He was proud of Gwendolen, and liked to show her off, even against Miss
Belle Thompson, and here had been a great opportunity, and what had she
made of it? He felt a good deal put out. It vexed him to think that
this Englishman, with the traveling Briton’s everlasting disposition to
generalize whole mountain ranges from single sample-grains of sand, would
jump to the conclusion that American girls were as dumb as himself–
generalizing the whole tribe from this single sample and she at her
poorest, there being nothing at that table to inspire her, give her a
start, keep her from going to sleep. He made up his mind that for the
honor of the country he would bring these two together again over the
social board before long. There would be a different result another
time, he judged. He said to himself, with a deep sense of injury,
“He’ll put in his diary–they all keep diaries–he’ll put in his diary
that she was miraculously uninteresting–dear, dear, but wasn’t she!
I never saw the like–and yet looking as beautiful as Satan, too–and
couldn’t seem to do anything but paw bread crumbs, and pick flowers to
pieces, and look fidgety. And it isn’t any better here in the Hall of
Audience. I’ve had enough; I’ll haul down my flag the others may fight
it out if they want to.”
He shook hands all around and went off to do some work which he said was
pressing. The idolaters were the width of the room apart; and apparently
unconscious of each other’s presence. The distance got shortened a
little, now. Very soon the mother withdrew. The distance narrowed
again. Tracy stood before a chromo of some Ohio politician which had
been retouched and chain-mailed for a crusading Rossmore, and Gwendolen
was sitting on the sofa not far from his elbow artificially absorbed in
examining a photograph album that hadn’t any photographs in it.
The “Senator” still lingered. He was sorry for the young people; it had
been a dull evening for them. In the goodness of his heart he tried to
make it pleasant for them now; tried to remove the ill impression
necessarily left by the general defeat; tried to be chatty, even tried to
be gay. But the responses were sickly, there was no starting any
enthusiasm; he would give it up and quit–it was a day specially picked
out and consecrated to failures.
But when Gwendolen rose up promptly and smiled a glad smile and said with
thankfulness and blessing, “Must you go?” it seemed cruel to desert, and
he sat down again.
He was about to begin a remark when–when he didn’t. We have all been
there. He didn’t know how he knew his concluding to stay longer had been
a mistake, he merely knew it; and knew it for dead certain, too. And so
he bade goodnight, and went mooning out, wondering what he could have
done that changed the atmosphere that way. As the door closed behind him
those two were standing side by side, looking at that door–looking at it
in a waiting, second-counting, but deeply grateful kind of way. And the
instant it closed they flung their arms about each other’s necks, and
there, heart to heart and lip to lip–
“Oh, my God, she’s kissing it!”
Nobody heard this remark, because Hawkins, who bred it, only thought it,
he didn’t utter it. He had turned, the moment he had closed the door,
and had pushed it open a little, intending to re-enter and ask what ill-
advised thing he had done or said, and apologize for it. But he didn’t
re-enter; he staggered off stunned, terrified, distressed.
CHAPTER XXII.
Five minutes later he was sitting in his room, with his head bowed within
the circle of his arms, on the table-final attitude of grief and despair.
His tears were flowing fast, and now and then a sob broke upon the
stillness. Presently he said:
“I knew her when she was a little child and used to climb about my knees;
I love her as I love my own, and now–oh, poor thing, poor thing, I
cannot bear it! –she’s gone and lost her heart to this mangy