The girl broke into a fondly approving laugh at his drolling. "Oh, I
guess you love to train! Us girls wanted to go low neck, too; but father
said we shouldn't, and mother said if we did she wouldn't come to the
front of the box once. Well, she didn't, anyway. We might just as well
'a' gone low neck. She stayed back the whole time, and when they had that
dance--the ballet, you know--she just shut her eyes. Well, Conrad didn't
like that part much, either; but us girls and Mrs. Mandel, we brazened it
out right in the front of the box. We were about the only ones there that
went high neck. Conrad had to wear a swallow-tail; but father hadn't any,
and he had to patch out with a white cravat. You couldn't see what he had
on in the back o' the box, anyway."
Mrs. March looked at Miss Dryfoos, who was waving her fan more and more
slowly up and down, and who, when she felt herself looked at, returned
Mrs. March's smile, which she meant to be ingratiating and perhaps
sympathetic, with a flash that made her start, and then ran her fierce
eyes over March's face. "Here comes mother," she said, with a sort of
breathlessness, as if speaking her thought aloud, and through the open
door the Marches could see the old lady on the stairs.
She paused half-way down, and turning, called up: "Coonrod! Coonrod! You
bring my shawl down with you."
Her daughter Mela called out to her, "Now, mother, Christine 'll give it
to you for not sending Mike."
"Well, I don't know where he is, Mely, child," the mother answered back.
"He ain't never around when he's wanted, and when he ain't, it seems like
a body couldn't git shet of him, nohow."
"Well, you ought to ring for him!" cried Miss Mela, enjoying the joke.
Her mother came in with a slow step; her head shook slightly as she
looked about the room, perhaps from nervousness, perhaps from a touch of
palsy. In either case the fact had a pathos which Mrs. March confessed in
the affection with which she took her hard, dry, large, old hand when she
was introduced to her, and in the sincerity which she put into the hope
that she was well.
"I'm just middlin'," Mrs. Dryfoos replied. "I ain't never so well,
nowadays. I tell fawther I don't believe it agrees with me very well
here, but he says I'll git used to it. He's away now, out at Moffitt,"
she said to March, and wavered on foot a moment before she sank into a
chair. She was a tall woman, who had been a beautiful girl, and her gray
hair had a memory of blondeness in it like Lindau's, March noticed. She
wore a simple silk gown, of a Quakerly gray, and she held a handkerchief
folded square, as it had come from the laundress. Something like the
Sabbath quiet of a little wooden meeting-house in thick Western woods
expressed itself to him from her presence.
"Laws, mother!" said Miss Mela; "what you got that old thing on for? If
I'd 'a' known you'd 'a' come down in that!"
"Coonrod said it was all right, Mely," said her mother.
Miss Mela explained to the Marches: "Mother was raised among the
Dunkards, and she thinks it's wicked to wear anything but a gray silk
even for dress-up."
"You hain't never heared o' the Dunkards, I reckon," the old woman said
to Mrs. March. "Some folks calls 'em the Beardy Men, because they don't
never shave; and they wash feet like they do in the Testament. My uncle
was one. He raised me."
"I guess pretty much everybody's a Beardy Man nowadays, if he ain't a
Dunkard!"
Miss Mela looked round for applause of her sally, but March was saying to
his wife: "It's a Pennsylvania German sect, I believe--something like the
Quakers. I used to see them when I was a boy."
"Aren't they something like the Mennists?" asked Mrs. Mandel.
"They're good people," said the old woman, "and the world 'd be a heap
better off if there was more like 'em."
Her son came in and laid a soft shawl over her shoulders before he shook
hands with the visitors. "I am glad you found your way here," he said to
them.
Christine, who had been bending forward over her fan, now lifted herself
up with a sigh and leaned back in her chair.
"I'm sorry my father isn't here," said the young man to Mrs. March. "He's
never met you yet?"
"No; and I should like to see him. We hear a great deal about your
father, you know, from Mr. Fulkerson."
"Oh, I hope you don't believe everything Mr. Fulkerson says about
people," Mela cried. "He's the greatest person for carrying on when he
gets going I ever saw. It makes Christine just as mad when him and mother
gets to talking about religion; she says she knows he don't care anything
more about it than the man in the moon. I reckon he don't try it on much
with father."
"Your fawther ain't ever been a perfessor," her mother interposed; "but
he's always been a good church-goin' man."
"Not since we come to New York," retorted the girl.
"He's been all broke up since he come to New York," said the old woman,
with an aggrieved look.
Mrs. Mandel attempted a diversion. "Have you heard any of our great New
York preachers yet, Mrs. March?"
"No, I haven't," Mrs. March admitted; and she tried to imply by her
candid tone that she intended to begin hearing them the very next Sunday.
"There are a great many things here," said Conrad, "to take your thoughts
off the preaching that you hear in most of the churches. I think the city
itself is preaching the best sermon all the time."
"I don't know that I understand you," said March.
Mela answered for him. "Oh, Conrad has got a lot of notions that nobody
can understand. You ought to see the church he goes to when he does go.
I'd about as lief go to a Catholic church myself; I don't see a bit o'
difference. He's the greatest crony with one of their preachers; he
dresses just like a priest, and he says he is a priest." She laughed for
enjoyment of the fact, and her brother cast down his eyes.
Mrs. March, in her turn, tried to take from it the personal tone which
the talk was always assuming. "Have you been to the fall exhibition?" she
asked Christine; and the girl drew herself up out of the abstraction she
seemed sunk in.
"The exhibition?" She looked at Mrs. Mandel.
"The pictures of the Academy, you know," Mrs. Mandel explained. "Where I
wanted you to go the day you had your dress tried on."
"No; we haven't been yet. Is it good?" She had turned to Mrs. March
again.
"I believe the fall exhibitions are never so good as the spring ones. But
there are some good pictures."
"I don't believe I care much about pictures," said Christine. "I don't
understand them."
"Ah, that's no excuse for not caring about them," said March, lightly.
"The painters themselves don't, half the time."
The girl looked at him with that glance at once defiant and appealing,
insolent and anxious, which he had noticed before, especially when she
stole it toward himself and his wife during her sister's babble. In the
light of Fulkerson's history of the family, its origin and its ambition,
he interpreted it to mean a sense of her sister's folly and an ignorant
will to override his opinion of anything incongruous in themselves and
their surroundings. He said to himself that she was deathly proud--too
proud to try to palliate anything, but capable of anything that would put
others under her feet. Her eyes seemed hopelessly to question his wife's
social quality, and he fancied, with not unkindly interest, the
inexperienced girl's doubt whether to treat them with much or little
respect. He lost himself in fancies about her and her ideals, necessarily
sordid, of her possibilities of suffering, of the triumphs and
disappointments before her. Her sister would accept both with a lightness
that would keep no trace of either; but in her they would sink lastingly
deep. He came out of his reverie to find Mrs. Dryfoos saying to him, in
her hoarse voice:
"I think it's a shame, some of the pictur's a body sees in the winders.
They say there's a law ag'inst them things; and if there is, I don't
understand why the police don't take up them that paints 'em. I hear
tell, since I been here, that there's women that goes to have pictur's
took from them that way by men painters." The point seemed aimed at
March, as if he were personally responsible for the scandal, and it fell
with a silencing effect for the moment. Nobody seemed willing to take it
up, and Mrs. Dryfoos went on, with an old woman's severity: "I say they
ought to be all tarred and feathered and rode on a rail. They'd be
drummed out of town in Moffitt."
Miss Mela said, with a crowing laugh: "I should think they would! And
they wouldn't anybody go low neck to the opera-house there, either--not
low neck the way they do here, anyway."
"And that pack of worthless hussies," her mother resumed, "that come out
on the stage, and begun to kick."
"Laws, mother!" the girl shouted, "I thought you said you had your eyes
shut!"
All but these two simpler creatures were abashed at the indecorum of
suggesting in words the commonplaces of the theatre and of art.
"Well, I did, Mely, as soon as I could believe my eyes. I don't know what
they're doin' in all their churches, to let such things go on," said the
old woman. "It's a sin and a shame, I think. Don't you, Coonrod?"
A ring at the door cut short whatever answer he was about to deliver.
"If it's going to be company, Coonrod," said his mother, making an effort
to rise, "I reckon I better go up-stairs."
"It's Mr. Fulkerson, I guess," said Conrad. "He thought he might come";
and at the mention of this light spirit Mrs. Dryfoos sank contentedly
back in her chair, and a relaxation of their painful tension seemed to
pass through the whole company. Conrad went to the door himself (the
serving-man tentatively, appeared some minutes later) and let in
Fulkerson's cheerful voice before his cheerful person.
"Ah, how dye do, Conrad? Brought our friend, Mr. Beaton, with me," those
within heard him say; and then, after a sound of putting off overcoats,
they saw him fill the doorway, with his feet set square and his arms
akimbo.