Part 12 (1/2)
”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: fas.h.i.+onable.”
Staniford laughed. ”Why, Miss Blood, you're fas.h.i.+onably 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.”