第22章

"There!" I said to Kendricks. "Do you think the general public would?""Miss Gage isn't the general public," said my wife, who had followed the course of my thought; her tone implied that Miss Gage was wiser and better.

"Would you allow yourself to be drawn," I asked, "dreamily issuing from an aisle of the pine grove as the tutelary goddess of a Pompeian cottage?"The girl cast a bewildered glance at my wife, who said, "You needn't pay any attention to him, Miss Gage. He has an idea that he is making a joke."We felt that we had done enough for one afternoon, when we had done the House of Pansa, and I proposed that we should go and sit down in Congress Park and listen to the Troy band. I was not without the hope that it would play "Washington Post."My wife contrived that we should fall in behind the young people as we went, and she asked, "What DO you suppose she made of it all?""Probably she thought it was the house of Sancho Panza.""No; she hasn't read enough to be so ignorant even as that. It's astonishing how much she doesn't know. What can her home life have been like?""Philistine to the last degree. We people who are near to literature have no conception how far from it most people are. The immense majority of 'homes,' as the newspapers call them, have no books in them except the Bible and a semi-religious volume or two--things you never see out of such 'homes'--and the State business directory. I was astonished when it came out that she knew about Every Other Week. It must have been by accident. The sordidness of her home life must be something unimaginable. The daughter of a village capitalist, who's put together his money dollar by dollar, as they do in such places, from the necessities and follies of his neighbours, and has half the farmers of the region by the throat through his mortgages--I don't think that she's 'one to be desired'

any more than 'the daughter of a hundred earls,' if so much.""She doesn't seem sordid herself."

"Oh, the taint doesn't show itself at once--'If nature put not forth her power About the opening of the flower, Who is it that would live an hour?'

and she is a flower, beautiful, exquisite""Yes, and she had a mother as well as this father of hers. Why shouldn't she be like her mother?"I laughed. "That is true! I wonder why we always leave the mother out of the count when we sum up the hereditary tendencies? Isuppose the mother is as much a parent as the father.""Quite. And there is no reason why this girl shouldn't have her mother's nature.""We don't actually KNOW anything against her father's nature yet," Isuggested; "but if her mother lived a starved and stunted life with him, it may account for that effect of disappointed greed which Ifancied in her when I first saw her."

"I don't call it greed in a young girl to want to see something of the world.""What do you call it?"

Kendricks and the girl were stopping at the gate of the pavilion, and looking round at us. "Ah, he's got enough for one day! He's going to leave her to us now."When we came up he said, "I'm going to run off a moment; I'm going up to the book-store there," and he pointed toward one that had spread across the sidewalk just below the Congress Hall verandah, with banks and shelves of novels, and a cry of bargains in them on signs sticking up from their rows. "I want to see if they have the Last Days of Pompeii.""We will find the ladies inside the park," I said. "I will go with you--""Mr. March wants to see if they have the last number of Every Other Week," my wife mocked after us. This was, indeed, commonly a foible of mine. I had newly become one of the owners of the periodical as well as the editor, and I was all the time looking out for it at the news-stands and book-stores, and judging their enterprise by its presence or absence. But this time I had another motive, though Idid not allege it.

"I suppose it's for Miss Gage?" I ventured to say, by way of prefacing what I wished to say. "Kendricks, I'm afraid we're abusing your good nature. I know you're up here to look about, and you're letting us use all your time. You mustn't do it. Women have no conscience about these things, and you can't expect a woman who has a young lady on her hands to spare you. I give you the hint.

Don't count upon Mrs. March in this matter.""Oh, I think you are very good to allow me to bother round," said the young fellow, with that indefatigable politeness of his. He added vaguely, "It's very interesting.""Seeing it through such a fresh mind?" I suggested. "Well, I'll own that I don't think you could have found a much fresher one. Has she read the Last Days of Pompeii?""She thought she had at first, but it was the Fall of Granada.""How delightful! Don't you wish we could read books with that utterly unliterary sense of them?""Don't you think women generally do?" he asked evasively.

"I daresay they do at De Witt Point."

He did not answer; I saw that he was not willing to talk the young lady over, and I could not help praising his taste to myself at the cost of my own. His delicacy forbade him the indulgence which my own protested against in vain. He showed his taste again in buying a cheap copy of the book, which he meant to give her, and of course he had to be all the more attentive to her because of my deprecating his self-devotion.