“I didn’t suppose the House of Pansa would lead to shop with you two.”
“You never can tell which way copy lies,” I returned; and I asked the
girl, “What should _you_ think, Miss Gage, of a little paper with a
thread of story, but mostly talk, on a supposititious Pompeian cottage?”
“I don’t believe I understand,” said she, far too remote from our
literary interests, as I saw, to be ashamed of her ignorance.
“There!” I said to Kendricks. “Do you think the general public would?”
“Miss Gage isn’t the general public,” said my wife, who had followed the
course of my thought; her tone implied that Miss Gage was wiser and
better.
“Would you allow yourself to be drawn,” I asked, “dreamily issuing from
an aisle of the pine grove as the tutelary goddess of a Pompeian
cottage?”
The girl cast a bewildered glance at my wife, who said, “You needn’t pay
any attention to him, Miss Gage. He has an idea that he is making a
joke.”
We felt that we had done enough for one afternoon, when we had done the
House of Pansa, and I proposed that we should go and sit down in Congress
Park and listen to the Troy band. I was not without the hope that it
would play “Washington Post.”
My wife contrived that we should fall in behind the young people as we
went, and she asked, “What _do_ you suppose she made of it all?”
“Probably she thought it was the house of Sancho Panza.”
“No; she hasn’t read enough to be so ignorant even as that. It’s
astonishing how much she doesn’t know. What can her home life have been
like?”
“Philistine to the last degree. We people who are near to literature
have no conception how far from it most people are. The immense majority
of ‘homes,’ as the newspapers call them, have no books in them except the
Bible and a semi-religious volume or two—things you never see out of such
‘homes’—and the State business directory. I was astonished when it came
out that she knew about _Every Other Week_. It must have been by
accident. The sordidness of her home life must be something
unimaginable. The daughter of a village capitalist, who’s put together
his money dollar by dollar, as they do in such places, from the
necessities and follies of his neighbours, and has half the farmers of
the region by the throat through his mortgages—I don’t think that she’s
‘one to be desired’ any more than ‘the daughter of a hundred earls,’ if
so much.”
“She doesn’t seem sordid herself.”
“Oh, the taint doesn’t show itself at once—
‘If nature put not forth her power
About the opening of the flower,
Who is it that would live an hour?’
and she _is_ a flower, beautiful, exquisite.”
“Yes, and she had a mother as well as this father of hers. Why shouldn’t
she be like her mother?”
I laughed. “That is true! I wonder why we always leave the mother out
of the count when we sum up the hereditary tendencies? I suppose the
mother is as much a parent as the father.”
“Quite. And there is no reason why this girl shouldn’t have her mother’s
nature.”
“We don’t actually _know_ anything against her father’s nature yet,” I
suggested; “but if her mother lived a starved and stunted life with him,
it may account for that effect of disappointed greed which I fancied in
her when I first saw her.”
“I don’t call it greed in a young girl to want to see something of the
world.”
“What do you call it?”
Kendricks and the girl were stopping at the gate of the pavilion, and
looking round at us. “Ah, he’s got enough for one day! He’s going to
leave her to us now.”
When we came up he said, “I’m going to run off a moment; I’m going up to
the book-store there,” and he pointed toward one that had spread across
the sidewalk just below the Congress Hall verandah, with banks and
shelves of novels, and a cry of bargains in them on signs sticking up
from their rows. “I want to see if they have the _Last Days of
Pompeii_.”
“We will find the ladies inside the park,” I said. “I will go with you—”
“Mr. March wants to see if they have the last number of _Every Other
Week_,” my wife mocked after us. This was, indeed, commonly a foible of
mine. I had newly become one of the owners of the periodical as well as
the editor, and I was all the time looking out for it at the news-stands
and book-stores, and judging their enterprise by its presence or absence.
But this time I had another motive, though I did not allege it.
“I suppose it’s for Miss Gage?” I ventured to say, by way of prefacing
what I wished to say. “Kendricks, I’m afraid we’re abusing your good
nature. I know you’re up here to look about, and you’re letting us use
all your time. You mustn’t do it. Women have no conscience about these
things, and you can’t expect a woman who has a young lady on her hands to
spare you. I give you the hint. Don’t count upon Mrs. March in this
matter.”
“Oh, I think you are very good to allow me to bother round,” said the
young fellow, with that indefatigable politeness of his. He added
vaguely, “It’s very interesting.”
“Seeing it through such a fresh mind?” I suggested. “Well, I’ll own that
I don’t think you could have found a much fresher one. Has she read the
_Last Days of Pompeii_?”
“She thought she had at first, but it was the _Fall of Granada_.”
“How delightful! Don’t you wish we could read books with that utterly
unliterary sense of them?”
“Don’t you think women generally do?” he asked evasively.
“I daresay they do at De Witt Point.”
He did not answer; I saw that he was not willing to talk the young lady
over, and I could not help praising his taste to myself at the cost of my
own. His delicacy forbade him the indulgence which my own protested
against in vain. He showed his taste again in buying a cheap copy of the
book, which he meant to give her, and of course he had to be all the more
attentive to her because of my deprecating his self-devotion.