"Oh yes, I quite agree with you," said Mrs. Pasmer, deep in her throat, and reserving deeper still her enjoyment of this early wisdom of Miss Anderson"s.
"Now, even at church--she carries the same spirit into the church. She doesn"t make allowance for human nature, and the church does."
"Oh, certainly!" Mrs. Pasmer agreed.
"She isn"t like a person that"s been brought up in the church. It"s more like the old Puritan spirit.--Excuse me, Mrs. Pasmer!"
"Yes, indeed! Say anything you like about the Puritans!" said Mrs.
Pasmer, delighted that, as a Bostonian, she should be thought to care for them.
"I always forget that you"re a Bostonian," Miss Anderson apologized.
"Oh, thank you!" cried Mrs. Pasmer.
"I"m going to try to make her like other girls," continued Miss Anderson.
"Do," said Alice"s mother, with the effect of wishing her joy of the undertaking.
"If there were a few young men about, a little over seventeen and a little under fifty, it would be easier," said Miss Anderson thoughtfully. "But how are you going to make a girl like other girls when there are no young men?"
"That"s very true," said Mrs. Pasmer, with an interest which she of course did her best to make impersonal. "Do you think there will be more, later on?"
"They will have to Huey up if they are comin"," said Miss Anderson.
"It"s the middle of August now, and the hotel closes the second week in September."
"Yes," said Mrs. Pasmer, vaguely looking at Alice. She had just appeared over the brow of the precipice, along whose face the arrivals and departures by the ferry-boat at Campobello obliquely ascend and descend.
She came walking swiftly toward the hotel, and, for her, so excitedly that Mrs. Pasmer involuntarily rose and went to meet her at the top of the broad hotel steps.
"What is it, Alice?"
"Oh, nothing! I thought I saw Mr. Munt coming off the boat."
"Mr. Munt?"
"Yes." She would not stay for further question.
Her mother looked after her with the edge of her fan over her mouth till she disappeared in the depths of the hotel corridor; then she sat down near the steps, and chatted with some half-grown boys lounging on the bal.u.s.trade, and waited for Munt to come up over the brink of the precipice. Dan Mavering came with him, running forward with a polite eagerness at sight of Mrs. Pasmer. She distributed a skillful astonishment equally between the two men she had equally expected to see, and was extremely cordial with them, not only because she was pleased with them, but because she was still more pleased with her daughter"s being, after all, like other girls, when it came to essentials.
XII.
Alice came down to lunch in a dress which reconciled the seaside and the drawing-room in an effect entirely satisfactory to her mother, and gave her hand to both the gentlemen without the affectation of surprise at seeing either.
"I saw Mr. Munt coning up from the boat," she said in answer to Mavering"s demand for some sort of astonishment from her. "I wasn"t certain that it was you."
Mrs. Pasmer, whose pretences had been all given away by this simple confession, did not resent it, she was so much pleased with her daughter"s evident excitement at the young man"s having come. Without being conscious of it, perhaps, Alice prettily a.s.sumed the part of hostess from the moment of their meeting, and did the honours of the hotel with a tacit implication of knowing that he had come to see her there. They had only met twice, but now, the third time, meeting after a little separation, their manner toward each other was as if their acquaintance had been making progress in the interval. She took him about quite as if he had joined their family party, and introduced him to Miss Anderson and to all her particular friends, for each of whom, within five minutes after his presentation, he contrived to do some winning service. She introduced him to her father, whom he treated with deep respect and said "Sir" to. She showed him the bowling alley, and began to play tennis with him.
Her mother, sitting with John Munt on the piazza, followed these polite attentions to Mavering with humorous satisfaction, which was qualified as they went on.
"Alice," she said to her, at a chance which offered itself during the evening, and then she hesitated for the right word.
"Well; mamma?" said the girl impatiently, stopping on her way to walk up and down the piazza with Mavering; she had run in to get a wrap and a Tam-o"-Shanter cap.
"Don"t--overdo--the honours."
"What do you mean, mamma?" asked the girl; dropping her arms before her, and letting the shawl trail on the floor.
"Don"t you think he was very kind to us on Cla.s.s Day?"
Her mother laughed. "But every one mayn"t know it"s grat.i.tude."
Alice went out, but she came back in a little while, and went up to her room without speaking to any one.
The fits of elation and depression with which this first day pa.s.sed for her succeeded one another during Mavering"s stay. He did not need Alice"s chaperonage long. By the next morning he seemed to know and to like everybody in the hotel, where he enjoyed a general favour which at that moment had no exceptions. In the afternoon he began to organise excursions and amus.e.m.e.nts with the help of Miss Anderson.
The plans all referred to Alice, who accepted and approved with an authority which every one tacitly admitted, just as every one recognised that Mavering had come to Campobello because she was there. Such a phase is perhaps the prettiest in the history of a love affair. All is yet in solution; nothing has been precipitated in word or fact. The parties to it even reserve a final construction of what they themselves say or do; they will not own to their hearts that they mean exactly this or that.
It is this phase which in its perfect freedom is the most American of all; under other conditions it is an instant, perceptible or imperceptible; under ours it is a distinct stage, unhurried by any outside influences.
The nearest approach to a definition of the situation was in a walk between Mavering and Mrs. Pasmer, and this talk, too, light and brief, might have had no such intention as her fancy a.s.signed his part of it.
She recurred to something that had been said on Cla.s.s Day about his taking up the law immediately, or going abroad first for a year.
"Oh, I"ve abandoned Europe altogether for the present," he said laughing. "And I don"t know but I may go back on the law too."
"Indeed! Then you are going to be an artist?"
"Oh no; not so bad as that. It isn"t settled yet, and I"m off here to think it over a while before the law school opens in September. My father wants me to go into his business and turn my powers to account in designing wall-papers."
"Oh, how very interesting!" At the same time Mrs. Pasmer ran over the whole field of her acquaintance without finding another wall-paper maker in it. But she remembered what Mrs. Saintsbury had said: it was manufacturing. This reminded her to ask if he had seen the Saintsburys lately, and he said, No; he believed they were still in Cambridge, though.
"And we shall actually see a young man," she said finally, "in the act of deciding his own destiny!"
He laughed for pleasure in her persiflage. "Yes; only don"t give me away. n.o.body else knows it."
"Oh no, indeed. Too much flattered, Mr. Mavering. Shall you let me know when you"ve decided? I shall be dying to know, and I shall be too high-minded to ask."
It was not then too late to adapt "Pinafore" to any exigency of life, and Mavering said, "You will learn from the expression of my eyes."
XIII.
The witnesses of Mavering"s successful efforts to make everybody like him were interested in his differentiation of the attentions he offered every age and s.e.x from those he paid Alice. But while they all agreed that there never was a sweeter fellow, they would have been puzzled to say in just what this difference consisted, and much as they liked him, the ladies of her cult were not quite satisfied with him till they decided that it was marked by an anxiety, a timidity, which was perfectly fascinating in a man so far from bashfulness as he. That is, he did nice things for others without asking; but with her there was always an explicit pause, and an implicit prayer and permission, first.
Upon this condition they consented to the glamour which he had for her, and which was evident to every one probably but him.