The witnesses of Mavering's successful efforts to make everybody like
him were interested in his differentiation of the attentions he offered
every age and sex from those he paid Alice. But while they all agreed
that there never was a sweeter fellow, they would have been puzzled to
say in just what this difference consisted, and much as they liked
him, the ladies of her cult were not quite satisfied with him till
they decided that it was marked by an anxiety, a timidity, which was
perfectly fascinating in a man so far from bashfulness as he. That is,
he did nice things for others without asking; but with her there was
always an explicit pause, and an implicit prayer and permission, first.
Upon this condition they consented to the glamour which he had for her,
and which was evident to every one probably but him.
Once agreeing that no one was good enough for Alice Pasmer, whose
qualities they felt that only women could really appreciate, they were
interested to see how near Mavering could come to being good enough; and
as the drama played itself before their eyes, they pleased themselves in
analysing its hero.
“He is not bashful, certainly,” said one of a little group who sat
midway of the piazza while Alice and Mavering walked up and down
together. “But don't you think he's modest? There's that difference, you
know.”
The lady addressed waited so long before answering that the young couple
came abreast of the group, and then she had to wait till they were out
of hearing. “Yes,” she said then, with a tender, sighing thoughtfulness,
“I've felt that in him. And really think he is a very loveable nature.
The only question would be whether he wasn't too loveable.”
“Yes,” said the first lady, with the same kind of suspiration, “I know
what you mean. And I suppose they ought to be something more alike in
disposition.”
“Or sympathies?” suggested the other.
“Yes, or sympathies.”
A third lady laughed a little. “Mr. Mavering has so many sympathies that
he ought to be like her in some of them.”
“Do you mean that he's too sympathetic--that he isn't sincere?” asked
the first--a single lady of forty-nine, a Miss Cotton, who had a little
knot of conscience between her pretty eyebrows, tied there by the
unremitting effort of half a century to do and say exactly the truth,
and to find it out.
Mrs. Brinkley, whom she addressed, was of that obesity which seems often
to incline people to sarcasm. “No, I don't think he's insincere. I think
he always means what he says and does--Well, do you think a little more
concentration of good-will would hurt him for Miss Pasmer's purpose--if
she has it?”
“Yes, I see,” said Miss Cotton. She waited, with her kind eyes fixed
wistfully upon Alice, for the young people to approach and get by. “I
wonder what the men think of him?”
“You might ask Miss Anderson,” said Mrs. Brinkley.
“Oh, do you think they tell her?”
“Not that exactly,” said Mrs. Brinkley, shaking with good-humoured
pleasure in her joke.
“Her voice--oh yes. She and Alice are great friends, of course.”
“I should think,” said Mrs. Stamwell, the second speaker, “that Mr.
Mavering would be jealous sometimes--till he looked twice.”
“Yes,” said Miss Cotton, obliged to admit the force of the remark,
but feeling that Mr. Mavering had been carried out of the field of her
vision by the turn of the talk. “I suppose,” she continued, “that he
wouldn't be so well liked by other young men as she is by other girls,
do you think?”
“I don't think, as a rule,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “that men are half so
appreciative of one another as women are. It's most amusing to see the
open scorn with which two young fellows treat each other if a pretty
girl introduces them.”
All the ladies joined in the laugh with which Mrs. Brinkley herself led
off. But Miss Cotton stopped laughing first.
“Do you mean,”, she asked, “that if a gentleman were generally popular
with gentlemen it would be--”
“Because he wasn't generally so with women? Something like that--if
you'll leave Mr. Mavering out of the question. Oh, how very good of
them!” she broke off, and all the ladies glanced at Mavering and Alice
where they had stopped at the further end of the piazza, and were
looking off. “Now I can probably finish before they get back here again.
What I do mean, Miss Cotton, is that neither sex willingly accepts the
favourites of the other.”
“Yes,” said Miss Cotton admissively.
“And all that saves Miss Pasmer is that she has not only the qualities
that women like in women, but some of the qualities that men, like in
them. She's thoroughly human.”
A little sensation, almost a murmur, not wholly of assent, went round
that circle which had so nearly voted Alice a saint.
“In the first place, she likes to please men.”
“Oh!” came from the group.
“And that makes them like her--if it doesn't go too far, as her mother
says.”
The ladies all laughed, recognising a common turn of phrase in Mrs.
Pasmer.
“I should think,” said Mrs. Stamwell, “that she would believe a little
in heredity if she noticed that in her daughter;” and the ladies laughed
again.
“Then,” Mrs. Brinkley resumed concerning Alice, “she has a very pretty
face--an extremely pretty face; she has a tender voice, and she's very,
very graceful--in rather an odd way; perhaps it's only a fascinating
awkwardness. Then she dresses--or her mother dresses her--exquisitely.”
The ladies, with another sensation, admitted the perfect accuracy with
which these points had been touched.
“That's what men like, what they fall in love with, what Mr. Mavering's
in love with this instant. It's no use women's flattering themselves
that they don't, for they do. The rest of the virtues and graces and
charms are for women. If that serious girl could only know the silly
things that that amiable simpleton is taken with in her, she'd--”
“Never speak to him again?” suggested Miss Cotton.
“No, I don't say that. But she would think twice before marrying him.”
“And then do it,” said Mrs. Stamwell pensively, with eyes that seemed
looking far into the past.
“Yes, and quite right to do it,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “I don't know that
we should be very proud ourselves if we confessed just what caught our
fancy in our husbands. For my part I shouldn't like to say how much a
light hat that Mr. Brinkley happened to be wearing had to do with the
matter.”
The ladies broke into another laugh, and then checked themselves,
so that Mrs. Pasmer, coming out of the corridor upon them, naturally
thought they were laughing at her. She reflected that if she had been
in their place she would have shown greater tact by not stopping just at
that instant.
But she did not mind. She knew that they talked her over, but having a
very good conscience, she simply talked them over in return. “Have you
seen my daughter within a few minutes?” she asked.
“She was with Mr. Mavering at the end of the piazza a moment ago,”
said Mrs. Brinkley. “They must leave just gone round the corner of the
building.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Pasmer. She had a novel, with her finger between its
leaves, pressed against her heart, after the manner of ladies coming out
on hotel piazzas. She sat down and rested it on her knee, with her hand
over the top.
Miss Cotton bent forward, and Mrs. Pasmer lifted her fingers to let her
see the name of the book.
“Oh yes,” said Miss Cotton. “But he's so terribly pessimistic, don't you
think?”
“What is it?” asked Mrs. Brinkley.
“Fumee,” said Mrs. Pasmer, laying the book title upward on her lap for
every one to see.
“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley, fanning herself. “Tourguenief. That man
gave me the worst quarter of an hour with his 'Lisa' that I ever had.”
“That's the same as the 'Nichee des Gentilshommes', isn't it?” asked
Mrs. Pasmer, with the involuntary superiority of a woman who reads her
Tourguenief in French.
“I don't know. I had it in English. I don't build my ships to cross the
sea in, as Emerson says; I take those I find built.”
“Ah! I was already on the other side,” said Mrs. Pasmer softly. She
added: “I must get Lisa. I like a good heart-break; don't you? If that's
what gave you the bad moment.”
“Heart-break? Heart-crush! Where Lavretsky comes back old to the scene
of his love for Lisa, and strikes that chord on the piano--well, I
simply wonder that I'm alive to recommend the book to you.
“Do you know,” said Miss Cotton, very deferentially, “that your daughter
always made me think of Lisa?”
“Indeed!” cried Mrs. Pasmer, not wholly pleased, but gratified that she
was able to hide her displeasure. “You make me very curious.”
“Oh, I doubt if you'll see more than a mere likeness of temperament,”
Mrs. Brinkley interfered bluntly. “All the conditions are so different.
There couldn't be an American Lisa. That's the charm of these Russian
tragedies. You feel that they're so perfectly true there, and so
perfectly impossible here. Lavretsky would simply have got himself
divorced from Varvara Pavlovna, and no clergyman could have objected to
marrying him to Lisa.”
“That's what I mean by his pessimism,” said Miss Cotton. “He leaves you
no hope. And I think that despair should never be used in a novel except
for some good purpose; don't you, Mrs. Brinkley?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “I was trying to think what good purpose
despair could be put to, in a book or out of it.”
“I don't think,” said Mrs. Pasmer, referring to the book in her lap,
“that he leaves you altogether in despair here, unless you'd rather he'd
run off with Irene than married Tatiana.”
“Oh, I certainly didn't wish that;” said Miss Cotton, in self-defence,
as if the shot had been aimed at her.
“The book ends with a marriage; there's no denying that,” said Mrs.
Brinkley, with a reserve in her tone which caused Mrs. Pasmer to
continue for her--
“And marriage means happiness--in a book.”
“I'm not sure that it does in this case. The time would come, after
Litvinof had told Tatiana everything, when she would have to ask
herself, and not once only, what sort of man it really was who was
willing to break his engagement and run off with another man's wife, and
whether he could ever repent enough for it. She could make excuses for
him, and would, but at the bottom of her heart--No, it seems to me
that there, almost for the only time, Tourguenief permitted himself an
amiable weakness. All that part of the book has the air of begging the
question.”
“But don't you see,” said Miss Cotton, leaning forward in the way she
had when very earnest, “that he means to show that her love is strong
enough for all that?”
“But he doesn't, because it isn't. Love isn't strong enough to save
people from unhappiness through each other's faults. Do you suppose that
so many married people are unhappy in each other because they don't love
each other? No; it's because they do love each other that their faults
are such a mutual torment. If they were indifferent, they wouldn't mind
each other's faults. Perhaps that's the reason why there are so many
American divorces; if they didn't care, like Europeans, who don't marry
for love, they could stand it.”
“Then the moral is,” said Mrs. Pasmer, at her lightest through the
surrounding gravity, “that as all Americans marry for love, only
Americans who have been very good ought to get married.”
“I'm not sure that the have-been goodness is enough either,” said Mrs.
Brinkley, willing to push it to the absurd. “You marry a man's future as
well as his past.”
“Dear me! You are terribly exigeante, Mrs. Brinkley,” said Mrs. Pasmer.
“One can afford to be so--in the abstract,” answered Mrs. Brinkley.
They all stopped talking and looked at John Munt, who was coming toward
them, and each felt a longing to lay the matter before him.
There was probably not a woman among them but had felt more, read more,
and thought more than John Munt, but he was a man, and the mind of a
man is the court of final appeal for the wisest women. Till some man has
pronounced upon their wisdom, they do not know whether it is wisdom or
not.
Munt drew up his chair, and addressed himself to the whole group through
Mrs. Pasmer: “We are thinking of getting up a little picnic to-morrow.”