"Miss Woodburn is wild for a real Northern winter," Mrs. Leighton explained.
"The othah naght Ah woke up and looked oat of the window and saw all the roofs covered with snow, and it turned oat to be nothing but moonlaght.
Ah was never so disappointed in mah lahfe," said Miss Woodburn.
"If you"ll come to St. Barnaby next summer, you shall have all the winter you want," said Alma.
"I can"t let you slander St. Barnaby in that way," said Beaton, with the air of wishing to be understood as meaning more than he said.
"Yes?" returned Alma, coolly. "I didn"t know you were so fond of the climate."
"I never think of it as a climate. It"s a landscape. It doesn"t matter whether it"s hot or cold."
"With the thermometer twenty below, you"d find that it mattered," Alma persisted.
"Is that the way you feel about St. Barnaby, too, Mrs. Leighton?" Beaton asked, with affected desolation.
"I shall be glad enough to go back in the summer," Mrs. Leighton conceded.
"And I should be glad to go now," said Beaton, looking at Alma. He had the dummy of "Every Other Week" in his hand, and he saw Alma"s eyes wandering toward it whenever he glanced at her. "I should be glad to go anywhere to get out of a job I"ve undertaken," he continued, to Mrs.
Leighton. "They"re going to start some sort of a new ill.u.s.trated magazine, and they"ve got me in for their art department. I"m not fit for it; I"d like to run away. Don"t you want to advise me a little, Mrs.
Leighton? You know how much I value your taste, and I"d like to have you look at the design for the cover of the first number: they"re going to have a different one for every number. I don"t know whether you"ll agree with me, but I think this is rather nice."
He faced the dummy round, and then laid it on the table before Mrs.
Leighton, pushing some of her work aside to make room for it and standing over her while she bent forward to look at it.
Alma kept her place, away from the table.
"Mah goodness! Ho" exciting!" said Miss Woodburn. "May anybody look?"
"Everybody," said Beaton.
"Well, isn"t it perfectly choming!" Miss Woodburn exclaimed. "Come and look at this, Miss Leighton," she called to Alma, who reluctantly approached.
"What lines are these?" Mrs. Leighton asked, pointing to Beaton"s pencil scratches.
"They"re suggestions of modifications," he replied.
"I don"t think they improve it much. What do you think, Alma?"
"Oh, I don"t know," said the girl, constraining her voice to an effect of indifference and glancing carelessly down at the sketch. "The design might be improved; but I don"t think those suggestions would do it."
"They"re mine," said Beaton, fixing his eyes upon her with a beautiful sad dreaminess that he knew he could put into them; he spoke with a dreamy remoteness of tone--his wind-harp stop, Wetmore called it.
"I supposed so," said Alma, calmly.
"Oh, mah goodness!" cried Miss Woodburn. "Is that the way you awtusts talk to each othah? Well, Ah"m glad Ah"m not an awtust--unless I could do all the talking."
"Artists cannot tell a fib," Alma said, "or even act one," and she laughed in Beaton"s upturned face.
He did not unbend his dreamy gaze. "You"re quite right. The suggestions are stupid."
Alma turned to Miss Woodburn: "You hear? Even when we speak of our own work."
"Ah nevah hoad anything lahke it!"
"And the design itself?" Beaton persisted.
"Oh, I"m not an art editor," Alma answered, with a laugh of exultant evasion.
A tall, dark, grave-looking man of fifty, with a swarthy face and iron-gray mustache and imperial and goatee, entered the room. Beaton knew the type; he had been through Virginia sketching for one of the ill.u.s.trated papers, and he had seen such men in Richmond. Miss Woodburn hardly needed to say, "May Ah introduce you to mah fathaw, Co"nel Woodburn, Mr. Beaton?"
The men shook hands, and Colonel Woodburn said, in that soft, gentle, slow Southern voice without our Northern contractions: "I am very glad to meet you, sir; happy to make yo" acquaintance. Do not move, madam," he said to Mrs. Leighton, who made a deprecatory motion to let him pa.s.s to the chair beyond her; "I can find my way." He bowed a bulk that did not lend itself readily to the devotion, and picked up the ball of yarn she had let drop out of her lap in half rising. "Yo" worsteds, madam."
"Yarn, yarn, Colonel Woodburn!" Alma shouted. "You"re quite incorrigible.
A spade is a spade!"
"But sometimes it is a trump, my dear young lady," said the Colonel, with unabated gallantry; "and when yo" mothah uses yarn, it is worsteds. But I respect worsteds even under the name of yarn: our ladies--my own mothah and sistahs--had to knit the socks we wore--all we could get in the woe."
"Yes, and aftah the woe," his daughter put in. "The knitting has not stopped yet in some places. Have you been much in the Soath, Mr. Beaton?"
Beaton explained just how much.
"Well, sir," said the Colonel, "then you have seen a country making gigantic struggles to retrieve its losses, sir. The South is advancing with enormous strides, sir."
"Too fast for some of us to keep up," said Miss Woodburn, in an audible aside. "The pace in Charlottesboag is pofectly killing, and we had to drop oat into a slow place like New York."
"The progress in the South is material now," said the Colonel; "and those of us whose interests are in another direction find ourselves--isolated --isolated, sir. The intellectual centres are still in the No"th, sir; the great cities draw the mental activity of the country to them, sir.
Necessarily New York is the metropolis."
"Oh, everything comes here," said Beaton, impatient of the elder"s ponderosity. Another sort of man would have sympathized with the Southerner"s willingness to talk of himself, and led him on to speak of his plans and ideals. But the sort of man that Beaton was could not do this; he put up the dummy into the wrapper he had let drop on the floor beside him, and tied it round with string while Colonel Woodburn was talking. He got to his feet with the words he spoke and offered Mrs.
Leighton his hand.
"Must you go?" she asked, in surprise.
"I am on my way to a reception," he said. She had noticed that he was in evening dress; and now she felt the vague hurt that people invited nowhere feel in the presence of those who are going somewhere. She did not feel it for herself, but for her daughter; and she knew Alma would not have let her feel it if she could have prevented it. But Alma had left the room for a moment, and she tacitly indulged this sense of injury in her behalf.
"Please say good-night to Miss Leighton for me," Beaton continued. He bowed to Miss Woodburn, "Goodnight, Miss Woodburn," and to her father, bluntly, "Goodnight."
"Good-night, sir," said the Colonel, with a sort of severe suavity.
"Oh, isn"t he choming!" Miss Woodburn whispered to Mrs. Leighton when Beaton left the room.
Alma spoke to him in the hall without. "You knew that was my design, Mr.
Beaton. Why did you bring it?"
"Why?" He looked at her in gloomy hesitation.
Then he said: "You know why. I wished to talk it over with you, to serve you, please you, get back your good opinion. But I"ve done neither the one nor the other; I"ve made a mess of the whole thing."