doesn’t he do something? Why does he idle away even the contemptible hours of peace and prosperity?”
“He does; he doesn’t. He’s at work on that book of his, all the time.”
“Oh, I don’t call that work.”
“He makes it work. Even if he went merely to literature for his material, his Contributions to the Annals of Heroism might be a serious labor; but he goes to life for it. He hunts up his heroes in the streets and in the back alleys, in domestic service, in the newspaper offices, in bank parlors, and even in the pulpits: he has a most catholic taste in heroism; he spares neither age, sex, nor condition. I suppose it isn’t an idle thing to instruct the world that all the highest dreams of self-devotion and courage and patience are daily realized in our blackguard metropolis: we leave culture and refinement to Boston. And if it were so, it must be allowed that even with a futile object in view, Easton does some incidental good: he half supports about half of his heroes, and he’s always wasting his time and substance in good deeds.”
“Well, well,” said Mrs. Gilbert, “I can’t admire such an eccentric, and you needn’t ask me.”
“I don’t. But this is just what shows the hopeless middlingness of your character. If you were a very much better or a very much worse woman, you would admire him immensely.”
“Oh, don’t talk to me, William! He’s a man’s man, and that’s the end of him. Why didn’t you bring him with you to-night?”
“He wouldn’t come.”
“Did you tell him there were fifteen ladies in the house?”
“It was that very stroke of logic which seemed to settle his mind about it. He is a man’s man, you’re right; he’s shyer of your admirable sex than any country boy; it’s no use to tell him you’re not so dangerous as you look. But even if he hadn’t been afraid of your ladies, the force of my argument might have been weakened by the fact of the twenty-five at the hotel. What are the superior inducements of your fifteen?”
“They are all very nice.”
“How many?”
“Well, three or four: and none of them are disagreeable.”
“Are you going to introduce me?”
“They’re in bed now—it’s half past eight—and they’d be asleep if it didn’t keep them awake to wonder who you are. If you’ll come to-morrow I’ll introduce you.”
“Good! Now I’ve been pretty satisfactory about Easton, I think—”
“I don’t see how you could have said less. Every word was extorted from you.”
“What I want to know,” continued Gilbert, “is whether the loveliest being in West Pekin, not to say the world, counts among your fair fifteen.”
When Mrs. Gilbert married, her husband’s youngest brother, William, had come to live with them, his father and mother being dead, and his brothers and sisters preoccupied with their own children. He was not in his teens yet, and she had taken the handsome, dark-eyed, black-headed boy under the fond protection which young married ladies sometimes like to bestow upon pretty boy brothers-in-law. This kindness, at first a little romantic, became, with the process of years that brought her no children of her own, a love more like that of mother and son between them. Her condescension had vastly flattered the handsome lad; as he grew older, she seemed to him the brightest as well as the kindest woman in the world; and now, after a score of years, when the crow was beginning to leave his footprints at the corners of her merry eyes, and she had fallen into that permanent disrepair which seems the destiny of so much youthful strength and spirit among our women, he knew no one whose company was more charming. The tacit compliment of his devotion doubtless touched a woman who was long past compliments in most things; something like health and youth he always seemed to bring back to her whenever he returned to her from absences that grew longer and longer after her husband removed to Boston—Mrs. Gilbert’s native city—and left William to follow his young man’s devices in New York. Through all changes and chances she had remained constant to this pet of her early matronhood, now a man past thirty. It was her great affliction that she could not watch over him at that distance in the dangerous and important matter of marriage, for she was both zealous and jealous that he should marry to the utmost advantage that the scant resources of her sex allowed, and it was but a partial consolation that she still had him to be anxious about.
They were sitting together in her hospitable room by the light of a kerosene lamp, with the mosquitoes, which swarm in West Pekin up to the end of July, baffled by window nettings. She rose dramatically, shut the window that opened upon the piazza, and said, “You haven’t seen her already! Where?”
“In one of the back pastures.”
“I’ll never believe it! How did she look? Dark or fair?”
“Dark; Greek; hair fluffy over the forehead; eyes that ‘stared on you silent and still, like the eyes in the house of the idols.’ I know it was she, for there can’t be two of her.” Gilbert gave a brief account of their meeting.
“It was, it was,” sighed Mrs. Gilbert, tragically. “It was Mrs. Belle Farrell!”
“Mrs?”
“A widow. The most opportunely bereft of women!”
“Susan, you interest me.”
“Oh, very likely! So will she. She must be famishing for a flirtation, and it’s you she’ll bend her devouring eyes upon, for I infer that your Mr. Easton, whatever he is, isn’t a flirt.”
“Easton? Well, no, I should think he wasn’t.”
Mrs. Gilbert leaned back, staring with a vacant smile across the room. But directly, as she began to talk of Mrs. Farrell, her eyes lighted up with the enjoyment that women feel in analyzing one of themselves for a man who likes women and knows how to make the due allowances and supply all the skipped details of the process. Gilbert had taken his place in her easy-chair when she shut the window, and she had disposed herself among the cushions and pillows of her lounge; he listened with lazy luxury and a smile of intelligence.
“Yes, she will interest you, William; she interests me, and I don’t dislike her as I might if I were a youthful beauty myself. In fact, she fascinates me, and I rather like her, on the whole. And I don’t see why I don’t approve of her. I don’t know anything against her.”
Gilbert laughed. “That’s rather a damaging thing to say of a lady.”
“Yes,” answered his sister-in-law, “I wouldn’t say it to everybody. But really, it seems odd that one doesn’t know anything against her. She’s very peculiar—for a woman; and I don’t know whether her peculiarity comes from her character or from her circumstances. It’s a trying thing to be just the kind of handsome young widow that Mrs. Farrell is in Boston.”
Gilbert did not comment audibly, but he lifted his eyebrows, and his sister-in-law went on: “Not but that we approve of youth and beauty as much as any one. In fact, if Mrs. Farrell had simply devoted herself to youth and beauty, and waited for the right man, she could have married again splendidly and been living abroad by this time. But, no! And that’s been her ruin.”
“She’s
