The Happiest Time of Their Lives Part 8

He found she knew very little about the history of New York. She had been brought up abroad, she said; her father had been a consul in France. It was a subject which he liked to expound. He loved his native city, which he with his own eyes had seen once as hardly more than a village. He and his ancestors--and Mr. Lanley's sense of identification with his ancestors was almost Chinese--had watched and had a little shaped the growth.

"I suppose you had Dutch ancestry, then," she said, trying to take an interest.

"Dutch." Mr. Lanley shut his eyes, resolving, since he had no idea what her own descent might be, that he would not explain to her the superior att.i.tude of the English settlers of the eighteenth century toward their Dutch predecessors. However, perhaps he did not entirely conceal his feeling, for he said: "No, I have no Dutch blood--not a drop. Very good people in their way, industrious--peasants." He hurried on to the great fire of 1835. "Swept between Wall Street and Coenties Slip," he said, with a splendid gesture, and then discovered that she had, never heard of "Quenches Slip," or worse, she had p.r.o.nounced it as it was spelled. He gently set her right there. His father had often told him that he had seen with his own eyes a note of hand which had been blown, during the course of the conflagration, as far as Flatbush. And the second fire of 1845. His father had been a man then, married, a prominent citizen, old enough, as Mr. Lanley said, with a faint smile, to have lost heavily. He could himself remember the New York of the Civil War, the bitter family quarrels, the forced resignations from clubs, the duels, the draft riots.

But, oddly enough, when it came to contemporary New York, it was Mrs.

Wayne who turned out to be most at home. Had he ever walked across the Blackwell's Island Bridge? (This was in the days before it bore the elevated trains.) No, he had driven. Ah, she said, that was wholly different. Above, where one walked, there was nothing to shut out the view of the river. Just to show that he was not a feeble old antiquarian, he suggested their taking a walk there at once. She held out her trailing garments and thin, blue slippers. And then she went on:

"There's another beautiful place I don't believe you know, for all you're such an old New-Yorker--a pier at the foot of East Eighty-something Street, where you can almost touch great seagoing vessels as they pa.s.s."

"Well, there at least we can go," said Mr. Lanley, and he stood up. "I have a car here, but it's open. Is it too cold? Have you a fur coat? I'll send back to the house for an extra one." He paused, brisk as he was; the thought of those four flights a second time dismayed him.

The servant had gone out, and Pete was still absent, presumably breaking the news of his engagement to Dr. Parret.

Mrs. Wayne had an idea. She went to a window on the south side of the room, opened it, and looked out. If he had good lungs, she told him, he could make his man hear.

Mr. Lanley did not visibly recoil. He leaned out and shouted. The chauffeur looked up, made a motion to jump out, fearing that his employer was being murdered in these unfamiliar surroundings; then he caught the order to go home for an extra coat.

Lanley drew his shoulder back into the room and shut the window; as he did so he saw a trace of something impish in the smile of his hostess.

"Why do you smile?" he asked quickly.

She did not make the mistake of trying to arrest her smile; she let it broaden.

"I don't suppose you have ever done such a thing before."

"Now, that does annoy me."

"Calling down five stories?"

"No; your thinking I minded."

"Well, I did think so."

"You were mistaken, utterly mistaken."

"I'm glad. If you mind doing such things, you give so much time to arranging not to do them."

Mr. Lanley was silent. He was deciding that he should rearrange some of the details of his life. Not that he contemplated giving all his orders from the fifth story, but he saw he had always devoted too much attention to preventing unimportant catastrophes.

Under her direction he was presently driving north; then he turned sharply east down a little hill, and came out on a low, flat pier. He put out the motor's lights. They were only a few feet above the water, which was as black as liquid jet, with flat silver and gold patches on it from white and yellow lights. Opposite to them the lighthouse at the north end of Blackwell's Island glowed like a hot coal. Then a great steamer obscured it.

"Isn't this nice?" Mrs. Wayne asked, and he saw that she wanted her discovery praised. He never lost the impression that she enjoyed being praised.

Such a spot, within sight of half a dozen historic sites, was a temptation to Mr. Lanley, and he would have unresistingly yielded to it if Mrs. Wayne had not said:

"But we haven't said a word yet about our children."

"True," answered Mr. Lanley. His heart sank. It is not easy, he thought, to explain to a person for whom you have just conceived a liking that her son had aspired above his station. He tapped his long, middle finger on the steering-wheel, just as at directors' meetings he tapped the table before he spoke, and began, "In a society somewhat artificially formed as ours is, Mrs. Wayne, it has always been my experience that--" Do what he would, it kept turning into a speech, and the essence of the speech was that while democracy did very well for men, a strictly aristocratic system was the only thing possible for girls--one's own girls, of course. In the dim light he could see that she had pushed all her hair back from her brows. She was trying to follow him exactly, so exactly that she confused him a little. He became more general. "In many ways,"

he concluded, "the advantages of character and experience are with the lower cla.s.ses." He had not meant to use the word, but when it slipped out, he did not regret it.

"In all ways," she answered.

He was not sure he had heard.

"All the advantages?" he said.

"All the advantages of character."

He had to ask her to explain. One reason, perhaps, why Mrs. Wayne habitually avoided a direct question was that, when once started, her candor had no bounds. Now she began to speak. She spoke more eagerly and more fluently than he, and it took him several minutes to see that quite unconsciously she was making him a strange, distorted complement to his speech, that in her mouth such words as "the leisure cla.s.ses, your sheltered girls," were terms of the deepest reproach. He must understand, she said, that as she did not know Miss Severance, there was nothing personal, nothing at all personal, in her feeling,--she was as careful not to hurt his feelings as he had tried to be not to hurt hers,--but she did own to a prejudice--at least Pete told her it was a prejudice--

Against what, in Heaven's name, Lanley at first wondered; and then it came to him.

"Oh, you have a prejudice against divorce?" he said.

Mrs. Wayne looked at him reproachfully.

"Oh, no," she answered. "How could you think that? But what has divorce to do with it? Your granddaughter hasn't been divorced."

A sound of disgust at the mere suggestion escaped him, and he said coldly:

"My daughter divorced her first husband."

"Oh, I did not know."

"Against what, then, is this unconquerable prejudice of yours?"

"Against the daughters of the leisure cla.s.s."

He was still quite at sea.

"You dislike them?"

"I fear them."

If she had said that she considered roses a menace, he could not have been more puzzled. He repeated her words aloud, as if he hoped that they might have some meaning for him if he heard his own lips p.r.o.nouncing them:

"You fear them."

"Yes," she went on, now interested only in expressing her belief, "I fear their ignorance and idleness and irresponsibility and self-indulgence, and, all the more because it is so delicate and attractive and unconscious; and their belief that the world owes them luxury and happiness without their lifting a finger. I fear their cowardice and lack of character--"

"Cowardice!" he cried, catching at the first word he could. "My dear Mrs.

Wayne, the aristocrats in the French Revolution, the British officer--"

"Oh, yes, they know how to die," she answered; "but do they know how to live when the horrible, sordid little strain of every-day life begins to make demands upon them, their futile education, the moral feebleness that comes with perfect safety! I know something can be made of such girls, but I don't want my son sacrificed in the process."

There was a long, dark silence; then Mr. Lanley said with a particularly careful and exact enunciation:

"I think, my dear madam, that you cannot have known very many of the young women you are describing. It may be that there are some like that--daughters of our mushroom finance; but I can a.s.sure you that the children of ladies and gentlemen are not at all as you seem to imagine."