I.

From his place on the floor of the Hemenway Gymnasium Mr. Elbridge G.

Mavering looked on at the Class Day gaiety with the advantage which his

stature, gave him over most people there. Hundreds of these were pretty

girls, in a great variety of charming costumes, such as the eclecticism

of modern fashion permits, and all sorts of ingenious compromises

between walking dress and ball dress. It struck him that the young men

on whose arms they hung, in promenading around the long oval within the

crowd of stationary spectators, were very much younger than students

used to be, whether they wore the dress-coats of the Seniors or the

cut-away of the Juniors and Sophomores; and the young girls themselves

did not look so old as he remembered them in his day. There was a band

playing somewhere, and the galleries were well filled with spectators

seated at their ease, and intent on the party-coloured turmoil of the

floor, where from time to time the younger promenaders broke away from

the ranks into a waltz, and after some turns drifted back, smiling and

controlling their quick breath, and resumed their promenade. The

place was intensely light, in the candour of a summer day which had no

reserves; and the brilliancy was not broken by the simple decorations.

Ropes of wild laurel twisted up the pine posts of the aisles, and swung

in festoons overhead; masses of tropical plants in pots were set along

between the posts on one side of the room; and on the other were the

lunch tables, where a great many people were standing about, eating

chicken and salmon salads, or strawberries and ice-cream, and drinking

claret-cup. From the whole rose that blended odour of viands, of

flowers, of stuff's, of toilet perfumes, which is the characteristic

expression of, all social festivities, and which exhilarates or

depresses--according as one is new or old to it.

Elbridge Mavering kept looking at the faces of the young men as if he

expected to see a certain one; then he turned his eyes patiently upon.

the faces around him. He had been introduced to a good many persons, but

he had come to that time of life when an introduction; unless charged

with some special interest, only adds the pain of doubt to the wearisome

encounter of unfamiliar people; and he had unconsciously put on the

severity of a man who finds himself without acquaintance where

others are meeting friends, when a small man, with a neatly trimmed

reddish-grey beard and prominent eyes, stepped in front of him, and

saluted him with the “Hello, Mavering!” of a contemporary.

His face, after a moment of question, relaxed into joyful recognition.

“Why, John Munt! is that you?” he said, and he took into his large moist

palm the dry little hand of his friend, while they both broke out into

the incoherencies of people meeting after a long time. Mr. Mavering

spoke in it voice soft yet firm, and with a certain thickness of tongue;

which gave a boyish charm to his slow, utterance, and Mr. Munt used the

sort of bronchial snuffle sometimes cultivated among us as a chest tone.

But they were cut short in their intersecting questions and exclamations

by the presence of the lady who detached herself from Mr. Munt's arm as

if to leave him the freer for his hand-shaking.

“Oh!” he said, suddenly recurring to her; “let me introduce you to

Mrs. Pasmer, Mr. Mavering,” and the latter made a bow that creased his

waistcoat at about the height of Mrs. Pasmer's pretty little nose.

His waistcoat had the curve which waistcoats often describe at his age;

and his heavy shoulders were thrown well back to balance this curve.

His coat hung carelessly open; the Panama hat in his hand suggested a

certain habitual informality of dress, but his smoothly shaven large

handsome face, with its jaws slowly ruminant upon nothing, intimated the

consequence of a man accustomed to supremacy in a subordinate place.

Mrs. Pasmer looked up to acknowledge the introduction with a sort of

pseudo-respectfulness which it would be hard otherwise to describe.

Whether she divined or not that she was in the presence of a magnate of

some sort, she was rather superfluously demure in the first two or three

things she said, and was all sympathy and interest in the meeting of

these old friends. They declared that they had not seen each other for

twenty years, or, at any rate, not since '59. She listened while they

disputed about the exact date, and looked from time to time at Mr. Munt,

as if for some explanation of Mr. Mavering; but Munt himself, when she

saw him last, had only just begun to commend himself to society, which

had since so fully accepted him, and she had so suddenly, the moment

before, found her self hand in glove with him that she might well have

appealed to a third person for some explanation of Munt. But she was not

a woman to be troubled much by this momentary mystification, and she

was not embarrassed at all when Munt said, as if it had all been

pre-arranged, “Well, now, Mrs. Pasmer, if you'll let me leave you with

Mr. Mavering a moment, I'll go off and bring that unnatural child to

you; no use dragging you round through this crowd longer.”

He made a gesture intended, in the American manner, to be at once polite

and jocose, and was gone, leaving Mrs. Pasmer a little surprised, and

Mr. Mavering in some misgiving, which he tried to overcome pressing his

jaws together two or three times without speaking. She had no trouble

in getting in the first remark. “Isn't all this charming, Mr. Mavering?”

She spoke in a deep low voice, with a caressing manner, and stood

looking up, at Mr. Mavering with one shoulder shrugged and the

other drooped, and a tasteful composition of her fan and hands and

handkerchief at her waist.

“Yes, ma'am, it is,” said Mr. Mavering. He seemed to say ma'am to

her with a public or official accent, which sent Mrs. Primer's mind

fluttering forth to poise briefly at such conjectures as, “Congressman

from a country district? judge of the Common Pleas? bank president?

railroad superintendent? leading physician in a large town?--no, Mr.

Munt said Mister,” and then to return to her pretty blue eyes, and to

centre there in that pseudo-respectful attention under the arch of her

neat brows and her soberly crinkled grey-threaded brown hair and her

very appropriate bonnet. A bonnet, she said, was much more than half the

battle after forty, and it was now quite after forty with Mrs. Pasmer;

but she was very well dressed otherwise. Mr. Mavering went on to say,

with a deliberation that seemed an element of his unknown dignity,

whatever it might be, “A number of the young fellows together can give a

much finer spread, and make more of the day, in a place like this, than

we used to do in our rooms.”

“Ah, then you're a Harvard man too!” said Mrs. Primer to herself, with

surprise, which she kept to herself, and she said to Mavering: “Oh yes,

indeed! It's altogether better. Aren't they nice looking fellows?” she

said, putting up her glass to look at the promenaders.

“Yes,” Mr. Mavering assented. “I suppose,” he added, out of the

consciousness of his own relation to the affair--“I suppose you've a son

somewhere here?”

“Oh dear, no!” cried Mrs. Primer, with a mingling, superhuman, but

for her of ironical deprecation and derision. “Only a daughter, Mr.

Mavering.”

At this feat of Mrs. Pasmer's, Mr. Mavering looked at her with question

as to her precise intention, and ended by repeating, hopelessly, “Only a

daughter?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a sigh of the same irony, “only a poor,

despised young girl, Mr. Mavering.”

“You speak,” said Mr. Mavering, beginning to catch on a little, “as if

it were a misfortune,” and his, dignity broke up into a smile that had

its queer fascination.

“Why, isn't it?” asked Mrs. Pasmer.

“Well, I shouldn't have thought so.”

“Then you don't believe that all that old-fashioned chivalry and

devotion have gone out? You don't think the young men are all spoiled

nowadays, and expect the young ladies to offer them attentions?”

“No,” said Mr. Mavering slowly, as if recovering from the shock of the

novel ideas. “Do you?”

“Oh, I'm such a stranger in Boston--I've lived abroad so long--that I

don't know. One hears all kinds of things. But I'm so glad you're not

one of those--pessimists!”

“Well,” said Mr. Mavering, still thoughtfully, “I don't know that I can

speak by the card exactly. I can't say how it is now. I haven't been

at a Class Day spread since my own Class Day; I haven't even been at

Commencement more than once or twice. But in my time here we didn't

expect the young ladies to show us attentions; at any rate, we didn't

wait for them to do it. We were very glad, to be asked to meet them, and

we thought it an honour if the young ladies would let us talk or dance

with them, or take them to picnics. I don't think that any of them could

complain of want of attention.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, “that's what I preached, that's what I

prophesied, when I brought my daughter home from Europe. I told her that

a girl's life in America was one long triumph; but they say now that

girls have more attention in London even than in Cambridge. One hears

such dreadful things!”

“Like what?” asked Mr. Mavering, with the unserious interest which Mrs.

Primer made most people feel in her talk.

“Oh; it's too vast a subject. But they tell you about charming girls

moping the whole evening through at Boston parties, with no young men to

talk with, and sitting from the beginning to the end of an assembly and

not going on the floor once. They say that unless a girl fairly throws

herself at the young men's heads she isn't noticed. It's this terrible

disproportion of the sexes that's at the root of it, I suppose; it

reverses everything. There aren't enough young men to go half round, and

they know it, and take advantage of it. I suppose it began in the war.”

He laughed, and, “I should think,” he said, laying hold of a single

idea out of several which she had presented, “that there would always be

enough young men in Cambridge to go round.”

Mrs. Pasmer gave a little cry. “In Cambridge!”

“Yes; when I was in college our superiority was entirely numerical.”

“But that's all passed long ago, from what I hear,” retorted Mrs.

Pasmer. “I know very well that it used to be thought a great advantage

for a girl to be brought up in Cambridge, because it gave her

independence and ease of manner to have so many young men attentive

to her. But they say the students all go into Boston now, and if the

Cambridge girls want to meet them, they have to go there too. Oh, I

assure you that, from what I hear, they've changed all that since our

time, Mr. Mavering.”

Mrs. Pasmer was certainly letting herself go a little more than she

would have approved of in another. The result was apparent in the

jocosity of this heavy Mr. Mavering's reply.

“Well, then, I'm glad that I was of our time, and not of this wicked

generation. But I presume that unnatural supremacy of the young men is

brought low, so to speak, after marriage?”

Mrs. Primer let herself go a little further. “Oh, give us an equal

chance,” she laughed, “and we can always take care of ourselves, and

something more. They say,” she added, “that the young married women now

have all the attention that girls could wish.”

“H'm!” said Mr. Mavering, frowning. “I think I should be tempted to box

my boy's ears if I saw him paying another man's wife attention.”

“What a Roman father!” cried Mrs. Pasmer, greatly amused, and letting

herself go a little further yet. She said to herself that she really

must find out who this remarkable Mr. Mavering was, and she cast her eye

over the hall for some glimpse of the absent Munt, whose arm she meant

to take, and whose ear she meant to fill with questions. But she did not

see him, and something else suggested itself. “He probably wouldn't let

you see him, or if he did, you wouldn't know it.”

“How not know it?”

Mrs. Primer did not answer. “One hears such dreadful things. What do you

say--or you'll think I'm a terrible gossip--”

“Oh no;” said Mr. Mavering, impatient for the dreadful thing, whatever

it was.

Mrs. Primer resumed: “--to the young married women meeting last winter

just after a lot of pretty girls had came out, and magnanimously

resolving to give the Buds a chance in society?”

“The Buds?”

“Yes, the Rose-buds--the debutantes; it's an odious little word, but

everybody uses it. Don't you think that's a strange state of things

for America? But I can't believe all those things,” said Mrs. Pasmer,

flinging off the shadow of this lurid social condition. “Isn't this a

pretty scene?”

“Yes, it is,” Mr. Mavering admitted, withdrawing his mind gradually from

a consideration of Mrs. Pasmer's awful instances. “Yes!” he added, in

final self-possession. “The young fellows certainly do things in a great

deal better style nowadays than we used to.”

“Oh yes, indeed! And all those pretty girls do seem to be having such a

good time!”

“Yes; they don't have the despised and rejected appearance that you'd

like to have one believe.”

“Not in the least!” Mrs. Pasmer readily consented. “They look radiantly

happy. It shows that you can't trust anything that people say to you.”

She abandoned the ground she had just been taking without apparent shame

for her inconsistency. “I fancy it's pretty much as it's always been: if

a girl is attractive, the young men find it out.”

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Mavering, unbending with dignity, “the young married

women have held another meeting, and resolved to give the Buds one more

chance.”

“Oh, there are some pretty mature Roses here,” said Mrs. Pasmer,

laughing evasively. “But I suppose Class Day can never be taken from the

young girls.”

“I hope not,” said Mr. Mavering. His wandering eye fell upon some

young men bringing refreshments across the nave toward them, and he was

reminded to ask Mrs. Pasmer, “Will you have something to eat?” He had

himself had a good deal to eat, before he took up his position at the

advantageous point where John Munt had found him.

“Why, yes, thank you,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “I ought to say, 'An ice,

please,' but I'm really hungry, and--”

“I'll get you some of the salad,” said Mr. Mavering, with the increased

liking a man feels for a woman when she owns to an appetite. “Sit down

here,” he added, and he caught a vacant chair toward her. When he turned

about from doing so, he confronted a young gentleman coming up to

Mrs. Pasmer with a young lady on his arm, and making a very low bow of

relinquishment.