Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister (page 2)

stop it, unless he came right out with the whole thing? I didn’t believe he was the man to do that ever, even under the loosening inspiration of drink. In wine lies truth, no doubt; but within him, was not moral elegance the bottom truth that would, even in his cups, keep him a gentleman, and control all such revelations? He might smash the glasses, but he would not speak of his misgivings as to Hortense Rieppe.

He began again, “Nor do I believe that a really nice girl would continue to think as those few do, if she once got safe away from them. Why, my dear sir,” he stretched out his hand in emphasis, “you do not have to do anything untimely and extreme if you are in good earnest a dead game sport. The time comes, and you meet the occasion as the duck swims. There was one of them–the right kind.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Why–you’re leaning against her headstone!”

The little incongruity made us both laugh, but it was only for the instant. The tender mood of the evening, and all that we had said, sustained the quiet and almost grave undertone of our conference. My own quite unconscious act of rising from the grave and standing before him on the path to listen brought back to us our harmonious pensiveness.

“She was born in Kings Port, but educated in Europe. I don’t suppose until the time came that she ever did anything harder than speak French, or play the piano, or ride a horse. She had wealth and so had her husband. He was killed in the war, and so were two of her sons. The third was too young to go. Their fortune was swept away, but the plantation was there, and the negroes were proud to remain faithful to the family. She took hold of the plantation, she walked the rice-banks in high boots. She had an overseer, who, it was told her, would possibly take her life by poison or by violence. She nevertheless lived in that lonely spot with no protector except her pistol and some directions about antidotes. She dismissed him when she had proved he was cheating her; she made the planting pay as well as any man did after the war; she educated her last son, got him into the navy, and then, one evening, walking the river-banks too late, she caught the fever and died. You will understand she went with one step from cherished ease to single-handed battle with life, a delicately nurtured lady, with no preparation for her trials.”

“Except moral elegance,” I murmured.

“Ah, that was the point, sir! To see her you would never have guessed it! She kept her burdens from the sight of all. She wore tribulation as if it were a flower in her bosom. We children always looked forward to her coming, because she was so gay and delightful to us, telling us stories of the old times–old rides when the country was wild, old journeys with the family and servants to the Hot Springs before the steam cars were invented, old adventures, with the battle of New Orleans or a famous duel in them–the sort of stories that begin with (for you seem to know something of it yourself, sir) ‘Your grandfather, my dear John, the year that he was twenty, got himself into serious embarrassments through paying his attentions to two reigning beauties at once.’ She was full of stories which began in that sort of pleasant way.”

I said: “When a person like that dies, an impoverishment falls upon us; the texture of life seems thinner.”

“Oh, yes, indeed! I know what you mean–to lose the people one has always seen from the cradle. Well, she has gone away, she has taken her memories out of the world, the old times, the old stories. Nobody, except a little nutshell of people here, knows or cares anything about her any more; and soon even the nutshell will be empty.” He paused, and then, as if brushing aside his churchyard mood, he translated into his changed thought another classic quotation: “But we can’t dawdle over the ‘tears of things’; it’s Nature’s law. Only, when I think of the rice-banks and the boots and the pistol, I wonder if the Newport ladies, for all their high-balls, could do any better!”

The crimson had faded, the twilight was altogether come, but the little noiseless breeze was blowing still; and as we left the quiet tombs behind us, and gained Worship Street, I could not help looking back where slept that older Kings Port about which I had heard and had said so much. Over the graves I saw the roses, nodding and moving, as if in acquiescent revery.

VII: The Girl Behind the Counter–II

“Which of them is idealizing?” This was the question that I asked myself, next morning, in my boarding-house, as I dressed for breakfast; the next morning is–at least I have always found it so–an excellent time for searching questions; and to-day I had waked up no longer beneath the strong, gentle spell of the churchyard. A bright sun was shining over the eastern waters of the town, I could see from my upper veranda the thousand flashes of the waves; the steam yacht rode placidly and competently among them, while a coastwise steamer was sailing by her, out to sea, to Savannah, or New York; the general world was going on, and– which of them was idealizing? It mightn’t be so bad, after all. Hadn’t I, perhaps, over-sentimentalized to myself the case of John Mayrant? Hadn’t I imagined for him ever so much more anxiety than the boy actually felt? For people can idealize down just as readily as they can idealize up. Of Miss Hortense Rieppe I had now two partial portraits–one by the displeased aunts, the other by their chivalric nephew; in both she held between her experienced lips, a cigarette; there the similarity ceased. And then, there was the toboggan fire-escape. Well, I must meet the living original before I could decide whether (for me, at any rate) she was the “brute” as seen by the eyes of Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, or the “really nice girl” who was going to marry John Mayrant on Wednesday week. Just at this point my thoughts brought up hard again at the cake. No; I couldn’t swallow that any better this morning than yesterday afternoon! Allow the gentleman to pay for the feast! Better to have omitted all feast; nothing simpler, and it would have been at least dignified, even if arid. But then, there was the lady (a cousin or an aunt–I couldn’t remember which this morning) who had told me she wasn’t solicitous. What did she mean by that? And she had looked quite queer when she spoke about the phosphates. Oh, yes, to be sure, she was his intimate aunt! Where, by the way, was Miss Rieppe?

By the time I had eaten my breakfast and walked up Worship Street to the post-office I was full of it all again; my searching thoughts hadn’t simplified a single point. I always called for my mail at the post-office, because I got it sooner; it didn’t come to the boarding-house before I had departed on my quest for royal blood, whereas, this way, I simply got my letters at the corner of Court and Worship streets and walked diagonally across and down Court a few steps to my researches, which I could vary and alleviate by reading and answering news from home.

It was from Aunt Carola that I heard to-day. Only a little of what she said will interest you. There had been a delightful meeting of the Selected Salic Scions. The Baltimore Chapter had paid her Chapter a visit. Three ladies and one very highly connected young gentleman had come–an encouragingly full and enthusiastic meeting. They had lunched upon cocoa, sherry, and croquettes, after which all had been more than glad to listen to a paper read by a descendant of Edward the Third and the young gentleman, a descendant of Catherine of Aragon, had recited a beautiful original poem, entitled “My Queen Grandmother.” Aunt Carola regretted that I could not have had the pleasure and the benefit of this meeting, the young gentleman had turned out to be, also, a refined and tasteful musician, playing, upon the piano a favorite gavotte of Louis the Thirteenth “And while you are in Kings Port,” my aunt said; “I expect you to profit by associating with the survivors of our good American society–people such as one could once meet everywhere when I was young, but who have been destroyed by the invasion of the proletariat. You are in the last citadel of good-breeding. By the way, find out, if you can, if any of the Bombo connection are extant; as through them I should like, if possible, to establish a chapter of the Scions in South Carolina. Have you, met a Miss Rieppe, a decidedly striking young woman, who says she is from Kings Port, and who recently passed through here with a very common man dancing attendance on her? He owns the Hermana, and she is said to be engaged to him.”

This wasn’t as good as meeting Miss Rieppe myself; but the new angle at which I got her from my Aunt was distinctly a contribution toward the young woman’s likeness; I felt that I should know her at sight, if ever she came within seeing distance. And it would be entertaining to find that she was a Bombo; but that could wait; what couldn’t wait was the Hermana. I postponed the Fannings, hurried by the door where they waited for me, and, coming to the end of Court Street, turned to the right and sought among the wharves the nearest vista that could give me a view of the harbor. Between the silent walls of commerce desolated, and by the empty windows from which Prosperity once looked out, I threaded my way to a point upon the town’s eastern edge. Yes, that was the steam yacht’s name: the Hermana. I didn’t make it out myself, she lay a trifle too far from shore; but I could read from a little fluttering pennant that her owner was not on board; and from the second loafer whom I questioned I learned, besides her name, that she had come from New York here to meet her owner, whose name he did not know and whose arrival was still indefinite. This was not very much to find out; but it was so much more than I had found out about the Fannings that, although I now faithfully returned to my researches, and sat over open books until noon, I couldn’t tell you a word of what I read. Where was Miss Rieppe, and where was the owner of the Hermana? Also, precisely how ill was the hero of Chattanooga, her poor dear father?

At the Exchange I opened the door upon a conversation which, in consequence, broke off abruptly; but this much I came in for:–

“Nothing but the slightest bruise above his eye. The other one is in bed.”

It was the severe lady who said this; I mean that lady who, among all the severe ones I had met, seemed capable of the highest exercise of this quality, although she had not exercised it in my presence. She looked, in her veil and her black street dress, as aloof, and as coldly scornful of the present day, as she had seemed when sitting over her embroidery; but it was not of 1818, or even 1840, that she had been talking just now: it was this morning that somebody was bruised, somebody was in bed.

The handsome lady acknowledged my salutation completely, but not encouragingly, and then, on the threshold, exchanged these parting sentences with the girl behind the counter:–

“They will have to shake hands. He was not very willing, but he listened to me. Of course, the chastisement was right–but it does not affect my opinion of his keeping on with the position.”

“No, indeed, Aunt Josephine!” the girl agreed. “I wish he wouldn’t. Did you say it was his right eye?”

“His left.” Miss Josephine St. Michael inclined her head once more to me and went out of the Exchange. I retired to my usual table, and the girl read in my manner, quite correctly, the feelings which I had not supposed I had allowed to be evident. She said:–

“Aunt Josephine always makes strangers think she’s displeased with them.”

I replied like the young ass which I constantly tell myself I have ceased to be: “Oh, displeasure is as much notice as one is entitled to from Miss St. Michael.”

The girl laughed with her delightful sweet mockery.

“I declare, you’re huffed! Now don’t tell me you’re not. But you mustn’t be. When you know her, you’ll know that that awful manner means Aunt Josephine is just being shy. Why, even I’m not afraid of her George Washington glances any more!”

“Very well,” I laughed, “I’ll try to have your courage.” Over my chocolate and sandwiches I sat in curiosity discreditable, but natural. Who was in bed–who would have to shake hands? And why had they stopped talking when I came in? Of course, I found myself hoping that John Mayrant had put the owner of the Hermana in bed at the slight cost of a bruise above his left eye. I wondered if the cake was again countermanded, and I started upon that line. “I think I’ll have to-day, if you please, another slice of that Lady Baltimore.” And I made ready for another verbal skirmish.

“I’m so sorry! It’s a little stale to-day. You can have the last slice, if you wish.”

“Thank you, I will.” She brought it. “It’s not so very stale,” I said. “How long since it has been made?”

“Oh, it’s the same you’ve been having. You’re its only patron just now.”

“Well, no. There’s Mr. Mayrant.”

“Not for a week yet, you remember.”

So the wedding was on yet. Still, John might have smashed the owner of the Hermana.

“Have you seen him lately?” I asked.

There was something special in the way she looked. “Not to-day. Have you?”

“Never in the forenoon. He has his duties and I have mine.”

She made a little pause, and then, “What do you think of the President?”

“The President?” I was at a loss.

“But I’m afraid you would take his view–the Northern view,” she mused.

It gave me, suddenly, her meaning. “Oh, the President of the United States! How you do change the subject!”

Her eyes were upon me, burning with sectional indignation, but she seemed to be thinking too much to speak. Now, here was a topic that I had avoided, and she had plumped it at me. Very well; she should have my view.

“If you mean that a gentleman cannot invite any respectable member of any race he pleases to dine privately in his house–“

“His house!” She was glowing now with it. “I think he is–I think he is– to have one of them–and even if he likes it, not to remember–cannot speak about him!” she wound up “I should say unbecoming things.” She had walked out, during these words, from behind the counter and as she stood there in the middle of the long room you might have thought she was about to lead a cavalry charge. Then, admirably, she put it all under, and spoke on with perfect self-control. “Why can’t somebody explain it to him? If I knew him, I would go to him myself, and I would say, Mr. President, we need not discuss our different tastes as to dinner company. Nor need we discuss how much you benefit the colored race by an act which makes every member of it immediately think that he is fit to dine with any king in the world. But you are staying in a house which is partly our house, ours, the South’s, for we, too, pay taxes, you know. And since you also know our deep feeling–you may even call it a prejudice, if it so pleases you–do you not think that, so long as you are residing in that house, you should not gratuitously shock our deep feeling?” She swept a magnificent low curtsy at the air.

“By Jove, Miss La Heu!” I exclaimed, “you put it so that it’s rather hard to answer.”

“I’m glad it strikes you so.”

“But did it make them all think they were going to dine?”

“Hundreds of thousands. It was proof to them that they were as good as anybody–just as good, without reading or writing or anything. The very next day some of the laziest and dirtiest where we live had a new strut, like the monkey when you put a red flannel cap on him–only the monkey doesn’t push ladies off the sidewalk. And that state of mind, you know,” said Miss La Heu, softening down from wrath to her roguish laugh, “isn’t the right state of mind for racial progress! But I wasn’t thinking of this. You know he has appointed one of them to office here.”

A light entered my brain: John Mayrant had a position at the Custom House! John Mayrant was subordinate to the President’s appointee! She hadn’t changed the subject so violently, after all.

I came squarely at it. “And so you wish him to resign his position?”

But I was ahead of her this time.

“The Chief of Customs?” she wonderingly murmured.

I brought her up with me now. “Did Miss Josephine St. Michael say it was over his left eye?”

The girl instantly looked everything she thought. “I believe you were present!” This was her highly comprehensive exclamation, accompanied also by a blush as splendidly young as John Mayrant had been while he so stammeringly brought out his wishes concerning the cake. I at once decided to deceive her utterly, and therefore I spoke the exact truth: “No, I wasn’t present.”

They did their work, my true words; the false impression flowed out of them as smoothly as California claret from a French bottle.

“I wonder who told you?” my victim remarked. “But it doesn’t really matter. Everybody is bound to know it. You surely were the last person with him in the churchyard?”

“Gracious!” I admitted again with splendidly mendacious veracity. “How we do find each other out in Kings Port!”

It was not by any means the least of the delights which I took in the company of this charming girl that sometimes she was too much for me, and sometimes I was too much for her. It was, of course, just the accident of our ages; in a very few years she would catch up, would pass, would always be too much for me. Well, to-day it was happily my turn; I wasn’t going to finish lunch without knowing all she, at any rate, could tell me about the left eye and the man in bed.

“Forty years ago,” I now, with ingenuity, remarked, “I suppose it would have been pistols.”

She assented. “And I like that better–don’t you–for gentlemen?”

“Well, you mean that fists are–“

“Yes,” she finished for me.

“All the same,” I maintained, “don’t you think that there ought to be some correspondence, some proportion, between the gravity of the cause and the gravity of–“

“Let the coal-heavers take to their fists!” she scornfully cried. “People of our class can’t descend–“

“Well, but,” I interrupted, “then you give the coal-heavers the palm for discrimination.”

“How’s that?”

“Why, perfectly! Your coal-heaver kills for some offenses, while for lighter ones he–gets a bruise over the left eye.”

“You don’t meet it, you don’t meet it! What is an insult ever but an insult?”

“Oh, we in the North notice certain degrees–insolence, impudence, impertinence, liberties, rudeness–all different.”

She took up my phrase with a sudden odd quietness. “You in the North.”

“Why, yes. We have, alas! to expect and allow for rudeness sometimes, even in our chosen few, and for liberties in their chosen few; it’s only the hotel clerk and the head waiter from whom we usually get impudence; while insolence is the chronic condition of the Wall Street rich.”

“You in the North!” she repeated. “And so your Northern eyes can’t see it, after all!” At these words my intelligence sailed into a great blank, while she continued: “Frankly–and forgive me for saying it–I was hoping that you were one Northerner who would see it.”

“But see what?” I barked in my despair.

She did not help me. “If I had been a man, nothing could have insulted me more than that. And that’s what you don’t see,” she regretfully finished. “It seems so strange.”

I sat in the midst of my great blank, while her handsome eyes rested upon me. In them was that look of a certain inquiry and a certain remoteness with which one pauses, in a museum, before some specimen of the cave-dwelling man.

“You comprehend so much,” she meditated slowly, aloud; “you’ve been such an agreeable disappointment, because your point of view is so often the same as ours.” She was still surveying me with the specimen expression, when it suddenly left her. “Do you mean to sit there and tell me,” she broke out, “that you wouldn’t have resented it yourself?”

“O dear!” my mind lamentably said to itself, inside. Of what may have been the exterior that I presented to her, sitting over my slice of Lady Baltimore, I can form no impression.

“Put yourself in his place,” the girl continued.

“Ah,” I gasped, “that is always so easy to say and so hard to do.”

My remark proved not a happy one. She made a brief, cold pause over it, and then, as she wheeled round from me, back to the counter: “No Southerner would let pass such an affront.”

It was final. She regained her usual place, she resumed her ledger; the curly dog, who had come out to hear our conversation, went in again; I was disgraced. Not only with the profile of her short, belligerent nose, but with the chilly way in which she made her pencil move over the ledger, she told me plainly that my self-respect had failed to meet her tests. This was what my remarkable ingenuity had achieved for me. I swallowed the last crumbs of Lady Baltimore, and went forward to settle the account.

“I suppose I’m scarcely entitled to ask for a fresh one to-morrow,” I ventured. “I am so fond of this cake.”

Her officialness met me adequately. “Certainly the public is entitled to whatever we print upon our bill-of-fare.”

Now this was going to be too bad! Henceforth I was to rank merely as “the public,” no matter how much Lady Baltimore I should lunch upon! A happy thought seized me, and I spoke out instantly on the strength of it.

“Miss La Heu, I’ve a confession to make.”

But upon this beginning of mine the inauspicious door opened and young John Mayrant came in. It was all right about his left eye; anybody could see that bruise!

“Oh!” he exclaimed, hearty, but somewhat disconcerted. “To think of finding you here! You’re going? But I’ll see you later?”

“I hope so,” I said. “You know where I work.”

“Yes–yes. I’ll come. We’ve all sorts of things more to say, haven’t we? We–good-by!”

Did I hear, as I gained the street, something being said about the General, and the state of his health?

VIII: Midsummer-Night’s Dream

You may imagine in what state of wondering I went out of that place, and how little I could now do away with my curiosity. By the droll looks and head-turnings which followed me from strangers that passed me by in the street, I was made aware that I must be talking aloud to myself, and the words which I had evidently uttered were these: “But who in the world can he have smashed up?”

Of course, beneath the public stare and smile I kept the rest of my thoughts to myself; yet they so possessed and took me from my surroundings, that presently, while crossing Royal Street, I was nearly run down by an electric car. Nor did even this serve to disperse my preoccupation; my walk back to Court and Chancel streets is as if it had not been; I can remember nothing about it, and the first account that I took of external objects was to find myself sitting in my accustomed chair in the Library, with the accustomed row of books about the battle of Cowpens waiting on the table in front of me. How long we had thus been facing each other, the books and I, I’ve not a notion. And with such mysterious machinery are we human beings filled–machinery that is in motion all the while, whether we are aware of it or not–that now, with some part of my mind, and with my pencil assisting, I composed several stanzas to my kingly ancestor, the goal of my fruitless search; and yet during the whole process of my metrical exercise I was really thinking and wondering about John Mayrant, his battles and his loves.

ODE ON INTIMATIONS OF ROYALTY

I sing to thee, thou Great Unknown, Who canst connect me with a throne
Through uncle, cousin, aunt, or sister, But not, I trust, through bar sinister.

Chorus:
Gules! Gules! and a cuckoo peccant!

Such was the frivolous opening of my poem, which, as it progressed, grew even less edifying; I have quoted this fragment merely to show you how little reverence for the Selected Salic Scions was by this time left in my spirit, and not because the verses themselves are in the least meritorious; they should serve as a model for no serious-minded singer, and they afford a striking instance of that volatile mood, not to say that inclination to ribaldry, which will at seasons crop out in me, do what I will. It is my hope that age may help me to subdue this, although I have observed it in some very old men.

I did not send my poem to Aunt Carola, but I wrote her a letter, even there and then, couched in terms which I believe were altogether respectful. I deplored my lack of success in discovering the link that was missing between me and king’s blood; I intimated my conviction that further effort on my part would still be met with failure; and I renounced with fitting expressions of disappointment my candidateship for the Scions thanking Aunt Carola for her generosity, by which I must now no longer profit. I added that I should remain in Kings Port for the present, as I was finding the climate of decided benefit to my health, and the courtesy of the people an education in itself.

Whatever pain at missing the glory of becoming a Scion may have lingered with me after this was much assuaged in a few days by my reading an article in a New York paper, which gave an account of a meeting of my Aunt’s Society, held in that city. My attention was attracted to this article by the prominent heading given to it: THEY WORE THEIR CROWNS. This in very conspicuous Roman capitals, caused me to sit up. There must have been truth in some of it, because the food eaten by the Scions was mentioned as consisting of sandwiches, sherry and croquettes; yet I think that the statement that the members present addressed each other according to the royal families from which they severally traced descent, as, for example, Brother Guelph and Sister Plantagenet, can scarce have beers aught but an exaggeration; nevertheless, the article brought me undeniable consolation for my disappointment.

After finishing my letter to Aunt Carola I should have hastened out to post it and escape from Cowpens, had I not remembered that John Mayrant had more or less promised to meet me here. Now, there was but a slender chance that he boy would speak to me on the subject of his late encounter; this I must learn from other sources; but he might speak to me about something that would open a way for my hostile preparations against Miss Rieppe. So far he had not touched upon his impending marriage in any way, but this reserve concerning a fact generally known among the people whom I was seeing could hardly go on long without becoming ridiculous. If he should shun mention of it to-day, I would take this as a plain sign that he did not look forward to it with the enthusiasm which a lover ought to feel for his approaching bliss; and on such silence from him I would begin, if I could, to undermine his intention of keeping an engagement of the heart when the heart no longer entered into it.

While my thoughts continued to be busied over this lover and his concerns, I noticed the works of William Shakespeare close beside me upon a shelf; and although it was with no special purpose in mind that I took out one of the volumes and sat down with it to wait for John Mayrant, in a little while an inspiration came to me from its pages, so that I was more anxious than ever the boy should not fail to meet me here in the Library.

Was it the bruise on his forehead that had perturbed his manner just now when he entered the Exchange? No, this was not likely to be the reason, since he had been full as much embarrassed that first day of my seeing him there, when he had given his order for Lady Baltimore so lamely that the girl behind the counter had come to his aid. And what could it have been that he had begun to tell her to-day as I was leaving the place? Was the making of that cake again to be postponed on account of the General’s precarious health? And what had been the nature of the insult which young John Mayrant had punished and was now commanded to shake hands over? Could it in truth be the owner of the Hermana whom he had thrashed so well as to lay him up in bed? That incident had damaged two people at least, the unknown vanquished combatant in his bodily welfare, and me in my character as an upstanding man in the fierce feminine estimation of Miss La Heu; but this injury it was my intention to set right; my confession to the girl behind the counter was merely delayed. As I sat with Shakespeare open in my lap, I added to my store of reasoning one little new straw of argument in favor of my opinion that John Mayrant was no longer at ease or happy about his love affair. I had never before met any young man in whose manner nature was so finely tempered with good bringing-up; forwardness and shyness were alike absent from him, and his bearing had a sort of polished unconsciousness as far removed from raw diffidence as it was from raw conceit; it was altogether a rare and charming address in a youth of such true youthfulness, but it had failed him upon two occasions which I have already mentioned. Both times that he had come to the Exchange he had stumbled in his usually prompt speech, lost his habitual ease, and betrayed, in short, all the signs of being disconcerted. The matter seemed suddenly quite plain to me: it was the nature of his errands to the Exchange. The first time he had been ordering the cake for his own wedding, and to-day it was something about the wedding again. Evidently the high mettle of his delicacy and breeding made him painfully conscious of the view which others must take of the part that Miss Rieppe was playing in all this–a view from which it was out of his power to shield her; and it was this consciousness that destroyed his composure. From what I was soon to learn of his fine and unmoved disregard for unfavorable opinion when he felt his course to be the right one, I know that it was no thought at all of his own scarcely heroic role during these days, but only the perception that outsiders must detect in his affianced lady some of those very same qualities which had chilled his too precipitate passion for her, and left him alone, without romance, without family sympathy, without social acclamations, with nothing indeed save his high-strung notion of honor to help him bravely face the wedding march. How appalling must the wedding march sound to a waiting bridegroom who sees the bride, that he no longer looks at except with distaste and estrangement, coming nearer and nearer to him up the aisle! A funeral march would be gayer than that music, I should think! The thought came to me to break out bluntly and say to him: “Countermand the cake! She’s only playing with you while that yachtsman is making up his mind.” But there could be but one outcome of such advice to John Mayrant: two people, instead of one, would be in bed suffering from contusions. As I mused on the boy and his attractive and appealing character, I became more rejoiced than ever that he had thrashed somebody, I cared not very much who nor yet very much why, so long as such thrashing had been thorough, which seemed quite evidently and happily the case. He stood now in my eyes, in some way that is too obscure for me to be able to explain to you, saved from some reproach whose subtlety likewise eludes my powers of analysis.

It was already five minutes after three o’clock, my dinner hour, when he at length appeared in the Library; and possibly I put some reproach into my greeting: “Won’t you walk along with me to Mrs. Trevise’s?” (That was my boarding house.)

“I could not get away from the Custom House sooner,” he explained; and into his eyes there came for a moment that look of unrest and preoccupation which I had observed at times while we had discussed Newport and alcoholic girls. The two subjects seemed certainly far enough apart! But he immediately began upon a conversation briskly enough–so briskly that I suspected at once he had got his subject ready in advance; he didn’t want me to speak first, lest I turn the talk into channels embarrassing, such as bruised foreheads or wedding cake. Well, this should not prevent me from dropping in his cup the wholesome bitters which I had prepared.

“Well, sir! Well, sir!” such was his hearty preface. “I wonder if you’re feeling ashamed of yourself?”

“Never when I read Shakespeare,” I answered restoring the plume to its place.

He looked at the title. “Which one?”

“One of the unsuitable love affairs that was prevented in time.”

“Romeo and Juliet?”

“No; Bottom and Titania–and Romeo and Juliet were not prevented in time. They had their bliss once and to the full, and died before they caused each other anything but ecstasy. No weariness of routine, no tears of disenchantment; complete love, completely realized–and finis! It’s the happiest ending of all the plays.”

He looked at me hard. “Sometimes I believe you’re ironic!”

I smiled at him. “A sign of the highest civilization, then. But please to think of Juliet after ten years of Romeo and his pin-headed intelligence and his preordained infidelities. Do you imagine that her predecessor, Rosamond, would have had no successors? Juliet would have been compelled to divorce Romeo, if only for the children’s sake.

“The children!” cried John Mayrant. “Why, it’s for their sake deserted women abstain from divorce!”

“Juliet would see deeper than such mothers. She could not have her little sons and daughters grow up and comprehend their father’s absences, and see their mother’s submission to his returns for such discovery would scorch the marrow of any hearts they had.”

At this, as we came out of the Library, he made an astonishing rejoinder, and one which I cannot in the least account for: “South Carolina does not allow divorce.”

“Then I should think,” I said to him, “that all you people here would be doubly careful as to what manner of husbands and wives you chose for yourselves.”

Such a remark was sailing, you may say, almost within three points of the wind; and his own accidental allusion to Romeo had brought it about with an aptness and a celerity which were better for my purpose than anything I had privately developed from the text of Bottom and Titania; none the less, however, did I intend to press into my service that fond couple also as basis for a moral, in spite of the sharp turn which those last words of mine now caused him at once to give to our conversation. His quick reversion to the beginning of the talk seemed like a dodging of remarks that hit too near home for him to relish hearing pursued.

“Well, sir,” he resumed with the same initial briskness, “I was ashamed if you were not.”

“I still don’t make out what impropriety we have jointly committed.”

“What do you think of the views you expressed about our country?”

“Oh! When we sat on the gravestones.”

“What do you think about it to-day?”

I turned to him as we slowly walked toward Worship Street. “Did you say anything then that you would take back now?”

He pondered, wrinkling his forehead. “Well, but all the same, didn’t we give the present hour a pretty black eye?”

“The present hour deserves a black eye, and two of them!”

He surveyed me squarely. “I believe you’re a pessimist!”

“That is the first trashy thing I’ve heard you say.”

“Thank you! At least admit you’re scarcely an optimist.”

“Optimist! Pessimist! Why, you’re talking just like a newspaper!”

He laughed. “Oh, don’t compare a gentleman to a newspaper.”

“Then keep your vocabulary clean of bargain-counter words. A while ago the journalists had a furious run upon the adjective ‘un-American.’ Anybody or anything that displeased them was ‘un-American.’ They ran it into the ground, and in its place they have lately set up ‘pessimist,’ which certainly has a threatening appearance. They don’t know its meaning, and in their mouths it merely signifies that what a man says snakes them feel personally uncomfortable. The word has become a dusty rag of slang. The arrested burglar very likely calls the policeman a pessimist; and, speaking reverently and with no intention to shock you, the scribes and Pharisees would undoubtedly have called Christ a pessimist when He called them hypocrites, had they been acquainted with the word.”

Once more my remarks drew from the boy an unexpected rejoinder. We had turned into Worship Street, and, as we passed the churchyard, he stopped and laid his hand upon the railing of the pate.

“You don’t shock me,” he said; and then: “But you would shock my aunts.” He paused, gazing into the churchyard, before he continued more slowly: “And so should I–if they knew it–shock them.”

“If they knew what?” I asked.

His hand indicated a sculptured crucifix near by.

“Do you believe everything still?” he answered. “Can you?”

As he looked at me, I suppose that he read negation in my eyes.

“No more can I,” he murmured. Again he looked in among the tombstones and flowers, where the old custodian saw us and took off his hat. “Howdy, Daddy Ben!” John Mayrant returned pleasantly, and then resuming to me: “No more can I believe everything.” Then he gave a brief, comical laugh. “And I hope my aunts won’t find that out! They would think me gone to perdition indeed. But I always go to church here” (he pointed to the quiet building, which, for all its modest size and simplicity, had a stately and inexpressible charm), “because I like to kneel where my mother said her prayers, you know.” He flushed a little over this confidence into which he had fallen, but he continued: “I like the words of the service, too, and I don’t ask myself over-curiously what I do believe; but there’s a permanent something within us–a Greater Self– don’t you think?”

“A permanent something,” I assented, “which has created all the religions all over the earth from the beginning, and of which Christianity itself is merely one of the present temples.”

He made an exclamation at my word “present.”

“Do you think anything in this world is final?” I asked him.

“But–” he began, somewhat at a loss.

“Haven’t you found out yet that human nature is the one indestructible reality that we know?”

“But–” he began again.

“Don’t we have the ‘latest thing’ all the time, and never the ultimate thing, never, never? The latest thing in women’s hats is that huge-brimmed affair with the veil as voluminous as a double-bed mosquito netting. That hat will look improbable next spring. The latest thing in science is radium. Radium has exploded the conservation of energy theory–turned it into a last year’s hat. Answer me, if Christianity is the same as when it wore among its savage ornaments a devil with horns and a flaming Hell! Forever and forever the human race reaches out its hand and shapes some system, some creed, some government, and declares: ‘This is at length the final thing, the cure-all,’ and lo and behold, something flowing and eternal in the race itself presently splits the creed and the government to pieces! Truth is a very marvelous thing. We feel it; it can fill our eyes with tears, our hearts with joy, it can make us die for it; but once our human lips attempt to formulate and thus imprison it, it becomes a lie. You cannot shut truth up in any words.”

“But it shall prevail!” the boy exclaimed with a sort of passion.

“Everything prevails,” I answered him.

“I don’t like that,” he said.

“Neither do I,” I returned. “But Jacob got Esau’s inheritance by a mean trick.”

“Jacob was punished for it.”

“Did that help Esau much?”

“You are a pessimist!”

“Just because I see Jacob and Esau to-day, alive and kicking in Wall Street, Washington, Newport, everywhere?”

“You’re no optimist, anyhow!”

“I hope I’m blind in neither eye.”

“You don’t give us credit–“

“For what?”

“For what we’ve accomplished since Jacob.”

“Printing, steam, and electricity, for instance? They spread the Bible and the yellow journal with equal velocity.”

“I don’t mean science. Take our institutions.”

“Well, we’ve accomplished hospitals and the stock market–a pretty even set-off between God and the devil.”

He laughed. “You don’t take a high view of us!”

“Nor a low one. I don’t play ostrich with any of the staring permanences of human nature. We’re just as noble to-day as David was sometimes, and just as bestial to-day as David was sometimes, and we’ve every possibility inside us all the time, whether we paint our naked skins, or wear steel armor or starched shirts.”

“Well, I believe good is the guiding power in the world.”

“Oh, John Mayrant! Good and evil draw us on like a span of horses, sometimes like a tandem, taking turns in the lead. Order has melted into disorder, and disorder into new order–how many times?”

“But better each time.”

“How can you know, who never lived in any age but your own?”

“I know we have a higher ideal.”

“Have we? The Greek was taught to love his neighbor as himself. He gave his great teacher a cup of poison. We gave ours the cross.”

Again he looked away from me into the sweet old churchyard. “I can’t answer you, but I don’t believe it.”

This brought me to gayety. “That’s unanswerable, anyhow!”

He still stared at the graves. “Those people in there didn’t think all these uncomfortable things.”

“Ah! no! They belonged in the first volume of the history of our national soul, before the bloom was off us.”

“That’s an odd notion! And pray what volume are we in now?”

“Only the second.”

“Since when?”

“Since that momentous picnic, the Spanish War!”

“I don’t see how that took the bloom off us.”

“It didn’t. It merely waked Europe up to the facts.”

“Our battleships, you mean?”

“Our steel rails, our gold coffers, our roaring affluence.”

“And our very accurate shooting!” he insisted; for he was a Southerner, and man’s gallantry appealed to him more than man’s industry.

I laughed. “Yes, indeed! We may say that the Spanish War closed our first volume with a bang. And now in the second we bid good-by to the virgin wilderness, for it’s explored; to the Indian, for he’s conquered; to the pioneer, for he’s dead; we’ve finished our wild, romantic adolescence and we find ourselves a recognized world power of eighty million people, and of general commercial endlessness, and playtime over.”

I think, John Mayrant now asserted, “that it is going too far to say the bloom is off us.”

“Oh, you’ll find snow in the woods away into April and May. The freedom-loving American, the embattled farmer, is not yet extinct in the far recesses. But the great cities grow like a creeping paralysis over freedom, and the man from the country is walking into them all the time because the poor, restless fellow believes wealth awaits him on their pavements. And when he doesn’t go to them, they come to him. The Wall Street bucket-shop goes fishing in the woods with wires a thousand miles long; and so we exchange the solid trailblazing enterprise of Volume One for Volume Two’s electric unrest. In Volume One our wagon was hitched to the star of liberty. Capital and labor have cut the traces. The labor union forbids the workingman to labor as his own virile energy and skill prompt him. If he disobeys, he is expelled and called a ‘scab.’ Don’t let us call ourselves the land of the free while such things go on. We’re all thinking a deal too much about our pockets nowadays. Eternal vigilance cannot watch liberty and the ticker at the same time.

“Well,” said John Mayrant, “we’re not thinking about our pockets in Kings Port, because” (and here there came into his voice and face that sudden humor which made him so delightful)–“because we haven’t got any pockets to think of!”

This brought me down to cheerfulness from my flight among the cold clouds.

He continued: “Any more lamentations, Mr. Jeremiah?”

“Those who begin to call names, John Mayrant–but never mind! I could lament you sick if I chose to go on about our corporations and corruption that I see with my pessimistic eye; but the other eye sees the American man himself–the type that our eighty millions on the whole melt into and to which my heart warms each time I land again from more polished and colder shores–my optimistic eye sees that American dealing adequately with these political diseases. For stronger even than his kindness, his ability, and his dishonesty is his self-preservation. He’s going to stand up for the ‘open shop’ and sit down on the ‘trust’; and I assure you that I don’t in the least resemble the Evening Post.”

A look of inquiry was in John Mayrant’s features.

“The New York Evening Post,” I repeated with surprise. Still the inquiry of his face remained.

“Oh, fortunate youth!” I cried. “To have escaped the New York Evening Post!”

“Is it so heinous?”

“Well! … well! … how exactly describe it? … make you see it? … It’s partially tongue-tied, a sad victim of its own excesses. Habitual over-indulgence in blaming has given it a painful stutter when attempting praise; it’s the sprucely written sheet of the supercilious; it’s the after-dinner pill of the American who prefers Europe; it’s our Republic’s common scold, the Xantippe of journalism, the paper without a country.”

“The paper without a country! That’s very good!”

“Oh, no! I’ll tell you something much better, but it is not mine. A clever New Yorker said that what with The Sun–“

“I know that paper.”

“–what with The Sun making vice so attractive in the morning and the Post making virtue so odious in the evening, it was very hard for a man to be good in New York.”

“I fear I should subscribe to The Sun,” said John Mayrant. He took his hand from the church-gate railing, and we had turned to stroll down Worship Street when he was unexpectedly addressed.

For some minutes, while John Mayrant and I had been talking, I had grown aware, without taking any definite note of it, that the old custodian of the churchyard, Daddy Ben, had come slowly near us from the distant corner of his demesne, where he had been (to all appearances) engaged in some trifling activity among the flowers–perhaps picking off the faded blossoms. It now came home to me that the venerable negro had really been, in a surreptitious way, watching John Mayrant, and waiting for something–either for the right moment to utter what he now uttered, or his own delayed decision to utter it at all.

“Mas’ John!” he called quite softly. His tone was fairly padded with caution, and I saw that in the pause which followed, his eye shot a swift look at the bruise on Mayrant’s forehead, and another look, equally swift, at me.

“Well, Daddy Ben, what is it?”

The custodian shunted close to the gate which separated him from us. “Mas’ John, I speck de President he dun’ know de cullud people like we knows ‘um, else he nebber bin ‘pint dat ar boss in de Cussum House, no, sah.”

After this effort he wiped his forehead and breathed hard.

To my astonishment, the effort brought immediately a stern change over John Mayrant’s face; then he answered in the kindest tones, “Thank you, Daddy Ben.”

This answer interpreted for me the whole thing, which otherwise would have been obscure enough: the old man held it to be an indignity that his young “Mas’ John” should, by the President’s act, find himself the subordinate of a member of the black race, and he had just now, in his perspiring effort, expressed his sympathy! Why he had chosen this particular moment (after quite obvious debate with himself) I did not see until somewhat later.

He now left us standing at the gate; and it was not for some moments that John Mayrant spoke again, evidently closing, for our two selves, this delicate subject.

“I wish we had not got into that second volume of yours.”

“That’s not progressive.”

“I hate progress.”

“What’s the use? Better grow old gracefully!

“‘Qui no pas I’esprif de son age De son age a tout le malheur.'”

“Well, I’m personally not growing old, just yet.”

“Neither is the United States.”

“Well, I don’t know. It’s too easy for sick or worthless people to survive nowadays. They are clotting up our square miles very fast. Philanthropists don’t seem to remember that you can beget children a great deal faster than you can educate them; and at this rate I believe universal suffrage will kill us off before our time.”

“Do not believe it! We are going to find out that universal suffrage is like the appendix–useful at an early stage of the race’s evolution but to-day merely a threat to life.”

He thought this over. “But a surgical operation is pretty serious, you know.”

“It’ll be done by absorption. Why, you’ve begun it yourselves, and so has Massachusetts. The appendix will be removed, black and white–and I shouldn’t much fear surgery. We’re not nearly civilized enough yet to have lost the power Of recuperation, and in spite of our express-train speed, I doubt if we shall travel from crudity to rottenness without a pause at maturity.”

“That is the old, old story,” he said.

“Yes; is there anything new under the sun?”

He was gloomy. “Nothing, I suppose.” Then the gloom lightened. “Nothing new under the sun–except the fashionable families of Newport!”

This again brought us from the clouds of speculation down to Worship Street, where we were walking toward South Place. It also unexpectedly furnished me with the means to lead back our talk so gently, without a jolt or a jerk, to my moral and the delicate topic of matrimony from which he had dodged away, that he never awoke to what was coming until it had come. He began pointing out, as we passed them, certain houses which were now, or had at some period been, the dwellings of his many relatives: “My cousin Julia So-and-so lives there,” he would say; or, “My great-uncle, known as Regent Tom, owned that before the War”; and once, “The Rev. Joseph Priedieu, my great-grandfather, built that house to marry his fifth wife in, but the grave claimed him first.”

So I asked him a riddle. “What is the difference between Kings Port and Newport?”

This he, of course, gave up.

“Here you are all connected by marriage, and there they are all connected by divorce.”

“That’s true!” he cried, “that’s very true. I met the most embarrassingly cater-cornered families.”

“Oh, they weren’t embarrassed!” I interjected.

“No, but I was,” said John.

“And you told me you weren’t innocent!” I exclaimed. “They are going to institute a divorce march,” I continued. “‘Lohengrin’ or ‘Midsummer- Night’s Dream’ played backward. They have not settled which it is to be taught in the nursery with the other kindergarten melodies.”

He was still unsuspectingly diverted; and we walked along until we turned in the direction of my boarding-house.

“Did you ever notice,” I now said, “what a perpetual allegory ‘Midsummer-Night’s Dream’ contains?”

“I thought it was just a fairy sort of thing.”

“Yes, but when a great poet sets his hand to a fairy sort of thing, you get–well, you get poor Titania.”

“She fell in love with a jackass,” he remarked. “Puck bewitched her.”

“Precisely. A lovely woman with her arms around a jackass. Does that never happen in Kings Port?”

He began smiling to himself. “I’m afraid Puck isn’t all dead yet.”

I was now in a position to begin dropping my bitters. “Shakespeare was probably too gallant to put it the other way, and make Oberon fall in love with a female jackass. But what an allegory!”

“Yes,” he muttered. “Yes.”

I followed with another drop. “Titania got out of it. It is not always solved so easily.”

“No,” he muttered. “No.” It was quite evident that the flavor of my bitters reached him.

He was walking slowly, with his head down, and frowning hard. We had now come to the steps of my boarding-house, and I dropped my last drop. “But a disenchanted woman has the best of it–before marriage, at least.”

He looked up quickly. “How?”

I evinced surprise. “Why, she can always break off honorably, and we never can, I suppose.”

For the third time this day he made me an astonishing rejoinder: “Would you like to take orders from a negro?”

It reduced me to stammering. “I have never–such a juncture has never–“

“Of course you wouldn’t. Even a Northerner!”

His face, as he said this, was a single glittering piece of fierceness. I was still so much taken aback that I said rather flatly: “But who has to?”

“I have to.” With this he abruptly turned on his heel and left me standing on the steps. For a moment I stared after him; and then, as I rang the bell, he was back again; and with that formality which at times overtook him he began: “I will ask you to excuse my hasty–“

“Oh, John Mayrant! What a notion!”

But he was by no means to be put off, and he proceeded with stiffer formality: “I feel that I have not acted politely just now, and I beg to assure you that I intended no slight.”

My first impulse was to lay a hand upon his shoulder and say to him: “My dear fellow, stuff and nonsense!” Thus I should have treated any Northern friend; but here was no Northerner. I am glad that I had the sense to feel that any careless, good-natured putting away of his deliberate and definitely tendered apology would seem to him a “slight” on my part. His punctilious value for certain observances between man and man reached me suddenly and deeply, and took me far from the familiarity which breeds contempt.

“Why, John Mayrant,” I said, “you could never offend me unless I thought that you wished to, and how should I possibly think that?”

“Thank you,” he replied very simply.

I rang the bell a second time. “If we can get into the house,” I suggested, “won’t you stop and dine with me?”

He was going to accept. “I shall be–” he had begun, in tones of gratification, when in one instant his face was stricken with complete dismay. “I had forgotten,” he said; and this time he was gone indeed, and in a hurry most apparent. It resembled a flight.

What was the matter now? You will naturally think that it was an appointment with his ladylove which he had forgotten; this was certainly my supposition as I turned again to the front door. There stood one of the waitresses, glaring with her white eyes half out of her black face at the already distant back of John Mayrant.

“Oh!” I thought; but, before I could think any more, the tall, dreadful boarder–the lady whom I secretly called Juno–swept up the steps, and by me into the house, with a dignity that one might term deafening.

The waitress now muttered, or rather sang, a series of pious apostrophes. “Oh, Lawd, de rampages and de ructions! Oh, Lawd, sinner is in my way, Daniel!” She was strongly, but I think pleasurably, excited; and she next turned to me with a most natural grin, and saying, “Chick’n’s mos’ gone, sah,” she went back to the dining room.

This admonition sent me upstairs to make as hasty a toilet as I could.

IX: Juno

Each recent remarkable occurrence had obliterated its predecessor, and it was with difficulty that I made a straight parting in my hair. Had it been Miss Rieppe that John so suddenly ran away to? It seemed now more as if the boy had been running away from somebody. The waitress had stared at him with extraordinary interest; she had seen his bruise; perhaps she knew how he had got it. Her excitement–had he smashed up his official superior at the custom house? That would be an impossible thing, I told myself instantly; as well might a nobleman cross swords with a peasant. Perhaps the stare of the waitress had reminded him of his bruise, and he might have felt disinclined to show himself with it in a company of gossiping strangers. Still, that would scarcely account for it–the dismay with which he had so suddenly left me. Was Juno the cause–she had come up behind me; he must have seen her and her portentous manner approaching–had the boy fled from her?

And then, his fierce outbreak about taking orders from a negro when I was moralizing over the misfortune of marrying a jackass! I got a sort of parting in my hair, and went down to the dining room.

Juno was there before me, with her bonnet, or rather her headdress, still on, and I heard her making apologies to Mrs. Trevise for being so late. Mrs. Trevise, of course, sat at the head of her table, and Juno sat at her right hand. I was very glad not to have a seat near Juno, because this lady was, as I have already hinted, an intolerable person to me. Either her Southern social position or her rent (she took the whole second floor, except Mrs. Trevise’s own rooms) was of importance to Mrs. Trevise; but I assure you that her ways kept our landlady’s cold, impervious tact watchful from the beginning to the end of almost every meal. Juno was one of those persons who possess so many and such strong feelings themselves that they think they have all the feelings there are; at least, they certainly consider no one’s feelings but their own. She possessed an inexhaustible store of anecdote, but it was exclusively about our Civil War; you would have supposed that nothing else had ever happened in the world. When conversation among the rest of us became general, she preserved a cold and acrid inattention; when the fancy took her to open her own mouth, it was always to begin some reminiscence, and the reminiscence always began: “In September, 1862, when the Northern vandals,” etc., etc., or “When the Northern vandals were repulsed by my husband’s cousin, General Braxton Bragg,” etc., etc. Now it was not that I was personally wounded by the term, because at the time of the vandals I was not even born, and also because I know that vandals cannot be kept out of any army. Deeply as I believed the March to the Sea to have been imperative, of “Sherman’s bummers” and their excesses I had a fair historic knowledge and a very poor opinion; and this I should have been glad to tell Juno, had she ever given me the chance; but her immodest sympathy for herself froze all sympathy for her. Why could she not preserve a well-bred silence upon her sufferings, as did the other old ladies I had met in Kings Port? Why did she drag them in, thrust them, poke them, shove them at you? Thus it was that for her insulting disregard of those whom her words might wound I detested Juno; and as she was a woman, and nearly old enough to be my grandmother, it was, of course, out of the question that I should retaliate. When she got very bad indeed, it was calm Mrs. Trevise’s last, but effective, resort to tinkle a little handbell and scold one of the waitresses whom its sound would then summon from the kitchen. This bell was tinkled not always by any means for my sake; other travellers from the North there were who came and went, pausing at Kings Port between Florida and their habitual abodes.

At present our company consisted of Juno; a middle-class Englishman employed in some business capacity in town; a pair of very young honeymooners from the “up-country”; a Louisiana poetess, who wore the long, cylindrical ringlets of 1830, and who was attending a convention the Daughters of Dixie; two or three males and females, best described as et ceteras; and myself. “I shall only take a mouthful for the sake of nourishment,” Juno was announcing, “and then I shall return to his bedside.”

“Is he very suffering?” inquired the poetess, in melodious accent.

“It was an infamous onslaught,” Juno replied.

The poetess threw up her eyes and crooned, “Noble, doughty champion!”

“You may say so indeed, madam,” said Juno.

“Raw beefsteak’s jolly good for your eye,” observed the Briton.

This suggestion did not appear to be heard by Juno.

“I had a row with a chap,” the Briton continued. He’s my best friend now. He made me put raw beefsteak–“

“I thank you,” interrupted Juno. “He requires no beefsteak, raw or cooked.”

The face of the Briton reddened. “Too groggy to eat, is he?”

Mrs. Trevise tinkled her bell. “Daphne! I have said to you twice to hand those yams.”

“I done handed ’em twice, ma’am.”

“Hand them right away, Daphne, and don’t be so forgetful.” It was not easy to disturb the composure of Mrs. Trevise.

The poetess now took up the broken thread. “Had I a son,” she declared, “I would sooner witness him starve than hear him take orders from a menial race.”

“But mightn’t starving be harder for him to experience than for you to witness, y’ know?” asked the Briton.

At this one of the et ceteras made a sort of snuffing noise, and ate his dinner hard.

It was the male honeymooner who next spoke. “Must have been quite a tussle, ma’am.”

“It was an infamous onslaught!” repeated Juno. “Wish I’d seen it!” sighed the honeymooner.

His bride smiled at him beamingly. “You’d have felt right lonesome to be out of it, David.”

“No apology has yet been offered,” continued Juno.

“But must your nephew apologize besides taking a licking?” inquired the Briton.

Juno turned an awful face upon hint. “It is from his brutal assailant that apologies are due. Mr. Mayrant’s family” (she paused here for blighting emphasis) “are well-bred people, and he will be coerced into behaving like a gentleman for once.”

I checked an impulse here to speak out and express my doubts as to the family coercion being founded upon any dissatisfaction with John’s conduct.

“I wonder if reading or recitation might not soothe your nephew?” said the poetess, now.

“I should doubt it,” answered Juno. “I have just come from his bedside.”

“I should so like to soothe him, if I could,” the poetess murmured. “If he were well enough to hear my convention ode–“

“He is not nearly well enough,” said Juno.

The et cetera here coughed and blew his nose so remarkably that we all started.

A short silence followed, which Juno relieved.

“I will give the young ruffian’s family the credit they deserve,” she stated. “The whole connection despises his keeping the position.”

Another et cetera now came into it. “Is it known what exactly precipitated the occurrence?”

Juno turned to him. “My nephew is a gentleman from whose lips no unworthy word could ever fall.’

“Oh!” said the et cetera, mildly. “He said something, then?”

“He conveyed a well-merited rebuke in fitting terms.”

“What were the terms?” inquired the Briton.

Juno again did not hear him. “It was after a friendly game of cards. My nephew protested against any gentleman remaining at the custom house since the recent insulting appointment.”

I was now almost the only member of the party who had preserved strict silence throughout this very interesting conversation, because, having no wish to converse with Juno at any time, I especially did not desire it now, just after her seeing me (I thought she must have seen me) in amicable conference with the object of her formidable displeasure.

“Every Mayrant is ferocious that I ever heard of,” she continued. “You cannot trust that seemingly delicate and human exterior. His father had it, too–deceiving exterior and raging interior, though I will say for that one that he would never have stooped to humiliate the family name as his son is doing. His regiment was near by when the Northern vandals burned our courthouse, and he made them run, I can tell you! It’s a mercy for that poor girl that the scales have dropped from her eyes and she has broken her engagement with him.”

“With the father?” asked a third et cetera.

Juno stared at the intruder.

Mrs. Trevise drawled a calm contribution. “The father died before this boy was born.”

“Oh, I see!” murmured the et cetera, gratefully.

Juno proceeded. “No woman’s life would be safe with him.”

“But mightn’t he be safer for a person’s niece than for their nephew?” said the Briton.

Mrs. Trevise’s hand moved toward the bell.

But Juno answered the question mournfully: “With such hereditary bloodthirstiness, who can tell?” And so Mrs. Trevise moved her hand away again.

“Excuse me, but do you know if the other gentleman is laid up, too?” inquired the male honeymooner, hopefully.

“I am happy to understand that he is,” replied Juno.

In sheer amazement I burst out, “Oh!” and abruptly stopped.

But it was too late. I had instantly become the centre of interest. The et ceteras and honeymooners craned their necks; the Briton leaned toward me from opposite; the poetess, who had worn an absent expression since being told that the injured champion was not nearly well enough to listen to her ode, now put on her glasses and gazed at me kindly; while Juno reared her headdress and spoke, not to me, but to the air in my general neighborhood.

“Has any one later intelligence than what I bring from my nephew’s bedside?”

So she hadn’t perceived who my companion at the step had been! Well, she should be enlightened, they all should be enlightened, and vengeance was mine. I spoke with gentleness:–

“Your nephew’s impressions, I fear, are still confused by his deplorable misadventure.”

“May I ask what you know about his impressions?”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the hand of Mrs. Trevise move toward her bell; but she wished to hear all about it more than she wished concord at her harmonious table; and the hand stopped.

Juno spoke again. “Who, pray, has later news than what I bring?”

My enemy was in my hand; and an enemy in the hand is worth I don’t know how many in the bush.

I answered most gently: “I do not come from Mr. Mayrant’s bedside, because I have just left him at the front door in sound health–saving a bruise over his left eye.”

During a second we all sat in a high-strung silence, and then Juno became truly superb. “Who sees the scars he brazenly conceals?”

It took away my breath; my battle would have been lost, when the Briton suggested: “But mayn’t he have shown those to his Aunt?”

We sat in no silence now; the first et cetera made extraordinary sounds on his plate, Mrs. Trevise tinkled her handbell with more unction than I had ever yet seen in her; and while she and Daphne interchanged streams of severe words which I was too disconcerted to follow, the other et ceteras and the honeymooners hectically effervesced into small talk. I presently found myself eating our last course amid a reestablished calm, when, with a rustle, Juno swept out from among us, to return (I suppose) to the bedside. As she passed behind the Briton’s chair, that invaluable person kicked me under the table, and on my raising my eyes to him he gave me a large, robust wink.

X: High Walk and the Ladies

I now burned to put many questions to the rest of the company. If, through my foolish and outreaching slyness with the girl behind the counter, the door of my comprehension had been shut, Juno had now opened it sufficiently wide for a number of facts to come crowding in, so to speak, abreast. Indeed, their simultaneous arrival was not a little confusing, as if several visitors had burst in upon me and at once begun speaking loudly, each shouting a separate and important matter which demanded my intelligent consideration. John Mayrant worked in the custom house, and Kings Port frowned upon this; not merely Kings Port in general–which counted little with the boy, if indeed he noticed general opinion at all–but the boy’s particular Kings Port, his severe old aunts, and his cousins, and the pretty girl at the Exchange, and the men he played cards with, all these frowned upon it, too; yet even this condemnation one could disregard if some lofty personal principle, some pledge to one’s own sacred honor, were at stake–but here was no such thing: John Mayrant hated the position himself. The salary? No, the salary would count for nothing in the face of such a prejudice as I had seen glitter from his eye! A strong, clever youth of twenty-three, with the world before him, and no one to support–stop! Hortense Rieppe! There was the lofty personal principle, the sacred pledge to honor; he was engaged presently to endow her with all his worldly goods; and to perform this faithfully a bridegroom must not, no matter how little he liked “taking orders from a negro,” fling away his worldly goods some few days before he was to pronounce his bridegroom’s vow. So here, at Mrs. Trevise’s dinner-table, I caught for one moment, to the full, a vision of the unhappy boy’s plight; he was sticking to a task which he loathed that he might support a wife whom he no longer desired. Such, as he saw it, was his duty; and nobody, not even a soul of his kin or his kind, gave him a word or a thought of understanding, gave him anything except the cold shoulder. Yes; from one soul he had got a sign–from aged Daddy Ben, at the churchyard gate; and amid my jostling surmises and conclusions, that quaint speech of the old negro, that little act of fidelity and affection from the heart of a black man, took on a strange pathos in its isolation amid the general harshness of his white superiors. Over this it was that I was pausing when, all in a second, perplexity again ruled my meditations. Juno had said that the engagement was broken. Well, if that were the case–But was it likely to be the case? Juno’s agreeable habit, a habit grown familiar to all of us in the house, was to sprinkle about, along with her vitriol, liberal quantities of the by-product of inaccuracy. Mingled with her latest illustrations, she had poured out for us one good dose of falsehood, the antidote for which it had been my happy office to administer on the spot. If John Mayrant wasn’t in bed from the wounds of combat, as she had given us to suppose, perhaps Hortense Rieppe hadn’t released him from his plighted troth, as Juno had also announced; and distinct relief filled me when I reasoned this out. I leave others to reason out why it was relief, and why a dull disappointment had come over me at the news that the match was off. This, for me, should have been good news, when you consider that I had been so lately telling myself such a marriage must not be, that I must myself, somehow (since no one else would), step in and arrest the calamity; and it seems odd that I should have felt this blankness and regret upon learning that the parties had happily settled it for themselves, and hence my difficult and delicate assistance was never to be needed by them.

Did any one else now sitting at our table know of Miss Rieppe’s reported act? What particulars concerning John’s fight had been given by Juno before my entrance? It didn’t surprise me that her nephew was in bed from Master Mayrant’s lusty blows. One could readily guess the manner in which young John, with his pent-up fury over the custom house, would “land” his chastisement all over the person of any rash critic! And what a talking about it must be going on everywhere to-day! If Kings Port tongues had been set in motion over me and my small notebook in a library, the whole town must be buzzing over every bruise given and taken in this evidently emphatic battle. I had hoped to glean some more precise information from my fellow-boarders after Juno had disembarrassed us of her sonorous presence; but even if they were possessed of all the facts which I lacked, Mrs. Trevise in some masterly fashion of her own banished the subject from further discussion. She held us off from it chiefly, I think, by adopting a certain upright posture in her chair, and a certain tone when she inquired if we wished a second help of the pudding. After thirty-five years of boarders and butchers, life held no secrets or surprises for her; she was a mature, lone, disenchanted, able lady, and even her silence was like an arm of the law.

An all too brief conversation, nipped by Mrs. Trevise at a stage even earlier than the bud, revealed to me that perhaps my fellow-boarders would have been glad to ask me questions, too.

It was the male honeymooner who addressed me. “Did I understand you to say, sir, that Mr. Mayrant had received a bruise over his left eye?”

“Daphne!” called out Mrs. Trevise, “Mr. Henderson will take an orange.”

And so we finished our meal without further reference to eyes, or noses, or anything of the sort. It was just as well, I reflected, when I reached my room, that I on my side had been asked no questions, since I most likely knew less than the others who had heard all that Juno had to say; and it would have been humiliating, after my superb appearance of knowing more, to explain that John Mayrant had walked with me all the way from the Library, and never told me a word about the affair.

This reflection increased my esteem for the boy’s admirable reticence. What private matter of his own had I ever learned from him? It was other people, invariably, who told me of his troubles. There had been that single, quickly controlled outbreak about his position in the Custom House, and also he had let fall that touching word concerning his faith and his liking to say his prayers in the place where his mother had said them; beyond this, there had never yet been anything of all that must at the present moment be intimately stirring in his heart.

Should I “like to take orders from a negro?” Put personally, it came to me now as a new idea came as something which had never entered my mind before, not even as an abstract hypothesis I didn’t have to think before reaching the answer though; something within me, which you ma call what you please–convention, prejudice, instinct–something answered most prompt and emphatically in the negative. I revolved in my mind as I tried to pack into a box a number of objects that I had bought in one or to “antique” shops. They wouldn’t go in, the objects; they were of defeating and recalcitrant shapes, and of hostile materials–glass and brass–and I must have a larger box made, and in that case I would buy this afternoon the other kettle-supporter (I forget its right name) and have the whole lot decently packed. Take orders from a colored man? Have him give you directions, dictate you letters, discipline you if you were unpunctual? No, indeed! And if such were my feeling, how must this young Southerner feel? With this in my mind, I made sure that the part in my back hair was right, and after that precaution soon found myself on my way, in a way somewhat roundabout, to the kettle-supporter sauntering northward along High Walk, and stopping often; the town, and the water, and the distant shores all were so lovely, so belonged to one another, so melted into one gentle impression of wistfulness and tenderness! I leaned upon the stone parapet and enjoyed the quiet which every surrounding detail brought to my senses. How could John Mayrant endure such a situation? I continued to wonder; and I also continued to assure myself it was absurd to suppose that the engagement was broken.

The shutting of a front door across the street almost directly behind me attracted my attention because of its being the first sound that had happened in noiseless, empty High Walk since I had been strolling there; and I turned from the parapet to see that I was no longer the solitary person in the street. Two ladies, one tall and one diminutive, both in black and with long black veils which they had put back from their faces, were evidently coming from a visit. As the tall one bowed to me I recognized Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, and took off my hat. It was not until they had crossed the street and come up the stone steps near where I stood on High Walk that the little lady also bowed to me; she was Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, and from something in her prim yet charming manner I gathered that she held it to be not perfectly well-bred in a lady to greet a gentleman across the width of a public highway, and that she could have wished that her tall companion had not thus greeted me, a stranger likely to comment upon Kings Port manners. In her eyes, such free deportment evidently went with her tall companion’s method of speech: hadn’t the little lady informed me during our first brief meeting that Kings Port at times thought Mrs. Gregory St. Michael’s tongue “too downright”?

The two ladies having graciously granted me permission to join them while they took the air, Mrs. Gregory must surely have shocked Mrs. Weguelin by saying to me, “I haven’t a penny for your thoughts, but I’ll exchange.”

“Would you thus bargain in the dark, madam?”

“Oh, I’ll risk that; and, to say truth, even your back, as we came out of that house, was a back of thought.”

“Well, I confess to some thinking. Shall I begin?”

It was Mrs. Weguelin who quickly replied, smiling: “Ladies first, you know. At least we still keep it so in Kings Port.”

“Would we did everywhere!” I exclaimed devoutly; and I was quite aware that beneath the little lady’s gentle smile a setting down had lurked, a setting down of the most delicate nature, administered to me not in the least because I had deserved one, but because she did not like Mrs. Gregory’s “downright” tongue, and could not stop her.

Mrs. Gregory now took the prerogative of ladies, and began. “I was thinking of what we had all just been saying during our visit across the way–and with which you are not going to agree–that our young people would do much better to let us old people arrange their marriages for them, as it Is done in Europe.”

“O dear!”

“I said that you would not agree; but that is because you are so young.”

“I don’t know that twenty-eight is so young.”

“You will know it when you are seventy-three.” This observation again came from Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, and again with a gentle and attractive smile. It was only the second time that she had spoken; and throughout the talk into which we now fell as we slowly walked up and down High Walk, she never took the lead; she left that to the “downright” tongue–but I noticed, however, that she chose her moments to follow the lead very aptly. I also perceived plainly that what we were really going to discuss was not at all the European principle of marriage-making, but just simply young John and his Hortense; they were the true kernel of the nut with whose concealing shell Mrs. Gregory was presenting me, and in proposing an exchange of thoughts she would get back only more thoughts upon the same subject. It was pretty evident how much Kings Port was buzzing over all this! They fondly believed they did not like it; but what would they have done without it? What, indeed, were they going to do when it was all over and done with, one way or another? As a matter of fact, they ought to be grateful to Hortense for contributing illustriously to the excitement of their lives.

“Of course, I am well aware,” Mrs. Gregory pursued, “that the young people of to-day believe they can all ‘teach their grandmothers to suck eggs,’ as we say in Kings Port.”

“We say it elsewhere, too,” I mildly put in.

“Indeed? I didn’t know that the North, with its pest of Hebrew and other low immigrants, had retained any of the good old homely saws which we brought from England. But do you imagine that if the control of marriage rested in the hands of parents and grandparents (where it properly belongs), you would be witnessing in the North this disgusting spectacle of divorce?”

“But, Mrs. St. Michael–“

“We didn’t invite you to argue when we invited you to walk!” cried the lady, laughing.

“We should like you to answer the question,” said Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael.

“And tell us,” Mrs. Gregory continued, “if it’s your opinion that a boy who has never been married is a better judge of matrimony’s pitfalls than his father.”

“Or than any older person who has bravely and worthily gone through with the experience,” Mrs. Weguelin added.

“Ladies, I’ve no mind to argue. But we’re ahead of Europe; we don’t need their clumsy old plan.”

Mrs. Gregory gave a gallant, incredulous snort. “I shall be interested to learn of anything that is done better here than in Europe.”

“Oh, many things, surely! But especially the mating of the fashionable young. They don’t need any parents to arrange for them; it’s much better managed through precocity.”

“Through precocity? I scarcely follow you.”

And Mrs. Weguelin softly added, “You must excuse us if we do not follow you.” But her softness nevertheless indicated that if there were any one present needing leniency, it was myself.

“Why, yes,” I told them, “it’s through precocity. The new-rich American no longer commits the blunder of keeping his children innocent. You’ll see it beginning in the dancing-class, where I heard an exquisite little girl of six say to a little boy, ‘Go away; I can’t dance with you, because my mamma says your mamma only keeps a maid to answer the doorbell.’ When they get home from the dancing-class, tutors in poker and bridge are waiting to teach them how to gamble for each other’s little dimes. I saw a little boy in knickerbockers and a wide collar throw down the evening paper–“

“At that age? They read the papers?” interrupted Mrs. Gregory.

“They read nothing else at any age. He threw it down and said, ‘Well, I guess there’s not much behind this raid on Steel Preferred.’ What need has such a boy for parents or grandparents? Presently he is travelling to a fashionable boarding-school in his father’s private car. At college all his adolescent curiosities are lavishly gratified. His sister at home reads the French romances, and by eighteen she, too, knows (in her head at least) the whole of life, so that she can be perfectly trusted; she would no more marry a mere half-millionaire just because she loved him than she would appear twice in the same ball-dress. She and her ball-dresses are described in the papers precisely as if she were an animal at a show–which indeed is what she has become; and she’s eager to be thus described, because she and her mother–even if her mother was once a lady and knew better–are haunted by one perpetual, sickening fear, the fear of being left out. And if you desire to pay correct ballroom compliments, you no longer go to her mother and tell her she’s looking every bit as young as her daughter; you go to the daughter and tell her she’s looking every bit as old as her mother, for that’s what she wishes to do, that’s what she tries for, what she talks, dresses, eats, drinks, goes to indecent plays and laughs for. Yes, we manage it through precocity, and the new-rich American parent has achieved at least one new thing under the sun, namely, the corruption of the child.”

My ladies silently consulted each other’s expressions, after which, in equal silence, their gaze returned to me; but their equally intent scrutiny was expressive of quite different things. It was with expectancy that Mrs. Gregory looked at me–she wanted more. Not so Mrs. Weguelin; she gave me disapproval; it was shadowed in her beautiful, lustrous eyes that burned dark in her white face with as much fire as that of youth, yet it was not of youth, being deeply charged with retrospection.

In what, then, had I sinned? For the little lady’s next words, coldly murmured, increased in me an uneasiness, as of sin:–

“You have told us much that we are not accustomed to hear in Kings Port.”

“Oh, I haven’t begun to tell you!” I exclaimed cheerily.

“You certainly have not told us,” said Mrs. Gregory, “how your ‘precocity’ escapes this divorce degradation.”

“Escape it? Those people think it is–well, provincial–not to have been divorced at least once!”

Mrs. Gregory opened her eyes, but Mrs. Weguelin shut her lips.

I continued: “Even the children, for their own little reasons, like it. Only last summer, in Newport, a young boy was asked how he enjoyed having a father and an ex-father.”

“Ex-father!” said Mrs. Gregory. “Vice-father is what I should call him.”

“Maria!” murmured Mrs. Weguelin, “how can you jest upon such topics?”

“I am far from jesting, Julia. Well, young gentleman, and what answer did this precious Newport child make?”

“He said (if you will pardon my giving you his little sentiment in his own quite expressive idiom), ‘Me for two fathers! Double money birthdays and Christmases. See?’ That was how he saw divorce.”

Once again my ladies consulted each other’s expressions; we moved along High Walk in such silence that I heard the stiff little rustle which the palmettos were making across the street; even these trees, you might have supposed, were whispering together over the horrors that I had recited in their decorous presence.

It was Mrs. Gregory who next spoke. “I can translate that last boy’s language, but what did the other boy mean about a ‘raid on Steel Preferred’–if I’ve got the jargon right?”

While I translated this for her, I felt again the disapproval in Mrs. Weguelin’s dark eyes; and my sins–for they were twofold–were presently made clear to me by this lady.

“Are such subjects as–as stocks” (she softly cloaked this word in scorn immeasurable)–“are such subjects mentioned in your good society at the North?”

I laughed heartily. “Everything’s mentioned!”

The lady paused over my reply. “I am afraid you must feel us to be very old-fashioned in, Kings Port,” she then said.

“But I rejoice in it!”

She ignored my not wholly dexterous compliment. “And some subjects,” she pursued, “seem to us so grave that if we permit ourselves to speak of them at all we cannot speak of them lightly.”

No, they couldn’t speak of them lightly! Here, then, stood my two sins revealed; everything I had imparted, and also my tone of imparting it, had displeased Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, not with the thing, but with me. I had transgressed her sound old American code of good manners, a code slightly pompous no doubt, but one in which no familiarity was allowed to breed contempt. To her good taste, there were things in the world which had, apparently, to exist, but which one banished from drawing-room discussion as one conceals from sight the kitchen and outhouses; one dealt with them only when necessity compelled, and never in small-talk; and here had I been, so to speak, small-talking them in that glib, modern, irresponsible cadence with which our brazen age rings and clatters like the beating of triangles and gongs. Not triangles and gongs, but rather strings and flutes, had been the music to which Kings Port society had attuned its measured voice.

I saw it all, and even saw that my own dramatic sense of Mrs. Weguelin’s dignity had perversely moved me to be more flippant than I actually felt; and I promised myself that a more chastened tone should forthwith redeem me from the false position I had got into.

“My dear,” said Mrs. Gregory to Mrs. Weguelin, “we must ask him to excuse our provincialism.”

For the second time I was not wholly dexterous. “But I like it so much!” I exclaimed; and both ladies laughed frankly.

Mrs. Gregory brought in a fable. “You’ll find us all ‘country mice’ here.”

This time I was happy. “At least, then, there’ll be no cat!” And this caused us all to make little bows.

But the word “cat” fell into our talk as does a drop of some acid into a chemical solution, instantly changing the whole to an unexpected new color. The unexpected new color was, in this instance, merely what had been latently lurking in the fluid of our consciousness all through and now it suddenly came out.

Mrs. Gregory stared over the parapet at the harbor. “I wonder if anybody has visited that steam yacht?”

“The Hermana?” I said. “She’s waiting, I believe, for her owner, who is enjoying himself very much on land.” It was a strong temptation to add, “enjoying himself with the cat,” but I resisted it.

“Oh!” said Mrs. Gregory. “Possibly a friend of yours?”

“Even his name is unknown to me. But I gather that he may be coming to Kings Port–to attend Mr. John Mayrant’s wedding next Wednesday week.”

I hadn’t gathered this; but one is at times driven to improvising. I wished so much to know if Juno was right about the engagement being broken, and I looked hard at the ladies as my words fairly grazed the “cat.” This time I expected them to consult each other’s expressions, and such, indeed, was their immediate proceeding.

“The Wednesday following, you mean,” Mrs. Weguelin corrected.

“Postponed again? Dear me!”

Mrs. Gregory spoke this time. “General Rieppe. Less well again, it seems.”

It would be like Juno to magnify a delay into a rupture. Then I had a hilarious thought, which I instantly put to the ladies. “If the poor General were to die completely, would the wedding be postponed completely?”

“There would not be the slightest chance of that,” Mrs. Gregory declared. And then she pronounced a sentence that was truly oracular: “She’s coming at once to see for herself.”

To which Mrs. Weguelin added with deeper condemnation than she had so far employed at all: “There is a rumor that she is actually coming in an automobile.”

My silence upon these two remarks was the silence of great and sudden interest; but it led Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael to do my perceptions a slight injustice, and she had no intention that I should miss the quality of her opinion regarding the vehicle in which Hortense was reported to be travelling.

“Miss Rieppe has the extraordinary taste to come here in an automobile,” said Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, with deepened severity.

Though I understood quite well, without this emphasizing, that the little lady would, with her unbending traditions, probably think it more respectable to approach Kings Port in a wheelbarrow, I was absorbed by the vague but copious import of Mrs. Gregory’s announcement. The oracles, moreover, continued.

“But she is undoubtedly very clever to come and see for herself,” was Mrs. Weguelin’s next comment.

Mrs. Gregory’s face, as she replied to her companion, took on a censorious and superior expression. “You’ll remember, Julia, that I told Josephine St. Michael it was what they had to expect.”

“But it was not Josephine, my dear, who at any time approved of taking such a course. It was Eliza’s whole doing.”

It was fairly raining oracles round me, and they quite resembled, for all the help and light they contained, their Delphic predecessors.

“And yet Eliza,” said Mrs. Gregory, “in the face of it, this very morning, repeated her eternal assertion that we shall all see the marriage will not take place.”

“Eliza,” murmured Mrs. Weguelin, “rates few things more highly than her own judgment.”

Mrs. Gregory mused. “Yet she is often right when she has no right to be right.”

I could not bear it any longer, and I said, “I heard to-day that Miss Rieppe had broken her engagement.”

“And where did you hear that nonsense?” asked Mrs. Gregory.

My heart leaped, and I told her where.

“Oh, well! you will hear anything in a boarding-house. Indeed, that would be a great deal too good to be true.”

“May I ask where Miss Rieppe is all this while?”

“The last news was from Palm Beach, where the air was said to be necessary for the General.”

“But,” Mrs. Weguelin repeated, “we have every reason to believe that she is coming here in an automobile.”

“We shall have to call, of course,” added Mrs. Gregory to her, not to me; they were leaving me out of it. Yes, these ladies were forgetting about me in their using preoccupation over whatever crisis it was that now hung over John Mayrant’s love affairs–a preoccupation which was evidently part of Kings Port’s universal buzz to-day, and which my joining them in the street had merely mitigated for a moment. I did not wish to be left out of it; I cannot tell you why–perhaps it was contagious in the local air–but a veritable madness of craving to know about it seized upon me. Of course, I saw that Miss Rieppe was, almost too grossly and obviously, “playing for time”; the health of people’s fathers did not cause weekly extensions of this sort. But what was it that the young lady expected time to effect for her? Her release, formally, by her young man, on the ground of his worldly ill fortune? Or was it for an offer from the owner of the Hermana that she was waiting, before she should take the step of formally releasing John Mayrant? No, neither of these conjectures seemed to furnish a key to the tactics of Miss Rieppe and the theory that each of these affianced parties was strategizing to cause the other to assume the odium of breaking their engagement, with no result save that of repeatedly countermanding a wedding-cake, struck me as belonging admirably to a stage-comedy in three acts, but scarcely to life as we find it. Besides, poor John Mayrant was, all too plainly, not strategizing; he was playing as straight a game as the honest heart of a gentleman could inspire. And so, baffled at all points, I said (for I simply had to try something which might lead to my sharing in Kings Port’s vibrating secret):–

“I can’t make out whether she wants to marry him or not.”

Mrs. Gregory answered. “That is just what she is coming to see for herself.”

“But since her love was for his phosphates only–!” was my natural exclamation.

It caused (and this time I did not expect it) my inveterate ladies to consult each other’s expressions. They prolonged their silence so much that I spoke again:–

“And backing out of this sort of thing can be done, I should think, quite as cleverly, and much more simply, from a distance.”

It was Mrs. Weguelin who answered now, or, rather, who headed me off. “Have you been able to make out whether he wants to marry her or not?”

“Oh, he never comes near any of that with me!”

“Certainly not. But we all understand that he has taken a fancy to you, and that you have talked much with him.”

So they all understood this, did they? This, too, had played its little special part in the buzz? Very well, then, nothing of my private impressions should drop from my lips here, to be quoted and misquoted and battledored and shuttlecocked, until it reached the boy himself (as it would inevitably) in fantastic disarrangement. I laughed. “Oh, yes! I have talked much with him. Shakespeare, I think, was our latest subject.”

Mrs. Weguelin was plainly watching for something to drop. “Shakespeare!” Her tone was of surprise.

I then indulged myself in that most delightful sort of impertinence, which consists in the other person’s not seeing it. “You wouldn’t be likely to have heard of that yet. It occurred only before dinner to-day. But we have also talked optimism, pessimism, sociology, evolution–Mr. Mayrant would soon become quite–” I stopped myself on the edge of something very clumsy.

But sharp Mrs. Gregory finished for me. “Yes, you mean that if he didn’t live in Kings Port (where we still have reverence, at any rate), he fit would imbibe all the shallow quackeries of the hour and resemble all the clever young donkeys of the minute.”

“Maria!” Mrs. Weguelin murmurously expostulated.

Mrs. Gregory immediately made me a handsome but equivocal apology. “I wasn’t thinking of you at all!” she declared gayly; and it set me doubting if perhaps she hadn’t, after all, comprehended my impertinence. “And, thank Heaven!” she continued, “John is one of us, in spite of his present stubborn course.”

But Mrs. Weguelin’s beautiful eyes were resting upon me with that disapproval I had come to know. To her, sociology and evolution and all “isms” were new-fangled inventions and murky with offense; to touch them was defilement, and in disclosing them to John Mayrant I was a corrupter of youth. She gathered it all up into a word that was radiant with a kind of lovely maternal gentleness:–

“We should not wish John to become radical.”

In her voice, the whole of old Kings Port was enshrined: hereditary faith and hereditary standards, mellow with the adherence of generations past, and solicitous for the boy of the young generation. I saw her eyes soften at the thought of him; and throughout the rest of our talk to its end her gaze would now and then return to me, shadowed with disapproval.

I addressed Mrs. Gregory. “By his ‘present stubborn course’ I suppose you mean the Custom House.”

“All of us deplore his obstinacy. His Aunt Eliza has strongly but vainly expostulated with him. And after that, Miss Josephine felt obliged to tell him that he need not come to see her again until he resigned a position which reflects ignominy upon us all.”

I suppressed a whistle. I thought (as I have said earlier) that I had caught a full vision of John Mayrant’s present plight. But my imagination had not soared to the height of Miss Josephine St. Michael’s act of discipline. This, it must have been, that the boy had checked himself from telling me in the churchyard. What a character of sterner times was Miss Josephine! I thought of Aunt Carola, but even she was not quite of this iron, and I said so to Mrs. Gregory. “I doubt if there be any old lady left in the North,” I said, “capable of such antique severity.”

But Mrs. Gregory opened my eyes still further. “Oh, you’d have them if you had the negro to deal with as we have him. Miss Josephine,” she added, “has to-day removed her sentence of banishment.”

I felt on the verge of new discoveries. “What!” I exclaimed, “and did she relent?”

“New circumstances intervened,” Mrs. Gregory loftily explained. “There was an occurrence–an encounter, in fact–in which John Mayrant fittingly punished one who had presumed. Upon hearing of it, this morning, Miss