Kendricks laughed, delighted, and asked, “Is she pretty?”
“Must a heroine be pretty?”
“She had better be. Otherwise she will have to be tremendously clever
and say all sorts of brilliant things, and that puts a great burden on
the author. If you proclaim boldly at the start that she’s a beauty, the
illustrator has got to look after her, and the author has a comparative
sinecure.”
Mrs. March thought a moment, and then she said: “Well, she is a beauty.
I don’t want to make it too hard for you.”
“When shall I see her?” Kendricks demanded, and he feigned an amusing
anxiety.
“Well, that depends upon how you behave, Mr. Kendricks. If you are very,
very good, perhaps I may let you see her this evening. We will take you
to call upon her.”
“Is it possible? Do you mean business? Then she is—in society?”
“_Mr._ Kendricks!” cried Mrs. March, with burlesque severity. “Do you
think that I would offer you a heroine who was _not_ in society? You
forget that I am from Boston!”
“Of course, of course! I understand that any heroine of your
acquaintance must be in society. But I thought—I didn’t know—but for the
moment—Saratoga seems to be so tremendously mixed; and Mr. March says
there is no society here: But if she is from Boston—”
“I didn’t say she was from Boston, Mr. Kendricks.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon!”
“She is from De Witt Point,” said Mrs. March, and she apparently enjoyed
his confusion, no less than my bewilderment at the course she was taking.
I was not going to be left behind, though, and I said: “I discovered this
heroine myself, Kendricks, and if there is to be any giving away—”
“Now, Basil!”
“I am going to do it. Mrs. March would never have cared anything about
her if it hadn’t been for me. I can’t let her impose on you. This
heroine is no more in society than she is from Boston. That is the
trouble with her. She has come here for society, and she can’t find
any.”
“Oh, that was what you were hinting at this morning,” said Kendricks. “I
thought it a pure figment of the imagination.”
“One doesn’t imagine such things as that, my dear fellow. One imagines a
heroine coming here, and having the most magnificent kind of social
career—lawn-parties, lunches, teas, dinners, picnics, hops—and going back
to De Witt Point with a dozen offers of marriage. That’s the kind of
work the imagination does. But this simple and appealing situation—this
beautiful young girl, with her poor little illusions, her secret hopes
half hidden from herself, her ignorant past, her visionary future—”
“Now, _I_ am going to tell you all about her, Mr. Kendricks,” Mrs. March
broke in upon me, with defiance in her eye; and she flung out the whole
fact with a rapidity of utterance that would have left far behind any
attempt of mine. But I made no attempt to compete with her; I contented
myself with a sarcastic silence which I could see daunted her a little at
last.
“And all that we’ve done, my dear fellow”—I took in irony the word she
left to me—“is to load ourselves up with these two impossible people, to
go their security to destiny, and answer for their having a good time.
We’re in luck.”
“Why, I don’t know,” said Kendricks, and I could see that his fancy was
beginning to play with the situation; “I don’t see why it isn’t a
charming scheme.”
“Of course it is,” cried Mrs. March, taking a little heart from his
courage.
“We can’t make out yet whether the girl is interesting,” I put in
maliciously.
“That is what _you_ say,” said my wife. “She is very shy, and of course
she wouldn’t show out her real nature to you. I found her _very_
interesting.”
“Now, Isabel!” I protested.
“She is fascinating,” the perverse woman persisted. “She has a
fascinating dulness.”
Kendricks laughed and I jeered at this complex characterisation.
“You make me impatient to judge for myself,” he said.
“Will you go with me to call upon them this evening?” asked Mrs. March.
“I shall be delighted. And you can count upon me to aid and abet you in
your generous conspiracy, Mrs. March, to the best of my ability. There’s
nothing I should like better than to help you—”
“Throw ‘dust in her beautiful eyes,’” I quoted.
“Not at all,” said my wife. “But to spread a beatific haze over
everything, so that as long as she stays in Saratoga she shall see life
rose-colour. Of course you may say that it’s a kind of deception—”
“Not at all!” cried the young fellow in his turn. “We will make it
reality. Then there will be no harm in it.”
“What a jesuitical casuist! You had better read what Cardinal Newman
says in his _Apologia_ about lying, young man.”
Neither of them minded me, for just then there was a stir of drapery
round the corner of the piazza from where we were sitting, and the next
moment Mrs. Deering and Miss Gage showed themselves.
“We were just talking of you,” said Mrs. March. “May I present our
friend Mr. Kendricks, Mrs. Deering? And Miss Gage?”
At sight of the young man, so well dressed and good-looking, who bowed so
prettily to her, and then bustled to place chairs for them, a certain
cloud seemed to lift from Miss Gage’s beautiful face, and to be at least
partly broken on Mrs. Deering’s visage. I began to talk to the girl, and
she answered in good spirits, and with more apparent interest in my
conversation than she had yet shown, while Kendricks very properly
devoted himself to the other ladies. Both his eyes were on them, but I
felt that he had a third somehow upon her, and that the smallest fact of
her beauty and grace was not lost upon him. I knew that her rich, tender
voice was doing its work, too, through the commonplaces she vouchsafed to
me. There was a moment when I saw him lift a questioning eyebrow upon
Mrs. March, and saw her answer with a fleeting frown of affirmation. I
cannot tell just how it was that, before he left us, his chair was on the
other side of Miss Gage’s, and I was eliminated from the dialogue.
He did not stay too long. There was another tableau of him on foot,
taking leave of Mrs. March, with a high hand-shake, which had then lately
come in, and which I saw the girl note, and then bowing to her and to
Mrs. Deering.
“Don’t forget,” my wife called after him, with a ready invention not lost
on his quick intelligence, “that you’re going to the concert with us
after tea. Eight o’clock, remember.”
“You may be sure I shall remember _that_,” he returned gaily.