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A Modern Instance

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A friend knows how to allow for mere quantity in your talk, and only
replies to the quality, separates your earnest from your whimsicality, and
accounts for some whimsicality in your earnest. "I didn't know but you
might have got that bee out of your bonnet, on the other side," said
Atherton.

"No, sir; we change our skies, but not our bees. What should I amount to
without my grievance? You wouldn't have known me. This talk to-night about
Hubbard has set my bee to buzzing with uncommon liveliness; and the thought
of the Law School next week does nothing to allay him. The Law School isn't
Harvard; I realize that more and more, though I have tried to fancy that it
was. No, sir, my wrongs are irreparable. I had the making of a real Harvard
man in me, and of a Unitarian, nicely balanced between radicalism and
amateur episcopacy. Now, I am an orthodox ruin, and the undutiful stepson
of a Down East _alma mater_. I belong nowhere; I'm at odds.--Is Hubbard's
wife really handsome, or is she only country-pretty?"

"She's beautiful,--I assure you she's beautiful," said Atherton with such
earnestness that Halleck laughed.

"Well, that's right! as my father says. How's she beautiful?"

"That's difficult to tell. It's rather a superb sort of style; and--What
did you really use to think of your friend?" Atherton broke off to ask.

"Who? Hubbard?"

"Yes."

"He was a poor, cheap sort of a creature. Deplorably smart, and regrettably
handsome. A fellow that assimilated everything to a certain extent, and
nothing thoroughly. A fellow with no more moral nature than a base-ball The
sort of chap you'd expect to find, the next time you met him, in Congress
or the house of correction."

"Yes, that accounts for it," said Atherton, thoughtfully.

"Accounts for what?"

"The sort of look she had. A look as if she were naturally above him, and
had somehow fascinated herself with him, and were worshipping him in some
sort of illusion."

"Doesn't that sound a little like refining upon the facts? Recollect: I've
never seen her, and I don't say you're wrong."

"I'm not sure I'm not, though. I talked with her, and found her nothing
more than honest and sensible and good; simple in her traditions, of
course, and countrified yet, in her ideas, with a tendency to the intensely
practical. I don't see why she mightn't very well be his wife. I suppose
every woman hoodwinks herself about her husband in some degree."

"Yes; and we always like to fancy something pathetic in the fate of pretty
girls that other fellows marry. I notice that we don't sorrow much over the
plain ones. How's the divine Clara?"

"I believe she's well," said Atherton. "I haven't seen her, all summer.
She's been at Beverley."

"Why, I should have supposed she would have come up and surf-bathed those
indigent children with her own hand. She's equal to it. What made her
falter in well-doing?"

"I don't know that we can properly call it faltering. There was a deficit
in the appropriation necessary, and she made it up herself. After that,
she consulted me seriously as to whether she ought not to stay in town
and superintend the execution of the plan. But I told her she might fitly
delegate that. She was all the more anxious to perform her whole duty,
because she confessed that indigent children were personally unpleasant to
her."

Halleck burst out laughing. "That's like Clara! How charming women are!
They're charming even in their goodness! I wonder the novelists don't take
a hint from that fact, and stop giving us those scaly heroines they've been
running lately. Why, a real woman can make righteousness delicious and
virtue piquant. I like them for that!"

"Do you?" asked Atherton, laughing in his turn at the single-minded
confession. He was some years older than his friend.

They had got down to Charles Street, and Halleck took out his watch at the
corner lamp. "It isn't at all late yet,--only half-past eight. The days are
getting shorter."

"Well?"

"Suppose we go and call on Hubbard now? He's right up here on Clover
Street!"

"I don't know," said Atherton. "It would do for you; you're an old friend.
But for me,--wouldn't it be rather unceremonious?"

"Oh, come along! They'll not be punctilious. They'll like our dropping in,
and I shall have Hubbard off my conscience. I must go to see him sooner or
later, for decency's sake."

Atherton suffered himself to be led away. "I suppose you won't stay long?"

"Oh, no; I shall cut it very short," said Halleck; and they climbed
the narrow little street where Marcia had at last found a house, after
searching the South End quite to the Highlands, and ransacking Charlestown
and Carnbridgeport. These points all seemed to her terribly remote from
where Bartley must be at work during the day, and she must be alone without
the sight of him from morning till night. The accessibility of Canary
Place had spoiled her for distances; she wanted Bartley at home for their
one-o'clock dinner; she wanted to have him within easy call at all times;
and she was glad when none of those far-off places yielded quite what they
desired in a house. They took the house on Clover Street, though it was a
little dearer than they expected, for two years, and they furnished it, as
far as they could, out of the three or four hundred dollars they had saved,
including the remaining hundred from the colt and cutter, kept sacredly
intact by Marcia. When you entered, the narrow staircase cramped you into
the little parlor opening out of the hall; and back of the parlor was
the dining-room. Overhead were two chambers, and overhead again were two
chambers more; in the basement was the kitchen. The house seemed absurdly
large to people who had been living for the last seven months in one room,
and the view of the Back Bay from the little bow-window of the front
chamber added all outdoors to their superfluous space.

Bartley came himself to answer Halleck's ring, and they met at once with
such a "Why, Halleck!" and "How do you do, Hubbard?" as restored something
of their old college comradery. Bartley welcomed Mr. Atherton under the
gas-light he had turned up, and then they huddled into the little parlor,
where Bartley introduced his old friend to his wife. Marcia wore a sort of
dark robe, trimmed with bows of crimson ribbon, which she had made
herself, and in which she looked a Roman patrician in an avatar of Boston
domesticity; and Bartley was rather proud to see his friend so visibly
dazzled by her beauty. It quite abashed Halleck, who limped helplessly
about, after his cane had been taken from him, before he sat down, while
Marcia, from the vantage of the sofa and the covert of her talk with
Atherton, was content that Halleck should be plain and awkward, with
close-cut drab hair and a dull complexion; she would not have liked even a
man who knew Bartley before she did to be very handsome.

Halleck and Bartley had some talk about college days, from which their eyes
wandered at times; and then Marcia excused herself to Atherton, and went
out, reappearing after an interval at the sliding doors, which she rolled
open between the parlor and dining-room. A table set for supper stood
behind her, and as she leaned a little forward with her hands each on
a leaf of the door, she said, with shy pride, "Bartley, I thought the
gentlemen would like to join you," and he answered, "Of course they would,"
and led the way out, refusing to hear any demur. His heart swelled with
satisfaction in Marcia; it was something like: having fellows drop in upon
you, and be asked out to supper in this easy way; it made Bartley feel
good, and he would have liked to give Marcia a hug on the spot. He could
not help pressing her foot, under the table, and exchanging a quiver of the
eyelashes with her, as he lifted the lid of the white tureen, and looked
at her across the glitter of their new crockery and cutlery. They made the
jokes of the season about the oyster being promptly on hand for the first
of the R months, and Bartley explained that he was sometimes kept at the
Events office rather late, and that then Marcia waited supper for him, and
always gave him an oyster stew, which she made herself. She could not
stop him, and the guests praised the oysters, and then they praised the
dining-room and the parlor; and when they rose from the table Bartley said,
"Now, we must show you the house," and persisted against her deprecations
in making her lead the way. She was in fact willing enough to show it; her
taste had made their money go to the utmost in furnishing it; and though
most people were then still in the period of green reps and tan terry, and
of dull black-walnut movables, she had everywhere bestowed little touches
that told. She had covered the marble parlor-mantel with cloth, and fringed
it; and she had set on it two vases in the Pompeiian colors then liked; her
carpet was of wood color and a moss pattern; she had done what could be
done with folding carpet chairs to give the little room a specious air
of luxury; the centre-table was heaped with her sewing and Bartley's
newspapers.

"We've just moved in, and we haven't furnished _all_ the rooms yet," she
said of two empty ones which Bartley perversely flung open.

"And I don't know that we shall. The house is much too big for us; but
we thought we'd better take it," he added, as if it were a castle for
vastness.

Halleck and Atherton were silent for some moments after they came away, and
then, "_I_ don't believe he whips her," suggested the latter.

"No, I guess he's fond of her," said Halleck, gravely.

"Did you see how careful he was of her, coming up and down stairs? That was
very pretty; and it was pretty to see them both so ready to show off their
young housekeeping to us."

"Yes, it improves a man to get married," said Halleck, with a long, stifled
sigh. "It's improved the most selfish hound I ever knew."




XXI.


The two elder Miss Hallecks were so much older than Olive, the youngest,
that they seemed to be of a sort of intermediary generation between her and
her parents, though Olive herself was well out of her teens, and was the
senior of her brother Ben by two or three years. The elder sisters were
always together, and they adhered in common to the religion of their father
and mother. The defection of their brother was passive, but Olive, having
conscientiously adopted an alien faith, was not a person to let others
imagine her ashamed of it, and her Unitarianism was outspoken. In her turn
she formed a kind of party with Ben inside the family, and would have led
him on in her own excesses of independence if his somewhat melancholy
indifferentism had consented. It was only in his absence that she had been
with her sisters during their summer sojourn in the White Mountains; when
they returned home, she vigorously went her way, and left them to go
theirs. She was fond of them in her defiant fashion; but in such a matter
as calling on Mrs. Hubbard she chose not to be mixed up with her family,
or in any way to countenance her family's prepossessions. Her sisters paid
their visit together, and she waited for Clara Kingsbury to come up from
the seaside. Then she went with her to call upon Marcia, sitting observant
and non-committal while Clara swooped through the little house, up stairs
and down, clamoring over its prettiness, and admiring the art with which so
few dollars could be made to go so far. "Think of finding such a bower on
Clover Street!" She made Marcia give her the cost of everything; and her
heart swelled with pride in her sex--when she heard that Marcia had put
down all the carpets herself. "I wanted to make them up," Marcia explained,
"but Mr. Hubbard wouldn't let me,--it cost so little at the store."

"Wouldn't let you!" cried Miss Kingsbury. "I should hope as much, indeed!
Why, my child, you're a Roman matron!"

She came away in agony lest Marcia might think she meant her nose. She
drove early the next morning to tell Olive Halleck that she had spent a
sleepless night from this cause, and to ask her what she _should_ do. "Do
you think she will be hurt, Olive? Tell me what led up to it. How did I
behave before that? The context is everything in such cases."

"Oh, you went about praising everything, and screaming and shouting, and
my-dearing and my-childing her, and patronizing--"

"There, there! say no more! That's sufficient! I see,--I see it all! I've
done the very most offensive thing I could, when I meant to be the most
appreciative."

"These country people don't like to be appreciated down to the quick, in
that way," said Olive. "I should think Mrs. Hubbard was rather a proud
person."

"I know! I know!" moaned Miss Kingsbury. 'It was ghastly."

"_I_ don't suppose she's ashamed of her nose--"

"Olive!" cried her friend, "be still! Why, I can't _bear_ it! Why, you
wretched thing!"

"I dare say all the ladies in Equity make up their own carpets, and put
them down, and she thought you were laughing at her."

"_Will_ you be still, Olive Halleck?" Miss Kingsbury was now a large,
blonde mass of suffering, "Oh, dear, dear! What shall I do? It was
sacrilege--yes, it was nothing less than sacrilege--to go on as I did. And
I meant so well! I did so admire, and respect, and revere her!" Olive burst
out laughing. "You wicked girl!" whimpered Clara. "Should you--should you
write to her?"

"And tell her you didn't mean her nose? Oh, by all means, Clara,--by all
means! Quite an inspiration. Why not make her an evening party?"

"Olive," said Clara, with guilty meekness, "I have been thinking of that."

"_No_, Clara! Not seriously!" cried Olive, sobered at the idea.

"Yes, seriously. Would it be so very bad? Only just a _little_ party,"
she pleaded. "Half a dozen people or so; just to show them that I really
feel--friendly. I know that he's told her all about meeting me here, and
I'm not going to have her think I want to drop him because he's married,
and lives in a little house on Clover Street."

"Noble Clara! So you wish to bring them out in Boston society? What will
you do with them after you've got them there?" Miss Kingsbury fidgeted in
her chair a little. "Now, look me in the eye, Clara! Whom were you going to
ask to meet them? Your unfashionable friends, the Hallecks?"

"My friends, the Hallecks, of course."

"And Mr. Atherton, your legal adviser?"

"I had thought of asking Mr. Atherton. You needn't say what he is, if you
please, Olive; you know that there's no one I prize so much."

"Very good. And Mr. Cameron?"

"He has got back,--yes. He's very nice."

"A Cambridge tutor; very young and of recent attachment to the College,
with no local affiliations, yet. What ladies?"

"Miss Strong is a nice girl; she is studying at the Conservatory."

"Yes. Poverty-stricken votary of Miss Kingsbury. Well?"

"Miss Clancy."

"Unfashionable sister of fashionable artist. Yes?"

"The Brayhems."

"Young radical clergyman, and his wife, without a congregation, and hoping
for a pulpit in Billerica. Parlor lectures on German literature in the mean
time. Well?"

"And Mrs. Savage, I thought."

"Well-preserved young widow of uncertain antecedents tending to grassiness;
out-door _protégée_ of the hostess. Yes, Clara, go on and give your party.
It will be _perfectly safe_! But do you think it will _deceive_ anybody?"

"Now, Olive Halleck!" cried Clara, "I am not going to have you talking to
me in that way! You have no right to do it, and you have no business to do
it," she added, trying to pluck up a spirit. "Is there anybody that I value
more than I do you and your sisters, and Ben?"

"No. But you don't value us _just in that way_, and you know it. Don't you
be a humbug, Clara. Now go on with your excuses."

"I'm not making excuses! Isn't Mr. Atherton in the most fashionable
society?"

"Yes. Why don't you ask some other fashionable people?"

"Olive, this is all nonsense,--perfect nonsense! I can invite any one I
like to meet any one I like, and if I choose to show Mr. Hubbard's wife a
little attention, I can do it, can't I?"

"Oh, of course!"

"And what would be the use of inviting fashionable people--as you call
them--to meet them? It would just embarrass them, all round."

"Perfectly correct, Miss Kingsbury. All that want you to do is to face the
facts of the case. I want you to realize that, in showing Mr. Hubbard's
wife this little attention, you're not doing it because you scorn to drop
an old friend, and want to do him the highest honor; but because you think
you can palm off your second-class acquaintance on them for first-class,
and try to make up in that way for telling her she had a hooked nose!"

"You _know_ that I didn't tell her she had a hooked nose."

"You told her that she was a Roman matron,--it's the same thing," said
Olive.

Miss Kingsbury bit her lip and tried to look a dignified resentment. She
ended by saying, with feeble spite, "I shall have the little evening for
all you say. I suppose you won't refuse to come because I don't ask the
whole Blue Book to meet them."

"Of course we shall come! I wouldn't miss it for anything. I always like to
see how you manage your pieces of social duplicity, Clara. But you needn't
expect that I will be a party to the swindle. No, Clara! I shall go to
these poor young people and tell them plainly, 'This is not the _best_
society; Miss Kingsbury keeps that for--'"

"Olive! I think I never saw even you in such a teasing humor." The tears
came into Clara's large, tender blue eyes, and she continued with an appeal
that had no effect, "I'm sure I don't see why you should make it a question
of anything of the sort. It's simply a wish to--to have a little company of
no particular kind, for no partic--Because I want to."

"Oh, that's it, is it? Then I highly approve of it," said Olive. "When is
it to be?"

"I sha'n't tell you, now! You may wait till I'm ready," pouted Clara, as
she rose to go.

"Don't go away thinking I'm enough to provoke a saint because _you've_ got
mad at me, Clara!"

"Mad? You know I'm not mad! But I think you might be a _little_ sympathetic
_some_times, Olive!" said her friend, kissing her.

"Not in cases of social duplicity, Clara. My wrath is all that saves you.
If you were not afraid of me, you would have been a lost worldling long
ago."

"I know you always really love me," said Miss Kingsbury, tenderly.

"No, I don't," retorted her friend, promptly. "Not when you're humbugging.
Don't expect it, for you won't get it." She followed Clara with a
triumphant laugh as she went out of the door; and except for this parting
taunt Clara might have given up her scheme. She first ordered her _coupé_
driven home, in fact, and then lowered the window to countermand the
direction, and drove to Bartley's door on Clover Street.

It was a very handsome equipage, and was in keeping with all the outward
belongings of Miss Kingsbury, who mingled a sense of duty and a love of
luxury in her life in very exact proportions. When her _coupé_ was not
standing before some of the wretchedest doors in the city, it was waiting
at the finest; and Clara's days were divided between the extremes of
squalor and of fashion.

She was the only child of parents who had early left her an orphan. Her
father, who was much her mother's senior, was an old friend of Olive's
father, and had made him his executor and the guardian of his daughter.
Mr. Halleck had taken her into his own family, and, in the conscientious
pursuance of what he believed would have been her father's preference, he
gave her worldly advantages which he would not have desired for one of his
own children. But the friendship that grew up between Clara and Olive
was too strong for him in some things, and the girls went to the same
fashionable school together.

When his ward came of age he made over to her the fortune, increased by his
careful management, which her father had left her, and advised her to put
her affairs in the hands of Mr. Atherton. She had shown a quite ungirlish
eagerness to manage them for herself; in the midst of her profusion she had
odd accesses of stinginess, in which she fancied herself coming to poverty;
and her guardian judged it best that she should have a lawyer who could
tell her at any moment just where she stood. She hesitated, but she did as
he advised; and having once intrusted her property to Atherton's care, she
added her conscience and her reason in large degree, and obeyed him
with embarrassing promptness in matters that did not interfere with her
pleasures. Her pleasures were of various kinds. She chose to buy herself a
fine house, and, having furnished it luxuriously and unearthed a cousin of
her father's in Vermont and brought her to Boston to matronize her, she
kept house on a magnificent scale, pinching, however, at certain points
with unexpected meanness. When she was alone, her table was of a Spartan
austerity; she exacted a great deal from her servants, and paid them as
small wages as she could. After that she did not mind lavishing money upon
them in kindness. A seamstress whom she had once employed fell sick, and
Miss Kingsbury sent her to the Bahamas and kept her there till she was
well, and then made her a guest in her house till the girl could get back
her work. She watched her cook through the measles, caring for her like a
mother; and, as Olive Halleck said, she was always portioning or burying
the sisters of her second-girls. She was in all sorts of charities, but she
was apt to cut her charities off with her pleasures at any moment, if she
felt poor. She was fond of dress, and went a great deal into society: she
suspected men generally of wishing to marry her for her money, but with
those whom she did not think capable of aspiring to her hand, she was
generously helpful with her riches. She liked to patronize; she had long
supported an unpromising painter at Rome, and she gave orders to desperate
artists at home.

The world had pretty well hardened one half of her heart, but the other
half was still soft and loving, and into this side of her mixed nature she
cowered when she believed she had committed some blunder or crime, and came
whimpering to Olive Halleck for punishment. She made Olive her discipline
partly in her lack of some fixed religion. She had not yet found a religion
that exactly suited her, though she had many times believed herself about
to be anchored in some faith forever.

She was almost sorry that she had put her resolution in effect when she
rang at the door, and Marcia herself answered the bell, in place of the one
servant who was at that moment hanging out the wash. It seemed wicked to
pretend to be showing this pretty creature a social attention, when she
meant to palm off a hollow imitation of society upon her. Why should she
not ask the very superfinest of her friends to meet such a brilliant
beauty? It would serve Olive Halleck right if she should do this, and leave
the Hallecks out; and Marcia would certainly be a sensation. She half
believed that she meant to do it when she quitted the house with Marcia's
promise that she would bring her husband to tea on Wednesday evening, at
eight; and she drove away so far penitent that she resolved at least to
make her company distinguished, if not fashionable. She said to herself
that she would make it fashionable yet, if she chose, and as a first move
in this direction she easily secured Mr. Atherton: he had no engagements,
so few people had got back to town. She called upon Mrs. Witherby,
needlessly reminding her of the charity committees they had served on
together; and then she went home and actually sent out notes to the
plainest daughter and the maiden aunt of two of the most high-born families
of her acquaintance. She added to her list an artist and his wife, ("Now
I shall _have_ to let him paint me!" she reflected,) a young author whose
book had made talk, a teacher of Italian with whom she was pretending to
read Dante, and a musical composer.

Olive came late, as if to get a whole effect of the affair at once; and her
smile revealed Clara's failure to her, if she had not realized it before.
She read there that the aristocratic and aesthetic additions which she had
made to the guests Olive originally divined had not sufficed; the party
remained a humbug. It had seemed absurd to invite anybody to meet two such
little, unknown people as the Hubbards; and then, to avoid marking them as
the subjects of the festivity by the precedence to be observed in going out
to supper, she resolved to have tea served in the drawing-room, and to make
it literally tea, with bread and butter, and some thin, ascetic cakes.

However sharp he was in business, Mr. Witherby was socially a dull man; and
his wife and daughter seemed to partake of his qualities by affinition and
heredity. They tried to make something of Marcia, but they failed through
their want of art. Mrs. Witherby, finding the wife of her husband's
assistant in Miss Kingsbury's house, conceived an awe of her, which Marcia
would not have known how to abate if she had imagined it; and in a little
while the Witherby family segregated themselves among the photograph albums
and the bricabrac, from which Clara seemed to herself to be fruitlessly
detaching them the whole evening. The plainest daughter and the maiden aunt
of the patrician families talked to each other with unavailing intervals of
the painter and the author, and the radical clergyman and his wife were
in danger of a conjugal devotion which society does not favor; the
unfashionable sister of the fashionable artist conversed with the young
tutor and the Japanese law-student whom he had asked leave to bring with
him, and whose small, mouse-like eyes continually twinkled away in pursuit
of the blonde beauty of his hostess. The widow was winningly attentive,
with a tendency to be confidential, to everybody. The Italian could not
disabuse himself of the notion that he was expected to be light and
cheerful, and when the pupil of the Conservatory sang, he abandoned himself
to his error, and clapped and cried bravo with unseemly vivacity. But he
was restored to reason when the composer sat down at the piano and
played, amid the hush that falls on society at such times, something from
Beethoven, and again something of his own, which was so like Beethoven that
Beethoven himself would not have known the difference.

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