“WELL, what _did_ you make of her, my dear?” Mrs. March demanded the
instant she was beyond their hearing. “I must say, you didn’t spare
yourself in the cause; you did bravely. What is she like?”
“Really, I don’t know,” I answered, after a moment’s reflection. “I
should say she was almost purely potential. She’s not so much this or
that kind of girl; she’s merely a radiant image of girlhood.”
“Now, your chicquing it, you’re faking it,” said Mrs. March, borrowing
the verbs severally from the art editor and the publisher of _Every Other
Week_. “You have got to tell me just how much and how little there
really is of her before I go any further with them. Is she stupid?”
“No—no; I shouldn’t say stupid exactly. She is—what shall I
say?—extremely plain-minded. I suppose the goddesses were plain-minded.
I’m a little puzzled by her attitude toward her own beauty. She doesn’t
live her beauty any more than a poet lives his poetry or a painter his
painting; though I’ve no doubt she knows her gift is hers just as they
do.”
“I think I understand. You mean she isn’t conscious.”
“No. Conscious isn’t quite the word,” I said fastidiously. “Isn’t there
some word that says less, or more, in the same direction?”
“No, there isn’t; and I shall think you don’t mean anything at all if you
keep on. Now, tell me how she really impressed you. Does she know
anything? Has she read anything? Has she any ideas?”
“Really, I can’t say whether they were ideas or not. She knew what
_Every Other Week_ was; she had read the stories in it; but I’m not sure
she valued it at its true worth. She is very plain-minded.”
“Don’t keep repeating that! What do you mean by plain-minded?”
“Well, honest, single, common-sense, coherent, arithmetical.”
“Horrors! Do you mean that she is _mannish_?”
“No, not mannish. And yet she gave me the notion that, when it came to
companionship, she would be just as well satisfied with a lot of girls as
young men.”
Mrs. March pulled her hand out of my arm, and stopped short under one of
those tall Saratoga shade-trees to dramatise her inference. “Then she is
the slyest of all possible pusses! Did she give you the notion that she
would be just as well satisfied with you as with a young man!”
“She couldn’t deceive me so far as _that_, my dear.”
“Very well; I shall take her in hand myself to-morrow, and find out what
she really is.”
Mrs. March went shopping the next forenoon with what was left of the
Deering party; Deering had taken the early train north, and she seemed to
have found the ladies livelier without him. She formed the impression
from their more joyous behaviour that he kept his wife from spending as
much money as she would naturally have done, and that, while he was not
perhaps exactly selfish, he was forgetful of her youth, of the difference
in years between them, and of her capacity for pleasures which he could
not care for. She said that Mrs. Deering and Miss Gage now acted like
two girls together, and, if anything, Miss Gage seemed the elder of the
two.
“And what did you decide about her?” I inquired.
“Well, I helped her buy a hat and a jacket at one of those nice shops
just below the hotel where they’re stopping, and we’ve started an evening
dress for her. She can’t wear that white duck morning, noon, and night.”
“But her character—her nature?”
“Oh! Well, she is rather plain-minded, as you call it. I think she
shows out her real feelings too much for a woman.”
“Why do you prefer dissimulation in your sex, my dear?”
“I don’t call it dissimulation. But of course a girl ought to hide her
feelings. Don’t you think it would have been better for her not to have
looked so obviously out of humour when you first saw her the other
night?”
“She wouldn’t have interested me so much, then, and she probably wouldn’t
have had your acquaintance now.”
“Oh, I don’t mean to say that even that kind of girl won’t get on, if she
gives her mind to it; but I think I should prefer a little less
plain-mindedness, as you call it, if I were a man.”