not know how to do otherwise. The elder daughter did not care
for society, apparently. The younger, who was but three years younger,
was not yet quite old enough to be ambitious of it. With all her
wonderful beauty, she had an innocence almost vegetable. When her
beauty, which in its immaturity was crude and harsh, suddenly ripened,
she bloomed and glowed with the unconsciousness of a flower; she not
merely did not feel herself admired, but hardly knew herself
discovered. If she dressed well, perhaps too well, it was because she
had the instinct of dress; but till she met this young man who was so
nice to her at Baie St. Paul, she had scarcely lived a detached,
individual life, so wholly had she depended on her mother and her
sister for her opinions, almost her sensations. She took account of
everything he did and said, pondering it, and trying to make out
exactly what he meant, to the inflection of a syllable, the slightest
movement or gesture. In this way she began for the first time to form
ideas which she had not derived from her family, and they were none the
less her own because they were often mistaken.
Some of the things that he partly said, partly looked, she reported to
her mother, and they talked them over, as they did everything relating
to these new acquaintances, and wrought them into the novel point of
view which they were acquiring. When Mrs. Lapham returned home, she
submitted all the accumulated facts of the case, and all her own
conjectures, to her husband, and canvassed them anew.
At first he was disposed to regard the whole affair as of small
importance, and she had to insist a little beyond her own convictions
in order to counteract his indifference.
"Well, I can tell you," she said, "that if you think they were not the
nicest people you ever saw, you're mightily mistaken. They had about
the best manners; and they had been everywhere, and knew everything. I
declare it made me feel as if we had always lived in the backwoods. I
don't know but the mother and the daughters would have let you feel so
a little, if they'd showed out all they thought; but they never did;
and the son--well, I can't express it, Silas! But that young man had
about perfect ways."
"Seem struck up on Irene?" asked the Colonel.
"How can I tell? He seemed just about as much struck up on me. Anyway,
he paid me as much attention as he did her. Perhaps it's more the way,
now, to notice the mother than it used to be."
Lapham ventured no conjecture, but asked, as he had asked already, who
the people were.
Mrs. Lapham repeated their name. Lapham nodded his head. "Do you know
them? What business is he in?"
"I guess he ain't in anything," said Lapham.
"They were very nice," said Mrs. Lapham impartially.
"Well, they'd ought to be," returned the Colonel. "Never done anything
else."
"They didn't seem stuck up," urged his wife.
"They'd no need to--with you. I could buy him and sell him, twice
over."
This answer satisfied Mrs. Lapham rather with the fact than with her
husband. "Well, I guess I wouldn't brag, Silas," she said.
In the winter the ladies of this family, who returned to town very
late, came to call on Mrs. Lapham. They were again very polite. But
the mother let drop, in apology for their calling almost at nightfall,
that the coachman had not known the way exactly.
"Nearly all our friends are on the New Land or on the Hill."
There was a barb in this that rankled after the ladies had gone; and on
comparing notes with her daughter, Mrs. Lapham found that a barb had
been left to rankle in her mind also.
"They said they had never been in this part of the town before."
Upon a strict search of her memory, Irene could not report that the
fact had been stated with anything like insinuation, but it was that
which gave it a more penetrating effect.
"Oh, well, of course," said Lapham, to whom these facts were referred.
"Those sort of people haven't got much business up our way, and they
don't come. It's a fair thing all round. We don't trouble the Hill or
the New Land much."
"We know where they are," suggested his wife thoughtfully.
"Yes," assented the Colonel. "I know where they are. I've got a lot
of land over on the Back Bay."
"You have?" eagerly demanded his wife.
"Want me to build on it?" he asked in reply, with a quizzical smile.
"I guess we can get along here for a while."