She burst into the room where her mother sat looking over some
housekeeping accounts. His kiss and his name were upon her lips; her
soul was full of him.
“Mamma!” she panted.
Her mother did not look round. She could have had no premonition of the
vital news that her daughter was bringing, and she went on comparing the
first autumn month's provision bill with that of the last spring month,
and trying to account for the difference.
The silence, broken by the rattling of the two bills in her mother's
hands as she glanced from one to the other through her glasses, seemed
suddenly impenetrable, and the prismatic world of the girl's rapture
burst like a bubble against it. There is no explanation of the effect
outside of temperament and overwrought sensibilities. She stared across
the room at her mother, who had not heard her, and then she broke into a
storm of tears.
“Alice!” cried her mother, with that sanative anger which comes to
rescue women from the terror of any sudden shock. “What is the matter
with you?--what do you mean?” She dropped both of the provision bills to
the floor, and started toward her daughter.
“Nothing--nothing! Let me go. I want to go to my room.” She tried to
reach the door beyond her mother.
“Indeed you shall not!” cried Mrs. Pasmer. “I will not have you behaving
so! What has happened to you? Tell me. You have frightened me half out
of my senses.”
The girl gave up her efforts to escape, and flung herself on the sofa,
with her face in the pillow, where she continued to sob. Her mother
began to relent at the sight of her passion. As a woman and as a mother
she knew her daughter, and she knew that this passion, whatever it was,
must have vent before there could be anything intelligible between them.
She did not press her with further question, but set about making her a
little more comfortable on the sofa; she pulled the pillow straight, and
dropped a light shawl over the girl's shoulders, so that she should not
take cold.
Then Mrs. Pasmer had made up her mind that Alice had met Mavering
somewhere, and that this outburst was the retarded effect of seeing him.
During the last six weeks she had assisted at many phases of feeling in
regard to him, and knew more clearly than Alice herself the meaning of
them all. She had been patient and kind, with the resources that every
woman finds in herself when it is the question of a daughter's ordeal in
an affair of the heart which she has favoured.
The storm passed as quickly as it came, and Alice sat upright casting
off the wraps. But once checked with the fact on her tongue, she found
it hard to utter it.
“What is it, Alice?--what is it?” urged her mother.
“Nothing. I--Mr. Mavering--we met--I met him at the Museum, and--we're
engaged! It's really so. It seems like raving, but it's true. He came
with me to the door; I wouldn't let him come in. Don't you believe it?
Oh, we are! indeed we are! Are you glad, mamma? You know I couldn't have
lived without him.”
She trembled on the verge of another outbreak.
Mrs. Pasmer sacrificed her astonishment in the interest of sanity, and
returned quietly: “Glad, Alice! You know that I think he's the sweetest
and best fellow in the world.”
“O mamma!”
“But are you sure--”
“Yes, Yes. I'm not crazy; it isn't a dream he was there--and I met
him--I couldn't run away--I put out my hand; I couldn't help it--I
thought I should give way; and he took it; and then--then we were
engaged. I don't know what we said: I went in to look at the 'Joan of
Arc' again, and there was no one else there. He seemed to feel just as
I did. I don't know whether either of us spoke. But we, knew we were
engaged, and we began to talk.”
Mrs. Pasmer began to laugh. To her irreverent soul only the droll side
of the statement appeared.
“Don't, mamma!” pleaded Alice piteously.
“No, no; I won't. But I hope Dan Mavering will be a little more definite
about it when I'm allowed to see him. Why couldn't he have come in with
you?”
“It would have killed me. I couldn't let him see me cry, and I knew I
should break down.”
“He'll have to see you cry a great many times, Alice,” said her mother,
with almost unexampled seriousness.
“Yes, but not yet--not so soon. He must think I'm very gloomy, and I
want to be always bright and cheerful with him. He knows why I wouldn't
let him come in; he knew I was going to have a cry.”
Mrs. Pasmer continued to laugh.
“Don't, mamma!” pleaded Alice.
“No, I won't,” replied her mother, as before. “I suppose he was
mystified. But now, if it's really settled between you, he'll be coming
here soon to see your papa and me.”
“Yes--to-night.”
“Well, it's very sudden,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “Though I suppose these
things always seem so.”
“Is it too sudden?” asked Alice, with misgiving. “It seemed so to me
when it was going on, but I couldn't stop it.”
Her mother laughed at her simplicity. “No, when it begins once, nothing
can stop it. But you've really known each other a good while, and for
the last six weeks at least you've known you own mind about him pretty
clearly. It's a pity you couldn't have known it before.”
“Yes, that's what he says. He says it was such a waste of time. Oh,
everything he says is perfectly fascinating!”
Her mother laughed and laughed again.
“What is it, mamma? Are you laughing at me?”
“Oh no. What an idea!”
“He couldn't seem to understand why I didn't say Yes the first time, if
I meant it.” She looked down dreamily at her hands in her lap, and
then she said, with a blush and a start, “They're very queer, don't you
think?”
“Who?”
“Young men.”
“Oh, very.”
“Yes,” Alice went on musingly. “Their minds are so different. Everything
they say and do is so unexpected, and yet it seems to be just right.”
Mrs. Pasmer asked herself if this single-mindedness was to go on for
ever, but she had not the heart to treat it with her natural levity.
Probably it was what charmed Mavering with the child. Mrs. Pasmer had
the firm belief that Mavering was not single-minded, and she respected
him for it. She would not spoil her daughter's perfect trust and hope by
any of the cynical suggestions of her own dark wisdom, but entered into
her mood, as such women are able to do, and flattered out of her every
detail of the morning's history. This was a feat which Mrs. Pasmer
enjoyed for its own sake, and it fully satisfied the curiosity which
she naturally felt to know all. She did not comment upon many of the
particulars; she opened her eyes a little at the notion of her daughter
sitting for two or three hours and talking with a young man in the
galleries of the Museum, and she asked if anybody they knew had come in.
When she heard that there were only strangers, and very few of them, she
said nothing; and she had the same consolation in regard to the walking
back and forth in the Garden. She was so full of potential escapades
herself, so apt to let herself go at times, that the fact of Alice's
innocent self-forgetfulness rather satisfied a need of her mother's
nature; she exulted in it when she learned that there were only nurses
and children in the Garden.
“And so you think you won't take up art this winter?” she said, when, in
the process of her cross-examination, Alice had left the sofa and got as
far as the door, with her hat in her hand and her sacque on her arm.
“No.”
“And the Sisters of St. James--you won't join them either?”
The girl escaped from the room.
“Alice! Alice!” her mother called after her; she came back. “You haven't
told me how he happened to be there.”
“Oh, that was the most amusing part of it. He had gone there to keep an
appointment with two ladies from Portland. They were to take him up in
their carriage and drive out to Cambridge, and when he saw me he forgot
all about them.”
“And what became of them?”
“We don't know. Isn't it ridiculous?”
If it appeared other or more than this to Mrs. Pasmer, she did not
say. She merely said, after a moment, “Well, it was certainly devoted,
Alice,” and let her go.