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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Europeans, by Henry James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: The Europeans
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: November, 1994 [eBook #179]
+[Most recently updated: September 18, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: An Anonymous Volunteer
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS ***
+
+
+
+
+The Europeans
+
+by Henry James
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+ CHAPTER I
+ CHAPTER II
+ CHAPTER III
+ CHAPTER IV
+ CHAPTER V
+ CHAPTER VI
+ CHAPTER VII
+ CHAPTER VIII
+ CHAPTER IX
+ CHAPTER X
+ CHAPTER XI
+ CHAPTER XII
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+A narrow grave-yard in the heart of a bustling, indifferent city, seen
+from the windows of a gloomy-looking inn, is at no time an object of
+enlivening suggestion; and the spectacle is not at its best when the
+mouldy tombstones and funereal umbrage have received the ineffectual
+refreshment of a dull, moist snow-fall. If, while the air is thickened
+by this frosty drizzle, the calendar should happen to indicate that the
+blessed vernal season is already six weeks old, it will be admitted
+that no depressing influence is absent from the scene. This fact was
+keenly felt on a certain 12th of May, upwards of thirty years since, by
+a lady who stood looking out of one of the windows of the best hotel in
+the ancient city of Boston. She had stood there for half an hour—stood
+there, that is, at intervals; for from time to time she turned back
+into the room and measured its length with a restless step. In the
+chimney-place was a red-hot fire which emitted a small blue flame; and
+in front of the fire, at a table, sat a young man who was busily plying
+a pencil. He had a number of sheets of paper cut into small equal
+squares, and he was apparently covering them with pictorial
+designs—strange-looking figures. He worked rapidly and attentively,
+sometimes threw back his head and held out his drawing at arm’s-length,
+and kept up a soft, gay-sounding humming and whistling. The lady
+brushed past him in her walk; her much-trimmed skirts were voluminous.
+She never dropped her eyes upon his work; she only turned them,
+occasionally, as she passed, to a mirror suspended above the
+toilet-table on the other side of the room. Here she paused a moment,
+gave a pinch to her waist with her two hands, or raised these
+members—they were very plump and pretty—to the multifold braids of her
+hair, with a movement half caressing, half corrective. An attentive
+observer might have fancied that during these periods of desultory
+self-inspection her face forgot its melancholy; but as soon as she
+neared the window again it began to proclaim that she was a very
+ill-pleased woman. And indeed, in what met her eyes there was little to
+be pleased with. The window-panes were battered by the sleet; the
+head-stones in the grave-yard beneath seemed to be holding themselves
+askance to keep it out of their faces. A tall iron railing protected
+them from the street, and on the other side of the railing an
+assemblage of Bostonians were trampling about in the liquid snow. Many
+of them were looking up and down; they appeared to be waiting for
+something. From time to time a strange vehicle drew near to the place
+where they stood,—such a vehicle as the lady at the window, in spite of
+a considerable acquaintance with human inventions, had never seen
+before: a huge, low omnibus, painted in brilliant colors, and decorated
+apparently with jangling bells, attached to a species of groove in the
+pavement, through which it was dragged, with a great deal of rumbling,
+bouncing and scratching, by a couple of remarkably small horses. When
+it reached a certain point the people in front of the grave-yard, of
+whom much the greater number were women, carrying satchels and parcels,
+projected themselves upon it in a compact body—a movement suggesting
+the scramble for places in a life-boat at sea—and were engulfed in its
+large interior. Then the life-boat—or the life-car, as the lady at the
+window of the hotel vaguely designated it—went bumping and jingling
+away upon its invisible wheels, with the helmsman (the man at the
+wheel) guiding its course incongruously from the prow. This phenomenon
+was repeated every three minutes, and the supply of eagerly-moving
+women in cloaks, bearing reticules and bundles, renewed itself in the
+most liberal manner. On the other side of the grave-yard was a row of
+small red brick houses, showing a series of homely, domestic-looking
+backs; at the end opposite the hotel a tall wooden church-spire,
+painted white, rose high into the vagueness of the snow-flakes. The
+lady at the window looked at it for some time; for reasons of her own
+she thought it the ugliest thing she had ever seen. She hated it, she
+despised it; it threw her into a state of irritation that was quite out
+of proportion to any sensible motive. She had never known herself to
+care so much about church-spires.
+
+She was not pretty; but even when it expressed perplexed irritation her
+face was most interesting and agreeable. Neither was she in her first
+youth; yet, though slender, with a great deal of extremely
+well-fashioned roundness of contour—a suggestion both of maturity and
+flexibility—she carried her three and thirty years as a light-wristed
+Hebe might have carried a brimming wine-cup. Her complexion was
+fatigued, as the French say; her mouth was large, her lips too full,
+her teeth uneven, her chin rather commonly modeled; she had a thick
+nose, and when she smiled—she was constantly smiling—the lines beside
+it rose too high, toward her eyes. But these eyes were charming: gray
+in color, brilliant, quickly glancing, gently resting, full of
+intelligence. Her forehead was very low—it was her only handsome
+feature; and she had a great abundance of crisp dark hair, finely
+frizzled, which was always braided in a manner that suggested some
+Southern or Eastern, some remotely foreign, woman. She had a large
+collection of ear-rings, and wore them in alternation; and they seemed
+to give a point to her Oriental or exotic aspect. A compliment had once
+been paid her, which, being repeated to her, gave her greater pleasure
+than anything she had ever heard. “A pretty woman?” someone had said.
+“Why, her features are very bad.” “I don’t know about her features,” a
+very discerning observer had answered; “but she carries her head like a
+pretty woman.” You may imagine whether, after this, she carried her
+head less becomingly.
+
+She turned away from the window at last, pressing her hands to her
+eyes. “It’s too horrible!” she exclaimed. “I shall go back—I shall go
+back!” And she flung herself into a chair before the fire.
+
+“Wait a little, dear child,” said the young man softly, sketching away
+at his little scraps of paper.
+
+The lady put out her foot; it was very small, and there was an immense
+rosette on her slipper. She fixed her eyes for a while on this
+ornament, and then she looked at the glowing bed of anthracite coal in
+the grate. “Did you ever see anything so hideous as that fire?” she
+demanded. “Did you ever see anything so—so _affreux_ as—as everything?”
+She spoke English with perfect purity; but she brought out this French
+epithet in a manner that indicated that she was accustomed to using
+French epithets.
+
+“I think the fire is very pretty,” said the young man, glancing at it a
+moment. “Those little blue tongues, dancing on top of the crimson
+embers, are extremely picturesque. They are like a fire in an
+alchemist’s laboratory.”
+
+“You are too good-natured, my dear,” his companion declared.
+
+The young man held out one of his drawings, with his head on one side.
+His tongue was gently moving along his under-lip. “Good-natured—yes.
+Too good-natured—no.”
+
+“You are irritating,” said the lady, looking at her slipper.
+
+He began to retouch his sketch. “I think you mean simply that you are
+irritated.”
+
+“Ah, for that, yes!” said his companion, with a little bitter laugh.
+“It’s the darkest day of my life—and you know what that means.”
+
+“Wait till tomorrow,” rejoined the young man.
+
+“Yes, we have made a great mistake. If there is any doubt about it
+today, there certainly will be none tomorrow. _Ce sera clair, au
+moins!_”
+
+The young man was silent a few moments, driving his pencil. Then at
+last, “There are no such things as mistakes,” he affirmed.
+
+“Very true—for those who are not clever enough to perceive them. Not to
+recognize one’s mistakes—that would be happiness in life,” the lady
+went on, still looking at her pretty foot.
+
+“My dearest sister,” said the young man, always intent upon his
+drawing, “it’s the first time you have told me I am not clever.”
+
+“Well, by your own theory I can’t call it a mistake,” answered his
+sister, pertinently enough.
+
+The young man gave a clear, fresh laugh. “You, at least, are clever
+enough, dearest sister,” he said.
+
+“I was not so when I proposed this.”
+
+“Was it you who proposed it?” asked her brother.
+
+She turned her head and gave him a little stare. “Do you desire the
+credit of it?”
+
+“If you like, I will take the blame,” he said, looking up with a smile.
+
+“Yes,” she rejoined in a moment, “you make no difference in these
+things. You have no sense of property.”
+
+The young man gave his joyous laugh again. “If that means I have no
+property, you are right!”
+
+“Don’t joke about your poverty,” said his sister. “That is quite as
+vulgar as to boast about it.”
+
+“My poverty! I have just finished a drawing that will bring me fifty
+francs!”
+
+_“Voyons,”_ said the lady, putting out her hand.
+
+He added a touch or two, and then gave her his sketch. She looked at
+it, but she went on with her idea of a moment before. “If a woman were
+to ask you to marry her you would say, ‘Certainly, my dear, with
+pleasure!’ And you would marry her and be ridiculously happy. Then at
+the end of three months you would say to her, ‘You know that blissful
+day when I begged you to be mine!’”
+
+The young man had risen from the table, stretching his arms a little;
+he walked to the window. “That is a description of a charming nature,”
+he said.
+
+“Oh, yes, you have a charming nature; I regard that as our capital. If
+I had not been convinced of that I should never have taken the risk of
+bringing you to this dreadful country.”
+
+“This comical country, this delightful country!” exclaimed the young
+man, and he broke into the most animated laughter.
+
+“Is it those women scrambling into the omnibus?” asked his companion.
+“What do you suppose is the attraction?”
+
+“I suppose there is a very good-looking man inside,” said the young
+man.
+
+“In each of them? They come along in hundreds, and the men in this
+country don’t seem at all handsome. As for the women—I have never seen
+so many at once since I left the convent.”
+
+“The women are very pretty,” her brother declared, “and the whole
+affair is very amusing. I must make a sketch of it.” And he came back
+to the table quickly, and picked up his utensils—a small
+sketching-board, a sheet of paper, and three or four crayons. He took
+his place at the window with these things, and stood there glancing
+out, plying his pencil with an air of easy skill. While he worked he
+wore a brilliant smile. Brilliant is indeed the word at this moment for
+his strongly-lighted face. He was eight and twenty years old; he had a
+short, slight, well-made figure. Though he bore a noticeable
+resemblance to his sister, he was a better favored person: fair-haired,
+clear-faced, witty-looking, with a delicate finish of feature and an
+expression at once urbane and not at all serious, a warm blue eye, an
+eyebrow finely drawn and excessively arched—an eyebrow which, if ladies
+wrote sonnets to those of their lovers, might have been made the
+subject of such a piece of verse—and a light moustache that flourished
+upwards as if blown that way by the breath of a constant smile. There
+was something in his physiognomy at once benevolent and picturesque.
+But, as I have hinted, it was not at all serious. The young man’s face
+was, in this respect, singular; it was not at all serious, and yet it
+inspired the liveliest confidence.
+
+“Be sure you put in plenty of snow,” said his sister. “_Bonté divine_,
+what a climate!”
+
+“I shall leave the sketch all white, and I shall put in the little
+figures in black,” the young man answered, laughing. “And I shall call
+it—what is that line in Keats?—Mid-May’s Eldest Child!”
+
+“I don’t remember,” said the lady, “that mamma ever told me it was like
+this.”
+
+“Mamma never told you anything disagreeable. And it’s not like
+this—every day. You will see that tomorrow we shall have a splendid
+day.”
+
+“_Qu’en savez-vous?_ Tomorrow I shall go away.”
+
+“Where shall you go?”
+
+“Anywhere away from here. Back to Silberstadt. I shall write to the
+Reigning Prince.”
+
+The young man turned a little and looked at her, with his crayon
+poised. “My dear Eugenia,” he murmured, “were you so happy at sea?”
+
+Eugenia got up; she still held in her hand the drawing her brother had
+given her. It was a bold, expressive sketch of a group of miserable
+people on the deck of a steamer, clinging together and clutching at
+each other, while the vessel lurched downward, at a terrific angle,
+into the hollow of a wave. It was extremely clever, and full of a sort
+of tragi-comical power. Eugenia dropped her eyes upon it and made a sad
+grimace. “How can you draw such odious scenes?” she asked. “I should
+like to throw it into the fire!” And she tossed the paper away. Her
+brother watched, quietly, to see where it went. It fluttered down to
+the floor, where he let it lie. She came toward the window, pinching in
+her waist. “Why don’t you reproach me—abuse me?” she asked. “I think I
+should feel better then. Why don’t you tell me that you hate me for
+bringing you here?”
+
+“Because you would not believe it. I adore you, dear sister! I am
+delighted to be here, and I am charmed with the prospect.”
+
+“I don’t know what had taken possession of me. I had lost my head,”
+Eugenia went on.
+
+The young man, on his side, went on plying his pencil. “It is evidently
+a most curious and interesting country. Here we are, and I mean to
+enjoy it.”
+
+His companion turned away with an impatient step, but presently came
+back. “High spirits are doubtless an excellent thing,” she said; “but
+you give one too much of them, and I can’t see that they have done you
+any good.”
+
+The young man stared, with lifted eyebrows, smiling; he tapped his
+handsome nose with his pencil. “They have made me happy!”
+
+“That was the least they could do; they have made you nothing else. You
+have gone through life thanking fortune for such very small favors that
+she has never put herself to any trouble for you.”
+
+“She must have put herself to a little, I think, to present me with so
+admirable a sister.”
+
+“Be serious, Felix. You forget that I am your elder.”
+
+“With a sister, then, so elderly!” rejoined Felix, laughing. “I hoped
+we had left seriousness in Europe.”
+
+“I fancy you will find it here. Remember that you are nearly thirty
+years old, and that you are nothing but an obscure Bohemian—a penniless
+correspondent of an illustrated newspaper.”
+
+“Obscure as much as you please, but not so much of a Bohemian as you
+think. And not at all penniless! I have a hundred pounds in my pocket.
+I have an engagement to make fifty sketches, and I mean to paint the
+portraits of all our cousins, and of all _their_ cousins, at a hundred
+dollars a head.”
+
+“You are not ambitious,” said Eugenia.
+
+“You are, dear Baroness,” the young man replied.
+
+The Baroness was silent a moment, looking out at the sleet-darkened
+grave-yard and the bumping horse-cars. “Yes, I am ambitious,” she said
+at last. “And my ambition has brought me to this dreadful place!” She
+glanced about her—the room had a certain vulgar nudity; the bed and the
+window were curtainless—and she gave a little passionate sigh. “Poor
+old ambition!” she exclaimed. Then she flung herself down upon a sofa
+which stood near against the wall, and covered her face with her hands.
+
+Her brother went on with his drawing, rapidly and skillfully; after
+some moments he sat down beside her and showed her his sketch. “Now,
+don’t you think that’s pretty good for an obscure Bohemian?” he asked.
+“I have knocked off another fifty francs.”
+
+Eugenia glanced at the little picture as he laid it on her lap. “Yes,
+it is very clever,” she said. And in a moment she added, “Do you
+suppose our cousins do that?”
+
+“Do what?”
+
+“Get into those things, and look like that.”
+
+Felix meditated awhile. “I really can’t say. It will be interesting to
+discover.”
+
+“Oh, the rich people can’t!” said the Baroness.
+
+“Are you very sure they are rich?” asked Felix, lightly.
+
+His sister slowly turned in her place, looking at him. “Heavenly
+powers!” she murmured. “You have a way of bringing out things!”
+
+“It will certainly be much pleasanter if they are rich,” Felix
+declared.
+
+“Do you suppose if I had not known they were rich I would ever have
+come?”
+
+The young man met his sister’s somewhat peremptory eye with his bright,
+contented glance. “Yes, it certainly will be pleasanter,” he repeated.
+
+“That is all I expect of them,” said the Baroness. “I don’t count upon
+their being clever or friendly—at first—or elegant or interesting. But
+I assure you I insist upon their being rich.”
+
+Felix leaned his head upon the back of the sofa and looked awhile at
+the oblong patch of sky to which the window served as frame. The snow
+was ceasing; it seemed to him that the sky had begun to brighten. “I
+count upon their being rich,” he said at last, “and powerful, and
+clever, and friendly, and elegant, and interesting, and generally
+delightful! _Tu vas voir_.” And he bent forward and kissed his sister.
+“Look there!” he went on. “As a portent, even while I speak, the sky is
+turning the color of gold; the day is going to be splendid.”
+
+And indeed, within five minutes the weather had changed. The sun broke
+out through the snow-clouds and jumped into the Baroness’s room.
+“_Bonté divine_,” exclaimed this lady, “what a climate!”
+
+“We will go out and see the world,” said Felix.
+
+And after a while they went out. The air had grown warm as well as
+brilliant; the sunshine had dried the pavements. They walked about the
+streets at hazard, looking at the people and the houses, the shops and
+the vehicles, the blazing blue sky and the muddy crossings, the
+hurrying men and the slow-strolling maidens, the fresh red bricks and
+the bright green trees, the extraordinary mixture of smartness and
+shabbiness. From one hour to another the day had grown vernal; even in
+the bustling streets there was an odor of earth and blossom. Felix was
+immensely entertained. He had called it a comical country, and he went
+about laughing at everything he saw. You would have said that American
+civilization expressed itself to his sense in a tissue of capital
+jokes. The jokes were certainly excellent, and the young man’s
+merriment was joyous and genial. He possessed what is called the
+pictorial sense; and this first glimpse of democratic manners stirred
+the same sort of attention that he would have given to the movements of
+a lively young person with a bright complexion. Such attention would
+have been demonstrative and complimentary; and in the present case
+Felix might have passed for an undispirited young exile revisiting the
+haunts of his childhood. He kept looking at the violent blue of the
+sky, at the scintillating air, at the scattered and multiplied patches
+of color.
+
+“_Comme c’est bariolé_, eh?” he said to his sister in that foreign
+tongue which they both appeared to feel a mysterious prompting
+occasionally to use.
+
+“Yes, it is _bariolé_ indeed,” the Baroness answered. “I don’t like the
+coloring; it hurts my eyes.”
+
+“It shows how extremes meet,” the young man rejoined. “Instead of
+coming to the West we seem to have gone to the East. The way the sky
+touches the house-tops is just like Cairo; and the red and blue
+sign-boards patched over the face of everything remind one of Mahometan
+decorations.”
+
+“The young women are not Mahometan,” said his companion. “They can’t be
+said to hide their faces. I never saw anything so bold.”
+
+“Thank Heaven they don’t hide their faces!” cried Felix. “Their faces
+are uncommonly pretty.”
+
+“Yes, their faces are often very pretty,” said the Baroness, who was a
+very clever woman. She was too clever a woman not to be capable of a
+great deal of just and fine observation. She clung more closely than
+usual to her brother’s arm; she was not exhilarated, as he was; she
+said very little, but she noted a great many things and made her
+reflections. She was a little excited; she felt that she had indeed
+come to a strange country, to make her fortune. Superficially, she was
+conscious of a good deal of irritation and displeasure; the Baroness
+was a very delicate and fastidious person. Of old, more than once, she
+had gone, for entertainment’s sake and in brilliant company, to a fair
+in a provincial town. It seemed to her now that she was at an enormous
+fair—that the entertainment and the _désagréments_ were very much the
+same. She found herself alternately smiling and shrinking; the show was
+very curious, but it was probable, from moment to moment, that one
+would be jostled. The Baroness had never seen so many people walking
+about before; she had never been so mixed up with people she did not
+know. But little by little she felt that this fair was a more serious
+undertaking. She went with her brother into a large public garden,
+which seemed very pretty, but where she was surprised at seeing no
+carriages. The afternoon was drawing to a close; the coarse, vivid
+grass and the slender tree-boles were gilded by the level
+sunbeams—gilded as with gold that was fresh from the mine. It was the
+hour at which ladies should come out for an airing and roll past a
+hedge of pedestrians, holding their parasols askance. Here, however,
+Eugenia observed no indications of this custom, the absence of which
+was more anomalous as there was a charming avenue of remarkably
+graceful, arching elms in the most convenient contiguity to a large,
+cheerful street, in which, evidently, among the more prosperous members
+of the _bourgeoisie_, a great deal of pedestrianism went forward. Our
+friends passed out into this well lighted promenade, and Felix noticed
+a great many more pretty girls and called his sister’s attention to
+them. This latter measure, however, was superfluous; for the Baroness
+had inspected, narrowly, these charming young ladies.
+
+“I feel an intimate conviction that our cousins are like that,” said
+Felix.
+
+The Baroness hoped so, but this is not what she said. “They are very
+pretty,” she said, “but they are mere little girls. Where are the
+women—the women of thirty?”
+
+“Of thirty-three, do you mean?” her brother was going to ask; for he
+understood often both what she said and what she did not say. But he
+only exclaimed upon the beauty of the sunset, while the Baroness, who
+had come to seek her fortune, reflected that it would certainly be well
+for her if the persons against whom she might need to measure herself
+should all be mere little girls. The sunset was superb; they stopped to
+look at it; Felix declared that he had never seen such a gorgeous
+mixture of colors. The Baroness also thought it splendid; and she was
+perhaps the more easily pleased from the fact that while she stood
+there she was conscious of much admiring observation on the part of
+various nice-looking people who passed that way, and to whom a
+distinguished, strikingly-dressed woman with a foreign air, exclaiming
+upon the beauties of nature on a Boston street corner in the French
+tongue, could not be an object of indifference. Eugenia’s spirits rose.
+She surrendered herself to a certain tranquil gaiety. If she had come
+to seek her fortune, it seemed to her that her fortune would be easy to
+find. There was a promise of it in the gorgeous purity of the western
+sky; there was an intimation in the mild, unimpertinent gaze of the
+passers of a certain natural facility in things.
+
+“You will not go back to Silberstadt, eh?” asked Felix.
+
+“Not tomorrow,” said the Baroness.
+
+“Nor write to the Reigning Prince?”
+
+“I shall write to him that they evidently know nothing about him over
+here.”
+
+“He will not believe you,” said the young man. “I advise you to let him
+alone.”
+
+Felix himself continued to be in high good humor. Brought up among
+ancient customs and in picturesque cities, he yet found plenty of local
+color in the little Puritan metropolis. That evening, after dinner, he
+told his sister that he should go forth early on the morrow to look up
+their cousins.
+
+“You are very impatient,” said Eugenia.
+
+“What can be more natural,” he asked, “after seeing all those pretty
+girls today? If one’s cousins are of that pattern, the sooner one knows
+them the better.”
+
+“Perhaps they are not,” said Eugenia. “We ought to have brought some
+letters—to some other people.”
+
+“The other people would not be our kinsfolk.”
+
+“Possibly they would be none the worse for that,” the Baroness replied.
+
+Her brother looked at her with his eyebrows lifted. “That was not what
+you said when you first proposed to me that we should come out here and
+fraternize with our relatives. You said that it was the prompting of
+natural affection; and when I suggested some reasons against it you
+declared that the _voix du sang_ should go before everything.”
+
+“You remember all that?” asked the Baroness.
+
+“Vividly! I was greatly moved by it.”
+
+She was walking up and down the room, as she had done in the morning;
+she stopped in her walk and looked at her brother. She apparently was
+going to say something, but she checked herself and resumed her walk.
+Then, in a few moments, she said something different, which had the
+effect of an explanation of the suppression of her earlier thought.
+“You will never be anything but a child, dear brother.”
+
+“One would suppose that you, madam,” answered Felix, laughing, “were a
+thousand years old.”
+
+“I am—sometimes,” said the Baroness.
+
+“I will go, then, and announce to our cousins the arrival of a
+personage so extraordinary. They will immediately come and pay you
+their respects.”
+
+Eugenia paced the length of the room again, and then she stopped before
+her brother, laying her hand upon his arm. “They are not to come and
+see me,” she said. “You are not to allow that. That is not the way I
+shall meet them first.” And in answer to his interrogative glance she
+went on. “You will go and examine, and report. You will come back and
+tell me who they are and what they are; their number, gender, their
+respective ages—all about them. Be sure you observe everything; be
+ready to describe to me the locality, the accessories—how shall I say
+it?—the _mise en scène_. Then, at my own time, at my own hour, under
+circumstances of my own choosing, I will go to them. I will present
+myself—I will appear before them!” said the Baroness, this time
+phrasing her idea with a certain frankness.
+
+“And what message am I to take to them?” asked Felix, who had a lively
+faith in the justness of his sister’s arrangements.
+
+She looked at him a moment—at his expression of agreeable veracity;
+and, with that justness that he admired, she replied, “Say what you
+please. Tell my story in the way that seems to you most—natural.” And
+she bent her forehead for him to kiss.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+The next day was splendid, as Felix had prophesied; if the winter had
+suddenly leaped into spring, the spring had for the moment as quickly
+leaped into summer. This was an observation made by a young girl who
+came out of a large square house in the country, and strolled about in
+the spacious garden which separated it from a muddy road. The flowering
+shrubs and the neatly-disposed plants were basking in the abundant
+light and warmth; the transparent shade of the great elms—they were
+magnificent trees—seemed to thicken by the hour; and the intensely
+habitual stillness offered a submissive medium to the sound of a
+distant church-bell. The young girl listened to the church-bell; but
+she was not dressed for church. She was bare-headed; she wore a white
+muslin waist, with an embroidered border, and the skirt of her dress
+was of colored muslin. She was a young lady of some two or three and
+twenty years of age, and though a young person of her sex walking
+bare-headed in a garden, of a Sunday morning in spring-time, can, in
+the nature of things, never be a displeasing object, you would not have
+pronounced this innocent Sabbath-breaker especially pretty. She was
+tall and pale, thin and a little awkward; her hair was fair and
+perfectly straight; her eyes were dark, and they had the singularity of
+seeming at once dull and restless—differing herein, as you see, fatally
+from the ideal “fine eyes,” which we always imagine to be both
+brilliant and tranquil. The doors and windows of the large square house
+were all wide open, to admit the purifying sunshine, which lay in
+generous patches upon the floor of a wide, high, covered piazza
+adjusted to two sides of the mansion—a piazza on which several
+straw-bottomed rocking-chairs and half a dozen of those small
+cylindrical stools in green and blue porcelain, which suggest an
+affiliation between the residents and the Eastern trade, were
+symmetrically disposed. It was an ancient house—ancient in the sense of
+being eighty years old; it was built of wood, painted a clean, clear,
+faded gray, and adorned along the front, at intervals, with flat wooden
+pilasters, painted white. These pilasters appeared to support a kind of
+classic pediment, which was decorated in the middle by a large triple
+window in a boldly carved frame, and in each of its smaller angles by a
+glazed circular aperture. A large white door, furnished with a
+highly-polished brass knocker, presented itself to the rural-looking
+road, with which it was connected by a spacious pathway, paved with
+worn and cracked, but very clean, bricks. Behind it there were meadows
+and orchards, a barn and a pond; and facing it, a short distance along
+the road, on the opposite side, stood a smaller house, painted white,
+with external shutters painted green, a little garden on one hand and
+an orchard on the other. All this was shining in the morning air,
+through which the simple details of the picture addressed themselves to
+the eye as distinctly as the items of a “sum” in addition.
+
+A second young lady presently came out of the house, across the piazza,
+descended into the garden and approached the young girl of whom I have
+spoken. This second young lady was also thin and pale; but she was
+older than the other; she was shorter; she had dark, smooth hair. Her
+eyes, unlike the other’s, were quick and bright; but they were not at
+all restless. She wore a straw bonnet with white ribbons, and a long,
+red, India scarf, which, on the front of her dress, reached to her
+feet. In her hand she carried a little key.
+
+“Gertrude,” she said, “are you very sure you had better not go to
+church?”
+
+Gertrude looked at her a moment, plucked a small sprig from a
+lilac-bush, smelled it and threw it away. “I am not very sure of
+anything!” she answered.
+
+The other young lady looked straight past her, at the distant pond,
+which lay shining between the long banks of fir trees. Then she said in
+a very soft voice, “This is the key of the dining-room closet. I think
+you had better have it, if anyone should want anything.”
+
+“Who is there to want anything?” Gertrude demanded. “I shall be all
+alone in the house.”
+
+“Someone may come,” said her companion.
+
+“Do you mean Mr. Brand?”
+
+“Yes, Gertrude. He may like a piece of cake.”
+
+“I don’t like men that are always eating cake!” Gertrude declared,
+giving a pull at the lilac-bush.
+
+Her companion glanced at her, and then looked down on the ground. “I
+think father expected you would come to church,” she said. “What shall
+I say to him?”
+
+“Say I have a bad headache.”
+
+“Would that be true?” asked the elder lady, looking straight at the
+pond again.
+
+“No, Charlotte,” said the younger one simply.
+
+Charlotte transferred her quiet eyes to her companion’s face. “I am
+afraid you are feeling restless.”
+
+“I am feeling as I always feel,” Gertrude replied, in the same tone.
+
+Charlotte turned away; but she stood there a moment. Presently she
+looked down at the front of her dress. “Doesn’t it seem to you,
+somehow, as if my scarf were too long?” she asked.
+
+Gertrude walked half round her, looking at the scarf. “I don’t think
+you wear it right,” she said.
+
+“How should I wear it, dear?”
+
+“I don’t know; differently from that. You should draw it differently
+over your shoulders, round your elbows; you should look differently
+behind.”
+
+“How should I look?” Charlotte inquired.
+
+“I don’t think I can tell you,” said Gertrude, plucking out the scarf a
+little behind. “I could do it myself, but I don’t think I can explain
+it.”
+
+Charlotte, by a movement of her elbows, corrected the laxity that had
+come from her companion’s touch. “Well, some day you must do it for me.
+It doesn’t matter now. Indeed, I don’t think it matters,” she added,
+“how one looks behind.”
+
+“I should say it mattered more,” said Gertrude. “Then you don’t know
+who may be observing you. You are not on your guard. You can’t try to
+look pretty.”
+
+Charlotte received this declaration with extreme gravity. “I don’t
+think one should ever try to look pretty,” she rejoined, earnestly.
+
+Her companion was silent. Then she said, “Well, perhaps it’s not of
+much use.”
+
+Charlotte looked at her a little, and then kissed her. “I hope you will
+be better when we come back.”
+
+“My dear sister, I am very well!” said Gertrude.
+
+Charlotte went down the large brick walk to the garden gate; her
+companion strolled slowly toward the house. At the gate Charlotte met a
+young man, who was coming in—a tall, fair young man, wearing a high hat
+and a pair of thread gloves. He was handsome, but rather too stout. He
+had a pleasant smile. “Oh, Mr. Brand!” exclaimed the young lady.
+
+“I came to see whether your sister was not going to church,” said the
+young man.
+
+“She says she is not going; but I am very glad you have come. I think
+if you were to talk to her a little”.... And Charlotte lowered her
+voice. “It seems as if she were restless.”
+
+Mr. Brand smiled down on the young lady from his great height. “I shall
+be very glad to talk to her. For that I should be willing to absent
+myself from almost any occasion of worship, however attractive.”
+
+“Well, I suppose you know,” said Charlotte, softly, as if positive
+acceptance of this proposition might be dangerous. “But I am afraid I
+shall be late.”
+
+“I hope you will have a pleasant sermon,” said the young man.
+
+“Oh, Mr. Gilman is always pleasant,” Charlotte answered. And she went
+on her way.
+
+Mr. Brand went into the garden, where Gertrude, hearing the gate close
+behind him, turned and looked at him. For a moment she watched him
+coming; then she turned away. But almost immediately she corrected this
+movement, and stood still, facing him. He took off his hat and wiped
+his forehead as he approached. Then he put on his hat again and held
+out his hand. His hat being removed, you would have perceived that his
+forehead was very large and smooth, and his hair abundant but rather
+colorless. His nose was too large, and his mouth and eyes were too
+small; but for all this he was, as I have said, a young man of striking
+appearance. The expression of his little clean-colored blue eyes was
+irresistibly gentle and serious; he looked, as the phrase is, as good
+as gold. The young girl, standing in the garden path, glanced, as he
+came up, at his thread gloves.
+
+“I hoped you were going to church,” he said. “I wanted to walk with
+you.”
+
+“I am very much obliged to you,” Gertrude answered. “I am not going to
+church.”
+
+She had shaken hands with him; he held her hand a moment. “Have you any
+special reason for not going?”
+
+“Yes, Mr. Brand,” said the young girl.
+
+“May I ask what it is?”
+
+She looked at him smiling; and in her smile, as I have intimated, there
+was a certain dullness. But mingled with this dullness was something
+sweet and suggestive. “Because the sky is so blue!” she said.
+
+He looked at the sky, which was magnificent, and then said, smiling
+too, “I have heard of young ladies staying at home for bad weather, but
+never for good. Your sister, whom I met at the gate, tells me you are
+depressed,” he added.
+
+“Depressed? I am never depressed.”
+
+“Oh, surely, sometimes,” replied Mr. Brand, as if he thought this a
+regrettable account of one’s self.
+
+“I am never depressed,” Gertrude repeated. “But I am sometimes wicked.
+When I am wicked I am in high spirits. I was wicked just now to my
+sister.”
+
+“What did you do to her?”
+
+“I said things that puzzled her—on purpose.”
+
+“Why did you do that, Miss Gertrude?” asked the young man.
+
+She began to smile again. “Because the sky is so blue!”
+
+“You say things that puzzle _me_,” Mr. Brand declared.
+
+“I always know when I do it,” proceeded Gertrude. “But people puzzle me
+more, I think. And they don’t seem to know!”
+
+“This is very interesting,” Mr. Brand observed, smiling.
+
+“You told me to tell you about my—my struggles,” the young girl went
+on.
+
+“Let us talk about them. I have so many things to say.”
+
+Gertrude turned away a moment; and then, turning back, “You had better
+go to church,” she said.
+
+“You know,” the young man urged, “that I have always one thing to say.”
+
+Gertrude looked at him a moment. “Please don’t say it now!”
+
+“We are all alone,” he continued, taking off his hat; “all alone in
+this beautiful Sunday stillness.”
+
+Gertrude looked around her, at the breaking buds, the shining distance,
+the blue sky to which she had referred as a pretext for her
+irregularities. “That’s the reason,” she said, “why I don’t want you to
+speak. Do me a favor; go to church.”
+
+“May I speak when I come back?” asked Mr. Brand.
+
+“If you are still disposed,” she answered.
+
+“I don’t know whether you are wicked,” he said, “but you are certainly
+puzzling.”
+
+She had turned away; she raised her hands to her ears. He looked at her
+a moment, and then he slowly walked to church.
+
+She wandered for a while about the garden, vaguely and without purpose.
+The church-bell had stopped ringing; the stillness was complete. This
+young lady relished highly, on occasions, the sense of being alone—the
+absence of the whole family and the emptiness of the house. Today,
+apparently, the servants had also gone to church; there was never a
+figure at the open windows; behind the house there was no stout negress
+in a red turban, lowering the bucket into the great shingle-hooded
+well. And the front door of the big, unguarded home stood open, with
+the trustfulness of the golden age; or what is more to the purpose,
+with that of New England’s silvery prime. Gertrude slowly passed
+through it, and went from one of the empty rooms to the other—large,
+clear-colored rooms, with white wainscots, ornamented with thin-legged
+mahogany furniture, and, on the walls, with old-fashioned engravings,
+chiefly of scriptural subjects, hung very high. This agreeable sense of
+solitude, of having the house to herself, of which I have spoken,
+always excited Gertrude’s imagination; she could not have told you why,
+and neither can her humble historian. It always seemed to her that she
+must do something particular—that she must honor the occasion; and
+while she roamed about, wondering what she could do, the occasion
+usually came to an end. Today she wondered more than ever. At last she
+took down a book; there was no library in the house, but there were
+books in all the rooms. None of them were forbidden books, and Gertrude
+had not stopped at home for the sake of a chance to climb to the
+inaccessible shelves. She possessed herself of a very obvious
+volume—one of the series of the _Arabian Nights_—and she brought it out
+into the portico and sat down with it in her lap. There, for a quarter
+of an hour, she read the history of the loves of the Prince
+Camaralzaman and the Princess Badoura. At last, looking up, she beheld,
+as it seemed to her, the Prince Camaralzaman standing before her. A
+beautiful young man was making her a very low bow—a magnificent bow,
+such as she had never seen before. He appeared to have dropped from the
+clouds; he was wonderfully handsome; he smiled—smiled as if he were
+smiling on purpose. Extreme surprise, for a moment, kept Gertrude
+sitting still; then she rose, without even keeping her finger in her
+book. The young man, with his hat in his hand, still looked at her,
+smiling and smiling. It was very strange.
+
+“Will you kindly tell me,” said the mysterious visitor, at last,
+“whether I have the honor of speaking to Miss Wentworth?”
+
+“My name is Gertrude Wentworth,” murmured the young woman.
+
+“Then—then—I have the honor—the pleasure—of being your cousin.”
+
+The young man had so much the character of an apparition that this
+announcement seemed to complete his unreality. “What cousin? Who are
+you?” said Gertrude.
+
+He stepped back a few paces and looked up at the house; then glanced
+round him at the garden and the distant view. After this he burst out
+laughing. “I see it must seem to you very strange,” he said. There was,
+after all, something substantial in his laughter. Gertrude looked at
+him from head to foot. Yes, he was remarkably handsome; but his smile
+was almost a grimace. “It is very still,” he went on, coming nearer
+again. And as she only looked at him, for reply, he added, “Are you all
+alone?”
+
+“Everyone has gone to church,” said Gertrude.
+
+“I was afraid of that!” the young man exclaimed. “But I hope you are
+not afraid of me.”
+
+“You ought to tell me who you are,” Gertrude answered.
+
+“I am afraid of you!” said the young man. “I had a different plan. I
+expected the servant would take in my card, and that you would put your
+heads together, before admitting me, and make out my identity.”
+
+Gertrude had been wondering with a quick intensity which brought its
+result; and the result seemed an answer—a wondrous, delightful
+answer—to her vague wish that something would befall her. “I know—I
+know,” she said. “You come from Europe.”
+
+“We came two days ago. You have heard of us, then—you believe in us?”
+
+“We have known, vaguely,” said Gertrude, “that we had relations in
+France.”
+
+“And have you ever wanted to see us?” asked the young man.
+
+Gertrude was silent a moment. “I have wanted to see you.”
+
+“I am glad, then, it is you I have found. We wanted to see you, so we
+came.”
+
+“On purpose?” asked Gertrude.
+
+The young man looked round him, smiling still. “Well, yes; on purpose.
+Does that sound as if we should bore you?” he added. “I don’t think we
+shall—I really don’t think we shall. We are rather fond of wandering,
+too; and we were glad of a pretext.”
+
+“And you have just arrived?”
+
+“In Boston, two days ago. At the inn I asked for Mr. Wentworth. He must
+be your father. They found out for me where he lived; they seemed often
+to have heard of him. I determined to come, without ceremony. So, this
+lovely morning, they set my face in the right direction, and told me to
+walk straight before me, out of town. I came on foot because I wanted
+to see the country. I walked and walked, and here I am! It’s a good
+many miles.”
+
+“It is seven miles and a half,” said Gertrude, softly. Now that this
+handsome young man was proving himself a reality she found herself
+vaguely trembling; she was deeply excited. She had never in her life
+spoken to a foreigner, and she had often thought it would be delightful
+to do so. Here was one who had suddenly been engendered by the Sabbath
+stillness for her private use; and such a brilliant, polite, smiling
+one! She found time and means to compose herself, however: to remind
+herself that she must exercise a sort of official hospitality. “We are
+very—very glad to see you,” she said. “Won’t you come into the house?”
+And she moved toward the open door.
+
+“You are not afraid of me, then?” asked the young man again, with his
+light laugh.
+
+She wondered a moment, and then, “We are not afraid—here,” she said.
+
+_“Ah, comme vous devez avoir raison!”_ cried the young man, looking all
+round him, appreciatively. It was the first time that Gertrude had
+heard so many words of French spoken. They gave her something of a
+sensation. Her companion followed her, watching, with a certain
+excitement of his own, this tall, interesting-looking girl, dressed in
+her clear, crisp muslin. He paused in the hall, where there was a broad
+white staircase with a white balustrade. “What a pleasant house!” he
+said. “It’s lighter inside than it is out.”
+
+“It’s pleasanter here,” said Gertrude, and she led the way into the
+parlor,—a high, clean, rather empty-looking room. Here they stood
+looking at each other,—the young man smiling more than ever; Gertrude,
+very serious, trying to smile.
+
+“I don’t believe you know my name,” he said. “I am called Felix Young.
+Your father is my uncle. My mother was his half sister, and older than
+he.”
+
+“Yes,” said Gertrude, “and she turned Roman Catholic and married in
+Europe.”
+
+“I see you know,” said the young man. “She married and she died. Your
+father’s family didn’t like her husband. They called him a foreigner;
+but he was not. My poor father was born in Sicily, but his parents were
+American.”
+
+“In Sicily?” Gertrude murmured.
+
+“It is true,” said Felix Young, “that they had spent their lives in
+Europe. But they were very patriotic. And so are we.”
+
+“And you are Sicilian,” said Gertrude.
+
+“Sicilian, no! Let’s see. I was born at a little place—a dear little
+place—in France. My sister was born at Vienna.”
+
+“So you are French,” said Gertrude.
+
+“Heaven forbid!” cried the young man. Gertrude’s eyes were fixed upon
+him almost insistently. He began to laugh again. “I can easily be
+French, if that will please you.”
+
+“You are a foreigner of some sort,” said Gertrude.
+
+“Of some sort—yes; I suppose so. But who can say of what sort? I don’t
+think we have ever had occasion to settle the question. You know there
+are people like that. About their country, their religion, their
+profession, they can’t tell.”
+
+Gertrude stood there gazing; she had not asked him to sit down. She had
+never heard of people like that; she wanted to hear. “Where do you
+live?” she asked.
+
+“They can’t tell that, either!” said Felix. “I am afraid you will think
+they are little better than vagabonds. I have lived
+anywhere—everywhere. I really think I have lived in every city in
+Europe.” Gertrude gave a little long soft exhalation. It made the young
+man smile at her again; and his smile made her blush a little. To take
+refuge from blushing she asked him if, after his long walk, he was not
+hungry or thirsty. Her hand was in her pocket; she was fumbling with
+the little key that her sister had given her. “Ah, my dear young lady,”
+he said, clasping his hands a little, “if you could give me, in
+charity, a glass of wine!”
+
+Gertrude gave a smile and a little nod, and went quickly out of the
+room. Presently she came back with a very large decanter in one hand
+and a plate in the other, on which was placed a big, round cake with a
+frosted top. Gertrude, in taking the cake from the closet, had had a
+moment of acute consciousness that it composed the refection of which
+her sister had thought that Mr. Brand would like to partake. Her
+kinsman from across the seas was looking at the pale, high-hung
+engravings. When she came in he turned and smiled at her, as if they
+had been old friends meeting after a separation. “You wait upon me
+yourself?” he asked. “I am served like the gods!” She had waited upon a
+great many people, but none of them had ever told her that. The
+observation added a certain lightness to the step with which she went
+to a little table where there were some curious red glasses—glasses
+covered with little gold sprigs, which Charlotte used to dust every
+morning with her own hands. Gertrude thought the glasses very handsome,
+and it was a pleasure to her to know that the wine was good; it was her
+father’s famous madeira. Felix Young thought it excellent; he wondered
+why he had been told that there was no wine in America. She cut him an
+immense triangle out of the cake, and again she thought of Mr. Brand.
+Felix sat there, with his glass in one hand and his huge morsel of cake
+in the other—eating, drinking, smiling, talking. “I am very hungry,” he
+said. “I am not at all tired; I am never tired. But I am very hungry.”
+
+“You must stay to dinner,” said Gertrude. “At two o’clock. They will
+all have come back from church; you will see the others.”
+
+“Who are the others?” asked the young man. “Describe them all.”
+
+“You will see for yourself. It is you that must tell me; now, about
+your sister.”
+
+“My sister is the Baroness Münster,” said Felix.
+
+On hearing that his sister was a Baroness, Gertrude got up and walked
+about slowly, in front of him. She was silent a moment. She was
+thinking of it. “Why didn’t she come, too?” she asked.
+
+“She did come; she is in Boston, at the hotel.”
+
+“We will go and see her,” said Gertrude, looking at him.
+
+“She begs you will not!” the young man replied. “She sends you her
+love; she sent me to announce her. She will come and pay her respects
+to your father.”
+
+Gertrude felt herself trembling again. A Baroness Münster, who sent a
+brilliant young man to “announce” her; who was coming, as the Queen of
+Sheba came to Solomon, to pay her “respects” to quiet Mr.
+Wentworth—such a personage presented herself to Gertrude’s vision with
+a most effective unexpectedness. For a moment she hardly knew what to
+say. “When will she come?” she asked at last.
+
+“As soon as you will allow her—tomorrow. She is very impatient,”
+answered Felix, who wished to be agreeable.
+
+“Tomorrow, yes,” said Gertrude. She wished to ask more about her; but
+she hardly knew what could be predicated of a Baroness Münster. “Is
+she—is she—married?”
+
+Felix had finished his cake and wine; he got up, fixing upon the young
+girl his bright, expressive eyes. “She is married to a German
+prince—Prince Adolf, of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein. He is not the
+reigning prince; he is a younger brother.”
+
+Gertrude gazed at her informant; her lips were slightly parted. “Is she
+a—a _Princess_?” she asked at last.
+
+“Oh, no,” said the young man; “her position is rather a singular one.
+It’s a morganatic marriage.”
+
+“Morganatic?” These were new names and new words to poor Gertrude.
+
+“That’s what they call a marriage, you know, contracted between a scion
+of a ruling house and—and a common mortal. They made Eugenia a
+Baroness, poor woman; but that was all they could do. Now they want to
+dissolve the marriage. Prince Adolf, between ourselves, is a ninny; but
+his brother, who is a clever man, has plans for him. Eugenia, naturally
+enough, makes difficulties; not, however, that I think she cares
+much—she’s a very clever woman; I’m sure you’ll like her—but she wants
+to bother them. Just now everything is _en l’air_.”
+
+The cheerful, off-hand tone in which her visitor related this darkly
+romantic tale seemed to Gertrude very strange; but it seemed also to
+convey a certain flattery to herself, a recognition of her wisdom and
+dignity. She felt a dozen impressions stirring within her, and
+presently the one that was uppermost found words. “They want to
+dissolve her marriage?” she asked.
+
+“So it appears.”
+
+“And against her will?”
+
+“Against her right.”
+
+“She must be very unhappy!” said Gertrude.
+
+Her visitor looked at her, smiling; he raised his hand to the back of
+his head and held it there a moment. “So she says,” he answered.
+“That’s her story. She told me to tell it you.”
+
+“Tell me more,” said Gertrude.
+
+“No, I will leave that to her; she does it better.”
+
+Gertrude gave her little excited sigh again. “Well, if she is unhappy,”
+she said, “I am glad she has come to us.”
+
+She had been so interested that she failed to notice the sound of a
+footstep in the portico; and yet it was a footstep that she always
+recognized. She heard it in the hall, and then she looked out of the
+window. They were all coming back from church—her father, her sister
+and brother, and their cousins, who always came to dinner on Sunday.
+Mr. Brand had come in first; he was in advance of the others, because,
+apparently, he was still disposed to say what she had not wished him to
+say an hour before. He came into the parlor, looking for Gertrude. He
+had two little books in his hand. On seeing Gertrude’s companion he
+slowly stopped, looking at him.
+
+“Is this a cousin?” asked Felix.
+
+Then Gertrude saw that she must introduce him; but her ears, and, by
+sympathy, her lips, were full of all that he had been telling her.
+“This is the Prince,” she said, “the Prince of
+Silberstadt-Schreckenstein!”
+
+Felix burst out laughing, and Mr. Brand stood staring, while the
+others, who had passed into the house, appeared behind him in the open
+doorway.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+That evening at dinner Felix Young gave his sister, the Baroness
+Münster, an account of his impressions. She saw that he had come back
+in the highest possible spirits; but this fact, to her own mind, was
+not a reason for rejoicing. She had but a limited confidence in her
+brother’s judgment; his capacity for taking rose-colored views was such
+as to vulgarize one of the prettiest of tints. Still, she supposed he
+could be trusted to give her the mere facts; and she invited him with
+some eagerness to communicate them. “I suppose, at least, they didn’t
+turn you out from the door;” she said. “You have been away some ten
+hours.”
+
+“Turn me from the door!” Felix exclaimed. “They took me to their
+hearts; they killed the fatted calf.”
+
+“I know what you want to say: they are a collection of angels.”
+
+“Exactly,” said Felix. “They are a collection of angels—simply.”
+
+“_C’est bien vague_,” remarked the Baroness. “What are they like?”
+
+“Like nothing you ever saw.”
+
+“I am sure I am much obliged; but that is hardly more definite.
+Seriously, they were glad to see you?”
+
+“Enchanted. It has been the proudest day of my life. Never, never have
+I been so lionized! I assure you, I was cock of the walk. My dear
+sister,” said the young man, “_nous n’avons qu’à nous tenir_; we shall
+be great swells!”
+
+Madame Münster looked at him, and her eye exhibited a slight responsive
+spark. She touched her lips to a glass of wine, and then she said,
+“Describe them. Give me a picture.”
+
+Felix drained his own glass. “Well, it’s in the country, among the
+meadows and woods; a wild sort of place, and yet not far from here.
+Only, such a road, my dear! Imagine one of the Alpine glaciers
+reproduced in mud. But you will not spend much time on it, for they
+want you to come and stay, once for all.”
+
+“Ah,” said the Baroness, “they want me to come and stay, once for all?
+_Bon_.”
+
+“It’s intensely rural, tremendously natural; and all overhung with this
+strange white light, this far-away blue sky. There’s a big wooden
+house—a kind of three-story bungalow; it looks like a magnified
+Nuremberg toy. There was a gentleman there that made a speech to me
+about it and called it a ‘venerable mansion;’ but it looks as if it had
+been built last night.”
+
+“Is it handsome—is it elegant?” asked the Baroness.
+
+Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. “It’s very clean! No splendors,
+no gilding, no troops of servants; rather straight-backed chairs. But
+you might eat off the floors, and you can sit down on the stairs.”
+
+“That must be a privilege. And the inhabitants are straight-backed too,
+of course.”
+
+“My dear sister,” said Felix, “the inhabitants are charming.”
+
+“In what style?”
+
+“In a style of their own. How shall I describe it? It’s primitive; it’s
+patriarchal; it’s the _ton_ of the golden age.”
+
+“And have they nothing golden but their _ton_? Are there no symptoms of
+wealth?”
+
+“I should say there was wealth without symptoms. A plain, homely way of
+life: nothing for show, and very little for—what shall I call it?—for
+the senses; but a great _aisance_, and a lot of money, out of sight,
+that comes forward very quietly for subscriptions to institutions, for
+repairing tenements, for paying doctor’s bills; perhaps even for
+portioning daughters.”
+
+“And the daughters?” Madame Münster demanded. “How many are there?”
+
+“There are two, Charlotte and Gertrude.”
+
+“Are they pretty?”
+
+“One of them,” said Felix.
+
+“Which is that?”
+
+The young man was silent, looking at his sister. “Charlotte,” he said
+at last.
+
+She looked at him in return. “I see. You are in love with Gertrude.
+They must be Puritans to their finger-tips; anything but gay!”
+
+“No, they are not gay,” Felix admitted. “They are sober; they are even
+severe. They are of a pensive cast; they take things hard. I think
+there is something the matter with them; they have some melancholy
+memory or some depressing expectation. It’s not the epicurean
+temperament. My uncle, Mr. Wentworth, is a tremendously high-toned old
+fellow; he looks as if he were undergoing martyrdom, not by fire, but
+by freezing. But we shall cheer them up; we shall do them good. They
+will take a good deal of stirring up; but they are wonderfully kind and
+gentle. And they are appreciative. They think one clever; they think
+one remarkable!”
+
+“That is very fine, so far as it goes,” said the Baroness. “But are we
+to be shut up to these three people, Mr. Wentworth and the two young
+women—what did you say their names were—Deborah and Hephzibah?”
+
+“Oh, no; there is another little girl, a cousin of theirs, a very
+pretty creature; a thorough little American. And then there is the son
+of the house.”
+
+“Good!” said the Baroness. “We are coming to the gentlemen. What of the
+son of the house?”
+
+“I am afraid he gets tipsy.”
+
+“He, then, has the epicurean temperament! How old is he?”
+
+“He is a boy of twenty; a pretty young fellow, but I am afraid he has
+vulgar tastes. And then there is Mr. Brand—a very tall young man, a
+sort of lay-priest. They seem to think a good deal of him, but I don’t
+exactly make him out.”
+
+“And is there nothing,” asked the Baroness, “between these
+extremes—this mysterious ecclesiastic and that intemperate youth?”
+
+“Oh, yes, there is Mr. Acton. I think,” said the young man, with a nod
+at his sister, “that you will like Mr. Acton.”
+
+“Remember that I am very fastidious,” said the Baroness. “Has he very
+good manners?”
+
+“He will have them with you. He is a man of the world; he has been to
+China.”
+
+Madame Münster gave a little laugh. “A man of the Chinese world! He
+must be very interesting.”
+
+“I have an idea that he brought home a fortune,” said Felix.
+
+“That is always interesting. Is he young, good-looking, clever?”
+
+“He is less than forty; he has a baldish head; he says witty things. I
+rather think,” added the young man, “that he will admire the Baroness
+Münster.”
+
+“It is very possible,” said this lady. Her brother never knew how she
+would take things; but shortly afterwards she declared that he had made
+a very pretty description and that on the morrow she would go and see
+for herself.
+
+They mounted, accordingly, into a great barouche—a vehicle as to which
+the Baroness found nothing to criticise but the price that was asked
+for it and the fact that the coachman wore a straw hat. (At Silberstadt
+Madame Münster had had liveries of yellow and crimson.) They drove into
+the country, and the Baroness, leaning far back and swaying her
+lace-fringed parasol, looked to right and to left and surveyed the
+way-side objects. After a while she pronounced them _affreux_. Her
+brother remarked that it was apparently a country in which the
+foreground was inferior to the _plans reculés_; and the Baroness
+rejoined that the landscape seemed to be all foreground. Felix had
+fixed with his new friends the hour at which he should bring his
+sister; it was four o’clock in the afternoon. The large, clean-faced
+house wore, to his eyes, as the barouche drove up to it, a very
+friendly aspect; the high, slender elms made lengthening shadows in
+front of it. The Baroness descended; her American kinsfolk were
+stationed in the portico. Felix waved his hat to them, and a tall, lean
+gentleman, with a high forehead and a clean shaven face, came forward
+toward the garden gate. Charlotte Wentworth walked at his side.
+Gertrude came behind, more slowly. Both of these young ladies wore
+rustling silk dresses. Felix ushered his sister into the gate. “Be very
+gracious,” he said to her. But he saw the admonition was superfluous.
+Eugenia was prepared to be gracious as only Eugenia could be. Felix
+knew no keener pleasure than to be able to admire his sister
+unrestrictedly; for if the opportunity was frequent, it was not
+inveterate. When she desired to please she was to him, as to everyone
+else, the most charming woman in the world. Then he forgot that she was
+ever anything else; that she was sometimes hard and perverse; that he
+was occasionally afraid of her. Now, as she took his arm to pass into
+the garden, he felt that she desired, that she proposed, to please, and
+this situation made him very happy. Eugenia would please.
+
+The tall gentleman came to meet her, looking very rigid and grave. But
+it was a rigidity that had no illiberal meaning. Mr. Wentworth’s manner
+was pregnant, on the contrary, with a sense of grand responsibility, of
+the solemnity of the occasion, of its being difficult to show
+sufficient deference to a lady at once so distinguished and so unhappy.
+Felix had observed on the day before his characteristic pallor; and now
+he perceived that there was something almost cadaverous in his uncle’s
+high-featured white face. But so clever were this young man’s quick
+sympathies and perceptions that he already learned that in these
+semi-mortuary manifestations there was no cause for alarm. His light
+imagination had gained a glimpse of Mr. Wentworth’s spiritual
+mechanism, and taught him that, the old man being infinitely
+conscientious, the special operation of conscience within him announced
+itself by several of the indications of physical faintness.
+
+The Baroness took her uncle’s hand, and stood looking at him with her
+ugly face and her beautiful smile. “Have I done right to come?” she
+asked.
+
+“Very right, very right,” said Mr. Wentworth, solemnly. He had arranged
+in his mind a little speech; but now it quite faded away. He felt
+almost frightened. He had never been looked at in just that way—with
+just that fixed, intense smile—by any woman; and it perplexed and
+weighed upon him, now, that the woman who was smiling so and who had
+instantly given him a vivid sense of her possessing other unprecedented
+attributes, was his own niece, the child of his own father’s daughter.
+The idea that his niece should be a German Baroness, married
+“morganatically” to a Prince, had already given him much to think
+about. Was it right, was it just, was it acceptable? He always slept
+badly, and the night before he had lain awake much more even than
+usual, asking himself these questions. The strange word “morganatic”
+was constantly in his ears; it reminded him of a certain Mrs. Morgan
+whom he had once known and who had been a bold, unpleasant woman. He
+had a feeling that it was his duty, so long as the Baroness looked at
+him, smiling in that way, to meet her glance with his own scrupulously
+adjusted, consciously frigid organs of vision; but on this occasion he
+failed to perform his duty to the last. He looked away toward his
+daughters. “We are very glad to see you,” he had said. “Allow me to
+introduce my daughters—Miss Charlotte Wentworth, Miss Gertrude
+Wentworth.”
+
+The Baroness thought she had never seen people less demonstrative. But
+Charlotte kissed her and took her hand, looking at her sweetly and
+solemnly. Gertrude seemed to her almost funereal, though Gertrude might
+have found a source of gaiety in the fact that Felix, with his
+magnificent smile, had been talking to her; he had greeted her as a
+very old friend. When she kissed the Baroness she had tears in her
+eyes. Madame Münster took each of these young women by the hand, and
+looked at them all over. Charlotte thought her very strange-looking and
+singularly dressed; she could not have said whether it was well or ill.
+She was glad, at any rate, that they had put on their silk
+gowns—especially Gertrude. “My cousins are very pretty,” said the
+Baroness, turning her eyes from one to the other. “Your daughters are
+very handsome, sir.”
+
+Charlotte blushed quickly; she had never yet heard her personal
+appearance alluded to in a loud, expressive voice. Gertrude looked
+away—not at Felix; she was extremely pleased. It was not the compliment
+that pleased her; she did not believe it; she thought herself very
+plain. She could hardly have told you the source of her satisfaction;
+it came from something in the way the Baroness spoke, and it was not
+diminished—it was rather deepened, oddly enough—by the young girl’s
+disbelief. Mr. Wentworth was silent; and then he asked, formally,
+“Won’t you come into the house?”
+
+“These are not all; you have some other children,” said the Baroness.
+
+“I have a son,” Mr. Wentworth answered.
+
+“And why doesn’t he come to meet me?” Eugenia cried. “I am afraid he is
+not so charming as his sisters.”
+
+“I don’t know; I will see about it,” the old man declared.
+
+“He is rather afraid of ladies,” Charlotte said, softly.
+
+“He is very handsome,” said Gertrude, as loud as she could.
+
+“We will go in and find him. We will draw him out of his _cachette_.”
+And the Baroness took Mr. Wentworth’s arm, who was not aware that he
+had offered it to her, and who, as they walked toward the house,
+wondered whether he ought to have offered it and whether it was proper
+for her to take it if it had not been offered. “I want to know you
+well,” said the Baroness, interrupting these meditations, “and I want
+you to know me.”
+
+“It seems natural that we should know each other,” Mr. Wentworth
+rejoined. “We are near relatives.”
+
+“Ah, there comes a moment in life when one reverts, irresistibly, to
+one’s natural ties—to one’s natural affections. You must have found
+that!” said Eugenia.
+
+Mr. Wentworth had been told the day before by Felix that Eugenia was
+very clever, very brilliant, and the information had held him in some
+suspense. This was the cleverness, he supposed; the brilliancy was
+beginning. “Yes, the natural affections are very strong,” he murmured.
+
+“In some people,” the Baroness declared. “Not in all.” Charlotte was
+walking beside her; she took hold of her hand again, smiling always.
+“And you, _cousine_, where did you get that enchanting complexion?” she
+went on; “such lilies and roses?” The roses in poor Charlotte’s
+countenance began speedily to predominate over the lilies, and she
+quickened her step and reached the portico. “This is the country of
+complexions,” the Baroness continued, addressing herself to Mr.
+Wentworth. “I am convinced they are more delicate. There are very good
+ones in England—in Holland; but they are very apt to be coarse. There
+is too much red.”
+
+“I think you will find,” said Mr. Wentworth, “that this country is
+superior in many respects to those you mention. I have been to England
+and Holland.”
+
+“Ah, you have been to Europe?” cried the Baroness. “Why didn’t you come
+and see me? But it’s better, after all, this way,” she said. They were
+entering the house; she paused and looked round her. “I see you have
+arranged your house—your beautiful house—in the—in the Dutch taste!”
+
+“The house is very old,” remarked Mr. Wentworth. “General Washington
+once spent a week here.”
+
+“Oh, I have heard of Washington,” cried the Baroness. “My father used
+to tell me of him.”
+
+Mr. Wentworth was silent a moment, and then, “I found he was very well
+known in Europe,” he said.
+
+Felix had lingered in the garden with Gertrude; he was standing before
+her and smiling, as he had done the day before. What had happened the
+day before seemed to her a kind of dream. He had been there and he had
+changed everything; the others had seen him, they had talked with him;
+but that he should come again, that he should be part of the future,
+part of her small, familiar, much-meditating life—this needed, afresh,
+the evidence of her senses. The evidence had come to her senses now;
+and her senses seemed to rejoice in it. “What do you think of Eugenia?”
+Felix asked. “Isn’t she charming?”
+
+“She is very brilliant,” said Gertrude. “But I can’t tell yet. She
+seems to me like a singer singing an air. You can’t tell till the song
+is done.”
+
+“Ah, the song will never be done!” exclaimed the young man, laughing.
+“Don’t you think her handsome?”
+
+Gertrude had been disappointed in the beauty of the Baroness Münster;
+she had expected her, for mysterious reasons, to resemble a very pretty
+portrait of the Empress Josephine, of which there hung an engraving in
+one of the parlors, and which the younger Miss Wentworth had always
+greatly admired. But the Baroness was not at all like that—not at all.
+Though different, however, she was very wonderful, and Gertrude felt
+herself most suggestively corrected. It was strange, nevertheless, that
+Felix should speak in that positive way about his sister’s beauty. “I
+think I _shall_ think her handsome,” Gertrude said. “It must be very
+interesting to know her. I don’t feel as if I ever could.”
+
+“Ah, you will know her well; you will become great friends,” Felix
+declared, as if this were the easiest thing in the world.
+
+“She is very graceful,” said Gertrude, looking after the Baroness,
+suspended to her father’s arm. It was a pleasure to her to say that
+anyone was graceful.
+
+Felix had been looking about him. “And your little cousin, of
+yesterday,” he said, “who was so wonderfully pretty—what has become of
+her?”
+
+“She is in the parlor,” Gertrude answered. “Yes, she is very pretty.”
+She felt as if it were her duty to take him straight into the house, to
+where he might be near her cousin. But after hesitating a moment she
+lingered still. “I didn’t believe you would come back,” she said.
+
+“Not come back!” cried Felix, laughing. “You didn’t know, then, the
+impression made upon this susceptible heart of mine.”
+
+She wondered whether he meant the impression her cousin Lizzie had
+made. “Well,” she said, “I didn’t think we should ever see you again.”
+
+“And pray what did you think would become of me?”
+
+“I don’t know. I thought you would melt away.”
+
+“That’s a compliment to my solidity! I melt very often,” said Felix,
+“but there is always something left of me.”
+
+“I came and waited for you by the door, because the others did,”
+Gertrude went on. “But if you had never appeared I should not have been
+surprised.”
+
+“I hope,” declared Felix, looking at her, “that you would have been
+disappointed.”
+
+She looked at him a little, and shook her head. “No—no!”
+
+_“Ah, par exemple!”_ cried the young man. “You deserve that I should
+never leave you.”
+
+Going into the parlor they found Mr. Wentworth performing
+introductions. A young man was standing before the Baroness, blushing a
+good deal, laughing a little, and shifting his weight from one foot to
+the other—a slim, mild-faced young man, with neatly-arranged features,
+like those of Mr. Wentworth. Two other gentlemen, behind him, had risen
+from their seats, and a little apart, near one of the windows, stood a
+remarkably pretty young girl. The young girl was knitting a stocking;
+but, while her fingers quickly moved, she looked with wide, brilliant
+eyes at the Baroness.
+
+“And what is your son’s name?” said Eugenia, smiling at the young man.
+
+“My name is Clifford Wentworth, ma’am,” he said in a tremulous voice.
+
+“Why didn’t you come out to meet me, Mr. Clifford Wentworth?” the
+Baroness demanded, with her beautiful smile.
+
+“I didn’t think you would want me,” said the young man, slowly sidling
+about.
+
+“One always wants a _beau cousin_,—if one has one! But if you are very
+nice to me in future I won’t remember it against you.” And Madame
+Münster transferred her smile to the other persons present. It rested
+first upon the candid countenance and long-skirted figure of Mr. Brand,
+whose eyes were intently fixed upon Mr. Wentworth, as if to beg him not
+to prolong an anomalous situation. Mr. Wentworth pronounced his name.
+Eugenia gave him a very charming glance, and then looked at the other
+gentleman.
+
+This latter personage was a man of rather less than the usual stature
+and the usual weight, with a quick, observant, agreeable dark eye, a
+small quantity of thin dark hair, and a small moustache. He had been
+standing with his hands in his pockets; and when Eugenia looked at him
+he took them out. But he did not, like Mr. Brand, look evasively and
+urgently at their host. He met Eugenia’s eyes; he appeared to
+appreciate the privilege of meeting them. Madame Münster instantly felt
+that he was, intrinsically, the most important person present. She was
+not unconscious that this impression was in some degree manifested in
+the little sympathetic nod with which she acknowledged Mr. Wentworth’s
+announcement, “My cousin, Mr. Acton!”
+
+“Your cousin—not mine?” said the Baroness.
+
+“It only depends upon you,” Mr. Acton declared, laughing.
+
+The Baroness looked at him a moment, and noticed that he had very white
+teeth. “Let it depend upon your behavior,” she said. “I think I had
+better wait. I have cousins enough. Unless I can also claim
+relationship,” she added, “with that charming young lady,” and she
+pointed to the young girl at the window.
+
+“That’s my sister,” said Mr. Acton. And Gertrude Wentworth put her arm
+round the young girl and led her forward. It was not, apparently, that
+she needed much leading. She came toward the Baroness with a light,
+quick step, and with perfect self-possession, rolling her stocking
+round its needles. She had dark blue eyes and dark brown hair; she was
+wonderfully pretty.
+
+Eugenia kissed her, as she had kissed the other young women, and then
+held her off a little, looking at her. “Now this is quite another
+_type_,” she said; she pronounced the word in the French manner. “This
+is a different outline, my uncle, a different character, from that of
+your own daughters. This, Felix,” she went on, “is very much more what
+we have always thought of as the American type.”
+
+The young girl, during this exposition, was smiling askance at everyone
+in turn, and at Felix out of turn. “I find only one type here!” cried
+Felix, laughing. “The type adorable!”
+
+This sally was received in perfect silence, but Felix, who learned all
+things quickly, had already learned that the silences frequently
+observed among his new acquaintances were not necessarily restrictive
+or resentful. It was, as one might say, the silence of expectation, of
+modesty. They were all standing round his sister, as if they were
+expecting her to acquit herself of the exhibition of some peculiar
+faculty, some brilliant talent. Their attitude seemed to imply that she
+was a kind of conversational mountebank, attired, intellectually, in
+gauze and spangles. This attitude gave a certain ironical force to
+Madame Münster’s next words. “Now this is your circle,” she said to her
+uncle. “This is your _salon_. These are your regular _habitués_, eh? I
+am so glad to see you all together.”
+
+“Oh,” said Mr. Wentworth, “they are always dropping in and out. You
+must do the same.”
+
+“Father,” interposed Charlotte Wentworth, “they must do something
+more.” And she turned her sweet, serious face, that seemed at once
+timid and placid, upon their interesting visitor. “What is your name?”
+she asked.
+
+“Eugenia-Camilla-Dolores,” said the Baroness, smiling. “But you needn’t
+say all that.”
+
+“I will say Eugenia, if you will let me. You must come and stay with
+us.”
+
+The Baroness laid her hand upon Charlotte’s arm very tenderly; but she
+reserved herself. She was wondering whether it would be possible to
+“stay” with these people. “It would be very charming—very charming,”
+she said; and her eyes wandered over the company, over the room. She
+wished to gain time before committing herself. Her glance fell upon
+young Mr. Brand, who stood there, with his arms folded and his hand on
+his chin, looking at her. “The gentleman, I suppose, is a sort of
+ecclesiastic,” she said to Mr. Wentworth, lowering her voice a little.
+
+“He is a minister,” answered Mr. Wentworth.
+
+“A Protestant?” asked Eugenia.
+
+“I am a Unitarian, madam,” replied Mr. Brand, impressively.
+
+“Ah, I see,” said Eugenia. “Something new.” She had never heard of this
+form of worship.
+
+Mr. Acton began to laugh, and Gertrude looked anxiously at Mr. Brand.
+
+“You have come very far,” said Mr. Wentworth.
+
+“Very far—very far,” the Baroness replied, with a graceful shake of her
+head—a shake that might have meant many different things.
+
+“That’s a reason why you ought to settle down with us,” said Mr.
+Wentworth, with that dryness of utterance which, as Eugenia was too
+intelligent not to feel, took nothing from the delicacy of his meaning.
+
+She looked at him, and for an instant, in his cold, still face, she
+seemed to see a far-away likeness to the vaguely remembered image of
+her mother. Eugenia was a woman of sudden emotions, and now,
+unexpectedly, she felt one rising in her heart. She kept looking round
+the circle; she knew that there was admiration in all the eyes that
+were fixed upon her. She smiled at them all.
+
+“I came to look—to try—to ask,” she said. “It seems to me I have done
+well. I am very tired; I want to rest.” There were tears in her eyes.
+The luminous interior, the gentle, tranquil people, the simple, serious
+life—the sense of these things pressed upon her with an overmastering
+force, and she felt herself yielding to one of the most genuine
+emotions she had ever known. “I should like to stay here,” she said.
+“Pray take me in.”
+
+Though she was smiling, there were tears in her voice as well as in her
+eyes. “My dear niece,” said Mr. Wentworth, softly. And Charlotte put
+out her arms and drew the Baroness toward her; while Robert Acton
+turned away, with his hands stealing into his pockets.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+A few days after the Baroness Münster had presented herself to her
+American kinsfolk she came, with her brother, and took up her abode in
+that small white house adjacent to Mr. Wentworth’s own dwelling of
+which mention has already been made. It was on going with his daughters
+to return her visit that Mr. Wentworth placed this comfortable cottage
+at her service; the offer being the result of a domestic colloquy,
+diffused through the ensuing twenty-four hours, in the course of which
+the two foreign visitors were discussed and analyzed with a great deal
+of earnestness and subtlety. The discussion went forward, as I say, in
+the family circle; but that circle on the evening following Madame
+Münster’s return to town, as on many other occasions, included Robert
+Acton and his pretty sister. If you had been present, it would probably
+not have seemed to you that the advent of these brilliant strangers was
+treated as an exhilarating occurrence, a pleasure the more in this
+tranquil household, a prospective source of entertainment. This was not
+Mr. Wentworth’s way of treating any human occurrence. The sudden
+irruption into the well-ordered consciousness of the Wentworths of an
+element not allowed for in its scheme of usual obligations required a
+readjustment of that sense of responsibility which constituted its
+principal furniture. To consider an event, crudely and baldly, in the
+light of the pleasure it might bring them was an intellectual exercise
+with which Felix Young’s American cousins were almost wholly
+unacquainted, and which they scarcely supposed to be largely pursued in
+any section of human society. The arrival of Felix and his sister was a
+satisfaction, but it was a singularly joyless and inelastic
+satisfaction. It was an extension of duty, of the exercise of the more
+recondite virtues; but neither Mr. Wentworth, nor Charlotte, nor Mr.
+Brand, who, among these excellent people, was a great promoter of
+reflection and aspiration, frankly adverted to it as an extension of
+enjoyment. This function was ultimately assumed by Gertrude Wentworth,
+who was a peculiar girl, but the full compass of whose peculiarities
+had not been exhibited before they very ingeniously found their pretext
+in the presence of these possibly too agreeable foreigners. Gertrude,
+however, had to struggle with a great accumulation of obstructions,
+both of the subjective, as the metaphysicians say, and of the
+objective, order; and indeed it is no small part of the purpose of this
+little history to set forth her struggle. What seemed paramount in this
+abrupt enlargement of Mr. Wentworth’s sympathies and those of his
+daughters was an extension of the field of possible mistakes; and the
+doctrine, as it may almost be called, of the oppressive gravity of
+mistakes was one of the most cherished traditions of the Wentworth
+family.
+
+“I don’t believe she wants to come and stay in this house,” said
+Gertrude; Madame Münster, from this time forward, receiving no other
+designation than the personal pronoun. Charlotte and Gertrude acquired
+considerable facility in addressing her, directly, as “Eugenia;” but in
+speaking of her to each other they rarely called her anything but
+“she.”
+
+“Doesn’t she think it good enough for her?” cried little Lizzie Acton,
+who was always asking unpractical questions that required, in
+strictness, no answer, and to which indeed she expected no other answer
+than such as she herself invariably furnished in a small,
+innocently-satirical laugh.
+
+“She certainly expressed a willingness to come,” said Mr. Wentworth.
+
+“That was only politeness,” Gertrude rejoined.
+
+“Yes, she is very polite—very polite,” said Mr. Wentworth.
+
+“She is too polite,” his son declared, in a softly growling tone which
+was habitual to him, but which was an indication of nothing worse than
+a vaguely humorous intention. “It is very embarrassing.”
+
+“That is more than can be said of you, sir,” said Lizzie Acton, with
+her little laugh.
+
+“Well, I don’t mean to encourage her,” Clifford went on.
+
+“I’m sure I don’t care if you do!” cried Lizzie.
+
+“She will not think of you, Clifford,” said Gertrude, gravely.
+
+“I hope not!” Clifford exclaimed.
+
+“She will think of Robert,” Gertrude continued, in the same tone.
+
+Robert Acton began to blush; but there was no occasion for it, for
+everyone was looking at Gertrude—everyone, at least, save Lizzie, who,
+with her pretty head on one side, contemplated her brother.
+
+“Why do you attribute motives, Gertrude?” asked Mr. Wentworth.
+
+“I don’t attribute motives, father,” said Gertrude. “I only say she
+will think of Robert; and she will!”
+
+“Gertrude judges by herself!” Acton exclaimed, laughing. “Don’t you,
+Gertrude? Of course the Baroness will think of me. She will think of me
+from morning till night.”
+
+“She will be very comfortable here,” said Charlotte, with something of
+a housewife’s pride. “She can have the large northeast room. And the
+French bedstead,” Charlotte added, with a constant sense of the lady’s
+foreignness.
+
+“She will not like it,” said Gertrude; “not even if you pin little
+tidies all over the chairs.”
+
+“Why not, dear?” asked Charlotte, perceiving a touch of irony here, but
+not resenting it.
+
+Gertrude had left her chair; she was walking about the room; her stiff
+silk dress, which she had put on in honor of the Baroness, made a sound
+upon the carpet. “I don’t know,” she replied. “She will want something
+more—more private.”
+
+“If she wants to be private she can stay in her room,” Lizzie Acton
+remarked.
+
+Gertrude paused in her walk, looking at her. “That would not be
+pleasant,” she answered. “She wants privacy and pleasure together.”
+
+Robert Acton began to laugh again. “My dear cousin, what a picture!”
+
+Charlotte had fixed her serious eyes upon her sister; she wondered
+whence she had suddenly derived these strange notions. Mr. Wentworth
+also observed his younger daughter.
+
+“I don’t know what her manner of life may have been,” he said; “but she
+certainly never can have enjoyed a more refined and salubrious home.”
+
+Gertrude stood there looking at them all. “She is the wife of a
+Prince,” she said.
+
+“We are all princes here,” said Mr. Wentworth; “and I don’t know of any
+palace in this neighborhood that is to let.”
+
+“Cousin William,” Robert Acton interposed, “do you want to do something
+handsome? Make them a present, for three months, of the little house
+over the way.”
+
+“You are very generous with other people’s things!” cried his sister.
+
+“Robert is very generous with his own things,” Mr. Wentworth observed
+dispassionately, and looking, in cold meditation, at his kinsman.
+
+“Gertrude,” Lizzie went on, “I had an idea you were so fond of your new
+cousin.”
+
+“Which new cousin?” asked Gertrude.
+
+“I don’t mean the Baroness!” the young girl rejoined, with her laugh.
+“I thought you expected to see so much of him.”
+
+“Of Felix? I hope to see a great deal of him,” said Gertrude, simply.
+
+“Then why do you want to keep him out of the house?”
+
+Gertrude looked at Lizzie Acton, and then looked away.
+
+“Should you want me to live in the house with you, Lizzie?” asked
+Clifford.
+
+“I hope you never will. I hate you!” Such was this young lady’s reply.
+
+“Father,” said Gertrude, stopping before Mr. Wentworth and smiling,
+with a smile the sweeter, as her smile always was, for its rarity; “do
+let them live in the little house over the way. It will be lovely!”
+
+Robert Acton had been watching her. “Gertrude is right,” he said.
+“Gertrude is the cleverest girl in the world. If I might take the
+liberty, I should strongly recommend their living there.”
+
+“There is nothing there so pretty as the northeast room,” Charlotte
+urged.
+
+“She will make it pretty. Leave her alone!” Acton exclaimed.
+
+Gertrude, at his compliment, had blushed and looked at him: it was as
+if someone less familiar had complimented her. “I am sure she will make
+it pretty. It will be very interesting. It will be a place to go to. It
+will be a foreign house.”
+
+“Are we very sure that we need a foreign house?” Mr. Wentworth
+inquired. “Do you think it desirable to establish a foreign house—in
+this quiet place?”
+
+“You speak,” said Acton, laughing, “as if it were a question of the
+poor Baroness opening a wine-shop or a gaming-table.”
+
+“It would be too lovely!” Gertrude declared again, laying her hand on
+the back of her father’s chair.
+
+“That she should open a gaming-table?” Charlotte asked, with great
+gravity.
+
+Gertrude looked at her a moment, and then, “Yes, Charlotte,” she said,
+simply.
+
+“Gertrude is growing pert,” Clifford Wentworth observed, with his
+humorous young growl. “That comes of associating with foreigners.”
+
+Mr. Wentworth looked up at his daughter, who was standing beside him;
+he drew her gently forward. “You must be careful,” he said. “You must
+keep watch. Indeed, we must all be careful. This is a great change; we
+are to be exposed to peculiar influences. I don’t say they are bad. I
+don’t judge them in advance. But they may perhaps make it necessary
+that we should exercise a great deal of wisdom and self-control. It
+will be a different tone.”
+
+Gertrude was silent a moment, in deference to her father’s speech; then
+she spoke in a manner that was not in the least an answer to it. “I
+want to see how they will live. I am sure they will have different
+hours. She will do all kinds of little things differently. When we go
+over there it will be like going to Europe. She will have a boudoir.
+She will invite us to dinner—very late. She will breakfast in her
+room.”
+
+Charlotte gazed at her sister again. Gertrude’s imagination seemed to
+her to be fairly running riot. She had always known that Gertrude had a
+great deal of imagination—she had been very proud of it. But at the
+same time she had always felt that it was a dangerous and irresponsible
+faculty; and now, to her sense, for the moment, it seemed to threaten
+to make her sister a strange person who should come in suddenly, as
+from a journey, talking of the peculiar and possibly unpleasant things
+she had observed. Charlotte’s imagination took no journeys whatever;
+she kept it, as it were, in her pocket, with the other furniture of
+this receptacle—a thimble, a little box of peppermint, and a morsel of
+court-plaster. “I don’t believe she would have any dinner—or any
+breakfast,” said Miss Wentworth. “I don’t believe she knows how to do
+anything herself. I should have to get her ever so many servants, and
+she wouldn’t like them.”
+
+“She has a maid,” said Gertrude; “a French maid. She mentioned her.”
+
+“I wonder if the maid has a little fluted cap and red slippers,” said
+Lizzie Acton. “There was a French maid in that play that Robert took me
+to see. She had pink stockings; she was very wicked.”
+
+“She was a _soubrette_,” Gertrude announced, who had never seen a play
+in her life. “They call that a soubrette. It will be a great chance to
+learn French.” Charlotte gave a little soft, helpless groan. She had a
+vision of a wicked, theatrical person, clad in pink stockings and red
+shoes, and speaking, with confounding volubility, an incomprehensible
+tongue, flitting through the sacred penetralia of that large, clean
+house. “That is one reason in favor of their coming here,” Gertrude
+went on. “But we can make Eugenia speak French to us, and Felix. I mean
+to begin—the next time.”
+
+Mr. Wentworth had kept her standing near him, and he gave her his
+earnest, thin, unresponsive glance again. “I want you to make me a
+promise, Gertrude,” he said.
+
+“What is it?” she asked, smiling.
+
+“Not to get excited. Not to allow these—these occurrences to be an
+occasion for excitement.”
+
+She looked down at him a moment, and then she shook her head. “I don’t
+think I can promise that, father. I am excited already.”
+
+Mr. Wentworth was silent a while; they all were silent, as if in
+recognition of something audacious and portentous.
+
+“I think they had better go to the other house,” said Charlotte,
+quietly.
+
+“I shall keep them in the other house,” Mr. Wentworth subjoined, more
+pregnantly.
+
+Gertrude turned away; then she looked across at Robert Acton. Her
+cousin Robert was a great friend of hers; she often looked at him this
+way instead of saying things. Her glance on this occasion, however,
+struck him as a substitute for a larger volume of diffident utterance
+than usual, inviting him to observe, among other things, the
+inefficiency of her father’s design—if design it was—for diminishing,
+in the interest of quiet nerves, their occasions of contact with their
+foreign relatives. But Acton immediately complimented Mr. Wentworth
+upon his liberality. “That’s a very nice thing to do,” he said, “giving
+them the little house. You will have treated them handsomely, and,
+whatever happens, you will be glad of it.” Mr. Wentworth was liberal,
+and he knew he was liberal. It gave him pleasure to know it, to feel
+it, to see it recorded; and this pleasure is the only palpable form of
+self-indulgence with which the narrator of these incidents will be able
+to charge him.
+
+“A three days’ visit at most, over there, is all I should have found
+possible,” Madame Münster remarked to her brother, after they had taken
+possession of the little white house. “It would have been too
+_intime_—decidedly too _intime_. Breakfast, dinner, and tea _en
+famille_—it would have been the end of the world if I could have
+reached the third day.” And she made the same observation to her maid
+Augustine, an intelligent person, who enjoyed a liberal share of her
+confidence. Felix declared that he would willingly spend his life in
+the bosom of the Wentworth family; that they were the kindest,
+simplest, most amiable people in the world, and that he had taken a
+prodigious fancy to them all. The Baroness quite agreed with him that
+they were simple and kind; they were thoroughly nice people, and she
+liked them extremely. The girls were perfect ladies; it was impossible
+to be more of a lady than Charlotte Wentworth, in spite of her little
+village air. “But as for thinking them the best company in the world,”
+said the Baroness, “that is another thing; and as for wishing to live
+_porte à porte_ with them, I should as soon think of wishing myself
+back in the convent again, to wear a bombazine apron and sleep in a
+dormitory.” And yet the Baroness was in high good humor; she had been
+very much pleased. With her lively perception and her refined
+imagination, she was capable of enjoying anything that was
+characteristic, anything that was good of its kind. The Wentworth
+household seemed to her very perfect in its kind—wonderfully peaceful
+and unspotted; pervaded by a sort of dove-colored freshness that had
+all the quietude and benevolence of what she deemed to be Quakerism,
+and yet seemed to be founded upon a degree of material abundance for
+which, in certain matters of detail, one might have looked in vain at
+the frugal little court of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein. She perceived
+immediately that her American relatives thought and talked very little
+about money; and this of itself made an impression upon Eugenia’s
+imagination. She perceived at the same time that if Charlotte or
+Gertrude should ask their father for a very considerable sum he would
+at once place it in their hands; and this made a still greater
+impression. The greatest impression of all, perhaps, was made by
+another rapid induction. The Baroness had an immediate conviction that
+Robert Acton would put his hand into his pocket every day in the week
+if that rattle-pated little sister of his should bid him. The men in
+this country, said the Baroness, are evidently very obliging. Her
+declaration that she was looking for rest and retirement had been by no
+means wholly untrue; nothing that the Baroness said was wholly untrue.
+It is but fair to add, perhaps, that nothing that she said was wholly
+true. She wrote to a friend in Germany that it was a return to nature;
+it was like drinking new milk, and she was very fond of new milk. She
+said to herself, of course, that it would be a little dull; but there
+can be no better proof of her good spirits than the fact that she
+thought she should not mind its being a little dull. It seemed to her,
+when from the piazza of her eleemosynary cottage she looked out over
+the soundless fields, the stony pastures, the clear-faced ponds, the
+rugged little orchards, that she had never been in the midst of so
+peculiarly intense a stillness; it was almost a delicate sensual
+pleasure. It was all very good, very innocent and safe, and out of it
+something good must come. Augustine, indeed, who had an unbounded faith
+in her mistress’s wisdom and far-sightedness, was a great deal
+perplexed and depressed. She was always ready to take her cue when she
+understood it; but she liked to understand it, and on this occasion
+comprehension failed. What, indeed, was the Baroness doing _dans cette
+galère_? what fish did she expect to land out of these very stagnant
+waters? The game was evidently a deep one. Augustine could trust her;
+but the sense of walking in the dark betrayed itself in the physiognomy
+of this spare, sober, sallow, middle-aged person, who had nothing in
+common with Gertrude Wentworth’s conception of a soubrette, by the most
+ironical scowl that had ever rested upon the unpretending tokens of the
+peace and plenty of the Wentworths. Fortunately, Augustine could quench
+skepticism in action. She quite agreed with her mistress—or rather she
+quite out-stripped her mistress—in thinking that the little white house
+was pitifully bare. _“Il faudra,”_ said Augustine, _“lui faire un peu
+de toilette.”_ And she began to hang up _portières_ in the doorways; to
+place wax candles, procured after some research, in unexpected
+situations; to dispose anomalous draperies over the arms of sofas and
+the backs of chairs. The Baroness had brought with her to the New World
+a copious provision of the element of costume; and the two Miss
+Wentworths, when they came over to see her, were somewhat bewildered by
+the obtrusive distribution of her wardrobe. There were India shawls
+suspended, curtain-wise, in the parlor door, and curious fabrics,
+corresponding to Gertrude’s metaphysical vision of an opera-cloak,
+tumbled about in the sitting-places. There were pink silk blinds in the
+windows, by which the room was strangely bedimmed; and along the
+chimney-piece was disposed a remarkable band of velvet, covered with
+coarse, dirty-looking lace. “I have been making myself a little
+comfortable,” said the Baroness, much to the confusion of Charlotte,
+who had been on the point of proposing to come and help her put her
+superfluous draperies away. But what Charlotte mistook for an almost
+culpably delayed subsidence Gertrude very presently perceived to be the
+most ingenious, the most interesting, the most romantic intention.
+“What is life, indeed, without curtains?” she secretly asked herself;
+and she appeared to herself to have been leading hitherto an existence
+singularly garish and totally devoid of festoons.
+
+Felix was not a young man who troubled himself greatly about
+anything—least of all about the conditions of enjoyment. His faculty of
+enjoyment was so large, so unconsciously eager, that it may be said of
+it that it had a permanent advance upon embarrassment and sorrow. His
+sentient faculty was intrinsically joyous, and novelty and change were
+in themselves a delight to him. As they had come to him with a great
+deal of frequency, his life had been more agreeable than appeared.
+Never was a nature more perfectly fortunate. It was not a restless,
+apprehensive, ambitious spirit, running a race with the tyranny of
+fate, but a temper so unsuspicious as to put Adversity off her guard,
+dodging and evading her with the easy, natural motion of a wind-shifted
+flower. Felix extracted entertainment from all things, and all his
+faculties—his imagination, his intelligence, his affections, his
+senses—had a hand in the game. It seemed to him that Eugenia and he had
+been very well treated; there was something absolutely touching in that
+combination of paternal liberality and social considerateness which
+marked Mr. Wentworth’s deportment. It was most uncommonly kind of him,
+for instance, to have given them a house. Felix was positively amused
+at having a house of his own; for the little white cottage among the
+apple trees—the chalet, as Madame Münster always called it—was much
+more sensibly his own than any domiciliary _quatrième_, looking upon a
+court, with the rent overdue. Felix had spent a good deal of his life
+in looking into courts, with a perhaps slightly tattered pair of elbows
+resting upon the ledge of a high-perched window, and the thin smoke of
+a cigarette rising into an atmosphere in which street-cries died away
+and the vibration of chimes from ancient belfries became sensible. He
+had never known anything so infinitely rural as these New England
+fields; and he took a great fancy to all their pastoral roughnesses. He
+had never had a greater sense of luxurious security; and at the risk of
+making him seem a rather sordid adventurer I must declare that he found
+an irresistible charm in the fact that he might dine every day at his
+uncle’s. The charm was irresistible, however, because his fancy flung a
+rosy light over this homely privilege. He appreciated highly the fare
+that was set before him. There was a kind of fresh-looking abundance
+about it which made him think that people must have lived so in the
+mythological era, when they spread their tables upon the grass,
+replenished them from cornucopias, and had no particular need of
+kitchen stoves. But the great thing that Felix enjoyed was having found
+a family—sitting in the midst of gentle, generous people whom he might
+call by their first names. He had never known anything more charming
+than the attention they paid to what he said. It was like a large sheet
+of clean, fine-grained drawing-paper, all ready to be washed over with
+effective splashes of water-color. He had never had any cousins, and he
+had never before found himself in contact so unrestricted with young
+unmarried ladies. He was extremely fond of the society of ladies, and
+it was new to him that it might be enjoyed in just this manner. At
+first he hardly knew what to make of his state of mind. It seemed to
+him that he was in love, indiscriminately, with three girls at once. He
+saw that Lizzie Acton was more brilliantly pretty than Charlotte and
+Gertrude; but this was scarcely a superiority. His pleasure came from
+something they had in common—a part of which was, indeed, that physical
+delicacy which seemed to make it proper that they should always dress
+in thin materials and clear colors. But they were delicate in other
+ways, and it was most agreeable to him to feel that these latter
+delicacies were appreciable by contact, as it were. He had known,
+fortunately, many virtuous gentlewomen, but it now appeared to him that
+in his relations with them (especially when they were unmarried) he had
+been looking at pictures under glass. He perceived at present what a
+nuisance the glass had been—how it perverted and interfered, how it
+caught the reflection of other objects and kept you walking from side
+to side. He had no need to ask himself whether Charlotte and Gertrude,
+and Lizzie Acton, were in the right light; they were always in the
+right light. He liked everything about them: he was, for instance, not
+at all above liking the fact that they had very slender feet and high
+insteps. He liked their pretty noses; he liked their surprised eyes and
+their hesitating, not at all positive way of speaking; he liked so much
+knowing that he was perfectly at liberty to be alone for hours,
+anywhere, with either of them; that preference for one to the other, as
+a companion of solitude, remained a minor affair. Charlotte Wentworth’s
+sweetly severe features were as agreeable as Lizzie Acton’s wonderfully
+expressive blue eyes; and Gertrude’s air of being always ready to walk
+about and listen was as charming as anything else, especially as she
+walked very gracefully. After a while Felix began to distinguish; but
+even then he would often wish, suddenly, that they were not all so sad.
+Even Lizzie Acton, in spite of her fine little chatter and laughter,
+appeared sad. Even Clifford Wentworth, who had extreme youth in his
+favor, and kept a buggy with enormous wheels and a little sorrel mare
+with the prettiest legs in the world—even this fortunate lad was apt to
+have an averted, uncomfortable glance, and to edge away from you at
+times, in the manner of a person with a bad conscience. The only person
+in the circle with no sense of oppression of any kind was, to Felix’s
+perception, Robert Acton.
+
+It might perhaps have been feared that after the completion of those
+graceful domiciliary embellishments which have been mentioned Madame
+Münster would have found herself confronted with alarming possibilities
+of _ennui_. But as yet she had not taken the alarm. The Baroness was a
+restless soul, and she projected her restlessness, as it may be said,
+into any situation that lay before her. Up to a certain point her
+restlessness might be counted upon to entertain her. She was always
+expecting something to happen, and, until it was disappointed,
+expectancy itself was a delicate pleasure. What the Baroness expected
+just now it would take some ingenuity to set forth; it is enough that
+while she looked about her she found something to occupy her
+imagination. She assured herself that she was enchanted with her new
+relatives; she professed to herself that, like her brother, she felt it
+a sacred satisfaction to have found a family. It is certain that she
+enjoyed to the utmost the gentleness of her kinsfolk’s deference. She
+had, first and last, received a great deal of admiration, and her
+experience of well-turned compliments was very considerable; but she
+knew that she had never been so real a power, never counted for so
+much, as now when, for the first time, the standard of comparison of
+her little circle was a prey to vagueness. The sense, indeed, that the
+good people about her had, as regards her remarkable self, no standard
+of comparison at all gave her a feeling of almost illimitable power. It
+was true, as she said to herself, that if for this reason they would be
+able to discover nothing against her, so they would perhaps neglect to
+perceive some of her superior points; but she always wound up her
+reflections by declaring that she would take care of that.
+
+Charlotte and Gertrude were in some perplexity between their desire to
+show all proper attention to Madame Münster and their fear of being
+importunate. The little house in the orchard had hitherto been occupied
+during the summer months by intimate friends of the family, or by poor
+relations who found in Mr. Wentworth a landlord attentive to repairs
+and oblivious of quarter-day. Under these circumstances the open door
+of the small house and that of the large one, facing each other across
+their homely gardens, levied no tax upon hourly visits. But the Misses
+Wentworth received an impression that Eugenia was no friend to the
+primitive custom of “dropping in;” she evidently had no idea of living
+without a door-keeper. “One goes into your house as into an inn—except
+that there are no servants rushing forward,” she said to Charlotte. And
+she added that that was very charming. Gertrude explained to her sister
+that she meant just the reverse; she didn’t like it at all. Charlotte
+inquired why she should tell an untruth, and Gertrude answered that
+there was probably some very good reason for it which they should
+discover when they knew her better. “There can surely be no good reason
+for telling an untruth,” said Charlotte. “I hope she does not think
+so.”
+
+They had of course desired, from the first, to do everything in the way
+of helping her to arrange herself. It had seemed to Charlotte that
+there would be a great many things to talk about; but the Baroness was
+apparently inclined to talk about nothing.
+
+“Write her a note, asking her leave to come and see her. I think that
+is what she will like,” said Gertrude.
+
+“Why should I give her the trouble of answering me?” Charlotte asked.
+“She will have to write a note and send it over.”
+
+“I don’t think she will take any trouble,” said Gertrude, profoundly.
+
+“What then will she do?”
+
+“That is what I am curious to see,” said Gertrude, leaving her sister
+with an impression that her curiosity was morbid.
+
+They went to see the Baroness without preliminary correspondence; and
+in the little salon which she had already created, with its becoming
+light and its festoons, they found Robert Acton.
+
+Eugenia was intensely gracious, but she accused them of neglecting her
+cruelly. “You see Mr. Acton has had to take pity upon me,” she said.
+“My brother goes off sketching, for hours; I can never depend upon him.
+So I was to send Mr. Acton to beg you to come and give me the benefit
+of your wisdom.”
+
+Gertrude looked at her sister. She wanted to say, “_That_ is what she
+would have done.” Charlotte said that they hoped the Baroness would
+always come and dine with them; it would give them so much pleasure;
+and, in that case, she would spare herself the trouble of having a
+cook.
+
+“Ah, but I must have a cook!” cried the Baroness. “An old negress in a
+yellow turban. I have set my heart upon that. I want to look out of my
+window and see her sitting there on the grass, against the background
+of those crooked, dusky little apple trees, pulling the husks off a
+lapful of Indian corn. That will be local color, you know. There isn’t
+much of it here—you don’t mind my saying that, do you?—so one must make
+the most of what one can get. I shall be most happy to dine with you
+whenever you will let me; but I want to be able to ask you sometimes.
+And I want to be able to ask Mr. Acton,” added the Baroness.
+
+“You must come and ask me at home,” said Acton. “You must come and see
+me; you must dine with me first. I want to show you my place; I want to
+introduce you to my mother.” He called again upon Madame Münster, two
+days later. He was constantly at the other house; he used to walk
+across the fields from his own place, and he appeared to have fewer
+scruples than his cousins with regard to dropping in. On this occasion
+he found that Mr. Brand had come to pay his respects to the charming
+stranger; but after Acton’s arrival the young theologian said nothing.
+He sat in his chair with his two hands clasped, fixing upon his hostess
+a grave, fascinated stare. The Baroness talked to Robert Acton, but, as
+she talked, she turned and smiled at Mr. Brand, who never took his eyes
+off her. The two men walked away together; they were going to Mr.
+Wentworth’s. Mr. Brand still said nothing; but after they had passed
+into Mr. Wentworth’s garden he stopped and looked back for some time at
+the little white house. Then, looking at his companion, with his head
+bent a little to one side and his eyes somewhat contracted, “Now I
+suppose that’s what is called conversation,” he said; “real
+conversation.”
+
+“It’s what I call a very clever woman,” said Acton, laughing.
+
+“It is most interesting,” Mr. Brand continued. “I only wish she would
+speak French; it would seem more in keeping. It must be quite the style
+that we have heard about, that we have read about—the style of
+conversation of Madame de Staël, of Madame Récamier.”
+
+Acton also looked at Madame Münster’s residence among its hollyhocks
+and apple trees. “What I should like to know,” he said, smiling, “is
+just what has brought Madame Récamier to live in that place!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Mr. Wentworth, with his cane and his gloves in his hand, went every
+afternoon to call upon his niece. A couple of hours later she came over
+to the great house to tea. She had let the proposal that she should
+regularly dine there fall to the ground; she was in the enjoyment of
+whatever satisfaction was to be derived from the spectacle of an old
+negress in a crimson turban shelling peas under the apple trees.
+Charlotte, who had provided the ancient negress, thought it must be a
+strange household, Eugenia having told her that Augustine managed
+everything, the ancient negress included—Augustine who was naturally
+devoid of all acquaintance with the expurgatory English tongue. By far
+the most immoral sentiment which I shall have occasion to attribute to
+Charlotte Wentworth was a certain emotion of disappointment at finding
+that, in spite of these irregular conditions, the domestic arrangements
+at the small house were apparently not—from Eugenia’s peculiar point of
+view—strikingly offensive. The Baroness found it amusing to go to tea;
+she dressed as if for dinner. The tea-table offered an anomalous and
+picturesque repast; and on leaving it they all sat and talked in the
+large piazza, or wandered about the garden in the starlight, with their
+ears full of those sounds of strange insects which, though they are
+supposed to be, all over the world, a part of the magic of summer
+nights, seemed to the Baroness to have beneath these western skies an
+incomparable resonance.
+
+Mr. Wentworth, though, as I say, he went punctiliously to call upon
+her, was not able to feel that he was getting used to his niece. It
+taxed his imagination to believe that she was really his half-sister’s
+child. His sister was a figure of his early years; she had been only
+twenty when she went abroad, never to return, making in foreign parts a
+willful and undesirable marriage. His aunt, Mrs. Whiteside, who had
+taken her to Europe for the benefit of the tour, gave, on her return,
+so lamentable an account of Mr. Adolphus Young, to whom the headstrong
+girl had united her destiny, that it operated as a chill upon family
+feeling—especially in the case of the half-brothers. Catherine had done
+nothing subsequently to propitiate her family; she had not even written
+to them in a way that indicated a lucid appreciation of their suspended
+sympathy; so that it had become a tradition in Boston circles that the
+highest charity, as regards this young lady, was to think it well to
+forget her, and to abstain from conjecture as to the extent to which
+her aberrations were reproduced in her descendants. Over these young
+people—a vague report of their existence had come to his ears—Mr.
+Wentworth had not, in the course of years, allowed his imagination to
+hover. It had plenty of occupation nearer home, and though he had many
+cares upon his conscience the idea that he had been an unnatural uncle
+was, very properly, never among the number. Now that his nephew and
+niece had come before him, he perceived that they were the fruit of
+influences and circumstances very different from those under which his
+own familiar progeny had reached a vaguely-qualified maturity. He felt
+no provocation to say that these influences had been exerted for evil;
+but he was sometimes afraid that he should not be able to like his
+distinguished, delicate, lady-like niece. He was paralyzed and
+bewildered by her foreignness. She spoke, somehow, a different
+language. There was something strange in her words. He had a feeling
+that another man, in his place, would accommodate himself to her tone;
+would ask her questions and joke with her, reply to those pleasantries
+of her own which sometimes seemed startling as addressed to an uncle.
+But Mr. Wentworth could not do these things. He could not even bring
+himself to attempt to measure her position in the world. She was the
+wife of a foreign nobleman who desired to repudiate her. This had a
+singular sound, but the old man felt himself destitute of the materials
+for a judgment. It seemed to him that he ought to find them in his own
+experience, as a man of the world and an almost public character; but
+they were not there, and he was ashamed to confess to himself—much more
+to reveal to Eugenia by interrogations possibly too innocent—the
+unfurnished condition of this repository.
+
+It appeared to him that he could get much nearer, as he would have
+said, to his nephew; though he was not sure that Felix was altogether
+safe. He was so bright and handsome and talkative that it was
+impossible not to think well of him; and yet it seemed as if there were
+something almost impudent, almost vicious—or as if there ought to be—in
+a young man being at once so joyous and so positive. It was to be
+observed that while Felix was not at all a serious young man there was
+somehow more of him—he had more weight and volume and resonance—than a
+number of young men who were distinctly serious. While Mr. Wentworth
+meditated upon this anomaly his nephew was admiring him unrestrictedly.
+He thought him a most delicate, generous, high-toned old gentleman,
+with a very handsome head, of the ascetic type, which he promised
+himself the profit of sketching. Felix was far from having made a
+secret of the fact that he wielded the paint-brush, and it was not his
+own fault if it failed to be generally understood that he was prepared
+to execute the most striking likenesses on the most reasonable terms.
+“He is an artist—my cousin is an artist,” said Gertrude; and she
+offered this information to everyone who would receive it. She offered
+it to herself, as it were, by way of admonition and reminder; she
+repeated to herself at odd moments, in lonely places, that Felix was
+invested with this sacred character. Gertrude had never seen an artist
+before; she had only read about such people. They seemed to her a
+romantic and mysterious class, whose life was made up of those
+agreeable accidents that never happened to other persons. And it merely
+quickened her meditations on this point that Felix should declare, as
+he repeatedly did, that he was really not an artist. “I have never gone
+into the thing seriously,” he said. “I have never studied; I have had
+no training. I do a little of everything, and nothing well. I am only
+an amateur.”
+
+It pleased Gertrude even more to think that he was an amateur than to
+think that he was an artist; the former word, to her fancy, had an even
+subtler connotation. She knew, however, that it was a word to use more
+soberly. Mr. Wentworth used it freely; for though he had not been
+exactly familiar with it, he found it convenient as a help toward
+classifying Felix, who, as a young man extremely clever and active and
+apparently respectable and yet not engaged in any recognized business,
+was an importunate anomaly. Of course the Baroness and her brother—she
+was always spoken of first—were a welcome topic of conversation between
+Mr. Wentworth and his daughters and their occasional visitors.
+
+“And the young man, your nephew, what is his profession?” asked an old
+gentleman—Mr. Broderip, of Salem—who had been Mr. Wentworth’s classmate
+at Harvard College in the year 1809, and who came into his office in
+Devonshire Street. (Mr. Wentworth, in his later years, used to go but
+three times a week to his office, where he had a large amount of highly
+confidential trust-business to transact.)
+
+“Well, he’s an amateur,” said Felix’s uncle, with folded hands, and
+with a certain satisfaction in being able to say it. And Mr. Broderip
+had gone back to Salem with a feeling that this was probably a
+“European” expression for a broker or a grain exporter.
+
+“I should like to do your head, sir,” said Felix to his uncle one
+evening, before them all—Mr. Brand and Robert Acton being also present.
+“I think I should make a very fine thing of it. It’s an interesting
+head; it’s very mediaeval.”
+
+Mr. Wentworth looked grave; he felt awkwardly, as if all the company
+had come in and found him standing before the looking-glass. “The Lord
+made it,” he said. “I don’t think it is for man to make it over again.”
+
+“Certainly the Lord made it,” replied Felix, laughing, “and he made it
+very well. But life has been touching up the work. It is a very
+interesting type of head. It’s delightfully wasted and emaciated. The
+complexion is wonderfully bleached.” And Felix looked round at the
+circle, as if to call their attention to these interesting points. Mr.
+Wentworth grew visibly paler. “I should like to do you as an old
+prelate, an old cardinal, or the prior of an order.”
+
+“A prelate, a cardinal?” murmured Mr. Wentworth. “Do you refer to the
+Roman Catholic priesthood?”
+
+“I mean an old ecclesiastic who should have led a very pure, abstinent
+life. Now I take it that has been the case with you, sir; one sees it
+in your face,” Felix proceeded. “You have been very—a very moderate.
+Don’t you think one always sees that in a man’s face?”
+
+“You see more in a man’s face than I should think of looking for,” said
+Mr. Wentworth coldly.
+
+The Baroness rattled her fan, and gave her brilliant laugh. “It is a
+risk to look so close!” she exclaimed. “My uncle has some peccadilloes
+on his conscience.” Mr. Wentworth looked at her, painfully at a loss;
+and in so far as the signs of a pure and abstinent life were visible in
+his face they were then probably peculiarly manifest. “You are a _beau
+vieillard_, dear uncle,” said Madame Münster, smiling with her foreign
+eyes.
+
+“I think you are paying me a compliment,” said the old man.
+
+“Surely, I am not the first woman that ever did so!” cried the
+Baroness.
+
+“I think you are,” said Mr. Wentworth gravely. And turning to Felix he
+added, in the same tone, “Please don’t take my likeness. My children
+have my daguerreotype. That is quite satisfactory.”
+
+“I won’t promise,” said Felix, “not to work your head into something!”
+
+Mr. Wentworth looked at him and then at all the others; then he got up
+and slowly walked away.
+
+“Felix,” said Gertrude, in the silence that followed, “I wish you would
+paint my portrait.”
+
+Charlotte wondered whether Gertrude was right in wishing this; and she
+looked at Mr. Brand as the most legitimate way of ascertaining.
+Whatever Gertrude did or said, Charlotte always looked at Mr. Brand. It
+was a standing pretext for looking at Mr. Brand—always, as Charlotte
+thought, in the interest of Gertrude’s welfare. It is true that she
+felt a tremulous interest in Gertrude being right; for Charlotte, in
+her small, still way, was an heroic sister.
+
+“We should be glad to have your portrait, Miss Gertrude,” said Mr.
+Brand.
+
+“I should be delighted to paint so charming a model,” Felix declared.
+
+“Do you think you are so lovely, my dear?” asked Lizzie Acton, with her
+little inoffensive pertness, biting off a knot in her knitting.
+
+“It is not because I think I am beautiful,” said Gertrude, looking all
+round. “I don’t think I am beautiful, at all.” She spoke with a sort of
+conscious deliberateness; and it seemed very strange to Charlotte to
+hear her discussing this question so publicly. “It is because I think
+it would be amusing to sit and be painted. I have always thought that.”
+
+“I am sorry you have not had better things to think about, my
+daughter,” said Mr. Wentworth.
+
+“You are very beautiful, cousin Gertrude,” Felix declared.
+
+“That’s a compliment,” said Gertrude. “I put all the compliments I
+receive into a little money-jug that has a slit in the side. I shake
+them up and down, and they rattle. There are not many yet—only two or
+three.”
+
+“No, it’s not a compliment,” Felix rejoined. “See; I am careful not to
+give it the form of a compliment. I didn’t think you were beautiful at
+first. But you have come to seem so little by little.”
+
+“Take care, now, your jug doesn’t burst!” exclaimed Lizzie.
+
+“I think sitting for one’s portrait is only one of the various forms of
+idleness,” said Mr. Wentworth. “Their name is legion.”
+
+“My dear sir,” cried Felix, “you can’t be said to be idle when you are
+making a man work so!”
+
+“One might be painted while one is asleep,” suggested Mr. Brand, as a
+contribution to the discussion.
+
+“Ah, do paint me while I am asleep,” said Gertrude to Felix, smiling.
+And she closed her eyes a little. It had by this time become a matter
+of almost exciting anxiety to Charlotte what Gertrude would say or
+would do next.
+
+She began to sit for her portrait on the following day—in the open air,
+on the north side of the piazza. “I wish you would tell me what you
+think of us—how we seem to you,” she said to Felix, as he sat before
+his easel.
+
+“You seem to me the best people in the world,” said Felix.
+
+“You say that,” Gertrude resumed, “because it saves you the trouble of
+saying anything else.”
+
+The young man glanced at her over the top of his canvas. “What else
+should I say? It would certainly be a great deal of trouble to say
+anything different.”
+
+“Well,” said Gertrude, “you have seen people before that you have
+liked, have you not?”
+
+“Indeed I have, thank Heaven!”
+
+“And they have been very different from us,” Gertrude went on.
+
+“That only proves,” said Felix, “that there are a thousand different
+ways of being good company.”
+
+“Do you think us good company?” asked Gertrude.
+
+“Company for a king!”
+
+Gertrude was silent a moment; and then, “There must be a thousand
+different ways of being dreary,” she said; “and sometimes I think we
+make use of them all.”
+
+Felix stood up quickly, holding up his hand. “If you could only keep
+that look on your face for half an hour—while I catch it!” he said. “It
+is uncommonly handsome.”
+
+“To look handsome for half an hour—that is a great deal to ask of me,”
+she answered.
+
+“It would be the portrait of a young woman who has taken some vow, some
+pledge, that she repents of,” said Felix, “and who is thinking it over
+at leisure.”
+
+“I have taken no vow, no pledge,” said Gertrude, very gravely; “I have
+nothing to repent of.”
+
+“My dear cousin, that was only a figure of speech. I am very sure that
+no one in your excellent family has anything to repent of.”
+
+“And yet we are always repenting!” Gertrude exclaimed. “That is what I
+mean by our being dreary. You know it perfectly well; you only pretend
+that you don’t.”
+
+Felix gave a quick laugh. “The half hour is going on, and yet you are
+handsomer than ever. One must be careful what one says, you see.”
+
+“To me,” said Gertrude, “you can say anything.”
+
+Felix looked at her, as an artist might, and painted for some time in
+silence.
+
+“Yes, you seem to me different from your father and sister—from most of
+the people you have lived with,” he observed.
+
+“To say that one’s self,” Gertrude went on, “is like saying—by
+implication, at least—that one is better. I am not better; I am much
+worse. But they say themselves that I am different. It makes them
+unhappy.”
+
+“Since you accuse me of concealing my real impressions, I may admit
+that I think the tendency—among you generally—is to be made unhappy too
+easily.”
+
+“I wish you would tell that to my father,” said Gertrude.
+
+“It might make him more unhappy!” Felix exclaimed, laughing.
+
+“It certainly would. I don’t believe you have seen people like that.”
+
+“Ah, my dear cousin, how do you know what I have seen?” Felix demanded.
+“How can I tell you?”
+
+“You might tell me a great many things, if you only would. You have
+seen people like yourself—people who are bright and gay and fond of
+amusement. We are not fond of amusement.”
+
+“Yes,” said Felix, “I confess that rather strikes me. You don’t seem to
+me to get all the pleasure out of life that you might. You don’t seem
+to me to enjoy..... Do you mind my saying this?” he asked, pausing.
+
+“Please go on,” said the girl, earnestly.
+
+“You seem to me very well placed for enjoying. You have money and
+liberty and what is called in Europe a ‘position.’ But you take a
+painful view of life, as one may say.”
+
+“One ought to think it bright and charming and delightful, eh?” asked
+Gertrude.
+
+“I should say so—if one can. It is true it all depends upon that,”
+Felix added.
+
+“You know there is a great deal of misery in the world,” said his
+model.
+
+“I have seen a little of it,” the young man rejoined. “But it was all
+over there—beyond the sea. I don’t see any here. This is a paradise.”
+
+Gertrude said nothing; she sat looking at the dahlias and the
+currant-bushes in the garden, while Felix went on with his work. “To
+‘enjoy,’” she began at last, “to take life—not painfully, must one do
+something wrong?”
+
+Felix gave his long, light laugh again. “Seriously, I think not. And
+for this reason, among others: you strike me as very capable of
+enjoying, if the chance were given you, and yet at the same time as
+incapable of wrong-doing.”
+
+“I am sure,” said Gertrude, “that you are very wrong in telling a
+person that she is incapable of that. We are never nearer to evil than
+when we believe that.”
+
+“You are handsomer than ever,” observed Felix, irrelevantly.
+
+Gertrude had got used to hearing him say this. There was not so much
+excitement in it as at first. “What ought one to do?” she continued.
+“To give parties, to go to the theatre, to read novels, to keep late
+hours?”
+
+“I don’t think it’s what one does or one doesn’t do that promotes
+enjoyment,” her companion answered. “It is the general way of looking
+at life.”
+
+“They look at it as a discipline—that’s what they do here. I have often
+been told that.”
+
+“Well, that’s very good. But there is another way,” added Felix,
+smiling: “to look at it as an opportunity.”
+
+“An opportunity—yes,” said Gertrude. “One would get more pleasure that
+way.”
+
+“I don’t attempt to say anything better for it than that it has been my
+own way—and that is not saying much!” Felix had laid down his palette
+and brushes; he was leaning back, with his arms folded, to judge the
+effect of his work. “And you know,” he said, “I am a very petty
+personage.”
+
+“You have a great deal of talent,” said Gertrude.
+
+“No—no,” the young man rejoined, in a tone of cheerful impartiality, “I
+have not a great deal of talent. It is nothing at all remarkable. I
+assure you I should know if it were. I shall always be obscure. The
+world will never hear of me.” Gertrude looked at him with a strange
+feeling. She was thinking of the great world which he knew and which
+she did not, and how full of brilliant talents it must be, since it
+could afford to make light of his abilities. “You needn’t in general
+attach much importance to anything I tell you,” he pursued; “but you
+may believe me when I say this,—that I am little better than a
+good-natured feather-head.”
+
+“A feather-head?” she repeated.
+
+“I am a species of Bohemian.”
+
+“A Bohemian?” Gertrude had never heard this term before, save as a
+geographical denomination; and she quite failed to understand the
+figurative meaning which her companion appeared to attach to it. But it
+gave her pleasure.
+
+Felix had pushed back his chair and risen to his feet; he slowly came
+toward her, smiling. “I am a sort of adventurer,” he said, looking down
+at her.
+
+She got up, meeting his smile. “An adventurer?” she repeated. “I should
+like to hear your adventures.”
+
+For an instant she believed that he was going to take her hand; but he
+dropped his own hands suddenly into the pockets of his painting-jacket.
+“There is no reason why you shouldn’t,” he said. “I have been an
+adventurer, but my adventures have been very innocent. They have all
+been happy ones; I don’t think there are any I shouldn’t tell. They
+were very pleasant and very pretty; I should like to go over them in
+memory. Sit down again, and I will begin,” he added in a moment, with
+his naturally persuasive smile.
+
+Gertrude sat down again on that day, and she sat down on several other
+days. Felix, while he plied his brush, told her a great many stories,
+and she listened with charmed avidity. Her eyes rested upon his lips;
+she was very serious; sometimes, from her air of wondering gravity, he
+thought she was displeased. But Felix never believed for more than a
+single moment in any displeasure of his own producing. This would have
+been fatuity if the optimism it expressed had not been much more a hope
+than a prejudice. It is beside the matter to say that he had a good
+conscience; for the best conscience is a sort of self-reproach, and
+this young man’s brilliantly healthy nature spent itself in objective
+good intentions which were ignorant of any test save exactness in
+hitting their mark. He told Gertrude how he had walked over France and
+Italy with a painter’s knapsack on his back, paying his way often by
+knocking off a flattering portrait of his host or hostess. He told her
+how he had played the violin in a little band of musicians—not of high
+celebrity—who traveled through foreign lands giving provincial
+concerts. He told her also how he had been a momentary ornament of a
+troupe of strolling actors, engaged in the arduous task of interpreting
+Shakespeare to French and German, Polish and Hungarian audiences.
+
+While this periodical recital was going on, Gertrude lived in a
+fantastic world; she seemed to herself to be reading a romance that
+came out in daily numbers. She had known nothing so delightful since
+the perusal of _Nicholas Nickleby_. One afternoon she went to see her
+cousin, Mrs. Acton, Robert’s mother, who was a great invalid, never
+leaving the house. She came back alone, on foot, across the fields—this
+being a short way which they often used. Felix had gone to Boston with
+her father, who desired to take the young man to call upon some of his
+friends, old gentlemen who remembered his mother—remembered her, but
+said nothing about her—and several of whom, with the gentle ladies
+their wives, had driven out from town to pay their respects at the
+little house among the apple trees, in vehicles which reminded the
+Baroness, who received her visitors with discriminating civility, of
+the large, light, rattling barouche in which she herself had made her
+journey to this neighborhood. The afternoon was waning; in the western
+sky the great picture of a New England sunset, painted in crimson and
+silver, was suspended from the zenith; and the stony pastures, as
+Gertrude traversed them, thinking intently to herself, were covered
+with a light, clear glow. At the open gate of one of the fields she saw
+from the distance a man’s figure; he stood there as if he were waiting
+for her, and as she came nearer she recognized Mr. Brand. She had a
+feeling as of not having seen him for some time; she could not have
+said for how long, for it yet seemed to her that he had been very
+lately at the house.
+
+“May I walk back with you?” he asked. And when she had said that he
+might if he wanted, he observed that he had seen her and recognized her
+half a mile away.
+
+“You must have very good eyes,” said Gertrude.
+
+“Yes, I have very good eyes, Miss Gertrude,” said Mr. Brand. She
+perceived that he meant something; but for a long time past Mr. Brand
+had constantly meant something, and she had almost got used to it. She
+felt, however, that what he meant had now a renewed power to disturb
+her, to perplex and agitate her. He walked beside her in silence for a
+moment, and then he added, “I have had no trouble in seeing that you
+are beginning to avoid me. But perhaps,” he went on, “one needn’t have
+had very good eyes to see that.”
+
+“I have not avoided you,” said Gertrude, without looking at him.
+
+“I think you have been unconscious that you were avoiding me,” Mr.
+Brand replied. “You have not even known that I was there.”
+
+“Well, you are here now, Mr. Brand!” said Gertrude, with a little
+laugh. “I know that very well.”
+
+He made no rejoinder. He simply walked beside her slowly, as they were
+obliged to walk over the soft grass. Presently they came to another
+gate, which was closed. Mr. Brand laid his hand upon it, but he made no
+movement to open it; he stood and looked at his companion. “You are
+very much interested—very much absorbed,” he said.
+
+Gertrude glanced at him; she saw that he was pale and that he looked
+excited. She had never seen Mr. Brand excited before, and she felt that
+the spectacle, if fully carried out, would be impressive, almost
+painful. “Absorbed in what?” she asked. Then she looked away at the
+illuminated sky. She felt guilty and uncomfortable, and yet she was
+vexed with herself for feeling so. But Mr. Brand, as he stood there
+looking at her with his small, kind, persistent eyes, represented an
+immense body of half-obliterated obligations, that were rising again
+into a certain distinctness.
+
+“You have new interests, new occupations,” he went on. “I don’t know
+that I can say that you have new duties. We have always old ones,
+Gertrude,” he added.
+
+“Please open the gate, Mr. Brand,” she said; and she felt as if, in
+saying so, she were cowardly and petulant. But he opened the gate, and
+allowed her to pass; then he closed it behind himself. Before she had
+time to turn away he put out his hand and held her an instant by the
+wrist.
+
+“I want to say something to you,” he said.
+
+“I know what you want to say,” she answered. And she was on the point
+of adding, “And I know just how you will say it;” but these words she
+kept back.
+
+“I love you, Gertrude,” he said. “I love you very much; I love you more
+than ever.”
+
+He said the words just as she had known he would; she had heard them
+before. They had no charm for her; she had said to herself before that
+it was very strange. It was supposed to be delightful for a woman to
+listen to such words; but these seemed to her flat and mechanical. “I
+wish you would forget that,” she declared.
+
+“How can I—why should I?” he asked.
+
+“I have made you no promise—given you no pledge,” she said, looking at
+him, with her voice trembling a little.
+
+“You have let me feel that I have an influence over you. You have
+opened your mind to me.”
+
+“I never opened my mind to you, Mr. Brand!” Gertrude cried, with some
+vehemence.
+
+“Then you were not so frank as I thought—as we all thought.”
+
+“I don’t see what anyone else had to do with it!” cried the girl.
+
+“I mean your father and your sister. You know it makes them happy to
+think you will listen to me.”
+
+She gave a little laugh. “It doesn’t make them happy,” she said.
+“Nothing makes them happy. No one is happy here.”
+
+“I think your cousin is very happy—Mr. Young,” rejoined Mr. Brand, in a
+soft, almost timid tone.
+
+“So much the better for him!” And Gertrude gave her little laugh again.
+
+The young man looked at her a moment. “You are very much changed,” he
+said.
+
+“I am glad to hear it,” Gertrude declared.
+
+“I am not. I have known you a long time, and I have loved you as you
+were.”
+
+“I am much obliged to you,” said Gertrude. “I must be going home.”
+
+He on his side, gave a little laugh.
+
+“You certainly do avoid me—you see!”
+
+“Avoid me, then,” said the girl.
+
+He looked at her again; and then, very gently, “No I will not avoid
+you,” he replied; “but I will leave you, for the present, to yourself.
+I think you will remember—after a while—some of the things you have
+forgotten. I think you will come back to me; I have great faith in
+that.”
+
+This time his voice was very touching; there was a strong, reproachful
+force in what he said, and Gertrude could answer nothing. He turned
+away and stood there, leaning his elbows on the gate and looking at the
+beautiful sunset. Gertrude left him and took her way home again; but
+when she reached the middle of the next field she suddenly burst into
+tears. Her tears seemed to her to have been a long time gathering, and
+for some moments it was a kind of glee to shed them. But they presently
+passed away. There was something a little hard about Gertrude; and she
+never wept again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Going of an afternoon to call upon his niece, Mr. Wentworth more than
+once found Robert Acton sitting in her little drawing-room. This was in
+no degree, to Mr. Wentworth, a perturbing fact, for he had no sense of
+competing with his young kinsman for Eugenia’s good graces. Madame
+Münster’s uncle had the highest opinion of Robert Acton, who, indeed,
+in the family at large, was the object of a great deal of
+undemonstrative appreciation. They were all proud of him, in so far as
+the charge of being proud may be brought against people who were,
+habitually, distinctly guiltless of the misdemeanor known as “taking
+credit.” They never boasted of Robert Acton, nor indulged in
+vainglorious reference to him; they never quoted the clever things he
+had said, nor mentioned the generous things he had done. But a sort of
+frigidly-tender faith in his unlimited goodness was a part of their
+personal sense of right; and there can, perhaps, be no better proof of
+the high esteem in which he was held than the fact that no explicit
+judgment was ever passed upon his actions. He was no more praised than
+he was blamed; but he was tacitly felt to be an ornament to his circle.
+He was the man of the world of the family. He had been to China and
+brought home a collection of curiosities; he had made a fortune—or
+rather he had quintupled a fortune already considerable; he was
+distinguished by that combination of celibacy, “property,” and good
+humor which appeals to even the most subdued imaginations; and it was
+taken for granted that he would presently place these advantages at the
+disposal of some well-regulated young woman of his own “set.” Mr.
+Wentworth was not a man to admit to himself that—his paternal duties
+apart—he liked any individual much better than all other individuals;
+but he thought Robert Acton extremely judicious; and this was perhaps
+as near an approach as he was capable of to the eagerness of
+preference, which his temperament repudiated as it would have
+disengaged itself from something slightly unchaste. Acton was, in fact,
+very judicious—and something more beside; and indeed it must be claimed
+for Mr. Wentworth that in the more illicit parts of his preference
+there hovered the vague adumbration of a belief that his cousin’s final
+merit was a certain enviable capacity for whistling, rather gallantly,
+at the sanctions of mere judgment—for showing a larger courage, a finer
+quality of pluck, than common occasion demanded. Mr. Wentworth would
+never have risked the intimation that Acton was made, in the smallest
+degree, of the stuff of a hero; but this is small blame to him, for
+Robert would certainly never have risked it himself. Acton certainly
+exercised great discretion in all things—beginning with his estimate of
+himself. He knew that he was by no means so much of a man of the world
+as he was supposed to be in local circles; but it must be added that he
+knew also that his natural shrewdness had a reach of which he had never
+quite given local circles the measure. He was addicted to taking the
+humorous view of things, and he had discovered that even in the
+narrowest circles such a disposition may find frequent opportunities.
+Such opportunities had formed for some time—that is, since his return
+from China, a year and a half before—the most active element in this
+gentleman’s life, which had just now a rather indolent air. He was
+perfectly willing to get married. He was very fond of books, and he had
+a handsome library; that is, his books were much more numerous than Mr.
+Wentworth’s. He was also very fond of pictures; but it must be
+confessed, in the fierce light of contemporary criticism, that his
+walls were adorned with several rather abortive masterpieces. He had
+got his learning—and there was more of it than commonly appeared—at
+Harvard College; and he took a pleasure in old associations, which made
+it a part of his daily contentment to live so near this institution
+that he often passed it in driving to Boston. He was extremely
+interested in the Baroness Münster.
+
+She was very frank with him; or at least she intended to be. “I am sure
+you find it very strange that I should have settled down in this
+out-of-the-way part of the world!” she said to him three or four weeks
+after she had installed herself. “I am certain you are wondering about
+my motives. They are very pure.” The Baroness by this time was an old
+inhabitant; the best society in Boston had called upon her, and
+Clifford Wentworth had taken her several times to drive in his buggy.
+
+Robert Acton was seated near her, playing with a fan; there were always
+several fans lying about her drawing-room, with long ribbons of
+different colors attached to them, and Acton was always playing with
+one. “No, I don’t find it at all strange,” he said slowly, smiling.
+“That a clever woman should turn up in Boston, or its suburbs—that does
+not require so much explanation. Boston is a very nice place.”
+
+“If you wish to make me contradict you,” said the Baroness, “_vous vous
+y prenez mal_. In certain moods there is nothing I am not capable of
+agreeing to. Boston is a paradise, and we are in the suburbs of
+Paradise.”
+
+“Just now I am not at all in the suburbs; I am in the place itself,”
+rejoined Acton, who was lounging a little in his chair. He was,
+however, not always lounging; and when he was he was not quite so
+relaxed as he pretended. To a certain extent, he sought refuge from
+shyness in this appearance of relaxation; and like many persons in the
+same circumstances he somewhat exaggerated the appearance. Beyond this,
+the air of being much at his ease was a cover for vigilant observation.
+He was more than interested in this clever woman, who, whatever he
+might say, was clever not at all after the Boston fashion; she plunged
+him into a kind of excitement, held him in vague suspense. He was
+obliged to admit to himself that he had never yet seen a woman just
+like this—not even in China. He was ashamed, for inscrutable reasons,
+of the vivacity of his emotion, and he carried it off, superficially,
+by taking, still superficially, the humorous view of Madame Münster. It
+was not at all true that he thought it very natural of her to have made
+this pious pilgrimage. It might have been said of him in advance that
+he was too good a Bostonian to regard in the light of an eccentricity
+the desire of even the remotest alien to visit the New England
+metropolis. This was an impulse for which, surely, no apology was
+needed; and Madame Münster was the fortunate possessor of several New
+England cousins. In fact, however, Madame Münster struck him as out of
+keeping with her little circle; she was at the best a very agreeable, a
+gracefully mystifying anomaly. He knew very well that it would not do
+to address these reflections too crudely to Mr. Wentworth; he would
+never have remarked to the old gentleman that he wondered what the
+Baroness was up to. And indeed he had no great desire to share his
+vague mistrust with anyone. There was a personal pleasure in it; the
+greatest pleasure he had known at least since he had come from China.
+He would keep the Baroness, for better or worse, to himself; he had a
+feeling that he deserved to enjoy a monopoly of her, for he was
+certainly the person who had most adequately gauged her capacity for
+social intercourse. Before long it became apparent to him that the
+Baroness was disposed to lay no tax upon such a monopoly.
+
+One day (he was sitting there again and playing with a fan) she asked
+him to apologize, should the occasion present itself, to certain people
+in Boston for her not having returned their calls. “There are half a
+dozen places,” she said; “a formidable list. Charlotte Wentworth has
+written it out for me, in a terrifically distinct hand. There is no
+ambiguity on the subject; I know perfectly where I must go. Mr.
+Wentworth informs me that the carriage is always at my disposal, and
+Charlotte offers to go with me, in a pair of tight gloves and a very
+stiff petticoat. And yet for three days I have been putting it off.
+They must think me horribly vicious.”
+
+“You ask me to apologize,” said Acton, “but you don’t tell me what
+excuse I can offer.”
+
+“That is more,” the Baroness declared, “than I am held to. It would be
+like my asking you to buy me a bouquet and giving you the money. I have
+no reason except that—somehow—it’s too violent an effort. It is not
+inspiring. Wouldn’t that serve as an excuse, in Boston? I am told they
+are very sincere; they don’t tell fibs. And then Felix ought to go with
+me, and he is never in readiness. I don’t see him. He is always roaming
+about the fields and sketching old barns, or taking ten-mile walks, or
+painting someone’s portrait, or rowing on the pond, or flirting with
+Gertrude Wentworth.”
+
+“I should think it would amuse you to go and see a few people,” said
+Acton. “You are having a very quiet time of it here. It’s a dull life
+for you.”
+
+“Ah, the quiet,—the quiet!” the Baroness exclaimed. “That’s what I
+like. It’s rest. That’s what I came here for. Amusement? I have had
+amusement. And as for seeing people—I have already seen a great many in
+my life. If it didn’t sound ungracious I should say that I wish very
+humbly your people here would leave me alone!”
+
+Acton looked at her a moment, and she looked at him. She was a woman
+who took being looked at remarkably well. “So you have come here for
+rest?” he asked.
+
+“So I may say. I came for many of those reasons that are no
+reasons—don’t you know?—and yet that are really the best: to come away,
+to change, to break with everything. When once one comes away one must
+arrive somewhere, and I asked myself why I shouldn’t arrive here.”
+
+“You certainly had time on the way!” said Acton, laughing.
+
+Madame Münster looked at him again; and then, smiling: “And I have
+certainly had time, since I got here, to ask myself why I came.
+However, I never ask myself idle questions. Here I am, and it seems to
+me you ought only to thank me.”
+
+“When you go away you will see the difficulties I shall put in your
+path.”
+
+“You mean to put difficulties in my path?” she asked, rearranging the
+rosebud in her corsage.
+
+“The greatest of all—that of having been so agreeable——”
+
+“That I shall be unable to depart? Don’t be too sure. I have left some
+very agreeable people over there.”
+
+“Ah,” said Acton, “but it was to come here, where I am!”
+
+“I didn’t know of your existence. Excuse me for saying anything so
+rude; but, honestly speaking, I did not. No,” the Baroness pursued, “it
+was precisely not to see you—such people as you—that I came.”
+
+“Such people as me?” cried Acton.
+
+“I had a sort of longing to come into those natural relations which I
+knew I should find here. Over there I had only, as I may say,
+artificial relations. Don’t you see the difference?”
+
+“The difference tells against me,” said Acton. “I suppose I am an
+artificial relation.”
+
+“Conventional,” declared the Baroness; “very conventional.”
+
+“Well, there is one way in which the relation of a lady and a gentleman
+may always become natural,” said Acton.
+
+“You mean by their becoming lovers? That may be natural or not. And at
+any rate,” rejoined Eugenia, _“nous n’en sommes pas là!”_
+
+They were not, as yet; but a little later, when she began to go with
+him to drive, it might almost have seemed that they were. He came for
+her several times, alone, in his high “wagon,” drawn by a pair of
+charming light-limbed horses. It was different, her having gone with
+Clifford Wentworth, who was her cousin, and so much younger. It was not
+to be imagined that she should have a flirtation with Clifford, who was
+a mere shame-faced boy, and whom a large section of Boston society
+supposed to be “engaged” to Lizzie Acton. Not, indeed, that it was to
+be conceived that the Baroness was a possible party to any flirtation
+whatever; for she was undoubtedly a married lady. It was generally
+known that her matrimonial condition was of the “morganatic” order; but
+in its natural aversion to suppose that this meant anything less than
+absolute wedlock, the conscience of the community took refuge in the
+belief that it implied something even more.
+
+Acton wished her to think highly of American scenery, and he drove her
+to great distances, picking out the prettiest roads and the largest
+points of view. If we are good when we are contented, Eugenia’s virtues
+should now certainly have been uppermost; for she found a charm in the
+rapid movement through a wild country, and in a companion who from time
+to time made the vehicle dip, with a motion like a swallow’s flight,
+over roads of primitive construction, and who, as she felt, would do a
+great many things that she might ask him. Sometimes, for a couple of
+hours together, there were almost no houses; there were nothing but
+woods and rivers and lakes and horizons adorned with bright-looking
+mountains. It seemed to the Baroness very wild, as I have said, and
+lovely; but the impression added something to that sense of the
+enlargement of opportunity which had been born of her arrival in the
+New World.
+
+One day—it was late in the afternoon—Acton pulled up his horses on the
+crest of a hill which commanded a beautiful prospect. He let them stand
+a long time to rest, while he sat there and talked with Madame Münster.
+The prospect was beautiful in spite of there being nothing human within
+sight. There was a wilderness of woods, and the gleam of a distant
+river, and a glimpse of half the hill-tops in Massachusetts. The road
+had a wide, grassy margin, on the further side of which there flowed a
+deep, clear brook; there were wild flowers in the grass, and beside the
+brook lay the trunk of a fallen tree. Acton waited a while; at last a
+rustic wayfarer came trudging along the road. Acton asked him to hold
+the horses—a service he consented to render, as a friendly turn to a
+fellow-citizen. Then he invited the Baroness to descend, and the two
+wandered away, across the grass, and sat down on the log beside the
+brook.
+
+“I imagine it doesn’t remind you of Silberstadt,” said Acton. It was
+the first time that he had mentioned Silberstadt to her, for particular
+reasons. He knew she had a husband there, and this was disagreeable to
+him; and, furthermore, it had been repeated to him that this husband
+wished to put her away—a state of affairs to which even indirect
+reference was to be deprecated. It was true, nevertheless, that the
+Baroness herself had often alluded to Silberstadt; and Acton had often
+wondered why her husband wished to get rid of her. It was a curious
+position for a lady—this being known as a repudiated wife; and it is
+worthy of observation that the Baroness carried it off with exceeding
+grace and dignity. She had made it felt, from the first, that there
+were two sides to the question, and that her own side, when she should
+choose to present it, would be replete with touching interest.
+
+“It does not remind me of the town, of course,” she said, “of the
+sculptured gables and the Gothic churches, of the wonderful Schloss,
+with its moat and its clustering towers. But it has a little look of
+some other parts of the principality. One might fancy one’s self among
+those grand old German forests, those legendary mountains; the sort of
+country one sees from the windows at Schreckenstein.”
+
+“What is Schreckenstein?” asked Acton.
+
+“It is a great castle,—the summer residence of the Reigning Prince.”
+
+“Have you ever lived there?”
+
+“I have stayed there,” said the Baroness. Acton was silent; he looked a
+while at the uncastled landscape before him. “It is the first time you
+have ever asked me about Silberstadt,” she said. “I should think you
+would want to know about my marriage; it must seem to you very
+strange.”
+
+Acton looked at her a moment. “Now you wouldn’t like me to say that!”
+
+“You Americans have such odd ways!” the Baroness declared. “You never
+ask anything outright; there seem to be so many things you can’t talk
+about.”
+
+“We Americans are very polite,” said Acton, whose national
+consciousness had been complicated by a residence in foreign lands, and
+who yet disliked to hear Americans abused. “We don’t like to tread upon
+people’s toes,” he said. “But I should like very much to hear about
+your marriage. Now tell me how it came about.”
+
+“The Prince fell in love with me,” replied the Baroness simply. “He
+pressed his suit very hard. At first he didn’t wish me to marry him; on
+the contrary. But on that basis I refused to listen to him. So he
+offered me marriage—in so far as he might. I was young, and I confess I
+was rather flattered. But if it were to be done again now, I certainly
+should not accept him.”
+
+“How long ago was this?” asked Acton.
+
+“Oh—several years,” said Eugenia. “You should never ask a woman for
+dates.”
+
+“Why, I should think that when a woman was relating history “ Acton
+answered. “And now he wants to break it off?”
+
+“They want him to make a political marriage. It is his brother’s idea.
+His brother is very clever.”
+
+“They must be a precious pair!” cried Robert Acton.
+
+The Baroness gave a little philosophic shrug. “_Que voulez-vous?_ They
+are princes. They think they are treating me very well. Silberstadt is
+a perfectly despotic little state, and the Reigning Prince may annul
+the marriage by a stroke of his pen. But he has promised me,
+nevertheless, not to do so without my formal consent.”
+
+“And this you have refused?”
+
+“Hitherto. It is an indignity, and I have wished at least to make it
+difficult for them. But I have a little document in my writing-desk
+which I have only to sign and send back to the Prince.”
+
+“Then it will be all over?”
+
+The Baroness lifted her hand, and dropped it again. “Of course I shall
+keep my title; at least, I shall be at liberty to keep it if I choose.
+And I suppose I shall keep it. One must have a name. And I shall keep
+my pension. It is very small—it is wretchedly small; but it is what I
+live on.”
+
+“And you have only to sign that paper?” Acton asked.
+
+The Baroness looked at him a moment. “Do you urge it?”
+
+He got up slowly, and stood with his hands in his pockets. “What do you
+gain by not doing it?”
+
+“I am supposed to gain this advantage—that if I delay, or temporize,
+the Prince may come back to me, may make a stand against his brother.
+He is very fond of me, and his brother has pushed him only little by
+little.”
+
+“If he were to come back to you,” said Acton, “would you—would you take
+him back?”
+
+The Baroness met his eyes; she colored just a little. Then she rose. “I
+should have the satisfaction of saying, ‘Now it is my turn. I break
+with your Serene Highness!’”
+
+They began to walk toward the carriage. “Well,” said Robert Acton,
+“it’s a curious story! How did you make his acquaintance?”
+
+“I was staying with an old lady—an old Countess—in Dresden. She had
+been a friend of my father’s. My father was dead; I was very much
+alone. My brother was wandering about the world in a theatrical
+troupe.”
+
+“Your brother ought to have stayed with you,” Acton observed, “and kept
+you from putting your trust in princes.”
+
+The Baroness was silent a moment, and then, “He did what he could,” she
+said. “He sent me money. The old Countess encouraged the Prince; she
+was even pressing. It seems to me,” Madame Münster added, gently,
+“that—under the circumstances—I behaved very well.”
+
+Acton glanced at her, and made the observation—he had made it
+before—that a woman looks the prettier for having unfolded her wrongs
+or her sufferings. “Well,” he reflected, audibly, “I should like to see
+you send his Serene Highness—somewhere!”
+
+Madame Münster stooped and plucked a daisy from the grass. “And not
+sign my renunciation?”
+
+“Well, I don’t know—I don’t know,” said Acton.
+
+“In one case I should have my revenge; in another case I should have my
+liberty.”
+
+Acton gave a little laugh as he helped her into the carriage. “At any
+rate,” he said, “take good care of that paper.”
+
+A couple of days afterward he asked her to come and see his house. The
+visit had already been proposed, but it had been put off in consequence
+of his mother’s illness. She was a constant invalid, and she had passed
+these recent years, very patiently, in a great flowered arm-chair at
+her bedroom window. Lately, for some days, she had been unable to see
+anyone; but now she was better, and she sent the Baroness a very civil
+message. Acton had wished their visitor to come to dinner; but Madame
+Münster preferred to begin with a simple call. She had reflected that
+if she should go to dinner Mr. Wentworth and his daughters would also
+be asked, and it had seemed to her that the peculiar character of the
+occasion would be best preserved in a _tête-à-tête_ with her host. Why
+the occasion should have a peculiar character she explained to no one.
+As far as anyone could see, it was simply very pleasant. Acton came for
+her and drove her to his door, an operation which was rapidly
+performed. His house the Baroness mentally pronounced a very good one;
+more articulately, she declared that it was enchanting. It was large
+and square and painted brown; it stood in a well-kept shrubbery, and
+was approached, from the gate, by a short drive. It was, moreover, a
+much more modern dwelling than Mr. Wentworth’s, and was more
+redundantly upholstered and expensively ornamented. The Baroness
+perceived that her entertainer had analyzed material comfort to a
+sufficiently fine point. And then he possessed the most delightful
+_chinoiseries_—trophies of his sojourn in the Celestial Empire: pagodas
+of ebony and cabinets of ivory; sculptured monsters, grinning and
+leering on chimney-pieces, in front of beautifully figured
+hand-screens; porcelain dinner-sets, gleaming behind the glass doors of
+mahogany buffets; large screens, in corners, covered with tense silk
+and embroidered with mandarins and dragons. These things were scattered
+all over the house, and they gave Eugenia a pretext for a complete
+domiciliary visit. She liked it, she enjoyed it; she thought it a very
+nice place. It had a mixture of the homely and the liberal, and though
+it was almost a museum, the large, little-used rooms were as fresh and
+clean as a well-kept dairy. Lizzie Acton told her that she dusted all
+the pagodas and other curiosities every day with her own hands; and the
+Baroness answered that she was evidently a household fairy. Lizzie had
+not at all the look of a young lady who dusted things; she wore such
+pretty dresses and had such delicate fingers that it was difficult to
+imagine her immersed in sordid cares. She came to meet Madame Münster
+on her arrival, but she said nothing, or almost nothing, and the
+Baroness again reflected—she had had occasion to do so before—that
+American girls had no manners. She disliked this little American girl,
+and she was quite prepared to learn that she had failed to commend
+herself to Miss Acton. Lizzie struck her as positive and explicit
+almost to pertness; and the idea of her combining the apparent
+incongruities of a taste for housework and the wearing of fresh,
+Parisian-looking dresses suggested the possession of a dangerous
+energy. It was a source of irritation to the Baroness that in this
+country it should seem to matter whether a little girl were a trifle
+less or a trifle more of a nonentity; for Eugenia had hitherto been
+conscious of no moral pressure as regards the appreciation of
+diminutive virgins. It was perhaps an indication of Lizzie’s pertness
+that she very soon retired and left the Baroness on her brother’s
+hands. Acton talked a great deal about his _chinoiseries_; he knew a
+good deal about porcelain and bric-à-brac. The Baroness, in her
+progress through the house, made, as it were, a great many stations.
+She sat down everywhere, confessed to being a little tired, and asked
+about the various objects with a curious mixture of alertness and
+inattention. If there had been anyone to say it to she would have
+declared that she was positively in love with her host; but she could
+hardly make this declaration—even in the strictest confidence—to Acton
+himself. It gave her, nevertheless, a pleasure that had some of the
+charm of unwontedness to feel, with that admirable keenness with which
+she was capable of feeling things, that he had a disposition without
+any edges; that even his humorous irony always expanded toward the
+point. One’s impression of his honesty was almost like carrying a bunch
+of flowers; the perfume was most agreeable, but they were occasionally
+an inconvenience. One could trust him, at any rate, round all the
+corners of the world; and, withal, he was not absolutely simple, which
+would have been excess; he was only relatively simple, which was quite
+enough for the Baroness.
+
+Lizzie reappeared to say that her mother would now be happy to receive
+Madame Münster; and the Baroness followed her to Mrs. Acton’s
+apartment. Eugenia reflected, as she went, that it was not the
+affectation of impertinence that made her dislike this young lady, for
+on that ground she could easily have beaten her. It was not an
+aspiration on the girl’s part to rivalry, but a kind of laughing,
+childishly-mocking indifference to the results of comparison. Mrs.
+Acton was an emaciated, sweet-faced woman of five and fifty, sitting
+with pillows behind her, and looking out on a clump of hemlocks. She
+was very modest, very timid, and very ill; she made Eugenia feel
+grateful that she herself was not like that—neither so ill, nor,
+possibly, so modest. On a chair, beside her, lay a volume of Emerson’s
+Essays. It was a great occasion for poor Mrs. Acton, in her helpless
+condition, to be confronted with a clever foreign lady, who had more
+manner than any lady—any dozen ladies—that she had ever seen.
+
+“I have heard a great deal about you,” she said, softly, to the
+Baroness.
+
+“From your son, eh?” Eugenia asked. “He has talked to me immensely of
+you. Oh, he talks of you as you would like,” the Baroness declared; “as
+such a son _must_ talk of such a mother!”
+
+Mrs. Acton sat gazing; this was part of Madame Münster’s “manner.” But
+Robert Acton was gazing too, in vivid consciousness that he had barely
+mentioned his mother to their brilliant guest. He never talked of this
+still maternal presence,—a presence refined to such delicacy that it
+had almost resolved itself, with him, simply into the subjective
+emotion of gratitude. And Acton rarely talked of his emotions. The
+Baroness turned her smile toward him, and she instantly felt that she
+had been observed to be fibbing. She had struck a false note. But who
+were these people to whom such fibbing was not pleasing? If they were
+annoyed, the Baroness was equally so; and after the exchange of a few
+civil inquiries and low-voiced responses she took leave of Mrs. Acton.
+She begged Robert not to come home with her; she would get into the
+carriage alone; she preferred that. This was imperious, and she thought
+he looked disappointed. While she stood before the door with him—the
+carriage was turning in the gravel-walk—this thought restored her
+serenity.
+
+When she had given him her hand in farewell she looked at him a moment.
+“I have almost decided to dispatch that paper,” she said.
+
+He knew that she alluded to the document that she had called her
+renunciation; and he assisted her into the carriage without saying
+anything. But just before the vehicle began to move he said, “Well,
+when you have in fact dispatched it, I hope you will let me know!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Felix Young finished Gertrude’s portrait, and he afterwards transferred
+to canvas the features of many members of that circle of which it may
+be said that he had become for the time the pivot and the centre. I am
+afraid it must be confessed that he was a decidedly flattering painter,
+and that he imparted to his models a romantic grace which seemed easily
+and cheaply acquired by the payment of a hundred dollars to a young man
+who made “sitting” so entertaining. For Felix was paid for his
+pictures, making, as he did, no secret of the fact that in guiding his
+steps to the Western world affectionate curiosity had gone hand in hand
+with a desire to better his condition. He took his uncle’s portrait
+quite as if Mr. Wentworth had never averted himself from the
+experiment; and as he compassed his end only by the exercise of gentle
+violence, it is but fair to add that he allowed the old man to give him
+nothing but his time. He passed his arm into Mr. Wentworth’s one summer
+morning—very few arms indeed had ever passed into Mr. Wentworth’s—and
+led him across the garden and along the road into the studio which he
+had extemporized in the little house among the apple trees. The grave
+gentleman felt himself more and more fascinated by his clever nephew,
+whose fresh, demonstrative youth seemed a compendium of experiences so
+strangely numerous. It appeared to him that Felix must know a great
+deal; he would like to learn what he thought about some of those things
+as regards which his own conversation had always been formal, but his
+knowledge vague. Felix had a confident, gayly trenchant way of judging
+human actions which Mr. Wentworth grew little by little to envy; it
+seemed like criticism made easy. Forming an opinion—say on a person’s
+conduct—was, with Mr. Wentworth, a good deal like fumbling in a lock
+with a key chosen at hazard. He seemed to himself to go about the world
+with a big bunch of these ineffectual instruments at his girdle. His
+nephew, on the other hand, with a single turn of the wrist, opened any
+door as adroitly as a horse-thief. He felt obliged to keep up the
+convention that an uncle is always wiser than a nephew, even if he
+could keep it up no otherwise than by listening in serious silence to
+Felix’s quick, light, constant discourse. But there came a day when he
+lapsed from consistency and almost asked his nephew’s advice.
+
+“Have you ever entertained the idea of settling in the United States?”
+he asked one morning, while Felix brilliantly plied his brush.
+
+“My dear uncle,” said Felix, “excuse me if your question makes me smile
+a little. To begin with, I have never entertained an idea. Ideas often
+entertain _me_; but I am afraid I have never seriously made a plan. I
+know what you are going to say; or rather, I know what you think, for I
+don’t think you will say it—that this is very frivolous and
+loose-minded on my part. So it is; but I am made like that; I take
+things as they come, and somehow there is always some new thing to
+follow the last. In the second place, I should never propose to
+_settle_. I can’t settle, my dear uncle; I’m not a settler. I know that
+is what strangers are supposed to do here; they always settle. But I
+haven’t—to answer your question—entertained that idea.”
+
+“You intend to return to Europe and resume your irregular manner of
+life?” Mr. Wentworth inquired.
+
+“I can’t say I intend. But it’s very likely I shall go back to Europe.
+After all, I am a European. I feel that, you know. It will depend a
+good deal upon my sister. She’s even more of a European than I; here,
+you know, she’s a picture out of her setting. And as for ‘resuming,’
+dear uncle, I really have never given up my irregular manner of life.
+What, for me, could be more irregular than this?”
+
+“Than what?” asked Mr. Wentworth, with his pale gravity.
+
+“Well, than everything! Living in the midst of you, this way; this
+charming, quiet, serious family life; fraternizing with Charlotte and
+Gertrude; calling upon twenty young ladies and going out to walk with
+them; sitting with you in the evening on the piazza and listening to
+the crickets, and going to bed at ten o’clock.”
+
+“Your description is very animated,” said Mr. Wentworth; “but I see
+nothing improper in what you describe.”
+
+“Neither do I, dear uncle. It is extremely delightful; I shouldn’t like
+it if it were improper. I assure you I don’t like improper things;
+though I dare say you think I do,” Felix went on, painting away.
+
+“I have never accused you of that.”
+
+“Pray don’t,” said Felix, “because, you see, at bottom I am a terrible
+Philistine.”
+
+“A Philistine?” repeated Mr. Wentworth.
+
+“I mean, as one may say, a plain, God-fearing man.” Mr. Wentworth
+looked at him reservedly, like a mystified sage, and Felix continued,
+“I trust I shall enjoy a venerable and venerated old age. I mean to
+live long. I can hardly call that a plan, perhaps; but it’s a keen
+desire—a rosy vision. I shall be a lively, perhaps even a frivolous old
+man!”
+
+“It is natural,” said his uncle, sententiously, “that one should desire
+to prolong an agreeable life. We have perhaps a selfish indisposition
+to bring our pleasure to a close. But I presume,” he added, “that you
+expect to marry.”
+
+“That too, dear uncle, is a hope, a desire, a vision,” said Felix. It
+occurred to him for an instant that this was possibly a preface to the
+offer of the hand of one of Mr. Wentworth’s admirable daughters. But in
+the name of decent modesty and a proper sense of the hard realities of
+this world, Felix banished the thought. His uncle was the incarnation
+of benevolence, certainly; but from that to accepting—much more
+postulating—the idea of a union between a young lady with a dowry
+presumptively brilliant and a penniless artist with no prospect of
+fame, there was a very long way. Felix had lately become conscious of a
+luxurious preference for the society—if possible unshared with
+others—of Gertrude Wentworth; but he had relegated this young lady, for
+the moment, to the coldly brilliant category of unattainable
+possessions. She was not the first woman for whom he had entertained an
+unpractical admiration. He had been in love with duchesses and
+countesses, and he had made, once or twice, a perilously near approach
+to cynicism in declaring that the disinterestedness of women had been
+overrated. On the whole, he had tempered audacity with modesty; and it
+is but fair to him now to say explicitly that he would have been
+incapable of taking advantage of his present large allowance of
+familiarity to make love to the younger of his handsome cousins. Felix
+had grown up among traditions in the light of which such a proceeding
+looked like a grievous breach of hospitality. I have said that he was
+always happy, and it may be counted among the present sources of his
+happiness that he had as regards this matter of his relations with
+Gertrude a deliciously good conscience. His own deportment seemed to
+him suffused with the beauty of virtue—a form of beauty that he admired
+with the same vivacity with which he admired all other forms.
+
+“I think that if you marry,” said Mr. Wentworth presently, “it will
+conduce to your happiness.”
+
+_“Sicurissimo!”_ Felix exclaimed; and then, arresting his brush, he
+looked at his uncle with a smile. “There is something I feel tempted to
+say to you. May I risk it?”
+
+Mr. Wentworth drew himself up a little. “I am very safe; I don’t repeat
+things.” But he hoped Felix would not risk too much.
+
+Felix was laughing at his answer.
+
+“It’s odd to hear you telling me how to be happy. I don’t think you
+know yourself, dear uncle. Now, does that sound brutal?”
+
+The old man was silent a moment, and then, with a dry dignity that
+suddenly touched his nephew: “We may sometimes point out a road we are
+unable to follow.”
+
+“Ah, don’t tell me you have had any sorrows,” Felix rejoined. “I didn’t
+suppose it, and I didn’t mean to allude to them. I simply meant that
+you all don’t amuse yourselves.”
+
+“Amuse ourselves? We are not children.”
+
+“Precisely not! You have reached the proper age. I was saying that the
+other day to Gertrude,” Felix added. “I hope it was not indiscreet.”
+
+“If it was,” said Mr. Wentworth, with a keener irony than Felix would
+have thought him capable of, “it was but your way of amusing yourself.
+I am afraid you have never had a trouble.”
+
+“Oh, yes, I have!” Felix declared, with some spirit; “before I knew
+better. But you don’t catch me at it again.”
+
+Mr. Wentworth maintained for a while a silence more expressive than a
+deep-drawn sigh. “You have no children,” he said at last.
+
+“Don’t tell me,” Felix exclaimed, “that your charming young people are
+a source of grief to you!”
+
+“I don’t speak of Charlotte.” And then, after a pause, Mr. Wentworth
+continued, “I don’t speak of Gertrude. But I feel considerable anxiety
+about Clifford. I will tell you another time.”
+
+The next time he gave Felix a sitting his nephew reminded him that he
+had taken him into his confidence. “How is Clifford today?” Felix
+asked. “He has always seemed to me a young man of remarkable
+discretion. Indeed, he is only too discreet; he seems on his guard
+against me—as if he thought me rather light company. The other day he
+told his sister—Gertrude repeated it to me—that I was always laughing
+at him. If I laugh it is simply from the impulse to try and inspire him
+with confidence. That is the only way I have.”
+
+“Clifford’s situation is no laughing matter,” said Mr. Wentworth. “It
+is very peculiar, as I suppose you have guessed.”
+
+“Ah, you mean his love affair with his cousin?”
+
+Mr. Wentworth stared, blushing a little. “I mean his absence from
+college. He has been suspended. We have decided not to speak of it
+unless we are asked.”
+
+“Suspended?” Felix repeated.
+
+“He has been requested by the Harvard authorities to absent himself for
+six months. Meanwhile he is studying with Mr. Brand. We think Mr. Brand
+will help him; at least we hope so.”
+
+“What befell him at college?” Felix asked. “He was too fond of
+pleasure? Mr. Brand certainly will not teach him any of those secrets!”
+
+“He was too fond of something of which he should not have been fond. I
+suppose it is considered a pleasure.”
+
+Felix gave his light laugh. “My dear uncle, is there any doubt about
+its being a pleasure? _C’est de son âge_, as they say in France.”
+
+“I should have said rather it was a vice of later life—of disappointed
+old age.”
+
+Felix glanced at his uncle, with his lifted eyebrows, and then, “Of
+what are you speaking?” he demanded, smiling.
+
+“Of the situation in which Clifford was found.”
+
+“Ah, he was found—he was caught?”
+
+“Necessarily, he was caught. He couldn’t walk; he staggered.”
+
+“Oh,” said Felix, “he drinks! I rather suspected that, from something I
+observed the first day I came here. I quite agree with you that it is a
+low taste. It’s not a vice for a gentleman. He ought to give it up.”
+
+“We hope for a good deal from Mr. Brand’s influence,” Mr. Wentworth
+went on. “He has talked to him from the first. And he never touches
+anything himself.”
+
+“I will talk to him—I will talk to him!” Felix declared, gayly.
+
+“What will you say to him?” asked his uncle, with some apprehension.
+
+Felix for some moments answered nothing. “Do you mean to marry him to
+his cousin?” he asked at last.
+
+“Marry him?” echoed Mr. Wentworth. “I shouldn’t think his cousin would
+want to marry him.”
+
+“You have no understanding, then, with Mrs. Acton?”
+
+Mr. Wentworth stared, almost blankly. “I have never discussed such
+subjects with her.”
+
+“I should think it might be time,” said Felix. “Lizzie Acton is
+admirably pretty, and if Clifford is dangerous....”
+
+“They are not engaged,” said Mr. Wentworth. “I have no reason to
+suppose they are engaged.”
+
+_“Par exemple!”_ cried Felix. “A clandestine engagement? Trust me,
+Clifford, as I say, is a charming boy. He is incapable of that. Lizzie
+Acton, then, would not be jealous of another woman.”
+
+“I certainly hope not,” said the old man, with a vague sense of
+jealousy being an even lower vice than a love of liquor.
+
+“The best thing for Clifford, then,” Felix propounded, “is to become
+interested in some clever, charming woman.” And he paused in his
+painting, and, with his elbows on his knees, looked with bright
+communicativeness at his uncle. “You see, I believe greatly in the
+influence of women. Living with women helps to make a man a gentleman.
+It is very true Clifford has his sisters, who are so charming. But
+there should be a different sentiment in play from the fraternal, you
+know. He has Lizzie Acton; but she, perhaps, is rather immature.”
+
+“I suspect Lizzie has talked to him, reasoned with him,” said Mr.
+Wentworth.
+
+“On the impropriety of getting tipsy—on the beauty of temperance? That
+is dreary work for a pretty young girl. No,” Felix continued; “Clifford
+ought to frequent some agreeable woman, who, without ever mentioning
+such unsavory subjects, would give him a sense of its being very
+ridiculous to be fuddled. If he could fall in love with her a little,
+so much the better. The thing would operate as a cure.”
+
+“Well, now, what lady should you suggest?” asked Mr. Wentworth.
+
+“There is a clever woman under your hand. My sister.”
+
+“Your sister—under my hand?” Mr. Wentworth repeated.
+
+“Say a word to Clifford. Tell him to be bold. He is well disposed
+already; he has invited her two or three times to drive. But I don’t
+think he comes to see her. Give him a hint to come—to come often. He
+will sit there of an afternoon, and they will talk. It will do him
+good.”
+
+Mr. Wentworth meditated. “You think she will exercise a helpful
+influence?”
+
+“She will exercise a civilizing—I may call it a sobering—influence. A
+charming, clever, witty woman always does—especially if she is a little
+of a coquette. My dear uncle, the society of such women has been half
+my education. If Clifford is suspended, as you say, from college, let
+Eugenia be his preceptress.”
+
+Mr. Wentworth continued thoughtful. “You think Eugenia is a coquette?”
+he asked.
+
+“What pretty woman is not?” Felix demanded in turn. But this, for Mr.
+Wentworth, could at the best have been no answer, for he did not think
+his niece pretty. “With Clifford,” the young man pursued, “Eugenia will
+simply be enough of a coquette to be a little ironical. That’s what he
+needs. So you recommend him to be nice with her, you know. The
+suggestion will come best from you.”
+
+“Do I understand,” asked the old man, “that I am to suggest to my son
+to make a—a profession of—of affection to Madame Münster?”
+
+“Yes, yes—a profession!” cried Felix sympathetically.
+
+“But, as I understand it, Madame Münster is a married woman.”
+
+“Ah,” said Felix, smiling, “of course she can’t marry him. But she will
+do what she can.”
+
+Mr. Wentworth sat for some time with his eyes on the floor; at last he
+got up. “I don’t think,” he said, “that I can undertake to recommend my
+son any such course.” And without meeting Felix’s surprised glance he
+broke off his sitting, which was not resumed for a fortnight.
+
+Felix was very fond of the little lake which occupied so many of Mr.
+Wentworth’s numerous acres, and of a remarkable pine grove which lay
+upon the further side of it, planted upon a steep embankment and
+haunted by the summer breeze. The murmur of the air in the far off
+tree-tops had a strange distinctness; it was almost articulate. One
+afternoon the young man came out of his painting-room and passed the
+open door of Eugenia’s little salon. Within, in the cool dimness, he
+saw his sister, dressed in white, buried in her arm-chair, and holding
+to her face an immense bouquet. Opposite to her sat Clifford Wentworth,
+twirling his hat. He had evidently just presented the bouquet to the
+Baroness, whose fine eyes, as she glanced at him over the big roses and
+geraniums, wore a conversational smile. Felix, standing on the
+threshold of the cottage, hesitated for a moment as to whether he
+should retrace his steps and enter the parlor. Then he went his way and
+passed into Mr. Wentworth’s garden. That civilizing process to which he
+had suggested that Clifford should be subjected appeared to have come
+on of itself. Felix was very sure, at least, that Mr. Wentworth had not
+adopted his ingenious device for stimulating the young man’s aesthetic
+consciousness. “Doubtless he supposes,” he said to himself, after the
+conversation that has been narrated, “that I desire, out of fraternal
+benevolence, to procure for Eugenia the amusement of a flirtation—or,
+as he probably calls it, an intrigue—with the too susceptible Clifford.
+It must be admitted—and I have noticed it before—that nothing exceeds
+the license occasionally taken by the imagination of very rigid
+people.” Felix, on his own side, had of course said nothing to
+Clifford; but he had observed to Eugenia that Mr. Wentworth was much
+mortified at his son’s low tastes. “We ought to do something to help
+them, after all their kindness to us,” he had added. “Encourage
+Clifford to come and see you, and inspire him with a taste for
+conversation. That will supplant the other, which only comes from his
+puerility, from his not taking his position in the world—that of a rich
+young man of ancient stock—seriously enough. Make him a little more
+serious. Even if he makes love to you it is no great matter.”
+
+“I am to offer myself as a superior form of intoxication—a substitute
+for a brandy bottle, eh?” asked the Baroness. “Truly, in this country
+one comes to strange uses.”
+
+But she had not positively declined to undertake Clifford’s higher
+education, and Felix, who had not thought of the matter again, being
+haunted with visions of more personal profit, now reflected that the
+work of redemption had fairly begun. The idea in prospect had seemed of
+the happiest, but in operation it made him a trifle uneasy. “What if
+Eugenia—what if Eugenia”—he asked himself softly; the question dying
+away in his sense of Eugenia’s undetermined capacity. But before Felix
+had time either to accept or to reject its admonition, even in this
+vague form, he saw Robert Acton turn out of Mr. Wentworth’s enclosure,
+by a distant gate, and come toward the cottage in the orchard. Acton
+had evidently walked from his own house along a shady by-way and was
+intending to pay a visit to Madame Münster. Felix watched him a moment;
+then he turned away. Acton could be left to play the part of Providence
+and interrupt—if interruption were needed—Clifford’s entanglement with
+Eugenia.
+
+Felix passed through the garden toward the house and toward a postern
+gate which opened upon a path leading across the fields, beside a
+little wood, to the lake. He stopped and looked up at the house; his
+eyes rested more particularly upon a certain open window, on the shady
+side. Presently Gertrude appeared there, looking out into the summer
+light. He took off his hat to her and bade her good-day; he remarked
+that he was going to row across the pond, and begged that she would do
+him the honor to accompany him. She looked at him a moment; then,
+without saying anything, she turned away. But she soon reappeared below
+in one of those quaint and charming Leghorn hats, tied with white satin
+bows, that were worn at that period; she also carried a green parasol.
+She went with him to the edge of the lake, where a couple of boats were
+always moored; they got into one of them, and Felix, with gentle
+strokes, propelled it to the opposite shore. The day was the perfection
+of summer weather; the little lake was the color of sunshine; the plash
+of the oars was the only sound, and they found themselves listening to
+it. They disembarked, and, by a winding path, ascended the pine-crested
+mound which overlooked the water, whose white expanse glittered between
+the trees. The place was delightfully cool, and had the added charm
+that—in the softly sounding pine boughs—you seemed to hear the coolness
+as well as feel it. Felix and Gertrude sat down on the rust-colored
+carpet of pine-needles and talked of many things. Felix spoke at last,
+in the course of talk, of his going away; it was the first time he had
+alluded to it.
+
+“You are going away?” said Gertrude, looking at him.
+
+“Some day—when the leaves begin to fall. You know I can’t stay
+forever.”
+
+Gertrude transferred her eyes to the outer prospect, and then, after a
+pause, she said, “I shall never see you again.”
+
+“Why not?” asked Felix. “We shall probably both survive my departure.”
+
+But Gertrude only repeated, “I shall never see you again. I shall never
+hear of you,” she went on. “I shall know nothing about you. I knew
+nothing about you before, and it will be the same again.”
+
+“I knew nothing about you then, unfortunately,” said Felix. “But now I
+shall write to you.”
+
+“Don’t write to me. I shall not answer you,” Gertrude declared.
+
+“I should of course burn your letters,” said Felix.
+
+Gertrude looked at him again. “Burn my letters? You sometimes say
+strange things.”
+
+“They are not strange in themselves,” the young man answered. “They are
+only strange as said to you. You will come to Europe.”
+
+“With whom shall I come?” She asked this question simply; she was very
+much in earnest. Felix was interested in her earnestness; for some
+moments he hesitated. “You can’t tell me that,” she pursued. “You can’t
+say that I shall go with my father and my sister; you don’t believe
+that.”
+
+“I shall keep your letters,” said Felix, presently, for all answer.
+
+“I never write. I don’t know how to write.” Gertrude, for some time,
+said nothing more; and her companion, as he looked at her, wished it
+had not been “disloyal” to make love to the daughter of an old
+gentleman who had offered one hospitality. The afternoon waned; the
+shadows stretched themselves; and the light grew deeper in the western
+sky. Two persons appeared on the opposite side of the lake, coming from
+the house and crossing the meadow. “It is Charlotte and Mr. Brand,”
+said Gertrude. “They are coming over here.” But Charlotte and Mr. Brand
+only came down to the edge of the water, and stood there, looking
+across; they made no motion to enter the boat that Felix had left at
+the mooring-place. Felix waved his hat to them; it was too far to call.
+They made no visible response, and they presently turned away and
+walked along the shore.
+
+“Mr. Brand is not demonstrative,” said Felix. “He is never
+demonstrative to me. He sits silent, with his chin in his hand, looking
+at me. Sometimes he looks away. Your father tells me he is so eloquent;
+and I should like to hear him talk. He looks like such a noble young
+man. But with me he will never talk. And yet I am so fond of listening
+to brilliant imagery!”
+
+“He is very eloquent,” said Gertrude; “but he has no brilliant imagery.
+I have heard him talk a great deal. I knew that when they saw us they
+would not come over here.”
+
+“Ah, he is making _la cour_, as they say, to your sister? They desire
+to be alone?”
+
+“No,” said Gertrude, gravely, “they have no such reason as that for
+being alone.”
+
+“But why doesn’t he make _la cour_ to Charlotte?” Felix inquired. “She
+is so pretty, so gentle, so good.”
+
+Gertrude glanced at him, and then she looked at the distantly-seen
+couple they were discussing. Mr. Brand and Charlotte were walking side
+by side. They might have been a pair of lovers, and yet they might not.
+“They think I should not be here,” said Gertrude.
+
+“With me? I thought you didn’t have those ideas.”
+
+“You don’t understand. There are a great many things you don’t
+understand.”
+
+“I understand my stupidity. But why, then, do not Charlotte and Mr.
+Brand, who, as an elder sister and a clergyman, are free to walk about
+together, come over and make me wiser by breaking up the unlawful
+interview into which I have lured you?”
+
+“That is the last thing they would do,” said Gertrude.
+
+Felix stared at her a moment, with his lifted eyebrows. _“Je n’y
+comprends rien!”_ he exclaimed; then his eyes followed for a while the
+retreating figures of this critical pair. “You may say what you
+please,” he declared; “it is evident to me that your sister is not
+indifferent to her clever companion. It is agreeable to her to be
+walking there with him. I can see that from here.” And in the
+excitement of observation Felix rose to his feet.
+
+Gertrude rose also, but she made no attempt to emulate her companion’s
+discovery; she looked rather in another direction. Felix’s words had
+struck her; but a certain delicacy checked her. “She is certainly not
+indifferent to Mr. Brand; she has the highest opinion of him.”
+
+“One can see it—one can see it,” said Felix, in a tone of amused
+contemplation, with his head on one side. Gertrude turned her back to
+the opposite shore; it was disagreeable to her to look, but she hoped
+Felix would say something more. “Ah, they have wandered away into the
+wood,” he added.
+
+Gertrude turned round again. “She is _not_ in love with him,” she said;
+it seemed her duty to say that.
+
+“Then he is in love with her; or if he is not, he ought to be. She is
+such a perfect little woman of her kind. She reminds me of a pair of
+old-fashioned silver sugar-tongs; you know I am very fond of sugar. And
+she is very nice with Mr. Brand; I have noticed that; very gentle and
+gracious.”
+
+Gertrude reflected a moment. Then she took a great resolution. “She
+wants him to marry me,” she said. “So of course she is nice.”
+
+Felix’s eyebrows rose higher than ever. “To marry you! Ah, ah, this is
+interesting. And you think one must be very nice with a man to induce
+him to do that?”
+
+Gertrude had turned a little pale, but she went on, “Mr. Brand wants it
+himself.”
+
+Felix folded his arms and stood looking at her. “I see—I see,” he said
+quickly. “Why did you never tell me this before?”
+
+“It is disagreeable to me to speak of it even now. I wished simply to
+explain to you about Charlotte.”
+
+“You don’t wish to marry Mr. Brand, then?”
+
+“No,” said Gertrude, gravely.
+
+“And does your father wish it?”
+
+“Very much.”
+
+“And you don’t like him—you have refused him?”
+
+“I don’t wish to marry him.”
+
+“Your father and sister think you ought to, eh?”
+
+“It is a long story,” said Gertrude. “They think there are good
+reasons. I can’t explain it. They think I have obligations, and that I
+have encouraged him.”
+
+Felix smiled at her, as if she had been telling him an amusing story
+about someone else. “I can’t tell you how this interests me,” he said.
+“Now you don’t recognize these reasons—these obligations?”
+
+“I am not sure; it is not easy.” And she picked up her parasol and
+turned away, as if to descend the slope.
+
+“Tell me this,” Felix went on, going with her: “are you likely to give
+in—to let them persuade you?”
+
+Gertrude looked at him with the serious face that she had constantly
+worn, in opposition to his almost eager smile. “I shall never marry Mr.
+Brand,” she said.
+
+“I see!” Felix rejoined. And they slowly descended the hill together,
+saying nothing till they reached the margin of the pond. “It is your
+own affair,” he then resumed; “but do you know, I am not altogether
+glad? If it were settled that you were to marry Mr. Brand I should take
+a certain comfort in the arrangement. I should feel more free. I have
+no right to make love to you myself, eh?” And he paused, lightly
+pressing his argument upon her.
+
+“None whatever,” replied Gertrude quickly—too quickly.
+
+“Your father would never hear of it; I haven’t a penny. Mr. Brand, of
+course, has property of his own, eh?”
+
+“I believe he has some property; but that has nothing to do with it.”
+
+“With you, of course not; but with your father and sister it must have.
+So, as I say, if this were settled, I should feel more at liberty.”
+
+“More at liberty?” Gertrude repeated. “Please unfasten the boat.”
+
+Felix untwisted the rope and stood holding it. “I should be able to say
+things to you that I can’t give myself the pleasure of saying now,” he
+went on. “I could tell you how much I admire you, without seeming to
+pretend to that which I have no right to pretend to. I should make
+violent love to you,” he added, laughing, “if I thought you were so
+placed as not to be offended by it.”
+
+“You mean if I were engaged to another man? That is strange reasoning!”
+Gertrude exclaimed.
+
+“In that case you would not take me seriously.”
+
+“I take everyone seriously,” said Gertrude. And without his help she
+stepped lightly into the boat.
+
+Felix took up the oars and sent it forward. “Ah, this is what you have
+been thinking about? It seemed to me you had something on your mind. I
+wish very much,” he added, “that you would tell me some of these
+so-called reasons—these obligations.”
+
+“They are not real reasons—good reasons,” said Gertrude, looking at the
+pink and yellow gleams in the water.
+
+“I can understand that! Because a handsome girl has had a spark of
+coquetry, that is no reason.”
+
+“If you mean me, it’s not that. I have not done that.”
+
+“It is something that troubles you, at any rate,” said Felix.
+
+“Not so much as it used to,” Gertrude rejoined.
+
+He looked at her, smiling always. “That is not saying much, eh?” But
+she only rested her eyes, very gravely, on the lighted water. She
+seemed to him to be trying to hide the signs of the trouble of which
+she had just told him. Felix felt, at all times, much the same impulse
+to dissipate visible melancholy that a good housewife feels to brush
+away dust. There was something he wished to brush away now; suddenly he
+stopped rowing and poised his oars. “Why should Mr. Brand have
+addressed himself to you, and not to your sister?” he asked. “I am sure
+she would listen to him.”
+
+Gertrude, in her family, was thought capable of a good deal of levity;
+but her levity had never gone so far as this. It moved her greatly,
+however, to hear Felix say that he was sure of something; so that,
+raising her eyes toward him, she tried intently, for some moments, to
+conjure up this wonderful image of a love-affair between her own sister
+and her own suitor. We know that Gertrude had an imaginative mind; so
+that it is not impossible that this effort should have been partially
+successful. But she only murmured, “Ah, Felix! ah, Felix!”
+
+“Why shouldn’t they marry? Try and make them marry!” cried Felix.
+
+“Try and make them?”
+
+“Turn the tables on them. Then they will leave you alone. I will help
+you as far as I can.”
+
+Gertrude’s heart began to beat; she was greatly excited; she had never
+had anything so interesting proposed to her before. Felix had begun to
+row again, and he now sent the boat home with long strokes. “I believe
+she _does_ care for him!” said Gertrude, after they had disembarked.
+
+“Of course she does, and we will marry them off. It will make them
+happy; it will make everyone happy. We shall have a wedding and I will
+write an epithalamium.”
+
+“It seems as if it would make _me_ happy,” said Gertrude.
+
+“To get rid of Mr. Brand, eh? To recover your liberty?”
+
+Gertrude walked on. “To see my sister married to so good a man.”
+
+Felix gave his light laugh. “You always put things on those grounds;
+you will never say anything for yourself. You are all so afraid, here,
+of being selfish. I don’t think you know how,” he went on. “Let me show
+you! It will make me happy for myself, and for just the reverse of what
+I told you a while ago. After that, when I make love to you, you will
+have to think I mean it.”
+
+“I shall never think you mean anything,” said Gertrude. “You are too
+fantastic.”
+
+“Ah,” cried Felix, “that’s a license to say everything! Gertrude, I
+adore you!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+Charlotte and Mr. Brand had not returned when they reached the house;
+but the Baroness had come to tea, and Robert Acton also, who now
+regularly asked for a place at this generous repast or made his
+appearance later in the evening. Clifford Wentworth, with his juvenile
+growl, remarked upon it.
+
+“You are always coming to tea nowadays, Robert,” he said. “I should
+think you had drunk enough tea in China.”
+
+“Since when is Mr. Acton more frequent?” asked the Baroness.
+
+“Since you came,” said Clifford. “It seems as if you were a kind of
+attraction.”
+
+“I suppose I am a curiosity,” said the Baroness. “Give me time and I
+will make you a salon.”
+
+“It would fall to pieces after you go!” exclaimed Acton.
+
+“Don’t talk about her going, in that familiar way,” Clifford said. “It
+makes me feel gloomy.”
+
+Mr. Wentworth glanced at his son, and taking note of these words,
+wondered if Felix had been teaching him, according to the programme he
+had sketched out, to make love to the wife of a German prince.
+
+Charlotte came in late with Mr. Brand; but Gertrude, to whom, at least,
+Felix had taught something, looked in vain, in her face, for the traces
+of a guilty passion. Mr. Brand sat down by Gertrude, and she presently
+asked him why they had not crossed the pond to join Felix and herself.
+
+“It is cruel of you to ask me that,” he answered, very softly. He had a
+large morsel of cake before him; but he fingered it without eating it.
+“I sometimes think you are growing cruel,” he added.
+
+Gertrude said nothing; she was afraid to speak. There was a kind of
+rage in her heart; she felt as if she could easily persuade herself
+that she was persecuted. She said to herself that it was quite right
+that she should not allow him to make her believe she was wrong. She
+thought of what Felix had said to her; she wished indeed Mr. Brand
+would marry Charlotte. She looked away from him and spoke no more. Mr.
+Brand ended by eating his cake, while Felix sat opposite, describing to
+Mr. Wentworth the students’ duels at Heidelberg. After tea they all
+dispersed themselves, as usual, upon the piazza and in the garden; and
+Mr. Brand drew near to Gertrude again.
+
+“I didn’t come to you this afternoon because you were not alone,” he
+began; “because you were with a newer friend.”
+
+“Felix? He is an old friend by this time.”
+
+Mr. Brand looked at the ground for some moments. “I thought I was
+prepared to hear you speak in that way,” he resumed. “But I find it
+very painful.”
+
+“I don’t see what else I can say,” said Gertrude.
+
+Mr. Brand walked beside her for a while in silence; Gertrude wished he
+would go away. “He is certainly very accomplished. But I think I ought
+to advise you.”
+
+“To advise me?”
+
+“I think I know your nature.”
+
+“I think you don’t,” said Gertrude, with a soft laugh.
+
+“You make yourself out worse than you are—to please him,” Mr. Brand
+said, gently.
+
+“Worse—to please him? What do you mean?” asked Gertrude, stopping.
+
+Mr. Brand stopped also, and with the same soft straight-forwardness,
+“He doesn’t care for the things you care for—the great questions of
+life.”
+
+Gertrude, with her eyes on his, shook her head. “I don’t care for the
+great questions of life. They are much beyond me.”
+
+“There was a time when you didn’t say that,” said Mr. Brand.
+
+“Oh,” rejoined Gertrude, “I think you made me talk a great deal of
+nonsense. And it depends,” she added, “upon what you call the great
+questions of life. There are some things I care for.”
+
+“Are they the things you talk about with your cousin?”
+
+“You should not say things to me against my cousin, Mr. Brand,” said
+Gertrude. “That is dishonorable.”
+
+He listened to this respectfully; then he answered, with a little
+vibration of the voice, “I should be very sorry to do anything
+dishonorable. But I don’t see why it is dishonorable to say that your
+cousin is frivolous.”
+
+“Go and say it to himself!”
+
+“I think he would admit it,” said Mr. Brand. “That is the tone he would
+take. He would not be ashamed of it.”
+
+“Then I am not ashamed of it!” Gertrude declared. “That is probably
+what I like him for. I am frivolous myself.”
+
+“You are trying, as I said just now, to lower yourself.”
+
+“I am trying for once to be natural!” cried Gertrude passionately. “I
+have been pretending, all my life; I have been dishonest; it is you
+that have made me so!” Mr. Brand stood gazing at her, and she went on,
+“Why shouldn’t I be frivolous, if I want? One has a right to be
+frivolous, if it’s one’s nature. No, I don’t care for the great
+questions. I care for pleasure—for amusement. Perhaps I am fond of
+wicked things; it is very possible!”
+
+Mr. Brand remained staring; he was even a little pale, as if he had
+been frightened. “I don’t think you know what you are saying!” he
+exclaimed.
+
+“Perhaps not. Perhaps I am talking nonsense. But it is only with you
+that I talk nonsense. I never do so with my cousin.”
+
+“I will speak to you again, when you are less excited,” said Mr. Brand.
+
+“I am always excited when you speak to me. I must tell you that—even if
+it prevents you altogether, in future. Your speaking to me irritates
+me. With my cousin it is very different. That seems quiet and natural.”
+
+He looked at her, and then he looked away, with a kind of helpless
+distress, at the dusky garden and the faint summer stars. After which,
+suddenly turning back, “Gertrude, Gertrude!” he softly groaned. “Am I
+really losing you?”
+
+She was touched—she was pained; but it had already occurred to her that
+she might do something better than say so. It would not have alleviated
+her companion’s distress to perceive, just then, whence she had
+sympathetically borrowed this ingenuity. “I am not sorry for you,”
+Gertrude said; “for in paying so much attention to me you are following
+a shadow—you are wasting something precious. There is something else
+you might have that you don’t look at—something better than I am. That
+is a reality!” And then, with intention, she looked at him and tried to
+smile a little. He thought this smile of hers very strange; but she
+turned away and left him.
+
+She wandered about alone in the garden wondering what Mr. Brand would
+make of her words, which it had been a singular pleasure for her to
+utter. Shortly after, passing in front of the house, she saw at a
+distance two persons standing near the garden gate. It was Mr. Brand
+going away and bidding good-night to Charlotte, who had walked down
+with him from the house. Gertrude saw that the parting was prolonged.
+Then she turned her back upon it. She had not gone very far, however,
+when she heard her sister slowly following her. She neither turned
+round nor waited for her; she knew what Charlotte was going to say.
+Charlotte, who at last overtook her, in fact presently began; she had
+passed her arm into Gertrude’s.
+
+“Will you listen to me, dear, if I say something very particular?”
+
+“I know what you are going to say,” said Gertrude. “Mr. Brand feels
+very badly.”
+
+“Oh, Gertrude, how can you treat him so?” Charlotte demanded. And as
+her sister made no answer she added, “After all he has done for you!”
+
+“What has he done for me?”
+
+“I wonder you can ask, Gertrude. He has helped you so. You told me so
+yourself, a great many times. You told me that he helped you to
+struggle with your—your peculiarities. You told me that he had taught
+you how to govern your temper.”
+
+For a moment Gertrude said nothing. Then, “Was my temper very bad?” she
+asked.
+
+“I am not accusing you, Gertrude,” said Charlotte.
+
+“What are you doing, then?” her sister demanded, with a short laugh.
+
+“I am pleading for Mr. Brand—reminding you of all you owe him.”
+
+“I have given it all back,” said Gertrude, still with her little laugh.
+“He can take back the virtue he imparted! I want to be wicked again.”
+
+Her sister made her stop in the path, and fixed upon her, in the
+darkness, a sweet, reproachful gaze. “If you talk this way I shall
+almost believe it. Think of all we owe Mr. Brand. Think of how he has
+always expected something of you. Think how much he has been to us.
+Think of his beautiful influence upon Clifford.”
+
+“He is very good,” said Gertrude, looking at her sister. “I know he is
+very good. But he shouldn’t speak against Felix.”
+
+“Felix is good,” Charlotte answered, softly but promptly. “Felix is
+very wonderful. Only he is so different. Mr. Brand is much nearer to
+us. I should never think of going to Felix with a trouble—with a
+question. Mr. Brand is much more to us, Gertrude.”
+
+“He is very—very good,” Gertrude repeated. “He is more to you; yes,
+much more. Charlotte,” she added suddenly, “you are in love with him!”
+
+“Oh, Gertrude!” cried poor Charlotte; and her sister saw her blushing
+in the darkness.
+
+Gertrude put her arm round her. “I wish he would marry you!” she went
+on.
+
+Charlotte shook herself free. “You must not say such things!” she
+exclaimed, beneath her breath.
+
+“You like him more than you say, and he likes you more than he knows.”
+
+“This is very cruel of you!” Charlotte Wentworth murmured.
+
+But if it was cruel Gertrude continued pitiless. “Not if it’s true,”
+she answered. “I wish he would marry you.”
+
+“Please don’t say that.”
+
+“I mean to tell him so!” said Gertrude.
+
+“Oh, Gertrude, Gertrude!” her sister almost moaned.
+
+“Yes, if he speaks to me again about myself. I will say, ‘Why don’t you
+marry Charlotte? She’s a thousand times better than I.’”
+
+“You _are_ wicked; you _are_ changed!” cried her sister.
+
+“If you don’t like it you can prevent it,” said Gertrude. “You can
+prevent it by keeping him from speaking to me!” And with this she
+walked away, very conscious of what she had done; measuring it and
+finding a certain joy and a quickened sense of freedom in it.
+
+Mr. Wentworth was rather wide of the mark in suspecting that Clifford
+had begun to pay unscrupulous compliments to his brilliant cousin; for
+the young man had really more scruples than he received credit for in
+his family. He had a certain transparent shamefacedness which was in
+itself a proof that he was not at his ease in dissipation. His
+collegiate peccadilloes had aroused a domestic murmur as disagreeable
+to the young man as the creaking of his boots would have been to a
+house-breaker. Only, as the house-breaker would have simplified matters
+by removing his _chaussures_, it had seemed to Clifford that the
+shortest cut to comfortable relations with people—relations which
+should make him cease to think that when they spoke to him they meant
+something improving—was to renounce all ambition toward a nefarious
+development. And, in fact, Clifford’s ambition took the most
+commendable form. He thought of himself in the future as the well-known
+and much-liked Mr. Wentworth, of Boston, who should, in the natural
+course of prosperity, have married his pretty cousin, Lizzie Acton;
+should live in a wide-fronted house, in view of the Common; and should
+drive, behind a light wagon, over the damp autumn roads, a pair of
+beautifully matched sorrel horses. Clifford’s vision of the coming
+years was very simple; its most definite features were this element of
+familiar matrimony and the duplication of his resources for trotting.
+He had not yet asked his cousin to marry him; but he meant to do so as
+soon as he had taken his degree. Lizzie was serenely conscious of his
+intention, and she had made up her mind that he would improve. Her
+brother, who was very fond of this light, quick, competent little
+Lizzie, saw on his side no reason to interpose. It seemed to him a
+graceful social law that Clifford and his sister should become engaged;
+he himself was not engaged, but everyone else, fortunately, was not
+such a fool as he. He was fond of Clifford, as well, and had his own
+way—of which it must be confessed he was a little ashamed—of looking at
+those aberrations which had led to the young man’s compulsory
+retirement from the neighboring seat of learning. Acton had seen the
+world, as he said to himself; he had been to China and had knocked
+about among men. He had learned the essential difference between a nice
+young fellow and a mean young fellow, and was satisfied that there was
+no harm in Clifford. He believed—although it must be added that he had
+not quite the courage to declare it—in the doctrine of wild oats, and
+thought it a useful preventive of superfluous fears. If Mr. Wentworth
+and Charlotte and Mr. Brand would only apply it in Clifford’s case,
+they would be happier; and Acton thought it a pity they should not be
+happier. They took the boy’s misdemeanors too much to heart; they
+talked to him too solemnly; they frightened and bewildered him. Of
+course there was the great standard of morality, which forbade that a
+man should get tipsy, play at billiards for money, or cultivate his
+sensual consciousness; but what fear was there that poor Clifford was
+going to run a tilt at any great standard? It had, however, never
+occurred to Acton to dedicate the Baroness Münster to the redemption of
+a refractory collegian. The instrument, here, would have seemed to him
+quite too complex for the operation. Felix, on the other hand, had
+spoken in obedience to the belief that the more charming a woman is the
+more numerous, literally, are her definite social uses.
+
+Eugenia herself, as we know, had plenty of leisure to enumerate her
+uses. As I have had the honor of intimating, she had come four thousand
+miles to seek her fortune; and it is not to be supposed that after this
+great effort she could neglect any apparent aid to advancement. It is
+my misfortune that in attempting to describe in a short compass the
+deportment of this remarkable woman I am obliged to express things
+rather brutally. I feel this to be the case, for instance, when I say
+that she had primarily detected such an aid to advancement in the
+person of Robert Acton, but that she had afterwards remembered that a
+prudent archer has always a second bowstring. Eugenia was a woman of
+finely-mingled motive, and her intentions were never sensibly gross.
+She had a sort of aesthetic ideal for Clifford which seemed to her a
+disinterested reason for taking him in hand. It was very well for a
+fresh-colored young gentleman to be ingenuous; but Clifford, really,
+was crude. With such a pretty face he ought to have prettier manners.
+She would teach him that, with a beautiful name, the expectation of a
+large property, and, as they said in Europe, a social position, an only
+son should know how to carry himself.
+
+Once Clifford had begun to come and see her by himself and for himself,
+he came very often. He hardly knew why he should come; he saw her
+almost every evening at his father’s house; he had nothing particular
+to say to her. She was not a young girl, and fellows of his age called
+only upon young girls. He exaggerated her age; she seemed to him an old
+woman; it was happy that the Baroness, with all her intelligence, was
+incapable of guessing this. But gradually it struck Clifford that
+visiting old women might be, if not a natural, at least, as they say of
+some articles of diet, an acquired taste. The Baroness was certainly a
+very amusing old woman; she talked to him as no lady—and indeed no
+gentleman—had ever talked to him before.
+
+“You should go to Europe and make the tour,” she said to him one
+afternoon. “Of course, on leaving college you will go.”
+
+“I don’t want to go,” Clifford declared. “I know some fellows who have
+been to Europe. They say you can have better fun here.”
+
+“That depends. It depends upon your idea of fun. Your friends probably
+were not introduced.”
+
+“Introduced?” Clifford demanded.
+
+“They had no opportunity of going into society; they formed no
+_relations_.” This was one of a certain number of words that the
+Baroness often pronounced in the French manner.
+
+“They went to a ball, in Paris; I know that,” said Clifford.
+
+“Ah, there are balls and balls; especially in Paris. No, you must go,
+you know; it is not a thing from which you can dispense yourself. You
+need it.”
+
+“Oh, I’m very well,” said Clifford. “I’m not sick.”
+
+“I don’t mean for your health, my poor child. I mean for your manners.”
+
+“I haven’t got any manners!” growled Clifford.
+
+“Precisely. You don’t mind my assenting to that, eh?” asked the
+Baroness with a smile. “You must go to Europe and get a few. You can
+get them better there. It is a pity you might not have come while I was
+living in—in Germany. I would have introduced you; I had a charming
+little circle. You would perhaps have been rather young; but the
+younger one begins, I think, the better. Now, at any rate, you have no
+time to lose, and when I return you must immediately come to me.”
+
+All this, to Clifford’s apprehension, was a great mixture—his beginning
+young, Eugenia’s return to Europe, his being introduced to her charming
+little circle. What was he to begin, and what was her little circle?
+His ideas about her marriage had a good deal of vagueness; but they
+were in so far definite as that he felt it to be a matter not to be
+freely mentioned. He sat and looked all round the room; he supposed she
+was alluding in some way to her marriage.
+
+“Oh, I don’t want to go to Germany,” he said; it seemed to him the most
+convenient thing to say.
+
+She looked at him a while, smiling with her lips, but not with her
+eyes.
+
+“You have scruples?” she asked.
+
+“Scruples?” said Clifford.
+
+“You young people, here, are very singular; one doesn’t know where to
+expect you. When you are not extremely improper you are so terribly
+proper. I dare say you think that, owing to my irregular marriage, I
+live with loose people. You were never more mistaken. I have been all
+the more particular.”
+
+“Oh, no,” said Clifford, honestly distressed. “I never thought such a
+thing as that.”
+
+“Are you very sure? I am convinced that your father does, and your
+sisters. They say to each other that here I am on my good behavior, but
+that over there—married by the left hand—I associate with light women.”
+
+“Oh, no,” cried Clifford, energetically, “they don’t say such things as
+that to each other!”
+
+“If they think them they had better say them,” the Baroness rejoined.
+“Then they can be contradicted. Please contradict that whenever you
+hear it, and don’t be afraid of coming to see me on account of the
+company I keep. I have the honor of knowing more distinguished men, my
+poor child, than you are likely to see in a life-time. I see very few
+women; but those are women of rank. So, my dear young Puritan, you
+needn’t be afraid. I am not in the least one of those who think that
+the society of women who have lost their place in the _vrai monde_ is
+necessary to form a young man. I have never taken that tone. I have
+kept my place myself, and I think we are a much better school than the
+others. Trust me, Clifford, and I will prove that to you,” the Baroness
+continued, while she made the agreeable reflection that she could not,
+at least, be accused of perverting her young kinsman. “So if you ever
+fall among thieves don’t go about saying I sent you to them.”
+
+Clifford thought it so comical that he should know—in spite of her
+figurative language—what she meant, and that she should mean what he
+knew, that he could hardly help laughing a little, although he tried
+hard. “Oh, no! oh, no!” he murmured.
+
+“Laugh out, laugh out, if I amuse you!” cried the Baroness. “I am here
+for that!” And Clifford thought her a very amusing person indeed. “But
+remember,” she said on this occasion, “that you are coming—next year—to
+pay me a visit over there.”
+
+About a week afterwards she said to him, point-blank, “Are you
+seriously making love to your little cousin?”
+
+“Seriously making love”—these words, on Madame Münster’s lips, had to
+Clifford’s sense a portentous and embarrassing sound; he hesitated
+about assenting, lest he should commit himself to more than he
+understood. “Well, I shouldn’t say it if I was!” he exclaimed.
+
+“Why wouldn’t you say it?” the Baroness demanded. “Those things ought
+to be known.”
+
+“I don’t care whether it is known or not,” Clifford rejoined. “But I
+don’t want people looking at me.”
+
+“A young man of your importance ought to learn to bear observation—to
+carry himself as if he were quite indifferent to it. I won’t say,
+exactly, unconscious,” the Baroness explained. “No, he must seem to
+know he is observed, and to think it natural he should be; but he must
+appear perfectly used to it. Now you haven’t that, Clifford; you
+haven’t that at all. You must have that, you know. Don’t tell me you
+are not a young man of importance,” Eugenia added. “Don’t say anything
+so flat as that.”
+
+“Oh, no, you don’t catch me saying that!” cried Clifford.
+
+“Yes, you must come to Germany,” Madame Münster continued. “I will show
+you how people can be talked about, and yet not seem to know it. You
+will be talked about, of course, with me; it will be said you are my
+lover. I will show you how little one may mind that—how little I shall
+mind it.”
+
+Clifford sat staring, blushing and laughing. “I shall mind it a good
+deal!” he declared.
+
+“Ah, not too much, you know; that would be uncivil. But I give you
+leave to mind it a little; especially if you have a passion for Miss
+Acton. _Voyons_; as regards that, you either have or you have not. It
+is very simple to say it.”
+
+“I don’t see why you want to know,” said Clifford.
+
+“You ought to want me to know. If one is arranging a marriage, one
+tells one’s friends.”
+
+“Oh, I’m not arranging anything,” said Clifford.
+
+“You don’t intend to marry your cousin?”
+
+“Well, I expect I shall do as I choose!”
+
+The Baroness leaned her head upon the back of her chair and closed her
+eyes, as if she were tired. Then opening them again, “Your cousin is
+very charming!” she said.
+
+“She is the prettiest girl in this place,” Clifford rejoined.
+
+“‘In this place’ is saying little; she would be charming anywhere. I am
+afraid you are entangled.”
+
+“Oh, no, I’m not entangled.”
+
+“Are you engaged? At your age that is the same thing.”
+
+Clifford looked at the Baroness with some audacity. “Will you tell no
+one?”
+
+“If it’s as sacred as that—no.”
+
+“Well, then—we are not!” said Clifford.
+
+“That’s the great secret—that you are not, eh?” asked the Baroness,
+with a quick laugh. “I am very glad to hear it. You are altogether too
+young. A young man in your position must choose and compare; he must
+see the world first. Depend upon it,” she added, “you should not settle
+that matter before you have come abroad and paid me that visit. There
+are several things I should like to call your attention to first.”
+
+“Well, I am rather afraid of that visit,” said Clifford. “It seems to
+me it will be rather like going to school again.”
+
+The Baroness looked at him a moment.
+
+“My dear child,” she said, “there is no agreeable man who has not, at
+some moment, been to school to a clever woman—probably a little older
+than himself. And you must be thankful when you get your instructions
+gratis. With me you would get it gratis.”
+
+The next day Clifford told Lizzie Acton that the Baroness thought her
+the most charming girl she had ever seen.
+
+Lizzie shook her head. “No, she doesn’t!” she said.
+
+“Do you think everything she says,” asked Clifford, “is to be taken the
+opposite way?”
+
+“I think that is!” said Lizzie.
+
+Clifford was going to remark that in this case the Baroness must desire
+greatly to bring about a marriage between Mr. Clifford Wentworth and
+Miss Elizabeth Acton; but he resolved, on the whole, to suppress this
+observation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+It seemed to Robert Acton, after Eugenia had come to his house, that
+something had passed between them which made them a good deal more
+intimate. It was hard to say exactly what, except her telling him that
+she had taken her resolution with regard to the Prince Adolf; for
+Madame Münster’s visit had made no difference in their relations. He
+came to see her very often; but he had come to see her very often
+before. It was agreeable to him to find himself in her little
+drawing-room; but this was not a new discovery. There was a change,
+however, in this sense: that if the Baroness had been a great deal in
+Acton’s thoughts before, she was now never out of them. From the first
+she had been personally fascinating; but the fascination now had become
+intellectual as well. He was constantly pondering her words and
+motions; they were as interesting as the factors in an algebraic
+problem. This is saying a good deal; for Acton was extremely fond of
+mathematics. He asked himself whether it could be that he was in love
+with her, and then hoped he was not; hoped it not so much for his own
+sake as for that of the amatory passion itself. If this was love, love
+had been overrated. Love was a poetic impulse, and his own state of
+feeling with regard to the Baroness was largely characterized by that
+eminently prosaic sentiment—curiosity. It was true, as Acton with his
+quietly cogitative habit observed to himself, that curiosity, pushed to
+a given point, might become a romantic passion; and he certainly
+thought enough about this charming woman to make him restless and even
+a little melancholy. It puzzled and vexed him at times to feel that he
+was not more ardent. He was not in the least bent upon remaining a
+bachelor. In his younger years he had been—or he had tried to be—of the
+opinion that it would be a good deal “jollier” not to marry, and he had
+flattered himself that his single condition was something of a citadel.
+It was a citadel, at all events, of which he had long since leveled the
+outworks. He had removed the guns from the ramparts; he had lowered the
+draw-bridge across the moat. The draw-bridge had swayed lightly under
+Madame Münster’s step; why should he not cause it to be raised again,
+so that she might be kept prisoner? He had an idea that she would
+become—in time at least, and on learning the conveniences of the place
+for making a lady comfortable—a tolerably patient captive. But the
+draw-bridge was never raised, and Acton’s brilliant visitor was as free
+to depart as she had been to come. It was part of his curiosity to know
+why the deuce so susceptible a man was _not_ in love with so charming a
+woman. If her various graces were, as I have said, the factors in an
+algebraic problem, the answer to this question was the indispensable
+unknown quantity. The pursuit of the unknown quantity was extremely
+absorbing; for the present it taxed all Acton’s faculties.
+
+Toward the middle of August he was obliged to leave home for some days;
+an old friend, with whom he had been associated in China, had begged
+him to come to Newport, where he lay extremely ill. His friend got
+better, and at the end of a week Acton was released. I use the word
+“released” advisedly; for in spite of his attachment to his Chinese
+comrade he had been but a half-hearted visitor. He felt as if he had
+been called away from the theatre during the progress of a remarkably
+interesting drama. The curtain was up all this time, and he was losing
+the fourth act; that fourth act which would have been so essential to a
+just appreciation of the fifth. In other words, he was thinking about
+the Baroness, who, seen at this distance, seemed a truly brilliant
+figure. He saw at Newport a great many pretty women, who certainly were
+figures as brilliant as beautiful light dresses could make them; but
+though they talked a great deal—and the Baroness’s strong point was
+perhaps also her conversation—Madame Münster appeared to lose nothing
+by the comparison. He wished she had come to Newport too. Would it not
+be possible to make up, as they said, a party for visiting the famous
+watering-place and invite Eugenia to join it? It was true that the
+complete satisfaction would be to spend a fortnight at Newport with
+Eugenia alone. It would be a great pleasure to see her, in society,
+carry everything before her, as he was sure she would do. When Acton
+caught himself thinking these thoughts he began to walk up and down,
+with his hands in his pockets, frowning a little and looking at the
+floor. What did it prove—for it certainly proved something—this lively
+disposition to be “off” somewhere with Madame Münster, away from all
+the rest of them? Such a vision, certainly, seemed a refined
+implication of matrimony, after the Baroness should have formally got
+rid of her informal husband. At any rate, Acton, with his
+characteristic discretion, forbore to give expression to whatever else
+it might imply, and the narrator of these incidents is not obliged to
+be more definite.
+
+He returned home rapidly, and, arriving in the afternoon, lost as
+little time as possible in joining the familiar circle at Mr.
+Wentworth’s. On reaching the house, however, he found the piazzas
+empty. The doors and windows were open, and their emptiness was made
+clear by the shafts of lamp-light from the parlors. Entering the house,
+he found Mr. Wentworth sitting alone in one of these apartments,
+engaged in the perusal of the _North American Review_. After they had
+exchanged greetings and his cousin had made discreet inquiry about his
+journey, Acton asked what had become of Mr. Wentworth’s companions.
+
+“They are scattered about, amusing themselves as usual,” said the old
+man. “I saw Charlotte, a short time since, seated, with Mr. Brand, upon
+the piazza. They were conversing with their customary animation. I
+suppose they have joined her sister, who, for the hundredth time, was
+doing the honors of the garden to her foreign cousin.”
+
+“I suppose you mean Felix,” said Acton. And on Mr. Wentworth’s
+assenting, he said, “And the others?”
+
+“Your sister has not come this evening. You must have seen her at
+home,” said Mr. Wentworth.
+
+“Yes. I proposed to her to come. She declined.”
+
+“Lizzie, I suppose, was expecting a visitor,” said the old man, with a
+kind of solemn slyness.
+
+“If she was expecting Clifford, he had not turned up.”
+
+Mr. Wentworth, at this intelligence, closed the _North American Review_
+and remarked that he had understood Clifford to say that he was going
+to see his cousin. Privately, he reflected that if Lizzie Acton had had
+no news of his son, Clifford must have gone to Boston for the evening:
+an unnatural course of a summer night, especially when accompanied with
+disingenuous representations.
+
+“You must remember that he has two cousins,” said Acton, laughing. And
+then, coming to the point, “If Lizzie is not here,” he added, “neither
+apparently is the Baroness.”
+
+Mr. Wentworth stared a moment, and remembered that queer proposition of
+Felix’s. For a moment he did not know whether it was not to be wished
+that Clifford, after all, might have gone to Boston. “The Baroness has
+not honored us tonight,” he said. “She has not come over for three
+days.”
+
+“Is she ill?” Acton asked.
+
+“No; I have been to see her.”
+
+“What is the matter with her?”
+
+“Well,” said Mr. Wentworth, “I infer she has tired of us.”
+
+Acton pretended to sit down, but he was restless; he found it
+impossible to talk with Mr. Wentworth. At the end of ten minutes he
+took up his hat and said that he thought he would “go off.” It was very
+late; it was ten o’clock.
+
+His quiet-faced kinsman looked at him a moment. “Are you going home?”
+he asked.
+
+Acton hesitated, and then answered that he had proposed to go over and
+take a look at the Baroness.
+
+“Well, you are honest, at least,” said Mr. Wentworth, sadly.
+
+“So are you, if you come to that!” cried Acton, laughing. “Why
+shouldn’t I be honest?”
+
+The old man opened the _North American_ again, and read a few lines.
+“If we have ever had any virtue among us, we had better keep hold of it
+now,” he said. He was not quoting.
+
+“We have a Baroness among us,” said Acton. “That’s what we must keep
+hold of!” He was too impatient to see Madame Münster again to wonder
+what Mr. Wentworth was talking about. Nevertheless, after he had passed
+out of the house and traversed the garden and the little piece of road
+that separated him from Eugenia’s provisional residence, he stopped a
+moment outside. He stood in her little garden; the long window of her
+parlor was open, and he could see the white curtains, with the
+lamp-light shining through them, swaying softly to and fro in the warm
+night wind. There was a sort of excitement in the idea of seeing Madame
+Münster again; he became aware that his heart was beating rather faster
+than usual. It was this that made him stop, with a half-amused
+surprise. But in a moment he went along the piazza, and, approaching
+the open window, tapped upon its lintel with his stick. He could see
+the Baroness within; she was standing in the middle of the room. She
+came to the window and pulled aside the curtain; then she stood looking
+at him a moment. She was not smiling; she seemed serious.
+
+_“Mais entrez donc!”_ she said at last. Acton passed in across the
+window-sill; he wondered, for an instant, what was the matter with her.
+But the next moment she had begun to smile and had put out her hand.
+“Better late than never,” she said. “It is very kind of you to come at
+this hour.”
+
+“I have just returned from my journey,” said Acton.
+
+“Ah, very kind, very kind,” she repeated, looking about her where to
+sit.
+
+“I went first to the other house,” Acton continued. “I expected to find
+you there.”
+
+She had sunk into her usual chair; but she got up again, and began to
+move about the room. Acton had laid down his hat and stick; he was
+looking at her, conscious that there was in fact a great charm in
+seeing her again. “I don’t know whether I ought to tell you to sit
+down,” she said. “It is too late to begin a visit.”
+
+“It’s too early to end one,” Acton declared; “and we needn’t mind the
+beginning.”
+
+She looked at him again, and, after a moment, dropped once more into
+her low chair, while he took a place near her. “We are in the middle,
+then?” she asked. “Was that where we were when you went away? No, I
+haven’t been to the other house.”
+
+“Not yesterday, nor the day before, eh?”
+
+“I don’t know how many days it is.”
+
+“You are tired of it,” said Acton.
+
+She leaned back in her chair; her arms were folded. “That is a terrible
+accusation, but I have not the courage to defend myself.”
+
+“I am not attacking you,” said Acton. “I expected something of this
+kind.”
+
+“It’s a proof of extreme intelligence. I hope you enjoyed your
+journey.”
+
+“Not at all,” Acton declared. “I would much rather have been here with
+you.”
+
+“Now you _are_ attacking me,” said the Baroness. “You are contrasting
+my inconstancy with your own fidelity.”
+
+“I confess I never get tired of people I like.”
+
+“Ah, you are not a poor wicked foreign woman, with irritable nerves and
+a sophisticated mind!”
+
+“Something has happened to you since I went away,” said Acton, changing
+his place.
+
+“Your going away—that is what has happened to me.”
+
+“Do you mean to say that you have missed me?” he asked.
+
+“If I had meant to say it, it would not be worth your making a note of.
+I am very dishonest and my compliments are worthless.”
+
+Acton was silent for some moments. “You have broken down,” he said at
+last.
+
+Madame Münster left her chair, and began to move about.
+
+“Only for a moment. I shall pull myself together again.”
+
+“You had better not take it too hard. If you are bored, you needn’t be
+afraid to say so—to me at least.”
+
+“You shouldn’t say such things as that,” the Baroness answered. “You
+should encourage me.”
+
+“I admire your patience; that is encouraging.”
+
+“You shouldn’t even say that. When you talk of my patience you are
+disloyal to your own people. Patience implies suffering; and what have
+I had to suffer?”
+
+“Oh, not hunger, not unkindness, certainly,” said Acton, laughing.
+“Nevertheless, we all admire your patience.”
+
+“You all detest me!” cried the Baroness, with a sudden vehemence,
+turning her back toward him.
+
+“You make it hard,” said Acton, getting up, “for a man to say something
+tender to you.” This evening there was something particularly striking
+and touching about her; an unwonted softness and a look of suppressed
+emotion. He felt himself suddenly appreciating the fact that she had
+behaved very well. She had come to this quiet corner of the world under
+the weight of a cruel indignity, and she had been so gracefully,
+modestly thankful for the rest she found there. She had joined that
+simple circle over the way; she had mingled in its plain, provincial
+talk; she had shared its meagre and savorless pleasures. She had set
+herself a task, and she had rigidly performed it. She had conformed to
+the angular conditions of New England life, and she had had the tact
+and pluck to carry it off as if she liked them. Acton felt a more
+downright need than he had ever felt before to tell her that he admired
+her and that she struck him as a very superior woman. All along,
+hitherto, he had been on his guard with her; he had been cautious,
+observant, suspicious. But now a certain light tumult in his blood
+seemed to tell him that a finer degree of confidence in this charming
+woman would be its own reward. “We don’t detest you,” he went on. “I
+don’t know what you mean. At any rate, I speak for myself; I don’t know
+anything about the others. Very likely, you detest them for the dull
+life they make you lead. Really, it would give me a sort of pleasure to
+hear you say so.”
+
+Eugenia had been looking at the door on the other side of the room; now
+she slowly turned her eyes toward Robert Acton. “What can be the
+motive,” she asked, “of a man like you—an honest man, a _galant
+homme_—in saying so base a thing as that?”
+
+“Does it sound very base?” asked Acton, candidly. “I suppose it does,
+and I thank you for telling me so. Of course, I don’t mean it
+literally.”
+
+The Baroness stood looking at him. “How do you mean it?” she asked.
+
+This question was difficult to answer, and Acton, feeling the least bit
+foolish, walked to the open window and looked out. He stood there,
+thinking a moment, and then he turned back. “You know that document
+that you were to send to Germany,” he said. “You called it your
+‘renunciation.’ Did you ever send it?”
+
+Madame Münster’s eyes expanded; she looked very grave. “What a singular
+answer to my question!”
+
+“Oh, it isn’t an answer,” said Acton. “I have wished to ask you, many
+times. I thought it probable you would tell me yourself. The question,
+on my part, seems abrupt now; but it would be abrupt at any time.”
+
+The Baroness was silent a moment; and then, “I think I have told you
+too much!” she said.
+
+This declaration appeared to Acton to have a certain force; he had
+indeed a sense of asking more of her than he offered her. He returned
+to the window, and watched, for a moment, a little star that twinkled
+through the lattice of the piazza. There were at any rate offers enough
+he could make; perhaps he had hitherto not been sufficiently explicit
+in doing so. “I wish you would ask something of me,” he presently said.
+“Is there nothing I can do for you? If you can’t stand this dull life
+any more, let me amuse you!”
+
+The Baroness had sunk once more into a chair, and she had taken up a
+fan which she held, with both hands, to her mouth. Over the top of the
+fan her eyes were fixed on him. “You are very strange tonight,” she
+said, with a little laugh.
+
+“I will do anything in the world,” he rejoined, standing in front of
+her. “Shouldn’t you like to travel about and see something of the
+country? Won’t you go to Niagara? You ought to see Niagara, you know.”
+
+“With you, do you mean?”
+
+“I should be delighted to take you.”
+
+“You alone?”
+
+Acton looked at her, smiling, and yet with a serious air. “Well, yes;
+we might go alone,” he said.
+
+“If you were not what you are,” she answered, “I should feel insulted.”
+
+“How do you mean—what I am?”
+
+“If you were one of the gentlemen I have been used to all my life. If
+you were not a queer Bostonian.”
+
+“If the gentlemen you have been used to have taught you to expect
+insults,” said Acton, “I am glad I am what I am. You had much better
+come to Niagara.”
+
+“If you wish to ‘amuse’ me,” the Baroness declared, “you need go to no
+further expense. You amuse me very effectually.”
+
+He sat down opposite to her; she still held her fan up to her face,
+with her eyes only showing above it. There was a moment’s silence, and
+then he said, returning to his former question, “Have you sent that
+document to Germany?”
+
+Again there was a moment’s silence. The expressive eyes of Madame
+Münster seemed, however, half to break it.
+
+“I will tell you—at Niagara!” she said.
+
+She had hardly spoken when the door at the further end of the room
+opened—the door upon which, some minutes previous, Eugenia had fixed
+her gaze. Clifford Wentworth stood there, blushing and looking rather
+awkward. The Baroness rose, quickly, and Acton, more slowly, did the
+same. Clifford gave him no greeting; he was looking at Eugenia.
+
+“Ah, you were here?” exclaimed Acton.
+
+“He was in Felix’s studio,” said Madame Münster. “He wanted to see his
+sketches.”
+
+Clifford looked at Robert Acton, but said nothing; he only fanned
+himself with his hat. “You chose a bad moment,” said Acton; “you hadn’t
+much light.”
+
+“I hadn’t any!” said Clifford, laughing.
+
+“Your candle went out?” Eugenia asked. “You should have come back here
+and lighted it again.”
+
+Clifford looked at her a moment. “So I have—come back. But I have left
+the candle!”
+
+Eugenia turned away. “You are very stupid, my poor boy. You had better
+go home.”
+
+“Well,” said Clifford, “good-night!”
+
+“Haven’t you a word to throw to a man when he has safely returned from
+a dangerous journey?” Acton asked.
+
+“How do you do?” said Clifford. “I thought—I thought you were——” and he
+paused, looking at the Baroness again.
+
+“You thought I was at Newport, eh? So I was—this morning.”
+
+“Good-night, clever child!” said Madame Münster, over her shoulder.
+
+Clifford stared at her—not at all like a clever child; and then, with
+one of his little facetious growls, took his departure.
+
+“What is the matter with him?” asked Acton, when he was gone. “He
+seemed rather in a muddle.”
+
+Eugenia, who was near the window, glanced out, listening a moment. “The
+matter—the matter”—she answered. “But you don’t say such things here.”
+
+“If you mean that he had been drinking a little, you can say that.”
+
+“He doesn’t drink any more. I have cured him. And in return—he’s in
+love with me.”
+
+It was Acton’s turn to stare. He instantly thought of his sister; but
+he said nothing about her. He began to laugh. “I don’t wonder at his
+passion! But I wonder at his forsaking your society for that of your
+brother’s paint-brushes.”
+
+Eugenia was silent a little. “He had not been in the studio. I invented
+that at the moment.”
+
+“Invented it? For what purpose?”
+
+“He has an idea of being romantic. He has adopted the habit of coming
+to see me at midnight—passing only through the orchard and through
+Felix’s painting-room, which has a door opening that way. It seems to
+amuse him,” added Eugenia, with a little laugh.
+
+Acton felt more surprise than he confessed to, for this was a new view
+of Clifford, whose irregularities had hitherto been quite without the
+romantic element. He tried to laugh again, but he felt rather too
+serious, and after a moment’s hesitation his seriousness explained
+itself. “I hope you don’t encourage him,” he said. “He must not be
+inconstant to poor Lizzie.”
+
+“To your sister?”
+
+“You know they are decidedly intimate,” said Acton.
+
+“Ah,” cried Eugenia, smiling, “has she—has she——”
+
+“I don’t know,” Acton interrupted, “what she has. But I always supposed
+that Clifford had a desire to make himself agreeable to her.”
+
+“Ah, _par exemple!_” the Baroness went on. “The little monster! The
+next time he becomes sentimental I will him tell that he ought to be
+ashamed of himself.”
+
+Acton was silent a moment. “You had better say nothing about it.”
+
+“I had told him as much already, on general grounds,” said the
+Baroness. “But in this country, you know, the relations of young people
+are so extraordinary that one is quite at sea. They are not engaged
+when you would quite say they ought to be. Take Charlotte Wentworth,
+for instance, and that young ecclesiastic. If I were her father I
+should insist upon his marrying her; but it appears to be thought there
+is no urgency. On the other hand, you suddenly learn that a boy of
+twenty and a little girl who is still with her governess—your sister
+has no governess? Well, then, who is never away from her mamma—a young
+couple, in short, between whom you have noticed nothing beyond an
+exchange of the childish pleasantries characteristic of their age, are
+on the point of setting up as man and wife.” The Baroness spoke with a
+certain exaggerated volubility which was in contrast with the languid
+grace that had characterized her manner before Clifford made his
+appearance. It seemed to Acton that there was a spark of irritation in
+her eye—a note of irony (as when she spoke of Lizzie being never away
+from her mother) in her voice. If Madame Münster was irritated, Robert
+Acton was vaguely mystified; she began to move about the room again,
+and he looked at her without saying anything. Presently she took out
+her watch, and, glancing at it, declared that it was three o’clock in
+the morning and that he must go.
+
+“I have not been here an hour,” he said, “and they are still sitting up
+at the other house. You can see the lights. Your brother has not come
+in.”
+
+“Oh, at the other house,” cried Eugenia, “they are terrible people! I
+don’t know what they may do over there. I am a quiet little humdrum
+woman; I have rigid rules and I keep them. One of them is not to have
+visitors in the small hours—especially clever men like you. So
+good-night!”
+
+Decidedly, the Baroness was incisive; and though Acton bade her
+good-night and departed, he was still a good deal mystified.
+
+The next day Clifford Wentworth came to see Lizzie, and Acton, who was
+at home and saw him pass through the garden, took note of the
+circumstance. He had a natural desire to make it tally with Madame
+Münster’s account of Clifford’s disaffection; but his ingenuity,
+finding itself unequal to the task, resolved at last to ask help of the
+young man’s candor. He waited till he saw him going away, and then he
+went out and overtook him in the grounds.
+
+“I wish very much you would answer me a question,” Acton said. “What
+were you doing, last night, at Madame Münster’s?”
+
+Clifford began to laugh and to blush, by no means like a young man with
+a romantic secret. “What did she tell you?” he asked.
+
+“That is exactly what I don’t want to say.”
+
+“Well, I want to tell you the same,” said Clifford; “and unless I know
+it perhaps I can’t.”
+
+They had stopped in a garden path; Acton looked hard at his rosy young
+kinsman. “She said she couldn’t fancy what had got into you; you
+appeared to have taken a violent dislike to her.”
+
+Clifford stared, looking a little alarmed. “Oh, come,” he growled, “you
+don’t mean that!”
+
+“And that when—for common civility’s sake—you came occasionally to the
+house you left her alone and spent your time in Felix’s studio, under
+pretext of looking at his sketches.”
+
+“Oh, come!” growled Clifford, again.
+
+“Did you ever know me to tell an untruth?”
+
+“Yes, lots of them!” said Clifford, seeing an opening, out of the
+discussion, for his sarcastic powers. “Well,” he presently added, “I
+thought you were my father.”
+
+“You knew someone was there?”
+
+“We heard you coming in.”
+
+Acton meditated. “You had been with the Baroness, then?”
+
+“I was in the parlor. We heard your step outside. I thought it was my
+father.”
+
+“And on that,” asked Acton, “you ran away?”
+
+“She told me to go—to go out by the studio.”
+
+Acton meditated more intensely; if there had been a chair at hand he
+would have sat down. “Why should she wish you not to meet your father?”
+
+“Well,” said Clifford, “father doesn’t like to see me there.”
+
+Acton looked askance at his companion and forbore to make any comment
+upon this assertion. “Has he said so,” he asked, “to the Baroness?”
+
+“Well, I hope not,” said Clifford. “He hasn’t said so—in so many
+words—to me. But I know it worries him; and I want to stop worrying
+him. The Baroness knows it, and she wants me to stop, too.”
+
+“To stop coming to see her?”
+
+“I don’t know about that; but to stop worrying father. Eugenia knows
+everything,” Clifford added, with an air of knowingness of his own.
+
+“Ah,” said Acton, interrogatively, “Eugenia knows everything?”
+
+“She knew it was not father coming in.”
+
+“Then why did you go?”
+
+Clifford blushed and laughed afresh. “Well, I was afraid it was. And
+besides, she told me to go, at any rate.”
+
+“Did she think it was I?” Acton asked.
+
+“She didn’t say so.”
+
+Again Robert Acton reflected. “But you didn’t go,” he presently said;
+“you came back.”
+
+“I couldn’t get out of the studio,” Clifford rejoined. “The door was
+locked, and Felix has nailed some planks across the lower half of the
+confounded windows to make the light come in from above. So they were
+no use. I waited there a good while, and then, suddenly, I felt
+ashamed. I didn’t want to be hiding away from my own father. I couldn’t
+stand it any longer. I bolted out, and when I found it was you I was a
+little flurried. But Eugenia carried it off, didn’t she?” Clifford
+added, in the tone of a young humorist whose perception had not been
+permanently clouded by the sense of his own discomfort.
+
+“Beautifully!” said Acton. “Especially,” he continued, “when one
+remembers that you were very imprudent and that she must have been a
+good deal annoyed.”
+
+“Oh,” cried Clifford, with the indifference of a young man who feels
+that however he may have failed of felicity in behavior he is extremely
+just in his impressions, “Eugenia doesn’t care for anything!”
+
+Acton hesitated a moment. “Thank you for telling me this,” he said at
+last. And then, laying his hand on Clifford’s shoulder, he added, “Tell
+me one thing more: are you by chance a little in love with the
+Baroness?”
+
+“No, sir!” said Clifford, almost shaking off his hand.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+The first sunday that followed Robert Acton’s return from Newport
+witnessed a change in the brilliant weather that had long prevailed.
+The rain began to fall and the day was cold and dreary. Mr. Wentworth
+and his daughters put on overshoes and went to church, and Felix Young,
+without overshoes, went also, holding an umbrella over Gertrude. It is
+to be feared that, in the whole observance, this was the privilege he
+most highly valued. The Baroness remained at home; she was in neither a
+cheerful nor a devotional mood. She had, however, never been, during
+her residence in the United States, what is called a regular attendant
+at divine service; and on this particular Sunday morning of which I
+began with speaking she stood at the window of her little drawing-room,
+watching the long arm of a rose tree that was attached to her piazza,
+but a portion of which had disengaged itself, sway to and fro, shake
+and gesticulate, against the dusky drizzle of the sky. Every now and
+then, in a gust of wind, the rose tree scattered a shower of
+water-drops against the window-pane; it appeared to have a kind of
+human movement—a menacing, warning intention. The room was very cold;
+Madame Münster put on a shawl and walked about. Then she determined to
+have some fire; and summoning her ancient negress, the contrast of
+whose polished ebony and whose crimson turban had been at first a
+source of satisfaction to her, she made arrangements for the production
+of a crackling flame. This old woman’s name was Azarina. The Baroness
+had begun by thinking that there would be a savory wildness in her
+talk, and, for amusement, she had encouraged her to chatter. But
+Azarina was dry and prim; her conversation was anything but African;
+she reminded Eugenia of the tiresome old ladies she met in society. She
+knew, however, how to make a fire; so that after she had laid the logs,
+Eugenia, who was terribly bored, found a quarter of an hour’s
+entertainment in sitting and watching them blaze and sputter. She had
+thought it very likely Robert Acton would come and see her; she had not
+met him since that infelicitous evening. But the morning waned without
+his coming; several times she thought she heard his step on the piazza;
+but it was only a window-shutter shaking in a rain-gust. The Baroness,
+since the beginning of that episode in her career of which a slight
+sketch has been attempted in these pages, had had many moments of
+irritation. But today her irritation had a peculiar keenness; it
+appeared to feed upon itself. It urged her to do something; but it
+suggested no particularly profitable line of action. If she could have
+done something at the moment, on the spot, she would have stepped upon
+a European steamer and turned her back, with a kind of rapture, upon
+that profoundly mortifying failure, her visit to her American
+relations. It is not exactly apparent why she should have termed this
+enterprise a failure, inasmuch as she had been treated with the highest
+distinction for which allowance had been made in American institutions.
+Her irritation came, at bottom, from the sense, which, always present,
+had suddenly grown acute, that the social soil on this big, vague
+continent was somehow not adapted for growing those plants whose
+fragrance she especially inclined to inhale and by which she liked to
+see herself surrounded—a species of vegetation for which she carried a
+collection of seedlings, as we may say, in her pocket. She found her
+chief happiness in the sense of exerting a certain power and making a
+certain impression; and now she felt the annoyance of a rather wearied
+swimmer who, on nearing shore, to land, finds a smooth straight wall of
+rock when he had counted upon a clean firm beach. Her power, in the
+American air, seemed to have lost its prehensile attributes; the smooth
+wall of rock was insurmountable. _“Surely je n’en suis pas là,”_ she
+said to herself, “that I let it make me uncomfortable that a Mr. Robert
+Acton shouldn’t honor me with a visit!” Yet she was vexed that he had
+not come; and she was vexed at her vexation.
+
+Her brother, at least, came in, stamping in the hall and shaking the
+wet from his coat. In a moment he entered the room, with a glow in his
+cheek and half-a-dozen rain-drops glistening on his moustache. “Ah, you
+have a fire,” he said.
+
+_“Les beaux jours sont passés,”_ replied the Baroness.
+
+“Never, never! They have only begun,” Felix declared, planting himself
+before the hearth. He turned his back to the fire, placed his hands
+behind him, extended his legs and looked away through the window with
+an expression of face which seemed to denote the perception of
+rose-color even in the tints of a wet Sunday.
+
+His sister, from her chair, looked up at him, watching him; and what
+she saw in his face was not grateful to her present mood. She was
+puzzled by many things, but her brother’s disposition was a frequent
+source of wonder to her. I say frequent and not constant, for there
+were long periods during which she gave her attention to other
+problems. Sometimes she had said to herself that his happy temper, his
+eternal gaiety, was an affectation, a _pose_; but she was vaguely
+conscious that during the present summer he had been a highly
+successful comedian. They had never yet had an explanation; she had not
+known the need of one. Felix was presumably following the bent of his
+disinterested genius, and she felt that she had no advice to give him
+that he would understand. With this, there was always a certain element
+of comfort about Felix—the assurance that he would not interfere. He
+was very delicate, this pure-minded Felix; in effect, he was her
+brother, and Madame Münster felt that there was a great propriety,
+every way, in that. It is true that Felix was delicate; he was not fond
+of explanations with his sister; this was one of the very few things in
+the world about which he was uncomfortable. But now he was not thinking
+of anything uncomfortable.
+
+“Dear brother,” said Eugenia at last, “do stop making _les yeux doux_
+at the rain.”
+
+“With pleasure. I will make them at you!” answered Felix.
+
+“How much longer,” asked Eugenia, in a moment, “do you propose to
+remain in this lovely spot?”
+
+Felix stared. “Do you want to go away—already?”
+
+“‘Already’ is delicious. I am not so happy as you.”
+
+Felix dropped into a chair, looking at the fire. “The fact is I _am_
+happy,” he said in his light, clear tone.
+
+“And do you propose to spend your life in making love to Gertrude
+Wentworth?”
+
+“Yes!” said Felix, smiling sidewise at his sister.
+
+The Baroness returned his glance, much more gravely; and then, “Do you
+like her?” she asked.
+
+“Don’t you?” Felix demanded.
+
+The Baroness was silent a moment. “I will answer you in the words of
+the gentleman who was asked if he liked music: _‘Je ne la crains
+pas!’’_”
+
+“She admires you immensely,” said Felix.
+
+“I don’t care for that. Other women should not admire one.”
+
+“They should dislike you?”
+
+Again Madame Münster hesitated. “They should hate me! It’s a measure of
+the time I have been losing here that they don’t.”
+
+“No time is lost in which one has been happy!” said Felix, with a
+bright sententiousness which may well have been a little irritating.
+
+“And in which,” rejoined his sister, with a harsher laugh, “one has
+secured the affections of a young lady with a fortune!”
+
+Felix explained, very candidly and seriously. “I have secured
+Gertrude’s affection, but I am by no means sure that I have secured her
+fortune. That may come—or it may not.”
+
+“Ah, well, it _may!_ That’s the great point.”
+
+“It depends upon her father. He doesn’t smile upon our union. You know
+he wants her to marry Mr. Brand.”
+
+“I know nothing about it!” cried the Baroness. “Please to put on a
+log.” Felix complied with her request and sat watching the quickening
+of the flame. Presently his sister added, “And you propose to elope
+with mademoiselle?”
+
+“By no means. I don’t wish to do anything that’s disagreeable to Mr.
+Wentworth. He has been far too kind to us.”
+
+“But you must choose between pleasing yourself and pleasing him.”
+
+“I want to please everyone!” exclaimed Felix, joyously. “I have a good
+conscience. I made up my mind at the outset that it was not my place to
+make love to Gertrude.”
+
+“So, to simplify matters, she made love to you!”
+
+Felix looked at his sister with sudden gravity. “You say you are not
+afraid of her,” he said. “But perhaps you ought to be—a little. She’s a
+very clever person.”
+
+“I begin to see it!” cried the Baroness. Her brother, making no
+rejoinder, leaned back in his chair, and there was a long silence. At
+last, with an altered accent, Madame Münster put another question. “You
+expect, at any rate, to marry?”
+
+“I shall be greatly disappointed if we don’t.”
+
+“A disappointment or two will do you good!” the Baroness declared.
+“And, afterwards, do you mean to turn American?”
+
+“It seems to me I am a very good American already. But we shall go to
+Europe. Gertrude wants extremely to see the world.”
+
+“Ah, like me, when I came here!” said the Baroness, with a little
+laugh.
+
+“No, not like you,” Felix rejoined, looking at his sister with a
+certain gentle seriousness. While he looked at her she rose from her
+chair, and he also got up. “Gertrude is not at all like you,” he went
+on; “but in her own way she is almost as clever.” He paused a moment;
+his soul was full of an agreeable feeling and of a lively disposition
+to express it. His sister, to his spiritual vision, was always like the
+lunar disk when only a part of it is lighted. The shadow on this bright
+surface seemed to him to expand and to contract; but whatever its
+proportions, he always appreciated the moonlight. He looked at the
+Baroness, and then he kissed her. “I am very much in love with
+Gertrude,” he said. Eugenia turned away and walked about the room, and
+Felix continued. “She is very interesting, and very different from what
+she seems. She has never had a chance. She is very brilliant. We will
+go to Europe and amuse ourselves.”
+
+The Baroness had gone to the window, where she stood looking out. The
+day was drearier than ever; the rain was doggedly falling. “Yes, to
+amuse yourselves,” she said at last, “you had decidedly better go to
+Europe!” Then she turned round, looking at her brother. A chair stood
+near her; she leaned her hands upon the back of it. “Don’t you think it
+is very good of me,” she asked, “to come all this way with you simply
+to see you properly married—if properly it is?”
+
+“Oh, it will be properly!” cried Felix, with light eagerness.
+
+The Baroness gave a little laugh. “You are thinking only of yourself,
+and you don’t answer my question. While you are amusing yourself—with
+the brilliant Gertrude—what shall I be doing?”
+
+_“Vous serez de la partie!”_ cried Felix.
+
+“Thank you: I should spoil it.” The Baroness dropped her eyes for some
+moments. “Do you propose, however, to leave me here?” she inquired.
+
+Felix smiled at her. “My dearest sister, where you are concerned I
+never propose. I execute your commands.”
+
+“I believe,” said Eugenia, slowly, “that you are the most heartless
+person living. Don’t you see that I am in trouble?”
+
+“I saw that you were not cheerful, and I gave you some good news.”
+
+“Well, let me give you some news,” said the Baroness. “You probably
+will not have discovered it for yourself. Robert Acton wants to marry
+me.”
+
+“No, I had not discovered that. But I quite understand it. Why does it
+make you unhappy?”
+
+“Because I can’t decide.”
+
+“Accept him, accept him!” cried Felix, joyously. “He is the best fellow
+in the world.”
+
+“He is immensely in love with me,” said the Baroness.
+
+“And he has a large fortune. Permit me in turn to remind you of that.”
+
+“Oh, I am perfectly aware of it,” said Eugenia. “That’s a great item in
+his favor. I am terribly candid.” And she left her place and came
+nearer her brother, looking at him hard. He was turning over several
+things; she was wondering in what manner he really understood her.
+
+There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said,
+and there was what she meant, and there was something, between the two,
+that was neither. It is probable that, in the last analysis, what she
+meant was that Felix should spare her the necessity of stating the case
+more exactly and should hold himself commissioned to assist her by all
+honorable means to marry the best fellow in the world. But in all this
+it was never discovered what Felix understood.
+
+“Once you have your liberty, what are your objections?” he asked.
+
+“Well, I don’t particularly like him.”
+
+“Oh, try a little.”
+
+“I am trying now,” said Eugenia. “I should succeed better if he didn’t
+live here. I could never live here.”
+
+“Make him go to Europe,” Felix suggested.
+
+“Ah, there you speak of happiness based upon violent effort,” the
+Baroness rejoined. “That is not what I am looking for. He would never
+live in Europe.”
+
+“He would live anywhere, with you!” said Felix, gallantly.
+
+His sister looked at him still, with a ray of penetration in her
+charming eyes; then she turned away again. “You see, at all events,”
+she presently went on, “that if it had been said of me that I had come
+over here to seek my fortune it would have to be added that I have
+found it!”
+
+“Don’t leave it lying!” urged Felix, with smiling solemnity.
+
+“I am much obliged to you for your interest,” his sister declared,
+after a moment. “But promise me one thing: _pas de zèle!_ If Mr. Acton
+should ask you to plead his cause, excuse yourself.”
+
+“I shall certainly have the excuse,” said Felix, “that I have a cause
+of my own to plead.”
+
+“If he should talk of me—favorably,” Eugenia continued, “warn him
+against dangerous illusions. I detest importunities; I want to decide
+at my leisure, with my eyes open.”
+
+“I shall be discreet,” said Felix, “except to you. To you I will say,
+Accept him outright.”
+
+She had advanced to the open doorway, and she stood looking at him. “I
+will go and dress and think of it,” she said; and he heard her moving
+slowly to her apartments.
+
+Late in the afternoon the rain stopped, and just afterwards there was a
+great flaming, flickering, trickling sunset. Felix sat in his
+painting-room and did some work; but at last, as the light, which had
+not been brilliant, began to fade, he laid down his brushes and came
+out to the little piazza of the cottage. Here he walked up and down for
+some time, looking at the splendid blaze of the western sky and saying,
+as he had often said before, that this was certainly the country of
+sunsets. There was something in these glorious deeps of fire that
+quickened his imagination; he always found images and promises in the
+western sky. He thought of a good many things—of roaming about the
+world with Gertrude Wentworth; he seemed to see their possible
+adventures, in a glowing frieze, between the cloud-bars; then of what
+Eugenia had just been telling him. He wished very much that Madame
+Münster would make a comfortable and honorable marriage. Presently, as
+the sunset expanded and deepened, the fancy took him of making a note
+of so magnificent a piece of coloring. He returned to his studio and
+fetched out a small panel, with his palette and brushes, and, placing
+the panel against a window-sill, he began to daub with great gusto.
+While he was so occupied he saw Mr. Brand, in the distance, slowly come
+down from Mr. Wentworth’s house, nursing a large folded umbrella. He
+walked with a joyless, meditative tread, and his eyes were bent upon
+the ground. Felix poised his brush for a moment, watching him; then, by
+a sudden impulse, as he drew nearer, advanced to the garden-gate and
+signaled to him—the palette and bunch of brushes contributing to this
+effect.
+
+Mr. Brand stopped and started; then he appeared to decide to accept
+Felix’s invitation. He came out of Mr. Wentworth’s gate and passed
+along the road; after which he entered the little garden of the
+cottage. Felix had gone back to his sunset; but he made his visitor
+welcome while he rapidly brushed it in.
+
+“I wanted so much to speak to you that I thought I would call you,” he
+said, in the friendliest tone. “All the more that you have been to see
+me so little. You have come to see my sister; I know that. But you
+haven’t come to see me—the celebrated artist. Artists are very
+sensitive, you know; they notice those things.” And Felix turned round,
+smiling, with a brush in his mouth.
+
+Mr. Brand stood there with a certain blank, candid majesty, pulling
+together the large flaps of his umbrella. “Why should I come to see
+you?” he asked. “I know nothing of Art.”
+
+“It would sound very conceited, I suppose,” said Felix, “if I were to
+say that it would be a good little chance for you to learn something.
+You would ask me why you should learn; and I should have no answer to
+that. I suppose a minister has no need for Art, eh?”
+
+“He has need for good temper, sir,” said Mr. Brand, with decision.
+
+Felix jumped up, with his palette on his thumb and a movement of the
+liveliest deprecation. “That’s because I keep you standing there while
+I splash my red paint! I beg a thousand pardons! You see what bad
+manners Art gives a man; and how right you are to let it alone. I
+didn’t mean you should stand, either. The piazza, as you see, is
+ornamented with rustic chairs; though indeed I ought to warn you that
+they have nails in the wrong places. I was just making a note of that
+sunset. I never saw such a blaze of different reds. It looks as if the
+Celestial City were in flames, eh? If that were really the case I
+suppose it would be the business of you theologians to put out the
+fire. Fancy me—an ungodly artist—quietly sitting down to paint it!”
+
+Mr. Brand had always credited Felix Young with a certain impudence, but
+it appeared to him that on this occasion his impudence was so great as
+to make a special explanation—or even an apology—necessary. And the
+impression, it must be added, was sufficiently natural. Felix had at
+all times a brilliant assurance of manner which was simply the vehicle
+of his good spirits and his good will; but at present he had a special
+design, and as he would have admitted that the design was audacious, so
+he was conscious of having summoned all the arts of conversation to his
+aid. But he was so far from desiring to offend his visitor that he was
+rapidly asking himself what personal compliment he could pay the young
+clergyman that would gratify him most. If he could think of it, he was
+prepared to pay it down. “Have you been preaching one of your beautiful
+sermons today?” he suddenly asked, laying down his palette. This was
+not what Felix had been trying to think of, but it was a tolerable
+stop-gap.
+
+Mr. Brand frowned—as much as a man can frown who has very fair, soft
+eyebrows, and, beneath them, very gentle, tranquil eyes. “No, I have
+not preached any sermon today. Did you bring me over here for the
+purpose of making that inquiry?”
+
+Felix saw that he was irritated, and he regretted it immensely; but he
+had no fear of not being, in the end, agreeable to Mr. Brand. He looked
+at him, smiling and laying his hand on his arm. “No, no, not for
+that—not for that. I wanted to ask you something; I wanted to tell you
+something. I am sure it will interest you very much. Only—as it is
+something rather private—we had better come into my little studio. I
+have a western window; we can still see the sunset. _Andiamo!_” And he
+gave a little pat to his companion’s arm.
+
+He led the way in; Mr. Brand stiffly and softly followed. The twilight
+had thickened in the little studio; but the wall opposite the western
+window was covered with a deep pink flush. There were a great many
+sketches and half-finished canvasses suspended in this rosy glow, and
+the corners of the room were vague and dusky. Felix begged Mr. Brand to
+sit down; then glancing round him, “By Jove, how pretty it looks!” he
+cried. But Mr. Brand would not sit down; he went and leaned against the
+window; he wondered what Felix wanted of him. In the shadow, on the
+darker parts of the wall, he saw the gleam of three or four pictures
+that looked fantastic and surprising. They seemed to represent naked
+figures. Felix stood there, with his head a little bent and his eyes
+fixed upon his visitor, smiling intensely, pulling his moustache. Mr.
+Brand felt vaguely uneasy. “It is very delicate—what I want to say,”
+Felix began. “But I have been thinking of it for some time.”
+
+“Please to say it as quickly as possible,” said Mr. Brand.
+
+“It’s because you are a clergyman, you know,” Felix went on. “I don’t
+think I should venture to say it to a common man.”
+
+Mr. Brand was silent a moment. “If it is a question of yielding to a
+weakness, of resenting an injury, I am afraid I am a very common man.”
+
+“My dearest friend,” cried Felix, “this is not an injury; it’s a
+benefit—a great service! You will like it extremely. Only it’s so
+delicate!” And, in the dim light, he continued to smile intensely. “You
+know I take a great interest in my cousins—in Charlotte and Gertrude
+Wentworth. That’s very evident from my having traveled some five
+thousand miles to see them.” Mr. Brand said nothing and Felix
+proceeded. “Coming into their society as a perfect stranger I received
+of course a great many new impressions, and my impressions had a great
+freshness, a great keenness. Do you know what I mean?”
+
+“I am not sure that I do; but I should like you to continue.”
+
+“I think my impressions have always a good deal of freshness,” said Mr.
+Brand’s entertainer; “but on this occasion it was perhaps particularly
+natural that—coming in, as I say, from outside—I should be struck with
+things that passed unnoticed among yourselves. And then I had my sister
+to help me; and she is simply the most observant woman in the world.”
+
+“I am not surprised,” said Mr. Brand, “that in our little circle two
+intelligent persons should have found food for observation. I am sure
+that, of late, I have found it myself!”
+
+“Ah, but I shall surprise you yet!” cried Felix, laughing. “Both my
+sister and I took a great fancy to my cousin Charlotte.”
+
+“Your cousin Charlotte?” repeated Mr. Brand.
+
+“We fell in love with her from the first!”
+
+“You fell in love with Charlotte?” Mr. Brand murmured.
+
+“_Dame!_” exclaimed Felix, “she’s a very charming person; and Eugenia
+was especially smitten.” Mr. Brand stood staring, and he pursued,
+“Affection, you know, opens one’s eyes, and we noticed something.
+Charlotte is not happy! Charlotte is in love.” And Felix, drawing
+nearer, laid his hand again upon his companion’s arm.
+
+There was something akin to an acknowledgment of fascination in the way
+Mr. Brand looked at him; but the young clergyman retained as yet quite
+enough self-possession to be able to say, with a good deal of
+solemnity, “She is not in love with you.”
+
+Felix gave a light laugh, and rejoined with the alacrity of a maritime
+adventurer who feels a puff of wind in his sail. “Ah, no; if she were
+in love with me I should know it! I am not so blind as you.”
+
+“As I?”
+
+“My dear sir, you are stone blind. Poor Charlotte is dead in love with
+_you!_”
+
+Mr. Brand said nothing for a moment; he breathed a little heavily. “Is
+that what you wanted to say to me?” he asked.
+
+“I have wanted to say it these three weeks. Because of late she has
+been worse. I told you,” added Felix, “it was very delicate.”
+
+“Well, sir”—Mr. Brand began; “well, sir——”
+
+“I was sure you didn’t know it,” Felix continued. “But don’t you see—as
+soon as I mention it—how everything is explained?” Mr. Brand answered
+nothing; he looked for a chair and softly sat down. Felix could see
+that he was blushing; he had looked straight at his host hitherto, but
+now he looked away. The foremost effect of what he had heard had been a
+sort of irritation of his modesty. “Of course,” said Felix, “I suggest
+nothing; it would be very presumptuous in me to advise you. But I think
+there is no doubt about the fact.”
+
+Mr. Brand looked hard at the floor for some moments; he was oppressed
+with a mixture of sensations. Felix, standing there, was very sure that
+one of them was profound surprise. The innocent young man had been
+completely unsuspicious of poor Charlotte’s hidden flame. This gave
+Felix great hope; he was sure that Mr. Brand would be flattered. Felix
+thought him very transparent, and indeed he was so; he could neither
+simulate nor dissimulate. “I scarcely know what to make of this,” he
+said at last, without looking up; and Felix was struck with the fact
+that he offered no protest or contradiction. Evidently Felix had
+kindled a train of memories—a retrospective illumination. It was
+making, to Mr. Brand’s astonished eyes, a very pretty blaze; his second
+emotion had been a gratification of vanity.
+
+“Thank me for telling you,” Felix rejoined. “It’s a good thing to
+know.”
+
+“I am not sure of that,” said Mr. Brand.
+
+“Ah, don’t let her languish!” Felix murmured, lightly and softly.
+
+“You _do_ advise me, then?” And Mr. Brand looked up.
+
+“I congratulate you!” said Felix, smiling. He had thought at first his
+visitor was simply appealing; but he saw he was a little ironical.
+
+“It is in your interest; you have interfered with me,” the young
+clergyman went on.
+
+Felix still stood and smiled. The little room had grown darker, and the
+crimson glow had faded; but Mr. Brand could see the brilliant
+expression of his face. “I won’t pretend not to know what you mean,”
+said Felix at last. “But I have not really interfered with you. Of what
+you had to lose—with another person—you have lost nothing. And think
+what you have gained!”
+
+“It seems to me I am the proper judge, on each side,” Mr. Brand
+declared. He got up, holding the brim of his hat against his mouth and
+staring at Felix through the dusk.
+
+“You have lost an illusion!” said Felix.
+
+“What do you call an illusion?”
+
+“The belief that you really know—that you have ever really
+known—Gertrude Wentworth. Depend upon that,” pursued Felix. “I don’t
+know her yet; but I have no illusions; I don’t pretend to.”
+
+Mr. Brand kept gazing, over his hat. “She has always been a lucid,
+limpid nature,” he said, solemnly.
+
+“She has always been a dormant nature. She was waiting for a
+touchstone. But now she is beginning to awaken.”
+
+“Don’t praise her to me!” said Mr. Brand, with a little quaver in his
+voice. “If you have the advantage of me that is not generous.”
+
+“My dear sir, I am melting with generosity!” exclaimed Felix. “And I am
+not praising my cousin. I am simply attempting a scientific definition
+of her. She doesn’t care for abstractions. Now I think the contrary is
+what you have always fancied—is the basis on which you have been
+building. She is extremely preoccupied with the concrete. I care for
+the concrete, too. But Gertrude is stronger than I; she whirls me
+along!”
+
+Mr. Brand looked for a moment into the crown of his hat. “It’s a most
+interesting nature.”
+
+“So it is,” said Felix. “But it pulls—it pulls—like a runaway horse.
+Now I like the feeling of a runaway horse; and if I am thrown out of
+the vehicle it is no great matter. But if _you_ should be thrown, Mr.
+Brand”—and Felix paused a moment—“another person also would suffer from
+the accident.”
+
+“What other person?”
+
+“Charlotte Wentworth!”
+
+Mr. Brand looked at Felix for a moment sidewise, mistrustfully; then
+his eyes slowly wandered over the ceiling. Felix was sure he was
+secretly struck with the romance of the situation. “I think this is
+none of our business,” the young minister murmured.
+
+“None of mine, perhaps; but surely yours!”
+
+Mr. Brand lingered still, looking at the ceiling; there was evidently
+something he wanted to say. “What do you mean by Miss Gertrude being
+strong?” he asked abruptly.
+
+“Well,” said Felix meditatively, “I mean that she has had a great deal
+of self-possession. She was waiting—for years; even when she seemed,
+perhaps, to be living in the present. She knew how to wait; she had a
+purpose. That’s what I mean by her being strong.”
+
+“But what do you mean by her purpose?”
+
+“Well—the purpose to see the world!”
+
+Mr. Brand eyed his strange informant askance again; but he said
+nothing. At last he turned away, as if to take leave. He seemed
+bewildered, however; for instead of going to the door he moved toward
+the opposite corner of the room. Felix stood and watched him for a
+moment—almost groping about in the dusk; then he led him to the door,
+with a tender, almost fraternal movement. “Is that all you have to
+say?” asked Mr. Brand.
+
+“Yes, it’s all—but it will bear a good deal of thinking of.”
+
+Felix went with him to the garden-gate, and watched him slowly walk
+away into the thickening twilight with a relaxed rigidity that tried to
+rectify itself. “He is offended, excited, bewildered, perplexed—and
+enchanted!” Felix said to himself. “That’s a capital mixture.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Since that visit paid by the Baroness Münster to Mrs. Acton, of which
+some account was given at an earlier stage of this narrative, the
+intercourse between these two ladies had been neither frequent nor
+intimate. It was not that Mrs. Acton had failed to appreciate Madame
+Münster’s charms; on the contrary, her perception of the graces of
+manner and conversation of her brilliant visitor had been only too
+acute. Mrs. Acton was, as they said in Boston, very “intense,” and her
+impressions were apt to be too many for her. The state of her health
+required the restriction of emotion; and this is why, receiving, as she
+sat in her eternal arm-chair, very few visitors, even of the soberest
+local type, she had been obliged to limit the number of her interviews
+with a lady whose costume and manner recalled to her imagination—Mrs.
+Acton’s imagination was a marvel—all that she had ever read of the most
+stirring historical periods. But she had sent the Baroness a great many
+quaintly-worded messages and a great many nosegays from her garden and
+baskets of beautiful fruit. Felix had eaten the fruit, and the Baroness
+had arranged the flowers and returned the baskets and the messages. On
+the day that followed that rainy Sunday of which mention has been made,
+Eugenia determined to go and pay the beneficent invalid a _“visite
+d’adieux”_; so it was that, to herself, she qualified her enterprise.
+It may be noted that neither on the Sunday evening nor on the Monday
+morning had she received that expected visit from Robert Acton. To his
+own consciousness, evidently he was “keeping away;” and as the
+Baroness, on her side, was keeping away from her uncle’s, whither, for
+several days, Felix had been the unembarrassed bearer of apologies and
+regrets for absence, chance had not taken the cards from the hands of
+design. Mr. Wentworth and his daughters had respected Eugenia’s
+seclusion; certain intervals of mysterious retirement appeared to them,
+vaguely, a natural part of the graceful, rhythmic movement of so
+remarkable a life. Gertrude especially held these periods in honor; she
+wondered what Madame Münster did at such times, but she would not have
+permitted herself to inquire too curiously.
+
+The long rain had freshened the air, and twelve hours’ brilliant
+sunshine had dried the roads; so that the Baroness, in the late
+afternoon, proposing to walk to Mrs. Acton’s, exposed herself to no
+great discomfort. As with her charming undulating step she moved along
+the clean, grassy margin of the road, beneath the thickly-hanging
+boughs of the orchards, through the quiet of the hour and place and the
+rich maturity of the summer, she was even conscious of a sort of
+luxurious melancholy. The Baroness had the amiable weakness of
+attaching herself to places—even when she had begun with a little
+aversion; and now, with the prospect of departure, she felt tenderly
+toward this well-wooded corner of the Western world, where the sunsets
+were so beautiful and one’s ambitions were so pure. Mrs. Acton was able
+to receive her; but on entering this lady’s large, freshly-scented room
+the Baroness saw that she was looking very ill. She was wonderfully
+white and transparent, and, in her flowered arm-chair, she made no
+attempt to move. But she flushed a little—like a young girl, the
+Baroness thought—and she rested her clear, smiling eyes upon those of
+her visitor. Her voice was low and monotonous, like a voice that had
+never expressed any human passions.
+
+“I have come to bid you good-bye,” said Eugenia. “I shall soon be going
+away.”
+
+“When are you going away?”
+
+“Very soon—any day.”
+
+“I am very sorry,” said Mrs. Acton. “I hoped you would stay—always.”
+
+“Always?” Eugenia demanded.
+
+“Well, I mean a long time,” said Mrs. Acton, in her sweet, feeble tone.
+“They tell me you are so comfortable—that you have got such a beautiful
+little house.”
+
+Eugenia stared—that is, she smiled; she thought of her poor little
+chalet and she wondered whether her hostess were jesting. “Yes, my
+house is exquisite,” she said; “though not to be compared to yours.”
+
+“And my son is so fond of going to see you,” Mrs. Acton added. “I am
+afraid my son will miss you.”
+
+“Ah, dear madam,” said Eugenia, with a little laugh, “I can’t stay in
+America for your son!”
+
+“Don’t you like America?”
+
+The Baroness looked at the front of her dress. “If I liked it—that
+would not be staying for your son!”
+
+Mrs. Acton gazed at her with her grave, tender eyes, as if she had not
+quite understood. The Baroness at last found something irritating in
+the sweet, soft stare of her hostess; and if one were not bound to be
+merciful to great invalids she would almost have taken the liberty of
+pronouncing her, mentally, a fool. “I am afraid, then, I shall never
+see you again,” said Mrs. Acton. “You know I am dying.”
+
+“Ah, dear madam,” murmured Eugenia.
+
+“I want to leave my children cheerful and happy. My daughter will
+probably marry her cousin.”
+
+“Two such interesting young people,” said the Baroness, vaguely. She
+was not thinking of Clifford Wentworth.
+
+“I feel so tranquil about my end,” Mrs. Acton went on. “It is coming so
+easily, so surely.” And she paused, with her mild gaze always on
+Eugenia’s.
+
+The Baroness hated to be reminded of death; but even in its imminence,
+so far as Mrs. Acton was concerned, she preserved her good manners.
+“Ah, madam, you are too charming an invalid,” she rejoined.
+
+But the delicacy of this rejoinder was apparently lost upon her
+hostess, who went on in her low, reasonable voice. “I want to leave my
+children bright and comfortable. You seem to me all so happy here—just
+as you are. So I wish you could stay. It would be so pleasant for
+Robert.”
+
+Eugenia wondered what she meant by its being pleasant for Robert; but
+she felt that she would never know what such a woman as that meant. She
+got up; she was afraid Mrs. Acton would tell her again that she was
+dying. “Good-bye, dear madam,” she said. “I must remember that your
+strength is precious.”
+
+Mrs. Acton took her hand and held it a moment. “Well, you _have_ been
+happy here, haven’t you? And you like us all, don’t you? I wish you
+would stay,” she added, “in your beautiful little house.”
+
+She had told Eugenia that her waiting-woman would be in the hall, to
+show her downstairs; but the large landing outside her door was empty,
+and Eugenia stood there looking about. She felt irritated; the dying
+lady had not _“la main heureuse.”_ She passed slowly downstairs, still
+looking about. The broad staircase made a great bend, and in the angle
+was a high window, looking westward, with a deep bench, covered with a
+row of flowering plants in curious old pots of blue china-ware. The
+yellow afternoon light came in through the flowers and flickered a
+little on the white wainscots. Eugenia paused a moment; the house was
+perfectly still, save for the ticking, somewhere, of a great clock. The
+lower hall stretched away at the foot of the stairs, half covered over
+with a large Oriental rug. Eugenia lingered a little, noticing a great
+many things. _“Comme c’est bien!”_ she said to herself; such a large,
+solid, irreproachable basis of existence the place seemed to her to
+indicate. And then she reflected that Mrs. Acton was soon to withdraw
+from it. The reflection accompanied her the rest of the way downstairs,
+where she paused again, making more observations. The hall was
+extremely broad, and on either side of the front door was a wide,
+deeply-set window, which threw the shadows of everything back into the
+house. There were high-backed chairs along the wall and big Eastern
+vases upon tables, and, on either side, a large cabinet with a glass
+front and little curiosities within, dimly gleaming. The doors were
+open—into the darkened parlor, the library, the dining-room. All these
+rooms seemed empty. Eugenia passed along, and stopped a moment on the
+threshold of each. _“Comme c’est bien!”_ she murmured again; she had
+thought of just such a house as this when she decided to come to
+America. She opened the front door for herself—her light tread had
+summoned none of the servants—and on the threshold she gave a last
+look. Outside, she was still in the humor for curious contemplation; so
+instead of going directly down the little drive, to the gate, she
+wandered away towards the garden, which lay to the right of the house.
+She had not gone many yards over the grass before she paused quickly;
+she perceived a gentleman stretched upon the level verdure, beneath a
+tree. He had not heard her coming, and he lay motionless, flat on his
+back, with his hands clasped under his head, staring up at the sky; so
+that the Baroness was able to reflect, at her leisure, upon the
+question of his identity. It was that of a person who had lately been
+much in her thoughts; but her first impulse, nevertheless, was to turn
+away; the last thing she desired was to have the air of coming in quest
+of Robert Acton. The gentleman on the grass, however, gave her no time
+to decide; he could not long remain unconscious of so agreeable a
+presence. He rolled back his eyes, stared, gave an exclamation, and
+then jumped up. He stood an instant, looking at her.
+
+“Excuse my ridiculous position,” he said.
+
+“I have just now no sense of the ridiculous. But, in case you have,
+don’t imagine I came to see you.”
+
+“Take care,” rejoined Acton, “how you put it into my head! I was
+thinking of you.”
+
+“The occupation of extreme leisure!” said the Baroness. “To think of a
+woman when you are in that position is no compliment.”
+
+“I didn’t say I was thinking well!” Acton affirmed, smiling.
+
+She looked at him, and then she turned away.
+
+“Though I didn’t come to see you,” she said, “remember at least that I
+am within your gates.”
+
+“I am delighted—I am honored! Won’t you come into the house?”
+
+“I have just come out of it. I have been calling upon your mother. I
+have been bidding her farewell.”
+
+“Farewell?” Acton demanded.
+
+“I am going away,” said the Baroness. And she turned away again, as if
+to illustrate her meaning.
+
+“When are you going?” asked Acton, standing a moment in his place. But
+the Baroness made no answer, and he followed her.
+
+“I came this way to look at your garden,” she said, walking back to the
+gate, over the grass. “But I must go.”
+
+“Let me at least go with you.” He went with her, and they said nothing
+till they reached the gate. It was open, and they looked down the road
+which was darkened over with long bosky shadows. “Must you go straight
+home?” Acton asked.
+
+But she made no answer. She said, after a moment, “Why have you not
+been to see me?” He said nothing, and then she went on, “Why don’t you
+answer me?”
+
+“I am trying to invent an answer,” Acton confessed.
+
+“Have you none ready?”
+
+“None that I can tell you,” he said. “But let me walk with you now.”
+
+“You may do as you like.”
+
+She moved slowly along the road, and Acton went with her. Presently he
+said, “If I had done as I liked I would have come to see you several
+times.”
+
+“Is that invented?” asked Eugenia.
+
+“No, that is natural. I stayed away because——”
+
+“Ah, here comes the reason, then!”
+
+“Because I wanted to think about you.”
+
+“Because you wanted to lie down!” said the Baroness. “I have seen you
+lie down—almost—in my drawing-room.”
+
+Acton stopped in the road, with a movement which seemed to beg her to
+linger a little. She paused, and he looked at her awhile; he thought
+her very charming. “You are jesting,” he said; “but if you are really
+going away it is very serious.”
+
+“If I stay,” and she gave a little laugh, “it is more serious still!”
+
+“When shall you go?”
+
+“As soon as possible.”
+
+“And why?”
+
+“Why should I stay?”
+
+“Because we all admire you so.”
+
+“That is not a reason. I am admired also in Europe.” And she began to
+walk homeward again.
+
+“What could I say to keep you?” asked Acton. He wanted to keep her, and
+it was a fact that he had been thinking of her for a week. He was in
+love with her now; he was conscious of that, or he thought he was; and
+the only question with him was whether he could trust her.
+
+“What you can say to keep me?” she repeated. “As I want very much to go
+it is not in my interest to tell you. Besides, I can’t imagine.”
+
+He went on with her in silence; he was much more affected by what she
+had told him than appeared. Ever since that evening of his return from
+Newport her image had had a terrible power to trouble him. What
+Clifford Wentworth had told him—that had affected him, too, in an
+adverse sense; but it had not liberated him from the discomfort of a
+charm of which his intelligence was impatient. “She is not honest, she
+is not honest,” he kept murmuring to himself. That is what he had been
+saying to the summer sky, ten minutes before. Unfortunately, he was
+unable to say it finally, definitively; and now that he was near her it
+seemed to matter wonderfully little. “She is a woman who will lie,” he
+had said to himself. Now, as he went along, he reminded himself of this
+observation; but it failed to frighten him as it had done before. He
+almost wished he could make her lie and then convict her of it, so that
+he might see how he should like that. He kept thinking of this as he
+walked by her side, while she moved forward with her light, graceful
+dignity. He had sat with her before; he had driven with her; but he had
+never walked with her.
+
+“By Jove, how _comme il faut_ she is!” he said, as he observed her
+sidewise. When they reached the cottage in the orchard she passed into
+the gate without asking him to follow; but she turned round, as he
+stood there, to bid him good-night.
+
+“I asked you a question the other night which you never answered,” he
+said. “Have you sent off that document—liberating yourself?”
+
+She hesitated for a single moment—very naturally. Then, “Yes,” she
+said, simply.
+
+He turned away; he wondered whether that would do for his lie. But he
+saw her again that evening, for the Baroness reappeared at her uncle’s.
+He had little talk with her, however; two gentlemen had driven out from
+Boston, in a buggy, to call upon Mr. Wentworth and his daughters, and
+Madame Münster was an object of absorbing interest to both of the
+visitors. One of them, indeed, said nothing to her; he only sat and
+watched with intense gravity, and leaned forward solemnly, presenting
+his ear (a very large one), as if he were deaf, whenever she dropped an
+observation. He had evidently been impressed with the idea of her
+misfortunes and reverses: he never smiled. His companion adopted a
+lighter, easier style; sat as near as possible to Madame Münster;
+attempted to draw her out, and proposed every few moments a new topic
+of conversation. Eugenia was less vividly responsive than usual and had
+less to say than, from her brilliant reputation, her interlocutor
+expected, upon the relative merits of European and American
+institutions; but she was inaccessible to Robert Acton, who roamed
+about the piazza with his hands in his pockets, listening for the
+grating sound of the buggy from Boston, as it should be brought round
+to the side-door. But he listened in vain, and at last he lost
+patience. His sister came to him and begged him to take her home, and
+he presently went off with her. Eugenia observed him leaving the house
+with Lizzie; in her present mood the fact seemed a contribution to her
+irritated conviction that he had several precious qualities. “Even that
+_mal-élevée_ little girl,” she reflected, “makes him do what she
+wishes.”
+
+She had been sitting just within one of the long windows that opened
+upon the piazza; but very soon after Acton had gone away she got up
+abruptly, just when the talkative gentleman from Boston was asking her
+what she thought of the “moral tone” of that city. On the piazza she
+encountered Clifford Wentworth, coming round from the other side of the
+house. She stopped him; she told him she wished to speak to him.
+
+“Why didn’t you go home with your cousin?” she asked.
+
+Clifford stared. “Why, Robert has taken her,” he said.
+
+“Exactly so. But you don’t usually leave that to him.”
+
+“Oh,” said Clifford, “I want to see those fellows start off. They don’t
+know how to drive.”
+
+“It is not, then, that you have quarreled with your cousin?”
+
+Clifford reflected a moment, and then with a simplicity which had, for
+the Baroness, a singularly baffling quality, “Oh, no; we have made up!”
+he said.
+
+She looked at him for some moments; but Clifford had begun to be afraid
+of the Baroness’s looks, and he endeavored, now, to shift himself out
+of their range. “Why do you never come to see me any more?” she asked.
+“Have I displeased you?”
+
+“Displeased me? Well, I guess not!” said Clifford, with a laugh.
+
+“Why haven’t you come, then?”
+
+“Well, because I am afraid of getting shut up in that back room.”
+
+Eugenia kept looking at him. “I should think you would like that.”
+
+“Like it!” cried Clifford.
+
+“I should, if I were a young man calling upon a charming woman.”
+
+“A charming woman isn’t much use to me when I am shut up in that back
+room!”
+
+“I am afraid I am not of much use to you anywhere!” said Madame
+Münster. “And yet you know how I have offered to be.”
+
+“Well,” observed Clifford, by way of response, “there comes the buggy.”
+
+“Never mind the buggy. Do you know I am going away?”
+
+“Do you mean now?”
+
+“I mean in a few days. I leave this place.”
+
+“You are going back to Europe?”
+
+“To Europe, where you are to come and see me.”
+
+“Oh, yes, I’ll come out there,” said Clifford.
+
+“But before that,” Eugenia declared, “you must come and see me here.”
+
+“Well, I shall keep clear of that back room!” rejoined her simple young
+kinsman.
+
+The Baroness was silent a moment. “Yes, you must come frankly—boldly.
+That will be very much better. I see that now.”
+
+“I see it!” said Clifford. And then, in an instant, “What’s the matter
+with that buggy?” His practiced ear had apparently detected an
+unnatural creak in the wheels of the light vehicle which had been
+brought to the portico, and he hurried away to investigate so grave an
+anomaly.
+
+The Baroness walked homeward, alone, in the starlight, asking herself a
+question. Was she to have gained nothing—was she to have gained
+nothing?
+
+Gertrude Wentworth had held a silent place in the little circle
+gathered about the two gentlemen from Boston. She was not interested in
+the visitors; she was watching Madame Münster, as she constantly
+watched her. She knew that Eugenia also was not interested—that she was
+bored; and Gertrude was absorbed in study of the problem how, in spite
+of her indifference and her absent attention, she managed to have such
+a charming manner. That was the manner Gertrude would have liked to
+have; she determined to cultivate it, and she wished that—to give her
+the charm—she might in future very often be bored. While she was
+engaged in these researches, Felix Young was looking for Charlotte, to
+whom he had something to say. For some time, now, he had had something
+to say to Charlotte, and this evening his sense of the propriety of
+holding some special conversation with her had reached the
+motive-point—resolved itself into acute and delightful desire. He
+wandered through the empty rooms on the large ground-floor of the
+house, and found her at last in a small apartment denominated, for
+reasons not immediately apparent, Mr. Wentworth’s “office:” an
+extremely neat and well-dusted room, with an array of law-books, in
+time-darkened sheep-skin, on one of the walls; a large map of the
+United States on the other, flanked on either side by an old steel
+engraving of one of Raphael’s Madonnas; and on the third several glass
+cases containing specimens of butterflies and beetles. Charlotte was
+sitting by a lamp, embroidering a slipper. Felix did not ask for whom
+the slipper was destined; he saw it was very large.
+
+He moved a chair toward her and sat down, smiling as usual, but, at
+first, not speaking. She watched him, with her needle poised, and with
+a certain shy, fluttered look which she always wore when he approached
+her. There was something in Felix’s manner that quickened her modesty,
+her self-consciousness; if absolute choice had been given her she would
+have preferred never to find herself alone with him; and in fact,
+though she thought him a most brilliant, distinguished, and
+well-meaning person, she had exercised a much larger amount of
+tremulous tact than he had ever suspected, to circumvent the accident
+of _tête-à-tête_. Poor Charlotte could have given no account of the
+matter that would not have seemed unjust both to herself and to her
+foreign kinsman; she could only have said—or rather, she would never
+have said it—that she did not like so much gentleman’s society at once.
+She was not reassured, accordingly, when he began, emphasizing his
+words with a kind of admiring radiance, “My dear cousin, I am enchanted
+at finding you alone.”
+
+“I am very often alone,” Charlotte observed. Then she quickly added, “I
+don’t mean I am lonely!”
+
+“So clever a woman as you is never lonely,” said Felix. “You have
+company in your beautiful work.” And he glanced at the big slipper.
+
+“I like to work,” declared Charlotte, simply.
+
+“So do I!” said her companion. “And I like to idle too. But it is not
+to idle that I have come in search of you. I want to tell you something
+very particular.”
+
+“Well,” murmured Charlotte; “of course, if you must——”
+
+“My dear cousin,” said Felix, “it’s nothing that a young lady may not
+listen to. At least I suppose it isn’t. But _voyons_; you shall judge.
+I am terribly in love.”
+
+“Well, Felix,” began Miss Wentworth, gravely. But her very gravity
+appeared to check the development of her phrase.
+
+“I am in love with your sister; but in love, Charlotte—in love!” the
+young man pursued. Charlotte had laid her work in her lap; her hands
+were tightly folded on top of it; she was staring at the carpet. “In
+short, I’m in love, dear lady,” said Felix. “Now I want you to help
+me.”
+
+“To help you?” asked Charlotte, with a tremor.
+
+“I don’t mean with Gertrude; she and I have a perfect understanding;
+and oh, how well she understands one! I mean with your father and with
+the world in general, including Mr. Brand.”
+
+“Poor Mr. Brand!” said Charlotte, slowly, but with a simplicity which
+made it evident to Felix that the young minister had not repeated to
+Miss Wentworth the talk that had lately occurred between them.
+
+“Ah, now, don’t say ‘poor’ Mr. Brand! I don’t pity Mr. Brand at all.
+But I pity your father a little, and I don’t want to displease him.
+Therefore, you see, I want you to plead for me. You don’t think me very
+shabby, eh?”
+
+“Shabby?” exclaimed Charlotte softly, for whom Felix represented the
+most polished and iridescent qualities of mankind.
+
+“I don’t mean in my appearance,” rejoined Felix, laughing; for
+Charlotte was looking at his boots. “I mean in my conduct. You don’t
+think it’s an abuse of hospitality?”
+
+“To—to care for Gertrude?” asked Charlotte.
+
+“To have really expressed one’s self. Because I _have_ expressed
+myself, Charlotte; I must tell you the whole truth—I have! Of course I
+want to marry her—and here is the difficulty. I held off as long as I
+could; but she is such a terribly fascinating person! She’s a strange
+creature, Charlotte; I don’t believe you really know her.” Charlotte
+took up her tapestry again, and again she laid it down. “I know your
+father has had higher views,” Felix continued; “and I think you have
+shared them. You have wanted to marry her to Mr. Brand.”
+
+“Oh, no,” said Charlotte, very earnestly. “Mr. Brand has always admired
+her. But we did not want anything of that kind.”
+
+Felix stared. “Surely, marriage was what you proposed.”
+
+“Yes; but we didn’t wish to force her.”
+
+“_A la bonne heure!_ That’s very unsafe you know. With these arranged
+marriages there is often the deuce to pay.”
+
+“Oh, Felix,” said Charlotte, “we didn’t want to ‘arrange.’”
+
+“I am delighted to hear that. Because in such cases—even when the woman
+is a thoroughly good creature—she can’t help looking for a
+compensation. A charming fellow comes along—and _voilà!_” Charlotte sat
+mutely staring at the floor, and Felix presently added, “Do go on with
+your slipper, I like to see you work.”
+
+Charlotte took up her variegated canvas, and began to draw vague blue
+stitches in a big round rose. “If Gertrude is so—so strange,” she said,
+“why do you want to marry her?”
+
+“Ah, that’s it, dear Charlotte! I like strange women; I always have
+liked them. Ask Eugenia! And Gertrude is wonderful; she says the most
+beautiful things!”
+
+Charlotte looked at him, almost for the first time, as if her meaning
+required to be severely pointed. “You have a great influence over her.”
+
+“Yes—and no!” said Felix. “I had at first, I think; but now it is six
+of one and half-a-dozen of the other; it is reciprocal. She affects me
+strongly—for she _is_ so strong. I don’t believe you know her; it’s a
+beautiful nature.”
+
+“Oh, yes, Felix; I have always thought Gertrude’s nature beautiful.”
+
+“Well, if you think so now,” cried the young man, “wait and see! She’s
+a folded flower. Let me pluck her from the parent tree and you will see
+her expand. I’m sure you will enjoy it.”
+
+“I don’t understand you,” murmured Charlotte. “I _can’t_, Felix.”
+
+“Well, you can understand this—that I beg you to say a good word for me
+to your father. He regards me, I naturally believe, as a very light
+fellow, a Bohemian, an irregular character. Tell him I am not all this;
+if I ever was, I have forgotten it. I am fond of pleasure—yes; but of
+innocent pleasure. Pain is all one; but in pleasure, you know, there
+are tremendous distinctions. Say to him that Gertrude is a folded
+flower and that I am a serious man!”
+
+Charlotte got up from her chair slowly rolling up her work. “We know
+you are very kind to everyone, Felix,” she said. “But we are extremely
+sorry for Mr. Brand.”
+
+“Of course you are—you especially! Because,” added Felix hastily, “you
+are a woman. But I don’t pity him. It ought to be enough for any man
+that you take an interest in him.”
+
+“It is not enough for Mr. Brand,” said Charlotte, simply. And she stood
+there a moment, as if waiting conscientiously for anything more that
+Felix might have to say.
+
+“Mr. Brand is not so keen about his marriage as he was,” he presently
+said. “He is afraid of your sister. He begins to think she is wicked.”
+
+Charlotte looked at him now with beautiful, appealing eyes—eyes into
+which he saw the tears rising. “Oh, Felix, Felix,” she cried, “what
+have you done to her?”
+
+“I think she was asleep; I have waked her up!”
+
+But Charlotte, apparently, was really crying, she walked straight out
+of the room. And Felix, standing there and meditating, had the apparent
+brutality to take satisfaction in her tears.
+
+Late that night Gertrude, silent and serious, came to him in the
+garden; it was a kind of appointment. Gertrude seemed to like
+appointments. She plucked a handful of heliotrope and stuck it into the
+front of her dress, but she said nothing. They walked together along
+one of the paths, and Felix looked at the great, square, hospitable
+house, massing itself vaguely in the starlight, with all its windows
+darkened.
+
+“I have a little of a bad conscience,” he said. “I oughtn’t to meet you
+this way till I have got your father’s consent.”
+
+Gertrude looked at him for some time. “I don’t understand you.”
+
+“You very often say that,” he said. “Considering how little we
+understand each other, it is a wonder how well we get on!”
+
+“We have done nothing but meet since you came here—but meet alone. The
+first time I ever saw you we were alone,” Gertrude went on. “What is
+the difference now? Is it because it is at night?”
+
+“The difference, Gertrude,” said Felix, stopping in the path, “the
+difference is that I love you more—more than before!” And then they
+stood there, talking, in the warm stillness and in front of the closed
+dark house. “I have been talking to Charlotte—been trying to bespeak
+her interest with your father. She has a kind of sublime perversity;
+was ever a woman so bent upon cutting off her own head?”
+
+“You are too careful,” said Gertrude; “you are too diplomatic.”
+
+“Well,” cried the young man, “I didn’t come here to make anyone
+unhappy!”
+
+Gertrude looked round her awhile in the odorous darkness. “I will do
+anything you please,” she said.
+
+“For instance?” asked Felix, smiling.
+
+“I will go away. I will do anything you please.”
+
+Felix looked at her in solemn admiration. “Yes, we will go away,” he
+said. “But we will make peace first.”
+
+Gertrude looked about her again, and then she broke out, passionately,
+“Why do they try to make one feel guilty? Why do they make it so
+difficult? Why can’t they understand?”
+
+“I will make them understand!” said Felix. He drew her hand into his
+arm, and they wandered about in the garden, talking, for an hour.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+Felix allowed Charlotte time to plead his cause; and then, on the third
+day, he sought an interview with his uncle. It was in the morning; Mr.
+Wentworth was in his office; and, on going in, Felix found that
+Charlotte was at that moment in conference with her father. She had, in
+fact, been constantly near him since her interview with Felix; she had
+made up her mind that it was her duty to repeat very literally her
+cousin’s passionate plea. She had accordingly followed Mr. Wentworth
+about like a shadow, in order to find him at hand when she should have
+mustered sufficient composure to speak. For poor Charlotte, in this
+matter, naturally lacked composure; especially when she meditated upon
+some of Felix’s intimations. It was not cheerful work, at the best, to
+keep giving small hammer-taps to the coffin in which one had laid away,
+for burial, the poor little unacknowledged offspring of one’s own
+misbehaving heart; and the occupation was not rendered more agreeable
+by the fact that the ghost of one’s stifled dream had been summoned
+from the shades by the strange, bold words of a talkative young
+foreigner. What had Felix meant by saying that Mr. Brand was not so
+keen? To herself her sister’s justly depressed suitor had shown no sign
+of faltering. Charlotte trembled all over when she allowed herself to
+believe for an instant now and then that, privately, Mr. Brand might
+have faltered; and as it seemed to give more force to Felix’s words to
+repeat them to her father, she was waiting until she should have taught
+herself to be very calm. But she had now begun to tell Mr. Wentworth
+that she was extremely anxious. She was proceeding to develop this
+idea, to enumerate the objects of her anxiety, when Felix came in.
+
+Mr. Wentworth sat there, with his legs crossed, lifting his dry, pure
+countenance from the Boston _Advertiser_. Felix entered smiling, as if
+he had something particular to say, and his uncle looked at him as if
+he both expected and deprecated this event. Felix vividly expressing
+himself had come to be a formidable figure to his uncle, who had not
+yet arrived at definite views as to a proper tone. For the first time
+in his life, as I have said, Mr. Wentworth shirked a responsibility; he
+earnestly desired that it might not be laid upon him to determine how
+his nephew’s lighter propositions should be treated. He lived under an
+apprehension that Felix might yet beguile him into assent to doubtful
+inductions, and his conscience instructed him that the best form of
+vigilance was the avoidance of discussion. He hoped that the pleasant
+episode of his nephew’s visit would pass away without a further lapse
+of consistency.
+
+Felix looked at Charlotte with an air of understanding, and then at Mr.
+Wentworth, and then at Charlotte again. Mr. Wentworth bent his refined
+eyebrows upon his nephew and stroked down the first page of the
+_Advertiser_. “I ought to have brought a bouquet,” said Felix,
+laughing. “In France they always do.”
+
+“We are not in France,” observed Mr. Wentworth, gravely, while
+Charlotte earnestly gazed at him.
+
+“No, luckily, we are not in France, where I am afraid I should have a
+harder time of it. My dear Charlotte, have you rendered me that
+delightful service?” And Felix bent toward her as if someone had been
+presenting him.
+
+Charlotte looked at him with almost frightened eyes; and Mr. Wentworth
+thought this might be the beginning of a discussion. “What is the
+bouquet for?” he inquired, by way of turning it off.
+
+Felix gazed at him, smiling. _“Pour la demande!”_ And then, drawing up
+a chair, he seated himself, hat in hand, with a kind of conscious
+solemnity.
+
+Presently he turned to Charlotte again. “My good Charlotte, my
+admirable Charlotte,” he murmured, “you have not played me false—you
+have not sided against me?”
+
+Charlotte got up, trembling extremely, though imperceptibly. “You must
+speak to my father yourself,” she said. “I think you are clever
+enough.”
+
+But Felix, rising too, begged her to remain. “I can speak better to an
+audience!” he declared.
+
+“I hope it is nothing disagreeable,” said Mr. Wentworth.
+
+“It’s something delightful, for me!” And Felix, laying down his hat,
+clasped his hands a little between his knees. “My dear uncle,” he said,
+“I desire, very earnestly, to marry your daughter Gertrude.” Charlotte
+sank slowly into her chair again, and Mr. Wentworth sat staring, with a
+light in his face that might have been flashed back from an iceberg. He
+stared and stared; he said nothing. Felix fell back, with his hands
+still clasped. “Ah—you don’t like it. I was afraid!” He blushed deeply,
+and Charlotte noticed it—remarking to herself that it was the first
+time she had ever seen him blush. She began to blush herself and to
+reflect that he might be much in love.
+
+“This is very abrupt,” said Mr. Wentworth, at last.
+
+“Have you never suspected it, dear uncle?” Felix inquired. “Well, that
+proves how discreet I have been. Yes, I thought you wouldn’t like it.”
+
+“It is very serious, Felix,” said Mr. Wentworth.
+
+“You think it’s an abuse of hospitality!” exclaimed Felix, smiling
+again.
+
+“Of hospitality?—an abuse?” his uncle repeated very slowly.
+
+“That is what Felix said to me,” said Charlotte, conscientiously.
+
+“Of course you think so; don’t defend yourself!” Felix pursued. “It
+_is_ an abuse, obviously; the most I can claim is that it is perhaps a
+pardonable one. I simply fell head over heels in love; one can hardly
+help that. Though you are Gertrude’s progenitor I don’t believe you
+know how attractive she is. Dear uncle, she contains the elements of a
+singularly—I may say a strangely—charming woman!”
+
+“She has always been to me an object of extreme concern,” said Mr.
+Wentworth. “We have always desired her happiness.”
+
+“Well, here it is!” Felix declared. “I will make her happy. She
+believes it, too. Now hadn’t you noticed that?”
+
+“I had noticed that she was much changed,” Mr. Wentworth declared, in a
+tone whose unexpressive, unimpassioned quality appeared to Felix to
+reveal a profundity of opposition. “It may be that she is only becoming
+what you call a charming woman.”
+
+“Gertrude, at heart, is so earnest, so true,” said Charlotte, very
+softly, fastening her eyes upon her father.
+
+“I delight to hear you praise her!” cried Felix.
+
+“She has a very peculiar temperament,” said Mr. Wentworth.
+
+“Eh, even that is praise!” Felix rejoined. “I know I am not the man you
+might have looked for. I have no position and no fortune; I can give
+Gertrude no place in the world. A place in the world—that’s what she
+ought to have; that would bring her out.”
+
+“A place to do her duty!” remarked Mr. Wentworth.
+
+“Ah, how charmingly she does it—her duty!” Felix exclaimed, with a
+radiant face. “What an exquisite conception she has of it! But she
+comes honestly by that, dear uncle.” Mr. Wentworth and Charlotte both
+looked at him as if they were watching a greyhound doubling. “Of course
+with me she will hide her light under a bushel,” he continued; “I being
+the bushel! Now I know you like me—you have certainly proved it. But
+you think I am frivolous and penniless and shabby! Granted—granted—a
+thousand times granted. I have been a loose fish—a fiddler, a painter,
+an actor. But there is this to be said: In the first place, I fancy you
+exaggerate; you lend me qualities I haven’t had. I have been a
+Bohemian—yes; but in Bohemia I always passed for a gentleman. I wish
+you could see some of my old _camarades_—they would tell you! It was
+the liberty I liked, but not the opportunities! My sins were all
+peccadilloes; I always respected my neighbor’s property—my neighbor’s
+wife. Do you see, dear uncle?” Mr. Wentworth ought to have seen; his
+cold blue eyes were intently fixed. “And then, _c’est fini!_ It’s all
+over. _Je me range_. I have settled down to a jog-trot. I find I can
+earn my living—a very fair one—by going about the world and painting
+bad portraits. It’s not a glorious profession, but it is a perfectly
+respectable one. You won’t deny that, eh? Going about the world, I say?
+I must not deny that, for that I am afraid I shall always do—in quest
+of agreeable sitters. When I say agreeable, I mean susceptible of
+delicate flattery and prompt of payment. Gertrude declares she is
+willing to share my wanderings and help to pose my models. She even
+thinks it will be charming; and that brings me to my third point.
+Gertrude likes me. Encourage her a little and she will tell you so.”
+
+Felix’s tongue obviously moved much faster than the imagination of his
+auditors; his eloquence, like the rocking of a boat in a deep, smooth
+lake, made long eddies of silence. And he seemed to be pleading and
+chattering still, with his brightly eager smile, his uplifted eyebrows,
+his expressive mouth, after he had ceased speaking, and while, with his
+glance quickly turning from the father to the daughter, he sat waiting
+for the effect of his appeal. “It is not your want of means,” said Mr.
+Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence.
+
+“Now it’s delightful of you to say that! Only don’t say it’s my want of
+character. Because I have a character—I assure you I have; a small one,
+a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible.”
+
+“Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?” Charlotte
+asked, with infinite mildness.
+
+“It is not only Mr. Brand,” Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he
+looked at his knee for a long time. “It is difficult to explain,” he
+said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. “It rests on moral
+grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best
+thing for Gertrude.”
+
+“What is better—what is better, dear uncle?” Felix rejoined urgently,
+rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had
+been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze
+to the handle of the door which faced him. “It is usually a fairly good
+thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!” cried Felix.
+
+While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn;
+the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered
+himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether
+and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her
+sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution,
+and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons
+present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand,
+and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her
+hands behind her and made no motion to sit down.
+
+“We are talking of you!” said Felix.
+
+“I know it,” she answered. “That’s why I came.” And she fastened her
+eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold
+blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light.
+
+“It is better you should be present,” said Mr. Wentworth. “We are
+discussing your future.”
+
+“Why discuss it?” asked Gertrude. “Leave it to me.”
+
+“That is, to me!” cried Felix.
+
+“I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours,” said
+the old man.
+
+Felix rubbed his forehead gently. “But _en attendant_ the last resort,
+your father lacks confidence,” he said to Gertrude.
+
+“Haven’t you confidence in Felix?” Gertrude was frowning; there was
+something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen.
+Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but
+suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her.
+
+Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. “I have had more confidence in
+Felix than in you,” he said.
+
+“Yes, you have never had confidence in me—never, never! I don’t know
+why.”
+
+“Oh sister, sister!” murmured Charlotte.
+
+“You have always needed advice,” Mr. Wentworth declared. “You have had
+a difficult temperament.”
+
+“Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had
+allowed it. You wouldn’t let me be natural. I don’t know what you
+wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst.”
+
+Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon
+Gertrude’s arm. “He cares so much for you,” she almost whispered.
+
+Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. “No, he
+does not,” she said.
+
+“I have never seen you so passionate,” observed Mr. Wentworth, with an
+air of indignation mitigated by high principles.
+
+“I am sorry if I offend you,” said Gertrude.
+
+“You offend me, but I don’t think you are sorry.”
+
+“Yes, father, she is sorry,” said Charlotte.
+
+“I would even go further, dear uncle,” Felix interposed. “I would
+question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?”
+
+To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, “She
+has not profited as we hoped.”
+
+“Profited? _Ah voilà!_” Felix exclaimed.
+
+Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. “I have told Felix I
+would go away with him,” she presently said.
+
+“Ah, you have said some admirable things!” cried the young man.
+
+“Go away, sister?” asked Charlotte.
+
+“Away—away; to some strange country.”
+
+“That is to frighten you,” said Felix, smiling at Charlotte.
+
+“To—what do you call it?” asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix.
+“To Bohemia.”
+
+“Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?” asked Mr. Wentworth,
+getting up.
+
+“Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_” cried Felix. “It seems to me that
+these are preliminaries.”
+
+Gertrude turned to her father. “I _have_ profited,” she said. “You
+wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed—for my age. I
+know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this
+gentleman.”
+
+“You had better consent, sir,” said Felix very gently.
+
+“Yes, sir, you had better consent,” added a very different voice.
+
+Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction
+from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped
+through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood
+patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much
+flushed; his face wore a singular expression.
+
+“Yes, sir, you had better consent,” Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward.
+“I know what Miss Gertrude means.”
+
+“My dear friend!” murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the
+young minister’s arm.
+
+Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He
+did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte’s earnest eyes were fastened
+to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The
+answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the
+elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr.
+Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a
+bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness—the air of a man
+who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the
+failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte
+thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand
+felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life;
+and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of
+awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man.
+
+“Come in, sir,” said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand.
+“It is very proper that you should be present.”
+
+“I know what you are talking about,” Mr. Brand rejoined. “I heard what
+your nephew said.”
+
+“And he heard what you said!” exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the
+arm.
+
+“I am not sure that I understood,” said Mr. Wentworth, who had
+angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures.
+
+Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been
+puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than
+Charlotte’s. “Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away,” she said
+to her father.
+
+The young minister gave her a strange look. “It is not because I don’t
+want to see you any more,” he declared, in a tone intended as it were
+for publicity.
+
+“I shouldn’t think you would want to see me any more,” Gertrude
+answered, gently.
+
+Mr. Wentworth stood staring. “Isn’t this rather a change, sir?” he
+inquired.
+
+“Yes, sir.” And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte.
+“Yes, sir,” he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to
+his lips.
+
+“Where are our moral grounds?” demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always
+thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a
+peculiar temperament.
+
+“It is sometimes very moral to change, you know,” suggested Felix.
+
+Charlotte had softly left her sister’s side. She had edged gently
+toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr.
+Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small
+compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it
+with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte
+was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her
+sister.
+
+“It is better not to speak of change,” said Mr. Brand. “In one sense
+there is no change. There was something I desired—something I asked of
+you; I desire something still—I ask it of you.” And he paused a moment;
+Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. “I should like, in my ministerial
+capacity, to unite this young couple.”
+
+Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and
+Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. “Heavenly Powers!”
+murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he
+had ever made.
+
+“That is very nice; that is very handsome!” Felix exclaimed.
+
+“I don’t understand,” said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that
+everyone else did.
+
+“That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand,” said Gertrude, emulating Felix.
+
+“I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure.”
+
+“As Gertrude says, it’s a beautiful idea,” said Felix.
+
+Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself
+treated his proposition very seriously. “I have thought of it, and I
+should like to do it,” he affirmed.
+
+Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination,
+as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister’s, but now it had taken
+several little jumps. “Father,” she murmured, “consent!”
+
+Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no
+imagination at all. “I have always thought,” he began, slowly, “that
+Gertrude’s character required a special line of development.”
+
+“Father,” repeated Charlotte, _“consent.”_
+
+Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning
+more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and
+this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what
+was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze
+with the young theologian’s; but even this told him nothing, and he
+continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, “I consent,” he said at last,
+“since Mr. Brand recommends it.”
+
+“I should like to perform the ceremony very soon,” observed Mr. Brand,
+with a sort of solemn simplicity.
+
+“Come, come, that’s charming!” cried Felix, profanely.
+
+Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. “Doubtless, when you understand it,”
+he said, with a certain judicial asperity.
+
+Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed
+his arm into Mr. Brand’s and stepped out of the long window with him,
+the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity.
+
+Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got
+into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They
+talked a good deal of Mr. Brand—though not exclusively.
+
+“That was a fine stroke,” said Felix. “It was really heroic.”
+
+Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. “That was what he
+wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine.”
+
+“He won’t be comfortable till he has married us,” said Felix. “So much
+the better.”
+
+“He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure.
+I know him so well,” Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke
+slowly, gazing at the clear water. “He thought of it a great deal,
+night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his
+mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that—nothing less than
+that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That’s how he likes to feel. It
+is better for him than if I had listened to him.”
+
+“It’s better for me,” smiled Felix. “But do you know, as regards the
+sacrifice, that I don’t believe he admired you when this decision was
+taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?”
+
+“He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so
+well.”
+
+“Well, then, he didn’t pity you so much.”
+
+Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. “You shouldn’t permit
+yourself,” she said, “to diminish the splendor of his action. He
+admires Charlotte,” she repeated.
+
+“That’s capital!” said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot
+say exactly to which member of Gertrude’s phrase he alluded; but he
+dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about.
+
+Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr.
+Wentworth’s at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet
+dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his
+marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and
+replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the
+whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of.
+
+Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. “I hope,” he said, “not to be
+thrown back on my reason.”
+
+“It is very true,” Eugenia rejoined, “that one’s reason is dismally
+flat. It’s a bed with the mattress removed.”
+
+But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the
+larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective
+sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the
+exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood
+up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience
+for her compliment to Gertrude.
+
+Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of
+the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she
+acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation.
+
+“I shall be so glad to know you better,” she said; “I have seen so much
+less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason
+why! You will love me a little, won’t you? I think I may say I gain on
+being known.” And terminating these observations with the softest
+cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official
+kiss upon Gertrude’s forehead.
+
+Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude’s imagination, diminished
+the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia’s personality, and she felt
+flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also
+seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious
+manifestations of Madame Münster’s wit.
+
+They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he
+walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came
+back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her
+uncle upon his daughter’s engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening
+with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that
+by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people
+who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter
+very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated.
+
+“Felix will make her a good husband,” said Eugenia. “He will be a
+charming companion; he has a great quality—indestructible gaiety.”
+
+“You think that’s a great quality?” asked the old man.
+
+Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. “You think one gets tired of
+it, eh?”
+
+“I don’t know that I am prepared to say that,” said Mr. Wentworth.
+
+“Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful
+for one’s self. A woman’s husband, you know, is supposed to be her
+second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common
+property.”
+
+“Gertrude was always very gay,” said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to
+follow this argument.
+
+Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer
+to the Baroness. “You say you gain by being known,” he said. “One
+certainly gains by knowing you.”
+
+“What have _you_ gained?” asked Eugenia.
+
+“An immense amount of wisdom.”
+
+“That’s a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!”
+
+Acton shook his head. “No, I was a great fool before I knew you!”
+
+“And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very
+complimentary.”
+
+“Let me keep it up,” said Acton, laughing. “I hope, for our pleasure,
+that your brother’s marriage will detain you.”
+
+“Why should I stop for my brother’s marriage when I would not stop for
+my own?” asked the Baroness.
+
+“Why shouldn’t you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have
+dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?”
+
+The Baroness looked at him a moment. “As I say? You look as if you
+doubted it.”
+
+“Ah,” said Acton, returning her glance, “that is a remnant of my old
+folly! We have other attractions,” he added. “We are to have another
+marriage.”
+
+But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. “My word
+was never doubted before,” she said.
+
+“We are to have another marriage,” Acton repeated, smiling.
+
+Then she appeared to understand. “Another marriage?” And she looked at
+the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance,
+was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning
+his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his
+large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a
+young moon. “It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte,” said Eugenia,
+“but it doesn’t look like it.”
+
+“There,” Acton answered, “you must judge just now by contraries. There
+is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these
+days; but that is not what I meant.”
+
+“Well,” said the Baroness, “I never guess my own lovers; so I can’t
+guess other people’s.”
+
+Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr.
+Wentworth approached his niece. “You will be interested to hear,” the
+old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, “of another
+matrimonial venture in our little circle.”
+
+“I was just telling the Baroness,” Acton observed.
+
+“Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement,” said
+Eugenia.
+
+Mr. Wentworth’s jocosity increased. “It is not exactly that; but it is
+in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had
+expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into
+his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should
+perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton.”
+
+The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning,
+with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, “I am certainly very stupid
+not to have thought of that,” she said. Acton looked down at his boots,
+as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate
+experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had
+been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This
+was done, however, promptly enough. “Where are the young people?” she
+asked.
+
+“They are spending the evening with my mother.”
+
+“Is not the thing very sudden?”
+
+Acton looked up. “Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit
+understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have
+received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair.”
+
+“The impulse,” said the Baroness, “was the charms of your very pretty
+sister.”
+
+“But my sister’s charms were an old story; he had always known her.”
+Acton had begun to experiment again.
+
+Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. “Ah, one
+can’t say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy.”
+
+“He’s a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man.” This was
+Acton’s last experiment. Madame Münster turned away.
+
+She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little
+drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the
+chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. “I
+shall not wait for your marriage,” she said to her brother. “Tomorrow
+my maid shall pack up.”
+
+“My dear sister,” Felix exclaimed, “we are to be married immediately!
+Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable.”
+
+But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked
+about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and
+cushions. “My maid shall pack up,” she repeated. “_Bonté divine_, what
+rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my ‘properties.’”
+
+“Is the play over, Eugenia?” asked Felix.
+
+She gave him a sharp glance. “I have spoken my part.”
+
+“With great applause!” said her brother.
+
+“Oh, applause—applause!” she murmured. And she gathered up two or three
+of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and
+then, “I don’t see how I can have endured it!” she said.
+
+“Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding.”
+
+“Thank you; that’s your affair. My affairs are elsewhere.”
+
+“Where are you going?”
+
+“To Germany—by the first ship.”
+
+“You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?”
+
+“I have refused him,” said Eugenia.
+
+Her brother looked at her in silence. “I am sorry,” he rejoined at
+last. “But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing.”
+
+“Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter,” said Eugenia.
+
+Felix inclined himself gravely. “You shall be obeyed. But your position
+in Germany?” he pursued.
+
+“Please to make no observations upon it.”
+
+“I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered.”
+
+“You are mistaken.”
+
+“But I thought you had signed——”
+
+“I have not signed!” said the Baroness.
+
+Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should
+immediately assist her to embark.
+
+Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his
+sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so
+handsomely; but Eugenia’s impatience to withdraw from a country in
+which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less
+to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion;
+but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing—in deciding that the
+conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to
+really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural
+field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply
+these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of
+spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition
+of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an
+inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who,
+for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and
+irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle’s, where she
+had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth’s
+affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and
+presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who
+as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired
+this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered
+whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie’s brother and
+guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It
+would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome
+present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his
+sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much
+the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw
+her—late the night before she went to Boston to embark.
+
+“For myself, I wish you might have stayed,” he said. “But not for your
+own sake.”
+
+“I don’t make so many differences,” said the Baroness. “I am simply
+sorry to be going.”
+
+“That’s a much deeper difference than mine,” Acton declared; “for you
+mean you are simply glad!”
+
+Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. “We shall often meet
+over there,” he said.
+
+“I don’t know,” she answered. “Europe seems to me much larger than
+America.”
+
+Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not
+the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young
+spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of
+the occasion. Gertrude left her father’s house with Felix Young; they
+were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young
+wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter’s
+influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that
+theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women
+which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good
+while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr.
+Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix’s gaiety
+confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety
+of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the
+home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself
+listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother’s death, married a
+particularly nice young girl.
+
+The End
+
+
+
+
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