II

I HAD already made up my mind that they had been the closest friends

before one of them married, and that the young wife still thought the

young girl worthy of the most splendid fate that marriage could have in

store for any of her sex. Women often make each other the idols of such

worship; but I could not have justified this lady’s adoration so far as

it concerned the mental and moral qualities of her friend, though I fully

shared it in regard to her beauty. To me she looked a little dull and a

little selfish, and I chose to think the husband modestly found her

selfish, if he were too modest to find her dull.

Yet, after all, I tacitly argued with him, why should we call her

selfish? It was perfectly right and fit that, as a young girl with such

great personal advantages, she should wish to see the world—even to show

herself to the world,—and find in it some agreeable youth who should

admire her, and desire to make her his own for ever. Compare this simple

and natural longing with the insatiate greed and ambition of one of our

own sex, I urged him, and then talk to me, if you can, of this poor

girl’s selfishness! A young man has more egoism in an hour than a young

girl has in her whole life. She thinks she wishes some one to be devoted

to her, but she really wishes some one to let her be devoted to him; and

how passively, how negatively, she must manage to accomplish her

self-sacrifice! He, on the contrary, means to go conquering and

enslaving forward; to be in and out of love right and left, and to end,

after many years of triumph, in the possession of the best and wisest and

fairest of her sex. I know the breed, my dear sir; I have been a young

man myself. We men have liberty, we have initiative; we are not

chaperoned; we can go to this one and that one freely and fearlessly.

But women must sit still, and be come to or shied off from. They cannot

cast the bold eye of interest; they can at most bridle under it, and

furtively respond from the corner of the eye of weak hope and gentle

deprecation. Be patient, then, with this poor child if she darkles a

little under the disappointment of not finding Saratoga so personally gay

as she supposed it would be, and takes it out of you and your wife, as if

you were to blame for it, in something like sulks.

He remained silent under these tacit appeals, but at the end he heaved a

deep sigh, as he might if he were acknowledging their justice, and were

promising to do his very best in the circumstances. His wife looked

round at him, but did not speak. In fact, they none of them spoke after

the first words of greeting to the girl, as I can very well testify; for

I sat eavesdropping with all my might, resolved not to lose a syllable,

and I am sure I lost none.

The young girl did not look round at that deep-drawn sigh of the man’s;

she did not lift her head even when he cleared his throat: but I was

intent upon him, for I thought that these sounds preluded an overture (I

am not sure of the figure) to my acquaintance, and in fact he actually

asked, “Do you know just when the concert begins?”

I was overjoyed at his question, for I was poignantly interested in the

little situation I had created, and I made haste to answer: “Well,

nominally at eight o’clock; but the first half-hour is usually taken up

in tuning the instruments. If you get into the pavilion at a quarter to

nine you won’t lose much. It isn’t so bad when it really begins.”

The man permitted himself a smile of the pleasure we Americans all feel

at having a thing understated in that way. His wife asked timidly, “Do

we have to engage our seats in the—pavilion?”

“Oh, no,” I laughed; “there’s no such rush as that. Haven’t you been at

the concerts before?”

The man answered for her: “We haven’t been here but a few days. I should

think,” he added to her, “it would be about as comfortable outside of the

house.” I perceived that he maintained his independence of my superior

knowledge by refusing to say “pavilion”; and in fact I do not know

whether that is the right name for the building myself.

“It will be hot enough anywhere,” I assented, as if the remark had been

made to me; but here I drew the line out of self-respect, and resolved

that he should make the next advances.

The young girl looked up at the first sound of my voice, and verified me

as the elderly man whom she had seen before; and then she looked down at

the water again. I understood, and I freely forgave her. If my beard

had been brown instead of grey I should have been an adventure; but to

the eye of girlhood adventure can never wear a grey beard. I was truly

sorry for her; I could read in the pensive droop of her averted face that

I was again a disappointment.

They all three sat, without speaking again, in the mannerless silence of

Americans. The man was not going to feel bound in further civility to me

because I had civilly answered a question of his. I divined that he

would be glad to withdraw from the overture he had made; he may have

thought from my readiness to meet him half way that I might be one of

those sharpers in whom Saratoga probably abounded. This did not offend

me; it amused me; I fancied his confusion if he could suddenly know how

helplessly and irreparably honest I was.

“I don’t know but it’s a little too damp here, Rufus,” said the wife.

“I don’t know but it is,” he answered; but none of them moved, and none

of them spoke again for some minutes. Then the wife said again, but this

time to the friend, “I don’t know but it’s a little too damp here,

Julia,” and the friend answered, as the husband had—

“I don’t know but it is.”

I had two surprises in this slight event. I could never have imagined

that the girl had so brunette a name as Julia, or anything less blond in

sound than, say, Evadne, at the very darkest; and I had made up my

mind—Heaven knows why—that her voice would be harsh. Perhaps I thought

it unfair that she should have a sweet voice added to all that beauty and

grace of hers; but she had a sweet voice, very tender and melodious, with

a plangent note in it that touched me and charmed me. Beautiful and

graceful as she was, she had lacked atmosphere before, and now suddenly

she had atmosphere. I resolved to keep as near to these people as I

could, and not to leave the place as long as they stayed; but I did not

think it well to let them feel that I was æsthetically shadowing them,

and I got up and strolled away toward the pavilion, keeping an eye in the

back of my head upon them.

I sat down in a commanding position, and watched the people gathering for

the concert; and in the drama of a group of Cubans, or of South

Americans, I almost forgot for a moment the pale idyl of my compatriots

at the kiosk. There was a short, stout little Spanish woman speaking in

the shapely sentences which the Latin race everywhere delights in, and

around her was an increasing number of serious Spanish men, listening as

if to important things, and paying her that respectful attention which

always amuses and puzzles me. In view of what we think their low

estimate of women, I cannot make out whether it is a personal tribute to

some specific woman whom they regard differently from all the rest of her

sex, or whether they choose to know in her for the nouce the abstract

woman who is better than woman in the concrete. I am sure I have never

seen men of any other race abandon themselves to such a luxury of respect

as these black and grey bearded Spaniards of leaden complexion showed

this dumpy personification of womanhood, with their prominent eyes bent

in homage upon her, and their hands trembling with readiness to seize

their hats off in reverence. It appeared presently that the matter they

were all canvassing so devoutly was the question of where she should sit.

It seemed to be decided that she could not do better than sit just at

that point. When she actually took a chair the stately convocation

ended, and its members, with low obeisances, dispersed themselves in

different directions. They had probably all been sitting with her the

whole afternoon on the verandah of the Everett House, where their race

chiefly resorts in Saratoga, and they were availing themselves of this

occasion to appear to be meeting her, after a long interval, in society.

I said to myself that of course they believed Saratoga was still that

centre of American fashion which it once was, and that they came and went

every summer, probably in the belief that they saw a great deal of social

gaiety there. This made me think, by a natural series of transitions, of

the persons of my American idyl, and I looked about the pavilion

everywhere for them without discovering, till the last, that they were

just behind me.

I found the fact touching. They had not wished to be in any wise

beholden to me, and had even tried to reject my friendly readiness to

know them better; but they had probably sought my vicinity in a sense of

their loneliness and helplessness, which they hoped I would not divine,

but which I divined instantly. Still, I thought it best not to show any

consciousness of them, and we sat through the first part of the concert

without taking notice of one another. Then the man leaned forward and

touched me on the shoulder.

“Will you let me take your programme a minute?”

“Why, certainly,” said I.

He took it, and after a vague glance at it he passed it to his wife, who

gave it in turn to the young girl. She studied it very briefly, and

then, after a questioning look, offered it back to me.

“Won’t you keep it?” I entreated. “I’ve quite done with it.”

“Oh, thank you,” she answered in her tender voice, and she and the wife

looked hard at the man, whom they seemed to unite in pushing forward by

that means.

He hemmed, and asked, “Have you been in Saratoga much?”

“Why, yes,” I said; “rather a good deal. My wife and I have been here

three or four summers.”

At the confession of my married state, which this statement implicated,

the women exchanged a glance, I fancied, of triumph, as if they had been

talking about me, and I had now confirmed the ground they had taken

concerning me. Then they joined in goading the man on again with their

eyes.

“Which hotel,” he asked, “should you say had the most going on?”

The young girl and the wife transferred their gaze to me, with an

intensified appeal in it. The man looked away with a certain shame—the

shame of a man who feels that his wife has made him make an ass of

himself. I tried to treat his question, by the quantity and quality of

my answer, as one of the most natural things in the world; and I probably

deceived them all by this effort, though I am sure that I was most

truthful and just concerning the claims of the different hotels to be the

centre of excitement. I thought I had earned the right to ask at the

end, “Are you stopping at the Grand Union?”

“No,” he said; and he mentioned one of the smaller hotels, which depend

upon the great houses for the entertainment of their guests. “Are you

there?” he asked, meaning the Grand Union.

“Oh no,” I said; “we couldn’t do that sort of thing, even if we wanted.”

And in my turn I named the modest hotel where we were, and said that I

thought it by all odds the pleasantest place in Saratoga. “But I can’t

say,” I added, “that there is a great deal going on there, either. If

you want that sort of thing you will have to go to some of the great

hotels. We have our little amusements, but they’re all rather mild.” I

kept talking to the man, but really addressing myself to the women.

“There’s something nearly every evening: prestidigitating, or

elocutioning, or a little concert, or charades, or impromptu theatricals,

or something of that sort. I can’t say there’s dancing, though really, I

suppose, if any one wanted to dance there would be dancing.”

I was aware that the women listened intelligently, even if the man did

not. The wife drew a long breath, and said, “It must be very pleasant.”

The girl said—rather more hungrily, I fancied—“Yes, indeed.”

I don’t know why their interest should have prompted me to go on and

paint the lily a little, but I certainly did so. I did not stop till the

music began again, and I had to stop. By the time the piece was finished

I had begun to have my misgivings, and I profited by the brief interval

of silence to say to the young girl, “I wouldn’t have you think we are a

whirl of gaiety exactly.”

“Oh no,” she answered pathetically, as if she were quite past expecting

that or anything like it.

We were silent again. At the end of the next piece they all rose, and

the wife said timidly to me, “Well, good-evening,” as if she might be

venturing too far; and her husband came to her rescue with “Well,

good-evening, sir.” The young girl merely bowed.

I did not stay much longer, for I was eager to get home and tell my wife

about my adventure, which seemed to me of a very rare and thrilling kind.

I believed that if I could present it to her duly, it would interest her

as much as it had interested me. But somehow, as I went on with it in

the lamplight of her room, it seemed to lose colour and specific

character.

“You are always making up these romances about young girls being off and

disappointed of a good time ever since we saw that poor little Kitty

Ellison with her cousins at Niagara,” said Mrs. March. “You seem to have

it on the brain.”

“Because it’s the most tragical thing in the world, and the commonest in

our transition state,” I retorted. I was somewhat exasperated to have my

romance treated as so stale a situation, though I was conscious now that

it did want perfect novelty. “It’s precisely for that reason that I like

to break my heart over it. I see it every summer, and it keeps me in a

passion of pity. Something ought to be done about it.”

“Well, don’t _you_ try to do anything, Basil, unless you write to the

newspapers.”

“I suppose,” I said, “that if the newspapers could be got to take hold of

it, perhaps something might be done.” The notion amused me; I went on to

play with it, and imagined Saratoga, by a joint effort of the leading

journals, recolonised with the social life that once made it the paradise

of young people.

“I have been writing to the children,” said my wife, “and telling them to

stay on at York Harbour if the Herricks want them so much. They would

hate it here. You say the girl looked cross. I can’t exactly imagine a

cross goddess.”

“There were lots of cross goddesses,” I said rather crossly myself; for I

saw that, after having trodden my romance in the dust, she was willing I

should pick it up again and shake it off, and I wished to show her that I

was not to be so lightly appeased.

“Perhaps I was thinking of angels,” she murmured.

“I distinctly didn’t say she was an angel,” I returned.

“Now, come, Basil; I see you’re keeping something back. What did you try

to do for those people? Did you tell them where you were stopping?”

“Yes, I did. They asked me, and I told them.”

“Did you brag the place up?”

“On the contrary, I understated its merits.”

“Oh, very well, then,” she said, quite as if I had confessed my guilt;

“they will come here, and you will have your romance on your hands for

the rest of the month. I’m thankful we’re going away the first of

August.”