April Hopes

by William Dean Howells

  IX.

  Mrs. Pasmer's husband looked a great deal older than herself, and, byoperation of a well-known law of compensation, he was lean and silent,while she was plump and voluble. He had thick eyebrows, which remainedblack after his hair and beard had become white, and which gave him anaspect of fierceness, expressive of nothing in his character. It wasfrom him that their daughter got her height, and, as Mrs. Pasmer freelyowned, her distinction.

  Soon after their marriage the Pasmers had gone to live in Paris, wherethey remained faithful to the fortunes of the Second Empire till itsfall, with intervals of return to their own country of a year or twoyears at a time. After the fall of the Empire they made their sojournin England, where they lived upon the edges and surfaces of things, asAmericans must in Europe everywhere, but had more permanency of feelingthan they had known in France, and something like a real social status.At one time it seemed as if they might end their days there; but thatwhich makes Americans different from all other peoples, and whichfinally claims their allegiance for their own land, made them wish tocome back to America, and to come back to Boston. After all, their placein England was strictly inferior, and must be. They knew titles, andconsorted with them, but they had none themselves, and the Englishconstancy which kept their friends faithful to them after they hadbecome an old story, was correlated with the English honesty whichnever permitted them to mistake themselves for even the lowest of thenobility. They went out last, and they did not come in first, ever.

  The invitations, upon these conditions, might have gone on indefinitely,but they did not imply a future for the young girl in whom the interestsof her parents centred. After being so long a little girl, she hadbecome a great girl, and then all at once she had become a younglady. They had to ask themselves, the mother definitely and the fatherformlessly, whether they wished their daughter to marry an Englishman,and their hearts answered them, like true Republican hearts, Not anuntitled Englishman, while they saw no prospect of her getting anyother. Mrs. Pasmer philosophised the case with a clearness and a couragewhich gave her husband a series of twinges analogous to the toothache,for a man naturally shrinks from such bold realisations. She said Alicehad the beauty of a beauty, and she had the distinction of a beauty, butshe had not the principles of a beauty; there was no use pretending thatshe had. For this reason the Prince of Wales's set, so accessible toAmerican loveliness with the courage of its convictions, was beyond her;and the question was whether there was money enough for a younger son,or whether, if there was, a younger son was worth it.

  However this might be, there was no question but there was now lessmoney than there had been, and a great deal less. The investments hadnot turned out as they promised; not only had dividends been passed, butthere had been permanent shrinkages. What was once an amiable competencyfrom the pooling of their joint resources had dwindled to a sum thatneeded a careful eye both to the income and the outgo. Alice's becominga young lady had increased their expenses by the suddenly mounting costof her dresses, and of the dresses which her mother must now buy forthe different role she had to sustain in society. They began to askthemselves what it was for, and to question whether, if she could notmarry a noble Englishman, Alice had not better marry a good American.

  Even with Mrs. Pasmer this question was tacit, and it need not beexplained to any one who knows our life that in her most worldly dreamsshe intended at the bottom of her heart that her daughter should marryfor love. It is the rule that Americans marry for love, and the veryrare exception that they marry for anything else; and if our divorcecourts are so busy in spite of this fact, it is perhaps because theAmericans also unmarry for love, or perhaps because love is not sosufficient in matters of the heart as has been represented in theliterature of people who have not been able to give it so fair atrial. But whether it is all in all in marriage, or only a very markedessential, it is certain that Mrs. Pasmer expected her daughter'smarriage to involve it. She would have shrunk from intimating anythingelse to her as from a gross indecency; and she could not possibly, byany finest insinuation, have made her a partner in her design for herhappiness. That, so far as Alice was concerned, was a thing which was tofall to her as from heaven; for this also is part of the American plan.We are the children of the poets, the devotees of the romancers, so faras that goes; and however material and practical we are in other things,in this we are a republic of shepherds and shepherdesses, and we live ina golden age; which if it sometimes seems an age of inconvertible paper,is certainly so through no want of faith in us.

  Though the Pasmers said that they ought to go home for Alice's sake,they both understood that they were going home experimentally, and notwith the intention of laying their bones in their native soil, unlessthey liked it, or found they could afford it. Mrs. Pasmer had noillusions in regard to it. She had learned from her former visits homethat it was frightfully expensive; and, during the fifteen years whichthey had spent chiefly abroad, she had observed the decay of thatdistinction which formerly attended returning sojourners from Europe.She had seen them cease gradually from the romantic reverence whichonce clothed them, and decline through a gathering indifference intosomething like slight and compassion, as people who have not beenable to make their place or hold their own at home; and she hadtaught herself so well how to pocket the superiority natural tothe Europeanised American before arriving at consciousness of thisdisesteem, that she paid a ready tribute to people who had always stayedat home.

  In fact Mrs. Pasmer was a flatterer, and it cannot be claimed for herthat she flattered adroitly always. But adroitness in flattery is notnecessary for its successful use. There is no morsel of it too gross forthe condor gullet and the ostrich stomach of human vanity; there isno society in which it does not give the utterer instant honourand acceptance in greater or less degree. Mrs. Pasmer, who was verygood-natured, employed it because she liked it herself, and knowing howabsolutely worthless it was from her own tongue, prized it from others.She could have rested perfectly safe without it in her social position,which she found unchanged by years of absence. She had not been aHibbins for nothing, and she was not a Pasmer for nothing, though whyshe should have been either for something it would not be easy to say.

  But while confessing the foibles of Mrs. Pasmer, it would not be fairto omit from the tale of her many virtues the final conscientiousnessof her openly involuted character. Not to mention other things, sheinstituted and practised economies as alien to her nature as to herhusband's, and in their narrowing affairs she kept him out of debt. Shewas prudent; she was alert; and while presenting to the world all theoutward effect of a butterfly, she possessed some of the best qualitiesof the bee.

  With his senatorial presence, his distinction of person and manner,Mr. Pasmer was inveterately selfish in that province of small personalthings where his wife left him unmolested. In what related to his owncomfort and convenience he was undisputed lord of himself. It was shewho ordered their comings and goings, and decided in which hemispherethey should sojourn from time to time, and in what city, street, andhouse, but always with the understanding that the kitchen and all thedomestic appointments were to her husband's mind. He was sensitive todegrees of heat and cold, and luxurious in the matter of lighting, andhe had a fine nose for plumbing. If he had not occupied himself so muchwith these details, he was the sort of man to have thought Mrs. Pasmer,with her buzz of activities and pretences, rather a tedious littlewoman. He had some delicate tastes, if not refined interests, and wasexpensively fond of certain sorts of bric-a-brac: he spent a great dealof time in packing and unpacking it, and he had cases stored in Rome andLondon and Paris; it had been one of his motives in consenting to comehome that he might get them out, and set up the various objects ofbronze and porcelain in cabinets. He had no vices, unless absoluteidleness ensuing uninterruptedly upon a remotely demonstrated unfitnessfor business can be called a vice. Like other people who have alwaysbeen idle, he did not consider his idleness a vice. He rather plumedhimself upon it, for the man who has done nothing all
his life naturallylooks down upon people who have done or are doing something. In Europehe had not all the advantage of this superiority which such a man hashere; he was often thrown with other idle people, who had been uselessfor so many generations that they had almost ceased to have anyconsciousness of it. In their presence Pasmer felt that his uselessnesshad not that passive elegance which only ancestral uselessness can give;that it was positive, and to that degree vulgar.

  A life like this was not one which would probably involve great passionsor affections, and it would be hard to describe exactly the feelingwith which he regarded his daughter. He liked her, of course, and he hadnaturally expected certain things of her, as a ladylike intelligence,behaviour, and appearance; but he had never shown any great tendernessfor her, or even pride in her. She had never given him any displeasure,however, and he had not shared his wife's question of mind at atemporary phase of Alice's development when she showed a decidedinclination for a religious life. He had apparently not observed thatthe girl had a pensive temperament in spite of the effect of worldlysplendour which her mother contrived for her, and that this pensivenessoccasionally deepened to gloom. He had certainly never seen that ina way of her own she was very romantic. Mrs. Pasmer had seen it, withamusement sometimes, and sometimes with anxiety, but always with thecourage to believe that she could cope with it when it was necessary.

  Whenever it was necessary she had all the moral courage she wanted; itseemed as if she could have it or not as she liked; and in coming homeshe had taken a flat instead of a house, though she had not talked withher friends three minutes without perceiving that the moment when flatshad promised to assert their social equality with houses in Boston waspast for ever. There were, of course, cases in which there could be noquestion of them; but for the most part they were plainly regarded asmakeshifts, the resorts of people of small means, or the defiancesor errors of people who had lived too much abroad. They stamped theiroccupants as of transitory and fluctuant character; good people mightlive in them, and did, as good people sometimes boarded; but they couldnot be regarded as forming a social base, except in rare instances.They presented peculiar difficulties in calling, and for any sort ofentertainment they were too--not public, perhaps, but--evident.

  In spite of these objections Mrs. Pasmer took a flat in the Cavendish,and she took it furnished from people who were going abroad for a year.