“I find him charming,” I said.
“So do I,” replied the doctor. “But preposterous. That’s my grandmother, by the way, whom he’s regaling. She and Miss Pride are currently enemies.”
I asked him why this was and he said, “Chiefly because my grandmother is a possessive old woman and next to her house in Concord, I am her favorite possession—her only grandchild, you see.”
“But surely Miss Pride has no designs on you!”
“Oh, but she has. When you meet Hope, you’ll see her aunt is barking up the wrong tree though. She wouldn’t have a dozen of my kind.”
At that moment, there appeared before us an anxious little man like a caricature of Terror, for his feline green eyes were immensely magnified by a pair of very thick lenses and his small mouth trembled beneath the insufficient ambush of a sandy mustache. He was a newcomer and said hastily that he intended to run right along as soon as he had spoken to the doctor whom he drew aside and talked with in a whisper for a few minutes.
The room was less densely crowded now for it was a quarter past six according to the delicate china clock on the mantel which, after it had made a sound like the last quiet purr of a cat before it goes to sleep, gave forth a single, bell-like chime, sustained and questioning. I had not noticed the clock before as it was dwarfed by the tremendous Copley incongruously placed above the narrow marble mantel. I discovered that I had not been conscious of the room at all until now, had not observed, as I had always intended to do, its transformation when it was occupied by guests. Now, at this late hour, dimly lighted, its walls pink from the fire in the hearth, it seemed surpassingly feminine and agreeable. I looked towards Miss Pride, handling her dainty Bavarian tea china and deftly replenishing the hot water in the silver tea-pot, conversing the while with her friends, so much the lady that both processes were carried on without any interference to each other. It came to me, so deliciously that I wanted to clap my hands together and crow, that I had never seen Miss Pride in the library without her green beaver hat: thus she had given me my tea there on the first day I had been in her house and thus she was, ready for church, every Sunday morning when I went in to pay my respects as she was playing chess against herself. I recalled the way my father had always worn his hat in the shop but left it there when he went into the house. While I knew that Miss Pride had been bare-headed the night she joined the gentlemen in their brandy, I was sure some other appurtenance, conversational perhaps, had disguised her feminine nature so that the bequests of her male ancestors were more apparent than those handed down from the mothers of her line.
Dr. McAllister’s alarmed little man scurried away, looking straight ahead as though he were afraid of being trapped. He was like a rabbit running through a clearing. He did not make it, for Miss Pride caught sight of him and cried, “There he is now! Stop, Otis Whitney!” Obediently and out of breath he trotted to her side. My friend sat down beside me on the love-seat and watched the scene: Mr. Otis Whitney had been pushed by a thin but powerful forefinger into a chair beside the tea-table and was undergoing an inquisition about the health of his son who was under Dr. McAllister’s care.
Abstractedly the doctor said, “By the way, I told my grandmother a little about you. Nothing you wouldn’t want known, but she’s a kindly old soul and you might like to visit her sometime when you want country air.”
Just as I glanced toward her, there came a lull in the conversation of the group that sat between us and the tea-table and I heard old Mrs. McAllister say to the Admiral, “The report from Manchester this year is the same as ever. Hope Mather had all the beaux. Isn’t she a heart-breaker! But you know she comes by it honestly.”
The Admiral, not only to flatter Miss Pride who had half turned away from Otis Whitney, but also because he believed it, replied, “Indeed she does that. Why, the only young lady who could hold a candle to Lucy Pride was her sister.”
But the old lady, with the sure touch of malice, said, “I quite agree, but actually I was thinking of Spencer Mather at that moment more than of his wife.”
I knew already the basis of the slanderous remark, and Dr. McAllister filled in some of the details for me. Hopestill’s father had been a notorious libertine, had married Charity Pride for her money, had flaunted in her face his philanderings with common women, and had died most disgracefully at a house party when, drunk, he had been thrown by a spirited horse that he could barely have managed sober. His wife died shortly afterwards of humiliation, it was believed. The doctor pointed to the grand piano at the left of the love-seat. “Miss Pride keeps this, mind you, not in memory of her sister who was quite accomplished but in memory of Spencer Mather’s brutality. It has a dummy keyboard. He was extremely sensitive to noises and could not bear to hear scales. After he got her this travesty—and she was so mild she didn’t protest—he used to say, ‘Look at poor Charity. She plays all day long and never gets anywhere.’ ”
In reply to my suggestion that the ill-will between Miss Pride and her niece stemmed from the former’s dislike of Spencer Mather, Dr. McAllister said with a smile, “We don’t speak of ‘ill-will’ between them, my dear. To use my grandmother’s phrase, we say they are both ‘strong characters.’ But, yes, that is perhaps why they don’t get on. That and the fact that Hope is said to resemble her aunt as she was at twenty—don’t ask me why the similarity annoys her. One would think she’d feel the opposite when people say of Hope, ‘She’s the image of you, Lucy.’ ”
Miss Pride had leaned over the diminutive and still fidgeting form of Otis Whitney and was saying to Mrs. McAllister, “I heard you mention Manchester. I understand the summer was, as they say, a ‘dud.’ Hope wrote that if it hadn’t been for your Philip’s little visit the whole season would have been a total loss.”
“Don’t flatter me, Lucy,” laughed the old lady and, turning to the Admiral, said, “Isn’t she the purest Christian to compliment me on that no-account grandson of mine! There’s nothing I’d rather believe. Why, I would be overjoyed if I could think that wild young rascal occupied the least place in Miss Hopestill Mather’s heart! No, Lucy, my dear, I know and you know that she’s a sensible girl. Look at him”—she pointed to my companion and at the same time sent him a conniving and adoring smile to indicate that she was merely playing a game, merely looking out for his interests—“he’s barely civil! And I see he has already victimized the youngest lady in the room. I give you my word of honor, he has been boring her with some awful descriptions of his interminable ‘cases.’ Really now, Lucy, admit he’s not nice.”
Philip flushed and shook his head at his grandmother like a reproving parent. His gesture was unfortunate for she cried, “Now he’s signaling me to hush! You see, he has a bad conscience. Admiral Nephews, what would you do with such a rogue?”
Miss Pride, who knew perfectly well that Philip was the apple of his grandmother’s eye and who took as an insult to her intelligence this deprecation of him—so false that the voice with which she ran him down was brimming over with love—said, “I can’t say I see eye to eye with you. What you say of Philip applies much more to Hope. Perhaps we’re both right, though, and in that case . . . well, birds of a feather flock together.”
The old lady was outwitted, for she could not admit that what Miss Pride said was precisely what she meant, that Hopestill was the unruly, fickle egotist that for the sake of her campaign against their marriage she had pretended her grandson was. She rose, fumbled for her stick, and said in a voice audible to everyone in the room, “Perly, Amy Brooks is coming to dinner with me next Tuesday. Can I expect you too? We can’t get along without you if we play ‘I am a famous man.’ ” And to Miss Pride, she added, “I dare say I couldn’t engage Hope for that evening, could I?”
“On the contrary,” rejoined Miss Pride, “she likes nothing better than to go to your house. Shall I give her a message?”
“I thought she was going to New York immediately,” said the f
oiled grandmother.
“Not until next week.” Then, with a slight sharpening of her expression, for evidently she had changed her tactics and had decided that it was better for the time being not to expose her niece to the determined old woman, she said, “But she will be occupied with packing. No, perhaps I’d better not mention it to her, for she would want to come and she really wouldn’t have the time.”
Mrs. McAllister sighed with relief, blew her grandson a kiss, and hobbled from the room on the Admiral’s arm. Her place was filled at once by Mrs. Frothingham who asked for another cup of tea and said, “I’m lingering disgracefully long. I want to see Hope and hear all about what she’s planning to do in New York. I do think she’s too clever to go off all by herself. Can she really be serious about studying psychology?”
“You must ask her, Evelyn, for I’m too ignorant of the subject to know. Can anyone be serious about it? I must confess I can’t. I have no more faith in dreams and the like than I have in Sally Hornblower’s spirits. By the way, have you heard her latest? She swears that at a séance not long ago a Japanese girl was present and asked to be connected with some departed relative and, my dear, not only did the connection go through but the medium gave the message in colloquial Japanese!”
“Odd as that is,” said Mrs. Frothingham in a lowered voice, “it’s no worse than the way Arthur Hornblower has been cutting up. Have you heard . . .” But Miss Pride put her finger to her lips and motioned toward Mr. Pingrey who was still talking excitedly to Miss Brooks. “Is he . . . ?” queried Mrs. Frothingham. Miss Pride nodded and I caught the whispered words, “Berthe and I are campaigning in that sector.”
Philip McAllister covered his smiling lips with his hand and then, on the pretext of examining a pot of philodendron, murmured to me, “My grandmother would like me to marry Amy Brooks. As you’ve probably deduced by now, our free will is purely relative. My mother had first say about where I was to go to school—there was a great to-do about it, I’ve been told, when I was two hours old—and my grandmother agreed on Groton instead of St. George only on the condition that I marry Amy who was then sixteen months old.”
“And you don’t like her?” I asked.
He did not answer. In less time than it had taken for the sound of my voice to carry to him, he had moved into a world poles apart from mine. I knew by the eager light that suffused his pale face, until this moment drawn and mask-like with fatigue, and by the tensing of his fingers from which arose a hygienic odor, that what had galvanized him and was still invisible to my eyes was some private shock. I had heard the front door open and a feminine voice say, “Good afternoon, Ethel.” The interval between the salutation and the appearance of the guest in the doorway—during which I identified the voice as the same one I had heard in this room when Miss Pride had left me in the vestibule—was an ordeal for both of us and in order to hide, on the one hand his impatience as a lover, and on the other, my curiosity, we began to exchange views on the probable success of Miss Pride’s memoirs as if it were the subject we had wanted to bring up all along but had been prevented by the intrusion of gossip which we could not help overhearing. And when Hopestill entered, even though nothing could have torn his eyes away from her, my friend, in an untroubled voice, was telling me that he liked nothing so much for bedtime reading as personal reminiscences and hoped Miss Pride would take Saint-Simon as her model.
Hopestill Mather, whose autumnal hair I remembered from the day at the Hotel, paused at the door like an actress overdoing her entrance in the fear that the audience would not applaud. And then she pressed forward, leisurely, through the assembly of guests and bandy-legged slipper-chairs. Her eyes were astray as she murmured courtesies which marked her as a person of poise and breeding, as though she were ambling through an art gallery, untouched by what she saw but knowing, with a firm, sure, aristocratic knowledge, that what she saw was right: that the Ruebensesque woman, who had been seated all afternoon beside the fire-place in conversation with a distinguished middle-aged man, was not to her esthetic taste, but that she recognized genius in the composition; that her cousin Amy Brooks belonged to an eminent school though she lacked the characteristic color that marked even the lesser works of Rembrandt. Though she might despise her aunt and her aunt’s friends, she seemed not to question their essential mettle: they were the authors and the stewards of reality. For the time being, I had gathered, she had chosen to visit other worlds, both real and unreal, by which she had been remembered in the last will of a larger order than New England. Between these greetings (the uniform warmth and urbanity of which, exactly like that I had observed in Dr. McAllister, made me see, with a pang of envy, that to start with they had a fundamental fraternity), as she held up her manners like the emblem of a secret cult, she showed by a smile in our direction that she was sorry to be detained in her progress to us who were, she promised, to receive the whole heart of her vivacity and not merely these pulsations which she allowed to the others.
Even from this distance and unable to distinguish her voice from those chattering others, or to see, because of the dim light, what sort of body encased the person I had envied for so many years, even so I had a feeling of that allurement that had been hinted to me in various ways, for though she was not beautiful (there was enough light for me to see that) she emanated a terrible femininity, like a soporific perfume, so that the men, while they rose promptly to their feet, allowed her to speak first as if they needed time in which to collect their wits.
She bent down to kiss her aunt as Admiral Nephews stood up. “I’m next,” he cried. “Hope, you outshine yourself. When are you going to have dinner with me?”
The girl turned up her smiling face to him and received his kiss. “You name the night, Admiral Nephews. For you, I’m always free, sir.” She sat down beside her aunt and they began to talk so amiably that I doubted if, after all, they really were enemies. But they spoke formally as if, while they were good friends, they were not altogether intimate. Hopestill complimented her aunt on the sandwiches and Miss Pride congratulated her on her costume, even though she had once told me in disgust that the girl spent nine-tenths of her time and all of her money on clothes, an indulgence shocking to a woman whose wardrobe consisted of four identical black broadcloth suits and two dark red evening dresses, one made of velvet and the other of crêpe. Her niece had converted a simple yellow dress into a “costume” by the addition of an Indian belt made of great silver conches. Her arms were laden with bracelets and her fingers with turquoise rings. Her long hair hung as straight as rain, an angelic, down-burning fire that parted for her small, perfect face which disdained the pastes and pigments of the cosmeticians, but was pale where God intended it to be and shone where He had burnished it. She was tanned from the seashore sun and from her ride this afternoon, retained the last glow of rosiness in her cheeks. She was tropical like the surcharged parrot; one felt that her flesh was hot to the touch and that her small feet, shod in white buckskin moccasins, were furnished with velvet pads like a cat’s. When I first took her in, I did not recognize her belt as Indian or her yellow dress as being of a particular cut and fashion: it was rather as though she were clothed in some natural, unpurchased habiliments like a leopard or a Luna moth.
“Oh, please don’t third-degree me,” she said, laughing, to Mrs. Frothingham. “I don’t know anything about psychology. I’m taking it up because I’ve soured on painters after this summer. It would shock Auntie if I told you why.”
“Shock isn’t the right word, my dear,” said Miss Pride. “The nonsense of Wainright Lowe hasn’t shocked me for years, but no one bores me more to hear about.”
“Hope!” cried Mrs. Frothingham. “Don’t tell me you picked him up!”
“How was I to know? Of course I did know the moment I stepped into his studio. But I simply couldn’t shake him.”
“He paints his pictures in half an hour,” said Miss Pride. “As a matter of fact, I think I could do them
in fifteen minutes.”
The Admiral said, “I must confess, Hope, that I’m glad you’ve gone in for something besides all this painting hanky-panky. Psychology is a little too new-fangled for me, but still . . .” He rose and kissed Miss Pride’s proffered hand. “As always, I’ve enjoyed it, ma’am, and unless I’m dead before then, I wager I’ll show up again next week. I’m well pleased you’ve got yourself a companion for the winter since this intellectual young lady insists on going off to Babylon.” The whole group at the tea-table glanced toward me and the Admiral said, “We talk the same language, Miss Marburg and I. I’m going to steal her some afternoon for a walk around Fresh Pond. Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, we’ll revel in the English poets. Good-by, Lucy, good-by, Hope, good-by, Evelyn. Good-by, you three graces!”
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