The Second Generation Part 30

"Why, nothing!" exclaimed Janet, looking a little wonder and much reproach.

Del laughed. "Now, really, Jen," said she. "You know you never in the world went to all the trouble of getting my address, and then left royalty at the Bristol for a _maison meublee_, four flights up and no elevator, just to _see_ me!"

"I had thought of something I was sure would give you pleasure," said Janet, injured.

"What do you want me to do for you?" repeated Adelaide, with smiling persistence.

"Mamma and I have an invitation to spend a week at Besancon--you know, it's the splendid old chateau Louis Treize used to love to visit. It's still the seat of the Saint Berthe family, and the present Marquis, a _dear_ friend of ours, is such a wonderful, fine old n.o.bleman--so simple and gracious and full of epigrams. He really ought to wear lace and ruffles and a beautiful peruke. At any rate, as I was saying, he has asked us down. But mamma has to go to England to see papa before he sails, and I thought you'd love to visit the chateau--you and Dory. It's so poetic--and historic, too."

"Your mother is going away and you'll be unable to make this visit unless you get a chaperon, and you want me to chaperon you," said Adelaide, who was not minded to be put in the att.i.tude of being the recipient of a favor from this particular young woman at this particular time, when in truth she was being asked to confer a favor. "Adversity" had already sharpened her wits to the extent of making her alert to the selfishness disguised as generosity which the prosperous love to shower upon their little brothers and sisters of the poor. She knew at once that Janet must have been desperately off for a chaperon to come to her.

A look of irritation marred Janet's spiritual countenance for an instant. But she never permitted anything whatsoever to stand between her and what she wished. She masked herself and said sweetly: "Won't you go, dear? I know you'll enjoy it--you and Dory. And it would be a great favor to me. I don't see how I can go unless you consent. You know, I mayn't go with just anyone."

Adelaide's first impulse was to refuse; but she did not. She put off decision by saying, "I'll ask Dory to-night, and let you know in the morning. Will that do?"

"Perfectly," said Janet, rising to go. "I'll count on you, for I know Dory will want to see the chateau and get a glimpse of life in the old aristocracy. It will be _so_ educational."

Dory felt the change in Del the instant he entered their little _salon_--felt that during the day some new element had intruded into their friendly life together, to interrupt, to unsettle, and to cloud the brightening vistas ahead. At the mention of Janet he began to understand.

He saw it all when she said with a show of indifference that deceived only herself, "Wouldn't you like to go down to Besancon?"

"Not I," replied he coldly. "Europe is full of that kind of places. You can't glance outdoors without seeing a house or a ruin where the sweat and blood of peasants were squandered."

"Janet thought you'd be interested in it as history," persisted Adelaide, beginning to feel irritated.

"That's amusing," said Dory. "You might have told her that scandal isn't history, that history never was made in such places. As for the people who live there now, they're certainly not worth while--the same pretentious ignoramuses that used to live there, except they no longer have fangs."

"You ought not to be so prejudiced," said Adelaide, who in those days often found common sense irritating. She had the all but universal habit of setting down to "prejudice" such views as are out of accord with the set of views held by one's business or professional or social a.s.sociates.

Her irritation confirmed Dory's suspicions. "I spoke only for myself,"

said he. "Of course, you'll accept Janet's invitation. She included me only as a matter of form."

"I couldn't, without you."

"Why not?"

"Well--wouldn't, then."

"But I urge you to go--want you to go! I can't possibly leave Paris, not for a day--at present."

"I shan't go without you," said Adelaide, trying hard to make her tone firm and final.

Dory leaned across the table toward her--they were in the garden of a cafe in the Latin Quarter. "If you don't go, Del," said he, "you'll make me feel that I am restraining you in a way far meaner than a direct request not to go. You want to go. I want you to go. There is _no_ reason why you shouldn't."

Adelaide smiled shamefacedly. "You honestly want to get rid of me?"

"Honestly. I'd feel like a jailer, if you didn't go."

"What'll you do in the evenings?"

"Work later, dine later, go to bed and get up earlier."

"Work--always work," she said. She sighed, not wholly insincerely. "I wish I weren't so idle and aimless. If I were the woman I ought to be--"

"None of that--none of that!" he cried, in mock sternness.

"I ought to be interested in your work."

"Why, I thought you were!" he exclaimed, in smiling astonishment.

"Oh, of course, in a way--in an 'entertainment' sort of way. I like to hear you talk about it--who wouldn't? But I don't give the kind of interest I should--the interest that thinks and suggests and stimulates."

"Don't be too sure of that," said Dory. "The 'helpful' sort of people are usually a nuisance."

But she knew the truth, though pa.s.sion might still be veiling it from him. Life, before her father's will forced an abrupt change, had been to her a showman, submitting his exhibits for her gracious approval, shifting them as soon as she looked as if she were about to be bored; and the change had come before she had lived long enough to exhaust and weary of the few things he has for the well-paying pa.s.sive spectator, but not before she had formed the habit of making only the pa.s.sive spectator's slight mental exertion.

"Dory is so generous," she thought, with the not acutely painful kind of remorse we lay upon the penitential altar for our own shortcomings, "that he doesn't realize how I'm shirking and letting him do all the pulling."

And to him she said, "If you could have seen into my mind while Janet was here, you'd give me up as hopeless."

Dory laughed. "I had a glimpse of it just now--when you didn't like it because I couldn't see my way clear to taking certain people so seriously as you think they deserve."

"But you _are_ prejudiced on that subject," she maintained.

"And ever shall be," admitted he, so good-humoredly that she could not but respond. "It's impossible for me to forget that every luxurious idler means scores who have to work long hours for almost nothing in order that he may be of no use to the world or to himself."

"You'd have the whole race on a dead level," said Adelaide.

"Of material prosperity--yes," replied Dory. "A high dead level. I'd abolish the coa.r.s.e, brutal contrasts between waste and want. Then there'd be a chance for the really interesting contrasts--the infinite varieties of thought and taste and character and individuality."

"I see," said Adelaide, as if struck by a new idea. "You'd have the contrasts, differences among flowers, not merely between flower and weed.

You'd abolish the weeds."

"Root and stalk," answered Dory, admiring her way of putting it. "My objection to these aristocratic ideals is that they are so vulgar--and so dishonest. Is that prejudice?"

"No--oh, no!" replied Del sincerely. "Now, it seems to me, I don't care to go with Janet."

"Not to oblige me--very particularly? I want you to go. I want you to see for yourself, Del."

She laughed. "Then I'll go--but only because you ask it."

That was indeed an elegant company at Besancon--elegant in dress, elegant in graceful carelessness of manners, elegant in graceful sinuosities of cleverly turned phrases. But after the pa.s.sing of the first and second days' sensations, Hiram and Ellen Ranger's daughter began to have somewhat the same feeling she remembered having as a little girl, when she went to both the afternoon and the evening performances of the circus. These people, going through always the same tricks in the same old narrow ring of cla.s.s ideas, lost much of their charm after a few repet.i.tions of their undoubtedly clever and attractive performance; she even began to see how they would become drearily monotonous. "No wonder they look bored," she thought. "They are." What enormous importance they attached to trifles! What ludicrous tenacity in exploded delusions! And what self-complacent claiming of remote, powerful ancestors who had founded their families, when those ancestors would have disclaimed them as puny nonent.i.ties. Their ideas were wholly provided for them, precisely as were their clothes and every artistic thing that gave them "background." They would have made as absurd a failure of trying to evolve the one as the other. Yet they posed--and were widely accepted--as the superiors of those who made their clothes and furniture and of those who made their ideas. And she had thought Dory partly insincere, partly prejudiced when he had laughed at them. Why, he had only shown the plainest kind of American good sense. As for sn.o.bbishness, was not the silly-child American brand of it less ridiculous than this unblushing and unconcealed self-reverence, without any physical, mental or material justification whatsoever? They hadn't good manners even, because--as Dory had once said--no one could have really good manners who believed, and acted upon the belief, that he was the superior of most of the members of his own family--the human race.

"I suppose I could compress myself back into being satisfied with this sort of people and things," she thought, as she looked round the ballroom from which pose and self-consciousness and rigid conventionality had banished spontaneous gayety. "I suppose I could even again come to fancying this the only life. But I certainly don't care for it now."

But, although Adelaide was thus using her eyes and her mind--her own eyes and her own mind--in observing what was going on around her, she did not disconcert the others, not even Janet, by expressing her thoughts. Common sense--absolute common sense--always sounds incongruous in a conventional atmosphere. In its milder forms it produces the effect of wit; in stronger doses it is a violent irritant; in large quant.i.ty, it causes those to whom it is administered to regard the person administering it as insane. Perhaps Adelaide might have talked more or less frankly to Janet had Janet not been so obviously in the highest of her own kind of heavens. She was raised to this pinnacle by the devoted attentions of the Viscount Brunais, eldest son of Saint Berthe and the most agreeable and adaptable of men, if the smallest and homeliest. Adelaide spoke of his intelligence to Janet, when they were alone before dinner on the fourth day, and Janet at once responded.

"And such a soul!" she exclaimed. "He inherits all the splendid, n.o.ble traditions of their old, _old_ family. You see in his face that he is descended from generations of refinement and--and--freedom from contact with vulgarizing work, don't you?"