Part 2 (1/2)
”How do you know them for new-comers?” asked Hope, looking after the carriage.
”By their improperly intelligent expression,” returned Phil. ”They look around them as you do, my child, with the air of wide-awake curiosity which marks the American traveller. That is out of place here. The Avenue abhors everything but a vacuum.”
”I never can find out,” continued Hope, ”how people recognize each other here. They do not look at each other, unless they know each other: and how are they to know if they know, unless they look first?”
”It seems an embarra.s.sment,” said Malbone. ”But it is supposed that fas.h.i.+on perforates the eyelids and looks through. If you attempt it in any other way, you are lost. Newly arrived people look about them, and, the more new wealth they have, the more they gaze. The men are uneasy behind their recently educated mustaches, and the women hold their parasols with trembling hands. It takes two years to learn to drive on the Avenue. Come again next summer, and you will see in those same carriages faces of remote superciliousness, that suggest generations of gout and ancestors.”
”What a pity one feels,” said Harry, ”for these people who still suffer from lingering modesty, and need a master to teach them to be insolent!”
”They learn it soon enough,” said Kate. ”Philip is right. Fas.h.i.+on lies in the eye. People fix their own position by the way they don't look at you.”
”There is a certain indifference of manner,” philosophized Malbone, ”before which ingenuous youth is crushed. I may know that a man can hardly read or write, and that his father was a ragpicker till one day he picked up bank-notes for a million. No matter. If he does not take the trouble to look at me, I must look reverentially at him.”
”Here is somebody who will look at Hope,” cried Kate, suddenly.
A carriage pa.s.sed, bearing a young lady with fair hair, and a keen, bright look, talking eagerly to a small and quiet youth beside her.
Her face brightened still more as she caught the eye of Hope, whose face lighted up in return, and who then sank back with a sort of sigh of relief, as if she had at last seen somebody she cared for. The lady waved an un-gloved hand, and drove by.
”Who is that?” asked Philip, eagerly. He was used to knowing every one.
”Hope's pet,” said Kate, ”and she who pets Hope, Lady Antwerp.”
”Is it possible?” said Malbone. ”That young creature? I fancied her ladys.h.i.+p in spectacles, with little side curls. Men speak of her with such dismay.”
”Of course,” said Kate, ”she asks them sensible questions.”
”That is bad,” admitted Philip. ”Nothing exasperates fas.h.i.+onable Americans like a really intelligent foreigner. They feel as Sydney Smith says the English clergy felt about Elizabeth Fry; she disturbs their repose, and gives rise to distressing comparisons,--they long to burn her alive. It is not their notion of a countess.”
”I am sure it was not mine,” said Hope; ”I can hardly remember that she is one; I only know that I like her, she is so simple and intelligent.
She might be a girl from a Normal School.”
”It is because you are just that,” said Kate, ”that she likes you.
She came here supposing that we had all been at such schools. Then she complained of us,--us girls in what we call good society, I mean,--because, as she more than hinted, we did not seem to know anything.”
”Some of the mothers were angry,” said Hope. ”But Aunt Jane told her that it was perfectly true, and that her ladys.h.i.+p had not yet seen the best-educated girls in America, who were generally the daughters of old ministers and well-to-do shopkeepers in small New England towns, Aunt Jane said.”
”Yes,” said Kate, ”she said that the best of those girls went to High Schools and Normal Schools, and learned things thoroughly, you know; but that we were only taught at boarding-schools and by governesses, and came out at eighteen, and what could we know? Then came Hope, who had been at those schools, and was the child of refined people too, and Lady Antwerp was perfectly satisfied.”
”Especially,” said Hope, ”when Aunt Jane told her that, after all, schools did not do very much good, for if people were born stupid they only became more tiresome by schooling. She said that she had forgotten all she learned at school except the boundaries of ancient Cappadocia.”
Aunt Jane's fearless sayings always pa.s.sed current among her nieces; and they drove on, Hope not being lowered in Philip's estimation, nor raised in her own, by being the pet of a pa.s.sing countess.
Who would not be charmed (he thought to himself) by this n.o.ble girl, who walks the earth fresh and strong as a Greek G.o.ddess, pure as Diana, stately as Juno? She belongs to the unspoiled womanhood of another age, and is wasted among these dolls and b.u.t.terflies.
He looked at her. She sat erect and graceful, unable to droop into the debility of fas.h.i.+onable reclining,--her breezy hair lifted a little by the soft wind, her face flushed, her full brown eyes looking eagerly about, her mouth smiling happily. To be with those she loved best, and to be driving over the beautiful earth! She was so happy that no mob of fas.h.i.+onables could have lessened her enjoyment, or made her for a moment conscious that anybody looked at her. The brilliant equipages which they met each moment were not wholly uninteresting even to her, for her affections went forth to some of the riders and to all the horses. She was as well contented at that moment, on the glittering Avenue, as if they had all been riding home through country lanes, and in constant peril of being jolted out among the whortleberry-bushes.
Her face brightened yet more as they met a carriage containing a graceful lady dressed with that exquisiteness of taste that charms both man and woman, even if no man can a.n.a.lyze and no woman rival its effect.
She had a perfectly high-bred look, and an eye that in an instant would calculate one's ancestors as far back as Nebuchadnezzar, and bow to them all together. She smiled good-naturedly on Hope, and kissed her hand to Kate.