"I am glad you see what a very good fellow he is. I have a real affection for Dunham."
"Oh, yes, he"s good. At first it surprised me. I mean--"
"No, no," Staniford quickly interrupted, "why did it surprise you to find Dunham good?"
"I don"t know. You don"t expect a person to be serious who is so--so--"
"Handsome?"
"No,--so--I don"t know just how to say it: fashionable."
Staniford laughed. "Why, Miss Blood, you"re fashionably dressed yourself, not to go any farther, and you"re serious."
"It"s different with a man," the girl explained.
"Well, then, how about me?" asked Staniford. "Am I too well dressed to be expected to be serious?"
"Mr. Dunham always seems in earnest," Lydia answered, evasively.
"And you think one can"t be in earnest without being serious?" Lydia suffered one of those silences to ensue in which Staniford had already found himself helpless. He knew that he should be forced to break it: and he said, with a little spiteful mocking, "I suppose the young men of South Bradfield are both serious and earnest."
"How?" asked Lydia.
"The young men of South Bradfield."
"I told you that there were none. They all go away."
"Well, then, the young men of Springfield, of Keene, of Greenfield."
"I can"t tell. I am not acquainted there."
Staniford had begun to have a disagreeable suspicion that her ready consent to walk up and down with a young man in the moonlight might have come from a habit of the kind. But it appeared that her fearlessness was like that of wild birds in those desert islands where man has never come. The discovery gave him pleasure out of proportion to its importance, and he paced back and forth in a silence that no longer chafed. Lydia walked very well, and kept his step with rhythmic unison, as if they were walking to music together. "That"s the time in her pulses," he thought, and then he said, "Then you don"t have a great deal of social excitement, I suppose,--dancing, and that kind of thing?
Though perhaps you don"t approve of dancing?"
"Oh, yes, I like it. Sometimes the summer boarders get up little dances at the hotel."
"Oh, the summer boarders!" Staniford had overlooked them. "The young men get them up, and invite the ladies?" he pursued.
"There are no young men, generally, among the summer boarders. The ladies dance together. Most of the gentlemen are old, or else invalids."
"Oh!" said Staniford.
"At the Mill Village, where I"ve taught two winters, they have dances sometimes,--the mill hands do."
"And do you go?"
"No. They are nearly all French Canadians and Irish people."
"Then you like dancing because there are no gentlemen to dance with?"
"There are gentlemen at the picnics."
"The picnics?"
"The teachers" picnics. They have them every summer, in a grove by the pond."
There was, then, a high-browed, dyspeptic high-school princ.i.p.al, and the desert-island theory was probably all wrong. It vexed Staniford, when he had so nearly got the compa.s.s of her social life, to find this unexplored corner in it.
"And I suppose you are leaving very agreeable friends among the teachers?"
"Some of them are pleasant. But I don"t know them very well. I"ve only been to one of the picnics."
Staniford drew a long, silent breath. After all, he knew everything. He mechanically dropped a little the arm on which her hand rested, that it might slip farther within. Her timid remoteness had its charm, and he fell to thinking, with amus.e.m.e.nt, how she who was so subordinate to him was, in the dimly known sphere in which he had been groping to find her, probably a person of authority and consequence. It satisfied a certain domineering quality in him to have reduced her to this humble att.i.tude, while it increased the protecting tenderness he was beginning to have for her. His mind went off further upon this matter of one"s different att.i.tudes toward different persons; he thought of men, and women too, before whom he should instantly feel like a boy, if he could be confronted with them, even in his present lordliness of mood. In a fashion of his when he convicted himself of anything, he laughed aloud.
Lydia shrank a little from him, in question. "I beg your pardon," he said. "I was laughing at something I happened to think of. Do you ever find yourself struggling very hard to be what you think people think you are?"
"Oh, yes," replied Lydia. "But I thought no one else did."
"Everybody does the thing that we think no one else does," said Staniford, sententiously.
"I don"t know whether I quite like it," said Lydia. "It seems like hypocrisy. It used to worry me. Sometimes I wondered if I had any real self. I seemed to be just what people made me, and a different person to each."
"I"m glad to hear it, Miss Blood. We are companions in hypocrisy. As we are such nonent.i.ties we shall not affect each other at all." Lydia laughed. "Don"t you think so? What are you laughing at? I told you what I was laughing at!"
"But I didn"t ask you."
"You wished to know."
"Yes, I did."
"Then you ought to tell me what I wish to know."
"It"s nothing," said Lydia. "I thought you were mistaken in what you said."
"Oh! Then you believe that there"s enough of you to affect me?"
"No."
"The other way, then?"
She did not answer.
"I"m delighted!" exclaimed Staniford. "I hope I don"t exert an uncomfortable influence. I should be very unhappy to think so." Lydia stooped side-wise, away from him, to get a fresh hold of her skirt, which she was carrying in her right hand, and she hung a little more heavily upon his arm. "I hope I make you think better of yourself,--very self-satisfied, very conceited even."
"No," said Lydia.
"You pique my curiosity beyond endurance. Tell me how I make you feel."
She looked quickly round at him, as if to see whether he was in earnest.
"Why, it"s nothing," she said. "You made me feel as if you were laughing at everybody."