Chapter I: LONGED to have the chance of bragging to my wife; but this chance did (1)

not come till the concert was quite over, after I rejoined her with my companion, and she could take leave of them all without seeming to abandon them. Then I judged it best to let her have the word; for I knew by the way she ran her hand through my arm, and began pushing me along out of earshot, that she was full of it.

“Well, Basil, I think that is the sweetest and simplest and kindest creature in the world, and I’m perfectly in love with her.”

I did not believe somehow that she meant the girl, but I thought it best merely to suggest, “There are two.”

“You know very well which I mean, and I would do anything I could for her. She’s got a difficult problem before her, and I pity her. The girl’s very well, and she _is_ a beauty; and I suppose she _has_ been having a dull time, and of course you couldn’t please Mrs. Deering half so well as by doing something for her friend. I suppose you’re feeling very proud that they’re just what you divined.”

“Not at all; I’m so used to divining people. How did you know I knew it?”

“I saw you talking to him, and I knew you were pumping him.”

“Pumping? He asked nothing better than to flow. He would put to shame the provoked spontaneity of any spring in Saratoga.”

“Well, did he say that he was going to leave them here?”

“He would like to do it—yes. He was very sweet and simple and kind, too, Isabel. He complained bitterly of the goddess, and all but said she sulked.”

“Why, I don’t know,” said my wife. “I think, considering, that she is rather amiable. She brightened up more and more.”

“That was prosperity, or the hope of it, my dear. Nothing illumines us like the prospect of pleasant things. She took you for society smiling upon her, and of course she smiled back. But it’s only the first smile of prosperity that cheers. If it keeps on smiling it ends by making us dissatisfied again. When people are getting into society they are very glad; when they have got in they seem to be rather gloomy. We mustn’t let these things go too far. Now that you’ve got your friends in good humour, the right way is to drop them—to cut them dead when you meet them, to look the other way. That will send them home perfectly radiant.”

“Nonsense! I am going to do all I can for them. What do you think we can do? They haven’t the first idea how to amuse themselves here. It’s a miracle they ever got that dress the girl is wearing. They just made a bold dash because they saw it in a dressmaker’s window the first day, and she had to have something. It’s killingly becoming to her; but I don’t believe they know it, and they don’t begin to know how cheap it was: it was simply _thrown_ away. I’m going shopping with them in the morning.”

“Oh!”

“But now the question is, what we can do to give them some little glimpse of social gaiety. That’s what they’ve come for.”

We were passing the corner of a large enclosure which seems devoted in Saratoga to the most distracting of its pleasures, and I said: “Well, we might give them a turn on the circular railway or the switchback; or we could take them to the Punch and Judy drama, or get their fortunes told in the seeress’s tent, or let them fire in the shooting-gallery, or buy some sweet-grass baskets of the Indians; and there is the pop-corn and the lemonade.”

“I will tell you what,” said Mrs. March, who had not been listening to a word I said; for if she had heard me she would not have had patience with my ironical suggestions.

“Well, what?”

“Or, no; that wouldn’t do, either.”

“I’m glad you don’t approve of the notion, on second thoughts. I didn’t like it from the beginning, and I didn’t even know what it was.”

“We could have them up to the house this evening, and introduce them to some of our friends,—only there isn’t a young man in the whole place,—and have them stay to the charades.”

“What do you think,” I said, “of their having come up this morning and tried to get rooms at our house?”

“Yes; they told me.”

“And don’t you call that rather forth-putting? It seems to me that it was taking a mean advantage of my brags.”

“It was perfectly innocent in them. But now, dearest, don’t be tiresome. I know that you like them as well as I do, and I will take all your little teasing affectations for granted. The question is, what can we do for them?”

“And the answer is, I don’t in the least know. There isn’t any society life at Saratoga that I can see; and if there is, we are not in it. How could we get any one else in? I see that’s what you’re aiming at. Those public socialities at the big hotels they could get into as well as we could; but they wouldn’t be anywhere when they got there, and they wouldn’t know what to do. You know what hollow mockeries those things are. Don’t you remember that hop we went to with the young Braceys the first summer? If those girls hadn’t waltzed with each other they wouldn’t have danced a step the whole evening.”

“I know, I know,” sighed my wife; “it was terrible. But these people are so very unworldly that don’t you think they could be deluded into the belief that they were seeing society if we took a little trouble? You used to be so inventive! You could think up something now if you tried.”

“My dear, a girl knows beyond all the arts of hoodwinking whether she’s having a good time, and your little scheme of passing off one of those hotel hops for a festivity would never work in the world.”

“Well, I think it is too bad! What has become of all the easy gaiety there used to be in the world?”

“It has been starched and ironed out of it, apparently. Saratoga is still trying to do the good old American act, with its big hotels and its heterogeneous hops, and I don’t suppose there’s ever such a thing as a society person at any of them. That wouldn’t be so bad. But the unsociety people seem to be afraid of one another. They feel that there is something in the air—something they don’t and can’t understand; something alien, that judges their old-fashioned American impulse to be sociable, and contemns it. No; we can’t do anything for our hapless friends—I can hardly call them our acquaintances. We must avoid them, and keep them merely as a pensive colour in our own vivid memories of Saratoga. If we made them have a good time, and sent them on their way rejoicing, I confess that I should feel myself distinctly a loser. As it is, they’re a strain of melancholy poetry in my life, of music in the minor key. I shall always associate their pathos with this hot summer weather, and I shall think of them whenever the thermometer registers eighty-nine. Don’t you see the advantage of that? I believe I can ultimately get some literature out of them. If I can think of a fitting fable for them Fulkerson will feature it in _Every Other Week_. He’ll get out a Saratoga number, and come up here and strike the hotels and springs for ad’s.”

“Well,” said Mrs. March, “I wish I had never seen them; and it’s all your fault, Basil. Of course, when you played upon my sympathies so about them, I couldn’t help feeling interested in them. We are a couple of romantic old geese, my dear.”

“Not at all, or at least I’m not. I simply used these people conjecturally to give myself an agreeable pang. I didn’t want to know anything more about them than I imagined, and I certainly didn’t dream of doing anything for them. You’ll spoil everything if you turn them from fiction into fact, and try to manipulate their destiny. Let them alone; they will work it out for themselves.”

“You know I can’t let them alone now,” she lamented. “I am not one of those who can give themselves an agreeable pang with the unhappiness of their fellow-creatures. I’m not satisfied to study them; I want to relieve them.”

She went on to praise herself to my disadvantage, as I notice wives will with their husbands, and I did not attempt to deny her this source of consolation. But when she ended by saying, “I believe I shall send you alone,” and explained that she had promised Mrs. Deering we would come to their hotel for them after tea, and go with them to hear the music at the United States and the Grand Union, I protested. I said that I always felt too sneaking when I was prowling round those hotels listening to their proprietary concerts, and I was aware of looking so sneaking that I expected every moment to be ordered off their piazzas. As for convoying a party of three strangers about alone, I should certainly not do it.

“Not if I’ve a headache?”

“Not if you’ve a headache.”

“Oh, very well, then.”

“What are you two quarrelling about?” cried a gay voice behind us, and we looked round into the laughing eyes of Miss Dale. She was the one cottager we knew in Saratoga, but when we were with her we felt that we knew everybody, so hospitable was the sense of world which her kindness exhaled.

“It was Mrs. March who was quarrelling,” I said. “I was only trying to convince her that she was wrong, and of course one has to lift one’s voice. I hope I hadn’t the effect of halloaing.”

“Well, I merely heard you above the steam harmonicon at the switchback,” said Miss Dale. “I don’t know whether you call _that_ holloaing.”

“Oh, Miss Dale,” said my wife, “we are in such a fatal—”

“Pickle,” I suggested, and she instantly adopted the word in her extremity.

“—pickle with some people that Providence has thrown in our way, and that we want to do something for”; and in a labyrinth of parentheses that no man could have found his way into or out of, she possessed Miss Dale of the whole romantic fact. “It was Mr. March, of course, who first discovered them,” she concluded, in plaintive accusation.

“Poor Mr. March!” cried Miss Dale. “Well, it is a pathetic case, but it isn’t the only one, if that’s any comfort. Saratoga is reeking with just such forlornities the whole summer long; but I can quite understand how you feel about it, Mrs. March.” We came to a corner, and she said abruptly: “Excuse my interrupting your quarrel! Not quite so _loud_, Mr. March!” and she flashed back a mocking look at me as she skurried off down the street with astonishing rapidity.

“How perfectly heartless!” cried my wife. “I certainly thought she would suggest something—offer to do something.”

“I relied upon her, too,” I said; “but now I have my doubts whether she was really going down that street till she saw that it was the best way to escape. We’re certainly in trouble, my dear, if people avoid us in this manner.”

V

“I AM doing it entirely on Mrs. Deering’s account,” said my wife that evening after tea, as we walked down the side-street that descended from our place to Broadway. “She has that girl on her hands, and I know she must be at her wits’ end.”

“And I do it entirely on Deering’s account,” I retorted. “He has both of those women on _his_ hands.”

We emerged into the glistening thoroughfare in front of the vast hotels, and I was struck, as I never fail to be, with its futile and unmeaning splendour. I think there is nothing in our dun-coloured civilisation prettier than that habit the ladies have in Saratoga of going out on the street after dark in their bare heads. When I first saw them wandering about so in the glitter of the shop-windows and the fitful glare of the electrics everywhere, I thought they must be some of those Spanish-Americans mistaking the warm, dry air of the Northern night for that of their own latitudes; but when I came up with them I could hear, if I could not see, that they were of our own race. Those flat and shapeless tones could come through the noses of no other. The beauty and the elegance were also ours, and the fearless trust of circumstance. They sauntered up and down before the gaunt, high porticoes of the hotels, as much at home as they could have been in their own houses, and in much the same dress as if they had been receiving there. The effect is one of incomparable cheer, and is a promise of social brilliancy which Saratoga no more keeps than she does that of her other characteristic aspects; say the forenoon effect of the same thoroughfare, with the piazzas banked with the hotel guests, and the street full of the light equipages which seem peculiar to the place passing and repassing, in the joyous sunlight and out of it, on the leaf-flecked street. Even the public carriages of Saratoga have a fresh, unjaded air; and to issue from the railway station in the midst of those buoyant top-phaetons and surreys, with their light-limbed horses, is to be thrilled by some such insensate expectation of pleasure as fills the heart of a boy at his first sally into the world. I always expect to find my lost youth waiting for me around the corner of the United States Hotel, and I accuse myself of some fault if it disappoints me, as it always does. I can imagine what gaudy hopes by day and by night the bright staging of the potential drama must awaken in the breast of a young girl when she first sees it, and how blank she must feel when the curtain goes down and there has been no play. It was a real anguish to me when that young girl with the Deerings welcomed my wife and me with a hopeful smile, as if we were the _dramatis personæ_, and now the performance must be going to begin. I could see how much our chance acquaintance had brightened the perspective for her, and how eagerly she had repaired all her illusions; and I thought how much better it would have been if she had been left to the dull and spiritless resignation in which I had first seen her. From that there could no fall, at least, and now she had risen from it only to sink again.

But, in fact, the whole party seemed falsely cheered by the event of the afternoon; and in the few moments that we sat with them on their verandah, before going to the music at the Grand Union, I could hear the ladies laughing together, while Deering joyously unfolded to me his plan of going home the next morning and leaving his wife and Miss Gage behind him. “They will stay in this hotel—they might as well—and I guess they can get along. My wife feels more acquainted since she met Mrs. March, and I shan’t feel so much like leavin’ her among strangers here I don’t know when she’s taken such a fancy to any one as she has to your wife, or Miss Gage either. I guess she’ll want to ask her about the stores.”

I said that I believed the fancy was mutual, and that there was nothing my wife liked better than telling people about stores. I added, in generalisation, that when a woman had spent all her own money on dress, it did her quite as much good to see other women spending theirs; and Deering said he guessed that was about so. He gave me a push on the shoulder to make me understand how keenly he appreciated the joke, and I perceived that we had won his heart too.

We joined the ladies, and I thought that my sufferings for her authorised me to attach myself more especially to Miss Gage, and to find out all I could about her. We walked ahead of the others, and I was aware of her making believe that it was quite the same as if she were going to the music with a young man. Not that she seemed disposed to trifle with my grey hairs; I quickly saw that this would not be in character with her; but some sort of illusion was essential to her youth, and she could not help rejuvenating me. This was quite like the goddess she looked, I reflected, but otherwise she was not formidably divine; and, in fact, I suppose the goddesses were, after all, only nice girls at heart. This one, at any rate, I decided, was a very nice girl when she was not sulking; and she was so brightened by her little adventure, which was really no adventure, that I could not believe I had ever seen her sulking.

The hotel people did not keep us from going into the court of the hotel, as I was afraid they might, and we all easily found places. In the pauses of the music I pointed out such notables and characters as I saw about us, and tried to possess her of as much of the Saratoga world as I knew. It was largely there in that bold evidence it loves, and in that social solitude to which the Saratoga of the hotels condemns the denizens of her world. I do not mean that the Saratoga crowd is at all a fast-looking crowd. There are sporting people and gamblers; but the great mass of the frequenters are plain, honest Americans, out upon a holiday from all parts of the country, and of an innocence too inveterate to have grasped the fact that there is no fashion in Saratoga now but the fashion of the ladies’ dresses. These, I must say, are of the newest and prettiest; the dressing of the women always strikes me there. My companion was eager to recognise the splendours which she had heard of, and I pointed out an old lady by the door, who sat there displaying upon her vast person an assortment of gems and jewels which she seemed as personally indifferent to as if she were a show-window, and I was glad to have the girl shrink from the spectacle in a kind of mute alarm. I tried to make her share my pleasure in a group of Cubans—fat father, fat mother, fat daughter—who came down the walk toward us in the halo of tropical tradition; but she had not the taste for olives, and I saw that I failed to persuade her of the æsthetic value of this alien element among us. She apparently could do almost as little with some old figures of bygone beaus spectrally revisiting the hotel haunts of their youth; but she was charmed with the sylvan loveliness of that incomparable court. It is, in fact, a park of the tall, slim Saratoga trees enclosed by the quadrangle of the hotel, exquisitely kept, and with its acres of greensward now showing their colour vividly in the light of the electrics, which shone from all sides on the fountain flashing and plashing in the midst. I said that here was that union of the sylvan and the urban which was always the dream of art, and which formed the delicate charm of pastoral poetry; and although I do not think she quite grasped the notion, I saw that she had a pleasure in the visible fact, and that was much better. Besides, she listened very respectfully, and with no signs of being bored.

In the wait between the two parts of the concert I invited her to walk around the court with me, and under the approving eye of Mrs. March we made this expedition. It seemed to me that I could not do a wiser thing, both for the satisfaction of my own curiosity and for the gratification of the autobiographical passion we all feel, than to lead her on to speak of herself. But she had little or nothing to say of herself, and what she said of other things was marked by a straightforward good sense, if not a wide intelligence. I think we make a mistake when we suppose that a beautiful woman must always be vain or conscious.

I fancy that a beauty is quite as often a solid and sensible person, with no inordinate wish to be worshipped, and this young lady struck me as wholly unspoiled by flattery. I decided that she was not the type that would take the fancy of De Witt Point, and that she had grown up without local attention for that reason, or possibly because a certain coldness in her overawed the free spirit of rustic love-making. No doubt she knew that she was beautiful, and I began to think that it was not so much disappointment at finding Saratoga as indifferent as De Witt Point which gave her the effect of disgust I had first noted in her the night before. That might rather have come from the sense of feeling herself a helpless burden on her friends, and from that young longing for companionship which is as far as may be from the desire of conquest, of triumph. Finding her now so gratefully content with the poor efforts to amuse her which an old fellow like me could make, I perceived that the society of other girls would suffice to make Saratoga quite another thing for her, and I cast about in my mind to contrive this somehow.

I confess that I liked her better and better, and before the evening was out I had quite transferred my compassion from the Deerings to her. It _was_ forlorn and dreary for her to be attached to this good couple, whose interests were primarily in each other, and who had not the first of those arts which could provide her with other company. She willingly told about their journey to Saratoga, and her story did not differ materially from the account Deering had already given me; but even the outward form of adventure had fallen from their experience since they had come to Saratoga. They had formed the habit of Congress Park by accident; but they had not been to the lake, or the races, or the House of Pansa, or Mount M’Gregor, or Hilton Park, or even the outlying springs. It was the first time they had been inside of the Grand Union. “Then you have never seen the parlour?” I asked; and after the concert I boldly led the way into the parlour, and lavished its magnificence upon them as if I had been the host, or one of the hotel guests at the very least. I enjoyed the breathlessness of the Deerings so much, as we walked up and down the vast drawing-rooms accompanied by our images in the mirrors, that I insisted upon sitting down with them all upon some of the richest pieces of furniture; and I was so flown with my success as cicerone that I made them come with me to the United States. I showed them through the parlours there, and then led them through to the inner verandah, which commanded another wooded court like that of the Grand Union. I tried to make them feel the statelier sentiment of the older hotel, and to stir their imaginations with a picture of the old times, when the Southern planters used to throng the place, and all that was gay and brilliant in fashionable society was to be seen there some time during the summer. I think that I failed in this, but apparently I succeeded in giving them an evening of dazzling splendour.

“Well, sir, this has been a great treat,” said Mr. Deering, when he bade us goodbye as well as good-night; he was going early in the morning.

The ladies murmured their gratitude, Mrs. Deering with an emotion that suited her thanks, and Miss Gage with a touch of something daughterly toward me that I thought pretty.

VI

“WELL, what _did_ you make of her, my dear?” Mrs. March demanded the instant she was beyond their hearing. “I must say, you didn’t spare yourself in the cause; you did bravely. What is she like?”

“Really, I don’t know,” I answered, after a moment’s reflection. “I should say she was almost purely potential. She’s not so much this or that kind of girl; she’s merely a radiant image of girlhood.”

“Now, your chicquing it, you’re faking it,” said Mrs. March, borrowing the verbs severally from the art editor and the publisher of _Every Other Week_. “You have got to tell me just how much and how little there really is of her before I go any further with them. Is she stupid?”

“No—no; I shouldn’t say stupid exactly. She is—what shall I say?—extremely plain-minded. I suppose the goddesses were plain-minded. I’m a little puzzled by her attitude toward her own beauty. She doesn’t live her beauty any more than a poet lives his poetry or a painter his painting; though I’ve no doubt she knows her gift is hers just as they do.”

“I think I understand. You mean she isn’t conscious.”

“No. Conscious isn’t quite the word,” I said fastidiously. “Isn’t there some word that says less, or more, in the same direction?”

“No, there isn’t; and I shall think you don’t mean anything at all if you keep on. Now, tell me how she really impressed you. Does she know anything? Has she read anything? Has she any ideas?”

“Really, I can’t say whether they were ideas or not. She knew what _Every Other Week_ was; she had read the stories in it; but I’m not sure she valued it at its true worth. She is very plain-minded.”

“Don’t keep repeating that! What do you mean by plain-minded?”

“Well, honest, single, common-sense, coherent, arithmetical.”

“Horrors! Do you mean that she is _mannish_?”

“No, not mannish. And yet she gave me the notion that, when it came to companionship, she would be just as well satisfied with a lot of girls as young men.”

Mrs. March pulled her hand out of my arm, and stopped short under one of those tall Saratoga shade-trees to dramatise her inference. “Then she is the slyest of all possible pusses! Did she give you the notion that she would be just as well satisfied with you as with a young man!”

“She couldn’t deceive me so far as _that_, my dear.”

“Very well; I shall take her in hand myself to-morrow, and find out what she really is.”

Mrs. March went shopping the next forenoon with what was left of the Deering party; Deering had taken the early train north, and she seemed to have found the ladies livelier without him. She formed the impression from their more joyous behaviour that he kept his wife from spending as much money as she would naturally have done, and that, while he was not perhaps exactly selfish, he was forgetful of her youth, of the difference in years between them, and of her capacity for pleasures which he could not care for. She said that Mrs. Deering and Miss Gage now acted like two girls together, and, if anything, Miss Gage seemed the elder of the two.

“And what did you decide about her?” I inquired.

“Well, I helped her buy a hat and a jacket at one of those nice shops just below the hotel where they’re stopping, and we’ve started an evening dress for her. She can’t wear that white duck morning, noon, and night.”

“But her character—her nature?”

“Oh! Well, she is rather plain-minded, as you call it. I think she shows out her real feelings too much for a woman.”

“Why do you prefer dissimulation in your sex, my dear?”

“I don’t call it dissimulation. But of course a girl ought to hide her feelings. Don’t you think it would have been better for her not to have looked so obviously out of humour when you first saw her the other night?”

“She wouldn’t have interested me so much, then, and she probably wouldn’t have had your acquaintance now.”

“Oh, I don’t mean to say that even that kind of girl won’t get on, if she gives her mind to it; but I think I should prefer a little less plain-mindedness, as you call it, if I were a man.”

I did not know exactly what to say to this, and I let Mrs. March go on.

“It’s so in the smallest thing. If you’re choosing a thing for her, and she likes another, she lets you feel it at once. I don’t mean that she’s rude about it, but she seems to set herself so square across the way, and you come up with a kind of bump against her. I don’t think that’s very feminine. That’s what I mean by mannish. You always know where to find her.”

I don’t know why this criticism should have amused me so much, but I began to laugh quite uncontrollably, and I laughed on and on. Mrs. March kept her temper with me admirably. When I was quiet again, she said—

“Mrs. Deering is a person that wins your heart at once; she has that appealing quality. You can see that she’s cowed by her husband, though he means to be kind to her; and yet you may be sure she gets round him, and has her own way all the time. I know it was her idea to have him go home and leave them here, and of course she made him think it was his. She saw that as long as he was here, and anxious to get back to his ‘stock,’ there was no hope of giving Miss Gage the sort of chance she came for, and so she determined to manage it. At the same time, you can see that she is true as steel, and would abhor anything like deceit worse than the pest.”

“I see; and that is why you dislike Miss Gage?”

“Dislike her? No, I don’t dislike her; but she is disappointing. If she were a plain girl her plain-mindedness would be all right; it would be amusing; she would turn it to account and make it seem humorous. But it doesn’t seem to go with her beauty; it takes away from that—I don’t know how to express it exactly.”

“You mean that she has no charm.”

“No; I don’t mean that at all. She has a great deal of charm of a certain kind, but it’s a very peculiar kind. After all, the truth is the truth, Basil, isn’t it?”

“It is sometimes, my dear,” I assented.

“And the truth has its charm, even when it’s too blunt.”

“Ah, I’m not so sure of that.”

“Yes—yes, it has. You mustn’t say so, Basil, or I shall lose all my faith in you. If I couldn’t trust you, I don’t know what I should do.”

“What are you after now, Isabel?”

“I am not after anything. I want you to go round to all the hotels and see if there is not some young man you know at one of them. There surely must be.”

“Would one young man be enough?”

“If he were attentive enough, he would be. One young man is as good as a thousand if the girl is the right kind.”

“But you have just been implying that Miss Gage is cold and selfish and greedy. Shall I go round exploring hotel registers for a victim to such a divinity as that?”

“No; you needn’t go till I have had a talk with her. I am not sure she is worth it; I am not sure that I want to do a single thing for her.”

VII

THE next day, after another forenoon’s shopping with her friends, Mrs. March announced: “Well, now, it has all come out, Basil, and I wonder you didn’t get the secret at once from your Mr. Deering. Have you been supposing that Miss Gage was a poor girl whom the Deerings had done the favour of bringing with them?”

“Why, what of it?” I asked provisionally.

“She is very well off. Her father is not only the president, as they call it, of the village, but he’s the president of the bank.”

“Yes; I told you that Deering told me so—”

“But he is very queer. He has kept her very close from the other young people, and Mrs. Deering is the only girl friend she’s ever had, and she’s grown up without having been anywhere without him. They had to plead with him to let her come with them—or Mrs. Deering had,—but when he once consented, he consented handsomely. He gave her a lot of money, and told them he wanted her to have the best time that money could buy; and of course you can understand how such a man would think that money would buy a good time anywhere. But the Deerings didn’t know how to go about it. She confessed as much when we were talking the girl over. I could see that she stood in awe of her somehow from the beginning, and that she felt more than the usual responsibility for her. That was the reason she was so eager to get her husband off home; as long as he was with them she would have to work everything through him, and that would be double labour, because he is so hopelessly _villaginous_, don’t you know, that he never could rise to the conception of anything else. He took them to a cheap, second-class hotel, and he was afraid to go with them anywhere because he never was sure that it was the right thing to do; and he was too proud to ask, and they had to keep prodding him all the time.”

“That’s delightful!”

“Oh, I dare say you think so; but if you knew how it wounded a woman’s self-respect you would feel differently; or you wouldn’t, rather. But now, thank goodness; they’ve got him off their hands, and they can begin to breathe freely. That is, Mrs. Deering could, if she hadn’t her heart in her mouth all the time, wondering what she can do for the girl, and bullying herself with the notion that she is to blame if she doesn’t have a good time. You can understand just how it was with them always. Mrs. Deering is one of those meek little things that a great, splendid, lonely creature like Miss Gage would take to in a small place, and perfectly crush under the weight of her confidence; and she would want to make her husband live up to her ideal of the girl, and would be miserable because he wouldn’t or couldn’t.”

“I believe the good Deering didn’t even think her handsome.”

“That’s it. And he thought anything that was good enough for his wife was good enough for Miss Gage, and he’d be stubborn about doing things on her account, even to please his wife.”

“Such conduct is imaginable of the good Deering. I don’t think he liked her.”

“Nor she him. Mrs. Deering helplessly hinted as much. She said he didn’t like to have her worrying so much about Miss Gage’s not having a good time, and she couldn’t make him feel as she did about it, and she was half glad for his own sake that he had to go home.”

“Did she say that?”

“Not exactly; but you could see that she meant it. Do you think it would do for them to change from their hotel, and go to the Grand Union or the States or Congress Hall?”

“Have you been putting them up to that, Isabel?”

“I knew you would suspect me, and I wouldn’t have asked for your opinion if I had cared anything for it, really. What would be the harm of their doing it?”

“None whatever, if you really want my worthless opinion. But what could they do there?”

“They could see something if they couldn’t do anything, and as soon as Miss Gage has got her new gowns I’m going to tell them you thought they could do it. It was their own idea, at any rate.”

“Miss Gage’s?”

“Mrs. Deering’s. She has the courage of a—I don’t know what. She sees that it’s a desperate case, and she wouldn’t stop at anything.”

“Now that her husband has gone home.”

“Well, which hotel shall they go to?”

“Oh, that requires reflection.”

“Very well, then, when you’ve reflected I want you to go to the hotel you’ve chosen, and introduce yourself to the clerk, and tell him your wife has two friends coming, and you want something very pleasant for them. Tell him all about yourself and _Every Other Week_.”

“He’ll think I want them deadheaded.”

“No matter, if your conscience is clear; and don’t be so shamefully modest as you always are, but speak up boldly. Now, will you? Promise me you will!”

“I will try, as the good little boy says. But, Isabel, we don’t know these people except from their own account.”

“And that is quite enough.”

“It will be quite enough for the hotel-keeper if they run their board. I shall have to pay it.”

“Now, Basil dear, don’t be disgusting, and go and do as you’re bid.”

It was amusing, but it was perfectly safe, and there was no reason why I should not engage rooms for the ladies at another hotel. I had not the least question of them, and I had failed to worry my wife with a pretended doubt. So I decided that I would go up at once and inquire at the Grand Union. I chose this hotel because, though it lacked the fine flower of the more ancient respectability and the legendary charm of the States, it was so spectacular that it would be in itself a perpetual excitement for those ladies, and would form an effect of society which, with some help from us, might very well deceive them. This was what I said to myself, though in my heart I knew better. Whatever Mrs. Deering might think, that girl was not going to be taken in with any such simple device, and I must count upon the daily chances in the place to afford her the good time she had come for.

As I mounted the steps to the portico of the Grand Union with my head down, and lost in a calculation of these chances, I heard my name gaily called, and I looked up to see young Kendricks, formerly of our staff on _Every Other Week_, and still a frequent contributor, and a great favourite of my wife’s and my own. My heart gave a great joyful bound at sight of him.

“My dear boy, when in the world did you come?”

“This morning by the steamboat train, and I am never, never going away!”

“You like it, then?”

“Like it! It’s the most delightful thing in the universe. Why, I’m simply wild about it, Mr. March. I go round saying to myself, Why have I thrown away my life? Why have I never come to Saratoga before? It’s simply supreme, and it’s American down to the ground. Yes; that’s what makes it so delightful. No other people could have invented it, and it doesn’t try to be anything but what we made it.”

“I’m so glad you look at it in that way. _We_ like it. We discovered it three or four years ago, and we never let a summer slip, if we can help it, without coming here for a week or a month. The place,” I enlarged, “has the charm of ruin, though it’s in such obvious repair; it has a past; it’s so completely gone by in a society sense. The cottage life here hasn’t killed the hotel life, as it has at Newport and Bar Harbour; but the ideal of cottage life everywhere else has made hotel life at Saratoga ungenteel. The hotels are full, but at the same time they are society solitudes.”

“How gay it is!” said the young fellow, as he gazed with a pensive smile into the street, where all those festive vehicles were coming and going, dappled by the leaf-shadows from the tall trees overhead. “What air! what a sky!” The one was indeed sparkling, and the other without a cloud, for it had rained in the night, and it seemed as if the weather could never be hot and close again.

I forgot how I had been sweltering about, and said: “Yes; it is a Saratoga day. It’s supposed that the sparkle of the air comes from the healthful gases thrown off by the springs. Some people say the springs are doctored; that’s what makes their gases so healthful.”

“Why, anything might happen here,” Kendricks mused, unheedful of me. “What a scene! what a stage! Why has nobody done a story about Saratoga?” he asked, with a literary turn I knew his thoughts would be taking. All Gerald Kendricks’s thoughts were of literature, but sometimes they were not of immediate literary effect, though that was never for long.

“Because,” I suggested, “one probably couldn’t get his young lady characters to come here if they were at all in society. But of course there must be charming presences here accidentally. Some young girl, say, might come here from a country place, expecting to see social gaiety—”

“Ah, but that would be too heart-breaking!”

“Not at all. Not if she met some young fellow accidentally—don’t you see?”

“It would be difficult to manage; and hasn’t it been done?”

“Everything has been done, my dear fellow. Or, you might suppose a young lady who comes on here with her father, a veteran politician, delegate to the Republican or Democratic convention—all the conventions meet in Saratoga,—and some ardent young delegate falls in love with her. That would be new ground. There you would have the political novel, which they wonder every now and then some of us don’t write.” The smile faded from Kendricks’s lips, and I laughed. “Well, then, there’s nothing for it but the Social Science Congress. Have a brilliant professor win the heart of a lovely sister-in-law of another member by a paper he reads before the Congress. No? You’re difficult. Are you stopping here?”

“Yes; are you?”

“I try to give myself the air of it when I am feeling very proud. But really, we live at a most charming little hotel on a back street, out of the whirl and rush that we should prefer to be in if we could afford it.” He said it must be delightful, and he made the proper inquiries about Mrs. March. Kendricks never forgot the gentleman in the artist, and he was as true to the _convenances_ as if they had been principles. That was what made Mrs. March like his stories so much more than the stories of some people who wrote better. He said he would drop in during the afternoon, and I went indoors on the pretext of buying a newspaper. Then, without engaging rooms for Mrs. Deering and Miss Gage, I hurried home.

VIII

“WELL, did you get the rooms?” asked my wife as soon as she saw me.

She did not quite call it across the street to me as I came up from where she sat on the piazza.

“No, I didn’t,” I said boldly, if somewhat breathlessly.

“Why didn’t you? You ought to have gone to the States if they were full at the Grand Union.”

“They were not full, unless Kendricks got their last room.”

“Do you mean that _he_ was there? Mr. Kendricks? If you are hoaxing me, Basil!”

“I am not, my dear; indeed I’m not,” said I, beginning to laugh, and this made her doubt me the more.

“Because if you are I shall simply never forgive you. And I’m in earnest this time,” she replied.

“Why should I want to hoax you about such a vital thing as that. Couldn’t Kendricks come to Saratoga as well as we? He’s here looking up the ground of a story I should think from what he said.”

“No matter what he’s here for; he’s here, and that’s enough. I never knew of anything so perfectly providential. Did you _tell_ him, Basil? Did you dare?”

“Tell him what?”

“You know; about Miss Gage.”

“Well, I came very near it. I dangled the fact before his eyes once, but I caught it away again in time. He never saw it. I thought I’d better let you tell him.”

“Is he coming here to see us?”

“He asked if he might.”

“He’s always nice. I don’t know that I shall ask him to do anything for them, after all; I’m not sure that she’s worth it. I wish some commoner person had happened along. Kendricks is too precious. I shall have to think about it; and don’t you tease me, Basil, will you?”

“I don’t know. If I’m not allowed to have any voice in the matter, I’m afraid I shall take it out in teasing. I don’t see why Miss Gage isn’t quite as good as Kendricks. I believe she’s taller, and though he’s pretty good-looking, I prefer her style of beauty. I dare say his family is better, but I fancy she’s richer; and his family isn’t good beyond New York city, and her money will go anywhere. It’s a pretty even thing.”

“Good gracious, Basil! you talk as if it were a question of marriage.”

“And you _think_ it is.”

“Now I see that you’re bent upon teasing, and we won’t talk any more, please. What time did he say he would call?”

“If I mayn’t talk, I can’t tell.”

“You may talk that much.”

“Well, then, he didn’t say.”

“Basil,” said my wife, after a moment, “if you could be serious, I should like very much to talk with you. I know that you’re excited by meeting Mr. Kendricks, and I know what you thought the instant you saw him. But, indeed, it won’t do, my dear. It’s more than we’ve any right to ask, and I shall not ask it, and I shall not let you. She is a stiff, awkward village person, and I don’t believe she’s amiable or intelligent; and to let a graceful, refined, superior man like Mr. Kendricks throw away his time upon her would be wicked, simply wicked. Let those people manage for themselves from this out. Of course you mustn’t get them rooms at the Grand Union now, for he’d be seeing us there with them, and feel bound to pay her attention. You must try for them at the States, since the matter’s been spoken of, or at Congress Hall. But there’s no hurry. We must have time to think whether we shall use Mr. Kendricks with them. I suppose it will do no harm to introduce him. If he stays we can’t very well avoid it; and I confess I should like to see how she impresses him! Of course we shall introduce him! But I insist I shall just do it merely as one human being to another; and don’t you come in with any of your romantic nonsense, Basil, about her social disappointment. Just how much did you give the situation away?”

I told as well as I could remember. “Well, that’s nothing. He’ll never think of it, and you mustn’t hint anything of the kind again.”

I promised devoutly, and she went on—

“It wouldn’t be nice—it wouldn’t be delicate to let him into the conspiracy. That must be entirely our affair, don’t you see? And I don’t want you to take a single step without me. I don’t want you even to discuss her with him. Will you? Because that will tempt you further.”

That afternoon Kendricks came promptly to call, like the little gentleman he was, and he was more satisfactory about Saratoga than he had been in the morning even. Mrs. March catechised him, and she didn’t leave an emotion of his unsearched by her vivid sympathy. She ended by saying—

“You must write a story about Saratoga. And I have got just the heroine for you.”

I started, but she ignored my start.

Kendricks laughed, delighted, and asked, “Is she pretty?”

“Must a heroine be pretty?”

“She had better be. Otherwise she will have to be tremendously clever and say all sorts of brilliant things, and that puts a great burden on the author. If you proclaim boldly at the start that she’s a beauty, the illustrator has got to look after her, and the author has a comparative sinecure.”

Mrs. March thought a moment, and then she said: “Well, she is a beauty. I don’t want to make it too hard for you.”

“When shall I see her?” Kendricks demanded, and he feigned an amusing anxiety.

“Well, that depends upon how you behave, Mr. Kendricks. If you are very, very good, perhaps I may let you see her this evening. We will take you to call upon her.”

“Is it possible? Do you mean business? Then she is—in society?”

“_Mr._ Kendricks!” cried Mrs. March, with burlesque severity. “Do you think that I would offer you a heroine who was _not_ in society? You forget that I am from Boston!”

“Of course, of course! I understand that any heroine of your acquaintance must be in society. But I thought—I didn’t know—but for the moment—Saratoga seems to be so tremendously mixed; and Mr. March says there is no society here: But if she is from Boston—”

“I didn’t say she was from Boston, Mr. Kendricks.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon!”

“She is from De Witt Point,” said Mrs. March, and she apparently enjoyed his confusion, no less than my bewilderment at the course she was taking.

I was not going to be left behind, though, and I said: “I discovered this heroine myself, Kendricks, and if there is to be any giving away—”

“Now, Basil!”

“I am going to do it. Mrs. March would never have cared anything about her if it hadn’t been for me. I can’t let her impose on you. This heroine is no more in society than she is from Boston. That is the trouble with her. She has come here for society, and she can’t find any.”

“Oh, that was what you were hinting at this morning,” said Kendricks. “I thought it a pure figment of the imagination.”

“One doesn’t imagine such things as that, my dear fellow. One imagines a heroine coming here, and having the most magnificent kind of social career—lawn-parties, lunches, teas, dinners, picnics, hops—and going back to De Witt Point with a dozen offers of marriage. That’s the kind of work the imagination does. But this simple and appealing situation—this beautiful young girl, with her poor little illusions, her secret hopes half hidden from herself, her ignorant past, her visionary future—”

“Now, _I_ am going to tell you all about her, Mr. Kendricks,” Mrs. March broke in upon me, with defiance in her eye; and she flung out the whole fact with a rapidity of utterance that would have left far behind any attempt of mine. But I made no attempt to compete with her; I contented myself with a sarcastic silence which I could see daunted her a little at last.

“And all that we’ve done, my dear fellow”—I took in irony the word she left to me—“is to load ourselves up with these two impossible people, to go their security to destiny, and answer for their having a good time. We’re in luck.”

“Why, I don’t know,” said Kendricks, and I could see that his fancy was beginning to play with the situation; “I don’t see why it isn’t a charming scheme.”

“Of course it is,” cried Mrs. March, taking a little heart from his courage.

“We can’t make out yet whether the girl is interesting,” I put in maliciously.

“That is what _you_ say,” said my wife. “She is very shy, and of course she wouldn’t show out her real nature to you. I found her _very_ interesting.”

“Now, Isabel!” I protested.

“She is fascinating,” the perverse woman persisted. “She has a fascinating dulness.”

Kendricks laughed and I jeered at this complex characterisation.

“You make me impatient to judge for myself,” he said.

“Will you go with me to call upon them this evening?” asked Mrs. March.

“I shall be delighted. And you can count upon me to aid and abet you in your generous conspiracy, Mrs. March, to the best of my ability. There’s nothing I should like better than to help you—”

“Throw ‘dust in her beautiful eyes,’” I quoted.

“Not at all,” said my wife. “But to spread a beatific haze over everything, so that as long as she stays in Saratoga she shall see life rose-colour. Of course you may say that it’s a kind of deception—”

“Not at all!” cried the young fellow in his turn. “We will make it reality. Then there will be no harm in it.”

“What a jesuitical casuist! You had better read what Cardinal Newman says in his _Apologia_ about lying, young man.”