a mite. I guess she enjoyed it. She don't seem to enjoy most things. She's got everything heart can wish at home. I don't know how it is. I was tellin' pa, Mr. Benson, today that girls ain't what they used to be in my time. Takes more to satisfy 'em. Now my daughter, if I say it as shouldn't, Mr. King, there ain't a better appearin,' nor smarter, nor more dutiful girl anywhere—well, I just couldn't live without her; and she's had the best schools in the East and Europe; done all Europe and Rome and Italy; and after all, somehow, she don't seem contented in Cyrusville—that's where we live in Ohio—one of the smartest places in the state; grown right up to be a city since we was married. She never says anything, but I can see. And we haven't spared anything on our house. And society—there's a great deal more society than I ever had.”
Mr. King might have been astonished at this outpouring if he had not observed that it is precisely in hotels and to entire strangers that some people are apt to talk with less reserve than to intimate friends.
“I've no doubt,” he said, “you have a lovely home in Cyrusville.”
“Well, I guess it's got all the improvements. Pa, Mr. Benson, said that he didn't know of anything that had been left out, and we had a man up from Cincinnati, who did all the furnishing before Irene came home.”
“Perhaps your daughter would have preferred to furnish it herself?”
“Mebbe so. She said it was splendid, but it looked like somebody else's house. She says the queerest things sometimes. I told Mr. Benson that I thought it would be a good thing to go away from home a little while and travel round. I've never been away much except in New York, where Mr. Benson has business a good deal. We've been in Washington this winter.”
“Are you going farther south?”
“Yes; we calculate to go down to the New Orleans Centennial. Pa wants to see the Exposition, and Irene wants to see what the South looks like, and so do I. I suppose it's perfectly safe now, so long after the war?”
“Oh, I should say so.”
“That's what Mr. Benson says. He says it's all nonsense the talk about what the South 'll do now the Democrats are in. He says the South wants to make money, and wants the country prosperous as much as anybody. Yes, we are going to take a regular tour all summer round to the different places where people go. Irene calls it a pilgrimage to the holy places of America. Pa thinks we'll get enough of it, and he's determined we shall have enough of it for once. I suppose we shall. I like to travel, but I haven't seen any place better than Cyrusville yet.”
As Irene did not make her appearance, Mr. King tore himself away from this interesting conversation and strolled about the parlors, made engagements to take early coffee at the fort, to go to church with Mrs. Cortlandt and her friends, and afterwards to drive over to Hampton and see the copper and other colored schools, talked a little politics over a late cigar, and then went to bed, rather curious to see if the eyes that Mrs. Cortlandt regarded as so dangerous would appear to him in the darkness.
When he awoke, his first faint impressions were that the Hygeia had drifted out to sea, and then that a dense fog had drifted in and enveloped it. But this illusion was speedily dispelled. The window-ledge was piled high with snow. Snow filled the air, whirled about by a gale that was banging the window-shutters and raging exactly like a Northern tempest.
It swirled the snow about in waves and dark masses interspersed with rifts of light, dark here and luminous there. The Rip-Raps were lost to view. Out at sea black clouds hung in the horizon, heavy reinforcements for the attacking storm. The ground was heaped with the still fast-falling snow—ten inches deep he heard it said when he descended. The Baltimore boat had not arrived, and could not get in. The waves at the wharf rolled in, black and heavy, with a sullen beat, and the sky shut down close to the water, except when a sudden stronger gust of wind cleared a luminous space for an instant. Stormbound: that is what the Hygeia was—a winter resort without any doubt.
The hotel was put to a test of its qualities. There was no getting abroad in such a storm. But the Hygeia appeared at its best in this emergency. The long glass corridors, where no one could venture in the arctic temperature, gave, nevertheless, an air of brightness and cheerfulness to the interior, where big fires blazed, and the company were exalted into good-fellowship and gayety—a decorous Sunday gayety—by the elemental war from which they were securely housed.
If the defenders of their country in the fortress mounted guard that morning, the guests at the Hygeia did not see them, but a good many of them mounted guard later at the hotel, and offered to the young ladies there that protection which the brave like to give the fair. Notwithstanding this, Mr. Stanhope King could not say the day was dull. After a morning presumably spent over works of a religious character, some of the young ladies, who had been the life of the excursion the day before, showed their versatility by devising serious amusements befitting the day, such as twenty questions on Scriptural subjects, palmistry, which on another day is an aid to mild flirtation, and an exhibition of mind-reading, not public—oh, dear, no—but with a favored group in a private parlor. In none of these groups, however, did Mr. King find Miss Benson, and when he encountered her after dinner in the reading-room, she confessed that she had declined an invitation to assist at the mind-reading, partly from a lack of interest, and partly from a reluctance to dabble in such things.
“Surely you are not uninterested in what is now called psychical research?” he asked.
“That depends,” said Irene. “If I were a physician, I should like to watch the operation of the minds of 'sensitives' as a pathological study. But the experiments I have seen are merely exciting and unsettling, without the least good result, with a haunting notion that you are being tricked or deluded. It is as much as I can do to try and know my own mind, without reading the minds of others.”
“But you cannot help the endeavor to read the mind of a person with whom you are talking.”
“Oh, that is different. That is really an encounter of wits, for you know that the best part of a conversation is the things not said. What they call mindreading is a vulgar business compared to this. Don't you think so, Mr. King?”
What Mr. King was actually thinking was that Irene's eyes were the most unfathomable blue he ever looked into, as they met his with perfect frankness, and he was wondering if she were reading his present state of mind; but what he said was, “I think your sort of mind-reading is a good deal more interesting than the other,” and he might have added, dangerous. For a man cannot attempt to find out what is in a woman's heart without a certain disturbance of his own. He added, “So you think our society is getting too sensitive and nervous, and inclined to make dangerous mental excursions?”
“I'm afraid I do not think much about such things,” Irene replied, looking out of the window into the storm. “I'm content with a very simple faith, even if it is called ignorance.”
Mr. King was thinking, as he watched the clear, spirited profile of the girl shown against the white tumult in the air, that he should like to belong to the party of ignorance himself, and he thought so long about it that the subject dropped, and the conversation fell into ordinary channels, and Mrs. Benson appeared. She thought they would move on as soon as the storm was over. Mr. King himself was going south in the morning, if travel were possible. When he said good-by, Mrs. Benson expressed the pleasure his acquaintance had given them, and hoped they
