doubtless these places are low; I’ll feel my way a little and see.” Then
she said aloud:
“Why I thought that Long Branch–”
There was no need to “feel” any further–there was that in both faces
before her which made that truth apparent. The dowager said:
“Nobody goes there, Miss Hawkins–at least only persons of no position in
society. And the President.” She added that with tranquility.
“Newport is damp, and cold, and windy and excessively disagreeable,” said
the daughter, “but it is very select. One cannot be fastidious about
minor matters when one has no choice.”
The visit had spun out nearly three minutes, now. Both ladies rose with
grave dignity, conferred upon Laura a formal invitation to call, aid then
retired from the conference. Laura remained in the drawing-room and left
them to pilot themselves out of the house–an inhospitable thing,
it seemed to her, but then she was following her instructions. She
stood, steeped in reverie, a while, and then she said:
“I think I could always enjoy icebergs–as scenery but not as company.”
Still, she knew these two people by reputation, and was aware that they
were not ice-bergs when they were in their own waters and amid their
legitimate surroundings, but on the contrary were people to be respected
for their stainless characters and esteemed for their social virtues and
their benevolent impulses. She thought it a pity that they had to be
such changed and dreary creatures on occasions of state.
The first call Laura received from the other extremity of the Washington
aristocracy followed close upon the heels of the one we have just been
describing. The callers this time were the Hon. Mrs. Oliver Higgins,
the Hon. Mrs. Patrique Oreille (pronounced O-relay,) Miss Bridget
(pronounced Breezhay) Oreille, Mrs. Peter Gashly, Miss Gashly, and Miss
Emmeline Gashly.
The three carriages arrived at the same moment from different directions.
They were new and wonderfully shiny, and the brasses on the harness were
highly polished and bore complicated monograms. There were showy coats
of arms, too, with Latin mottoes. The coachmen and footmen were clad in
bright new livery, of striking colors, and they had black rosettes with
shaving-brushes projecting above them, on the sides of their stove-pipe
hats.
When the visitors swept into the drawing-room they filled the place with
a suffocating sweetness procured at the perfumer’s. Their costumes, as
to architecture, were the latest fashion intensified; they were rainbow-
hued; they were hung with jewels–chiefly diamonds. It would have been
plain to any eye that it had cost something to upholster these women.
The Hon. Mrs. Oliver Higgins was the wife of a delegate from a distant
territory–a gentleman who had kept the principal “saloon,” and sold the
best whiskey in the principal village in his wilderness, and so, of
course, was recognized as the first man of his commonwealth and its
fittest representative.
He was a man of paramount influence at home, for he was public spirited,
he was chief of the fire department, he had an admirable command of
profane language, and had killed several “parties.” His shirt fronts
were always immaculate; his boots daintily polished, and no man could
lift a foot and fire a dead shot at a stray speck of dirt on it with a
white handkerchief with a finer grace than he; his watch chain weighed a
pound; the gold in his finger ring was worth forty five dollars; he wore
a diamond cluster-pin and he parted his hair behind. He had always been,
regarded as the most elegant gentleman in his territory, and it was
conceded by all that no man thereabouts was anywhere near his equal in
the telling of an obscene story except the venerable white-haired
governor himself. The Hon. Higgins had not come to serve his country in
Washington for nothing. The appropriation which he had engineered
through Congress for the maintenance, of the Indians in his Territory
would have made all those savages rich if it had ever got to them.
The Hon. Mrs. Higgins was a picturesque woman, and a fluent talker, and
she held a tolerably high station among the Parvenus. Her English was
fair enough, as a general thing–though, being of New York origin, she