I DID not afflict myself very much, nor pretend to do so. They knew the
way home, and after I had blundered about in search of them through the
lampshot darkness, I settled myself to walk back at my leisure,
comfortably sure that I should find them on the verandah waiting for me
when I reached the hotel. It was quite a thick night, and I almost ran
into a couple at a corner of our quieter street when I had got to it out
of Broadway. They seemed to be standing and looking about, and when the
man said, “He must have thought we took the first turn,” and the woman,
“Yes, that must have been the way,” I recognised my estrays.
I thought I would not discover myself to them, but follow on, and
surprise them by arriving at our steps at the same moment they did, and I
prepared myself to hurry after them. But they seemed in no hurry, and I
had even some difficulty in accommodating my pace to the slowness of
theirs.
“Won’t you take my arm, Miss Gage?” he asked as they moved on.
“It’s so _very_ dark,” she answered, and I knew she had taken it. “I can
hardly see a step, and poor Mr. March with his glasses—I don’t know what
he’ll do.”
“Oh, he only uses them to read with; he can see as well as we can in the
dark.”
“He’s very young in his feelings,” said the girl; “he puts me in mind of
my own father.”
“He’s very young in his thoughts,” said Kendricks; “and that’s much more
to the purpose for a magazine editor. There are very few men of his age
who keep in touch with the times as he does.”
“Still, Mrs. March seems a good deal younger, don’t you think? I wonder
how soon they begin to feel old?”
“Oh, not till along in the forties, I should say. It’s a good deal in
temperament. I don’t suppose that either of them realises yet that
they’re old, and they must be nearly fifty.”
“How strange it must be,” said the girl, “fifty years old! Twenty seems
old enough, goodness knows.”
“How should you like to be a dotard of twenty-seven?” Kendricks asked,
and she laughed at his joke.
“I don’t suppose I should mind it so much if I were a man.”
I had promised myself that if the talk became at all confidential I would
drop behind out of earshot; but though it was curiously intimate for me
to be put apart in the minds of these young people on account of my years
as not of the same race or fate as themselves, there was nothing in what
they said that I might not innocently overhear, as far as they were
concerned, and I listened on.
But they had apparently given me quite enough attention. After some
mutual laughter at what she said last, they were silent a moment, and
then he said soberly, “There’s something fine in this isolation the dark
gives you, isn’t there? You’re as remote in it from our own time and
place as if you were wandering in interplanetary space.”
“I suppose we _are_ doing that all the time—on the earth,” she suggested.
“Yes; but how hard it is to realise that we are on the earth now.
Sometimes I have a sense of it, though, when the moon breaks from one
flying cloud to another. Then it seems as if I were a passenger on some
vast, shapeless ship sailing through the air. What,” he asked, with no
relevancy that I could perceive, “was the strangest feeling _you_ ever
had?” I remembered asking girls such questions when I was young, and
their not apparently thinking it at all odd.
“I don’t know,” she returned thoughtfully. “There was one time when I
was little, and it had sleeted, and the sun came out just before it set,
and seemed to set all the woods on fire. I thought the world was burning
up.”
“It must have been very weird,” said Kendricks; and I thought, “Oh, good
heavens! Has he got to talking of weird things?”
“It’s strange,” he added, “how we all have that belief when we are
children that the world is going to burn up! I don’t suppose any child
escapes it. Do you remember that poem of Thompson’s—the _City of
Dreadful Night_ man—where he describes the end of the world?”
“No, I never read it.”
“Well, merely, he says when the conflagration began the little flames
looked like crocuses breaking through the sod. If it ever happened I
fancy it would be quite as simple as that. But perhaps you don’t like
gloomy poetry?”
“Yes, yes, I do. It’s the only kind that I care about.”
“Then you hate funny poetry?”
“I think it’s disgusting. Papa is always cutting it out of the papers
and wanting to send it to me, and we have the greatest _times_!”
“I suppose,” said Kendricks, “it expresses some moods, though.”
“Oh yes; it expresses some moods; and sometimes it makes me laugh in
spite of myself, and ashamed of anything serious.”
“That’s always the effect of a farce with me.”
“But then I’m ashamed of being ashamed afterward,” said the girl. “I
suppose you go to the theatre a great deal in New York.”
“It’s a school of life,” said Kendricks. “I mean the audience.”
“I would like to go to the opera once. I am going to make papa take me
in the winter.” She laughed with a gay sense of power, and he said—
“You seem to be great friends with your father.”
“Yes, we’re always together. I always went everywhere with him; this is
the first time I’ve been away without him. But I thought I’d come with
Mrs. Deering and see what Saratoga was like; I had never been here.”
“And is it like what you thought?”
“No. The first week we didn’t do anything. Then we got acquainted with
Mr. and Mrs. March, and I began to really see something. But I supposed
it was all balls and gaiety.”
“We must get up a few if you’re so fond of them,” Kendricks playfully
suggested.
“Oh, I don’t know as I am. I never went much at home. Papa didn’t care
to have me.”
“Ah, do you think it was right for him to keep you all to himself?” The
girl did not answer, and they had both halted so abruptly that I almost
ran into them. “I don’t quite make out where we are.” Kendricks seemed
to be peering about. I plunged across the street lest he should ask me.
I heard him add, “Oh yes; I know now,” and then they pressed forward.
We were quite near our hotel, but I thought it best to walk round the
square and let them arrive first. On the way I amused myself thinking
how different the girl had shown herself to him from what she had ever
shown herself to my wife or me. She had really, this plain-minded
goddess, a vein of poetic feeling, some inner beauty of soul answering to
the outer beauty of body. She had a romantic attachment to her father,
and this shed a sort of light on both of them, though I knew that it was
not always a revelation of character.