"Perhaps," the girl went on, with a touch of guileless melancholy, "I am naturally this shape."
Here, it must be confessed, Miss Ferrol forgot herself for the moment, and expressed her indignation with undue fervor.
"Perish the thought!" she exclaimed. "Why, child! your figure is a hundred times better than mine."
Louisiana wore for a moment a look of absolute fright.
"Oh, no!" she cried. "Oh, no. Your figure is magnificent."
"Magnificent!" echoed Miss Ferrol, giving way to her enthusiasm, and indulging in figures of speech. "Don"t you see that I am thin--absolutely thin. But my things fit me, and my dressmaker understands me. If you were dressed as I am,"--pausing to look her over from head to foot--"Ah!" she exclaimed, pathetically, "how I should like to see you in some of my clothes!"
A tender chord was touched. A gentle sadness, aroused by this instance of wasted opportunities, rested upon her. But instantaneously she brightened, seemingly without any particular cause. A brilliant idea had occurred to her. But she did not reveal it.
"I will wait," she thought, "until she is more at her ease with me."
She really was more at her ease already. Just this one little sc.r.a.p of conversation had done that. She became almost affectionate in a shy way before they reached the dining-room.
"I want to ask you something," she said, as they neared the door.
"What is it?"
She held Miss Ferrol back with a light clasp on her arm. Her air was quite tragic in a small way.
"Please say "Louise," when you speak to me," she said. "Never say "Miss Louisiana"--never--never!"
"No, I shall never say "Miss Louisiana,"" her companion answered. "How would you like "Miss Rogers?""
"I would rather have "Louise,"" she said, disappointedly.
"Well," returned Miss Ferrol, ""Louise" let it be."
And "Louise" it was thenceforward. If she had not been so pretty, so innocent, and so affectionate and humble a young creature, she might have been troublesome at times (it occurred to Olivia Ferrol), she clung so pertinaciously to their chance acquaintanceship; she was so helpless and desolate if left to herself, and so inordinately glad to be taken in hand again. She made no new friends,--which was perhaps natural enough, after all. She had nothing in common with the young women who played ten-pins and croquet and rode out in parties with their cavaliers. She was not of them, and understood them as little as they understood her. She knew very well that they regarded her with scornful tolerance when they were of the ill-natured cla.s.s, and with ill-subdued wonder when they were amiable. She could not play ten-pins or croquet, nor could she dance.
"What are the men kneeling down for, and why do they keep stopping to put on those queer little caps and things?" she whispered to Miss Ferrol one night.
"They are trying to dance a German," replied Miss Ferrol, "and the man who is leading them only knows one figure."
As for the riding, she had been used to riding all her life; but no one asked her to join them, and if they had done so she would have been too wise,--unsophisticated as she was,--to accept the invitation. So where Miss Ferrol was seen she was seen also, and she was never so happy as when she was invited into her protector"s room and allowed to spend the morning or evening there. She would have been content to sit there forever and listen to Miss Ferrol"s graphic description of life in the great world: The names of celebrated personages made small impression upon her. It was revealed gradually to Miss Ferrol that she had private doubts as to the actual existence of some of them, and the rest she had never heard of before.
"You never read "The Scarlet Letter?"" asked her instructress upon one occasion.
She flushed guiltily.
"No," she answered. "Nor--nor any of the others."
Miss Ferrol gazed at her silently for a few moments. Then she asked her a question in a low voice, specially mellowed, so that it might not alarm her.
"Do you know who John Stuart Mill is?" she said.
"No," she replied from the dust of humiliation.
"Have you never heard--just _heard_--of Ruskin?"
"No."
"Nor of Michael Angelo?"
"N-no--ye-es, I think so--perhaps, but I don"t know what he did."
"Do you," she continued, very slowly, "do--you--know--anything--about--Worth?"
"No, nothing."
Her questioner clasped her hands with repressed emotion.
"Oh," she cried, "how--how you have been neglected!"
She was really depressed, but her _protegee_ was so much more deeply so that she felt it her duty to contain herself and return to cheerfulness.
"Never mind," she said. "I will tell you all I know about them, and,"--after a pause for speculative thought upon the subject,--"by-the-by, it isn"t much, and I will lend you some books to read, and give you a list of some you must persuade your father to buy for you, and you will be all right. It is rather dreadful not to know the names of people and things; but, after all, I think there are very few people who--ahem!"
She was checked here by rigid conscientious scruples. If she was to train this young mind in the path of learning and literature, she must place before her a higher standard of merit than the somewhat shady and slipshod one her eagerness had almost betrayed her into upholding. She had heard people talk of "standards" and "ideals," and when she was kept to the point and in regulation working order, she could be very eloquent upon these subjects herself.
"You will have to work very seriously," she remarked, rather incongruously and with a rapid change of position. "If you wish to--to acquire anything, you must read conscientiously and--and with a purpose." She was rather proud of that last clause.
"Must I?" inquired Louise, humbly. "I should like to--if I knew where to begin. Who was Worth? Was he a poet?"
Miss Ferrol acquired a fine, high color very suddenly.
"Oh," she answered, with some uneasiness, "you--you have no need to begin with Worth. He doesn"t matter so much--really."
"I thought," Miss Rogers said meekly, "that you were more troubled about my not having read what he wrote, than about my not knowing any of the others."
"Oh, no. You see--the fact is, he--he never wrote anything."
"What did he do?" she asked, anxious for information.
"He--it isn"t "did," it is "does." He--makes dresses."
"Dresses!"
This single word, but no exclamation point could express its tone of wild amazement.
"Yes."
"A man!"
"Yes."