Mary S. Watts

“ He had what is perhaps the best tact in the world, the tact of a kind heart; but a plain man's experience does not prepare him for moments of such awkwardness, and the doctor's self-possession for once left him in the lurch. He advanced to meet Mrs. Pallinder, blunderingly putting on his eye-glasses, and blunderingly dropping them again to the length of their black silk ribbon, stuttering out a welcome, apprehensive of Steven's next move, out of patience with the whole grotesque and intolerable situation, and fearful that he showed it. ”

“ Weingartner, I'm so sorry," I said. "My niece is engaged. And I don't think she knows how you feel, or has had any idea of encouraging you. Helen isn't that kind of a girl,"
He looked at me with an extraordinary expression. He had been nervously turning his hat between his hands, and now clapped it on the table with some emphasis.
"Helen—nothing!" said he. "It's you I'm talking about"; and followed this up by a fervent statement, the like of which I have not heard in twenty years.
They say every woman knows—but every woman does not know. ”

“ But I knew they were taking poor Caroline Gwynne to "the place where they put mad people," that Sam had promised her so long ago. We wondered under our breaths whether it was Sam who had ordered it; whether the two boys had agreed or quarrelled; and what the other Gwynnes had said or done. The unspeakable isolation of insanity that converts a human being into a kind of dreadful chattel hung about Caroline; we did not dare to ask a question. Doctor Vardaman knew all about it, but—"I'm afraid to say anything to John," whispered Miss Clara. "He wouldn't tell anyhow, you know. Doctors never do. ”

“ So the Danes, at first, could make no headway at all, madame, and they were sore and angry. And the young women came and stood on the walls and called out to taunt them: 'Eohric, King of the Danes, why do you not come into Valmi?' But, madame, they laugh best who laugh last. By-and-by they had nothing more to eat in the town, and the Danes would let nothing come in. They were starving, these brave citizens, and they killed rats and mules and ate them, and the children cried for bread. That is to make one mad, madame, when the little children suffer! ”

“ Yes, Pallinder was a scamp; but Doctor Vardaman found, with a wretched surprise, that he had had no real comprehension of what the word meant—the thing it denoted. This was its meaning, this shabby trickery, this cheap deceit; the discovery came upon him like a blow. There is an extraordinary bitterness to any generous mind in beholding the uncovered shame of a friend; we hate to see the feet of clay; the pain is two-edged and strikes us either way with the sense of his unworthiness, of our own folly. The doctor had liked Pallinder ”

“ Too much of his life had been passed in the grimly fantastic environment of Gwynne family traditions for him to be completely emancipated at twenty-four.
"I want to do the right thing as much as anybody," said Gwynne; he scowled into the fire, chewing the end of his cigar. "Only it's not always easy to say what is the right thing. In real life right and wrong aren't laid down in black and white the way they are in those Tommy-and-Harry books we used to have when we were children; they sort of shade off into each other. You've got to—to make compromises. ”

“ A great actor was lost to the world when Pierre elected to spend his life leading tourists about Valmi. We understood without further words. They had buried them alive.
The palace stood on an eminence dominating the view to land and sea for many miles; and, on one side, the ground sloped away steeply to the shore; so steeply that, perching on the ruinous old palace wall, we could see, in a rift between the houses, a stair plunging down, which, Pierre said, led to a place they called the Quai Reine-Marguerite. ”

“ I have seen her turn her eyes on the coloured butler when commanding a fresh relay of waffles with an expression to draw from him rubies, let alone waffles! Her liking for the doctor was perhaps as sincere a sentiment as she could harbour; who could forbear a fondness for that genial, tolerant, grey-headed satirist? In him were to be found all the strangely dissonant yet most manly qualities of his generation. In the early eighties there was still extant a tribe of hearty old gentlemen who wore black silk stocks, swore freely, and knew Henry Clay. ”

“ My niece Helen is a self-reliant and adventurous spirit; she will undertake to go anywhere, serene in the assurance of ultimately getting somewhere, either to her appointed place, or, as she is fond of saying, to some other just as good. For myself, as I am equally fond of saying, I want to go where I want to go. But, unfortunately, there never was a person so totally unblessed with any sense of location; I am of those who get up in the night and fall out of the window or down the backstairs. ”

“ Who so wise as our young people? Nobody would be at the pains to banish them from the room. They would not laugh at or with grandpa; they would only wonder a little and pity him. They are all gone, all these humane old lads with their whisky-punches, their dreadful old fly-blown anecdotes, their extraordinary, innocent coarseness of mind. The type has vanished from among us, extinct like the dinosaur, dead as Desdemona! It is hard to figure them pacing beneath the cloudy porticos of that rather shoddy gilt Heaven in which they stoutly believed ”

“ Archie Lewis had told us that Templeton, whom he saw every day in his father's office, had told him he had made the lease at a hundred and seventy-five a month; we did not think that a very low rent, we who lived contentedly enough in houses at one-fifth that amount, like by far the greater number of our friends. But the Pallinders plainly did not measure by our standards. Mazie had a fresh dress for every party; she wore almost as much jewelry as her mother, and when Mrs. Pallinder came out in all her diamonds, she was the most resplendent spectacle our society ever witnessed. ”

“ Colonel Pallinder threw back his head in hearty amusement. "Oh, Lord, that wasn't a client, Doctor, that old creature—what was her name now, MacGonigal, MacGilligan, MacSomething? No, I was trying to get rid of her as gently as might be without hurting her feelings. For after all people like that have feelings, you know; they are worthy of some consideration; hang it, a gentleman has only one kind of manners. I'm glad she came in while my clerks were all out, and saw me instead of any of them—you know what Jack-in-office is. ”

“ Among the forgotten fashions of the years from eighteen-eighty to eighty-five was that of giving our parties, evening or afternoon, for young people or old, of whatever kind, in short, in our own homes; the easy hospitality of clubs or fashionable hotels was not yet known. Houses with double-parlours and a dining-room back were considered ideal for any sort of entertainment; and, of course, such an architectural triumph as the old Gwynne house with that splendid ballroom on the third floor, was hors concours. ”

“ It occurred to him, with a fine irony, that here was probably one of Gwynne's cases where there was some right on both sides. The main thing at the moment, he realised, was to get Steven quieted.
"I'm sorry, but I—really I can't advise you, Steven," he said in his most moderate voice. "Have you talked to Mr. Templeton? He's your real agent, you know; he does the collecting, doesn't he? I'm sure if he and Gwynne both think——"
"Templeton! He's a—a creature of Gwynne's!" cried Steven angrily. "He's no better than a—a mercenary—a—a hired bravo!" ”

“ Say, Doc., it's a good ways to Broadway, ain't it?" said he, and waved a farewell. "So long! Many thanks! See you later!" He flashed forth from the house, his retainer at his heels. The doctor saw their tumultuous passage down the walk, saw them scramble, clamber, struggle into the waiting hack, saw it hurl upon its way with vociferations—and silence fell like a blow. There stood Doctor Vardaman and the policeman staring at each other in the empty porch.
"That fellow can hump, can't he?" said Clancy admiringly. "You just gotta where he comes from. Tell you, New York's th' place!" ”

“ Lewis," Miss Mollie took courage to say falteringly.
"Not so bad as being in debt to somebody yourself, though," said Archie genially. This well-intended levity was a serious mistake; they shrank—they withered before the dreadful suggestion.
"We—we aren't that, Mr. Lewis," cried both old maids in scared chorus. "It's not we that are in debt—it's somebody that owes us——"
"That owes the GWYNNE ESTATE," said Steven ponderously. ”

“ Many warm-hearted people felt a great sympathy for Doctor Vardaman in his isolation and solitude after Miss Clara's death; I suspect that had the doctor been an old maid instead of an old bachelor, he would not have received so much attention. There is something in the spectacle of an elderly unattached male being, no matter how independent he may be, or how capable of taking care of himself, that at once engages the solicitude of all his friends, men and women alike. ”

“ The only thing about which they were in entire concord was the glory past, present, and to come of their name; they saw desecration in laying hands upon the torn and mildewed wall-paper, the blistered varnish, the leaking roofs of Uncle Samuel's shrine. It would have taken twelve or fifteen hundred dollars to put the place in order, at the least; and indeed as time went on, it promised to take more. The viewless forces of destruction invade an empty house, and lay it waste like a devastating army. "If they would just let me shingle the roof anyhow," said Templeton in despair. ”

“ We are none of us saints, as the doctor himself said; we dislike especially the pose of holier-than-thou. Jones and Smith may not be model citizens, but let us give them the benefit of the doubt and continue to accept their dinner-invitations. Doctor Vardaman, an upright man who would as soon have taken a horse-whip to a servant as cheat him out of a penny, found himself averse to believe what was under his eyes every day, and obscurely whispered here and there by people in other ranks of life than Huddesley's. What if the Pallinders were besieged by duns, and their servants unpaid? ”

“ He is not like his father, neither so delicate in body, nor so gentle and winning as I remember the elder Gwynne—but, in truth, I do not know if I ever found the way to his heart, with all my diplomacy; the unconquerable barrier of age divided us; childhood looks with so solidly-rooted a suspicion on our efforts to approach it; it guards its quaint jungles, its enchanted gardens with so jealous a care that we may well despair of ever touching hands. ”

“ Teddy was very good-natured; he sang, he winked, he joked, he told stories, he lavished endearments on his "frenge." Even in his worry, the doctor found time for the reflection that wine in, truth out is the most solid of maxims; liquor puts nothing into a man's nature that was not there already, it can but reveal him naked; and if he will be a brute in his cups, it is odds but you shall find him a brute at heart out of them. ”

“ He only wore them when the event was of enough importance to justify such a display—a queer sentimental tribute to certain queer sentimental recollections. They had been given him who knows how long ago, and by whom? So do we all in secret offer some absurd and pathetic oblation before the shrines of the past. I dare say when the doctor opened the top drawer of his high-shouldered mahogany bureau and took his Labrador-stone buttons out of their dingy little green morocco case, for one moment the breath of a vanished spring saluted him, and the roses still bloomed by the calm Bendemeer. ”

“ Most of the young people she asked caught eagerly at the invitation; you may laugh, or perhaps jeer, but house parties were not then the affair of everyday occurrence they have since become—not in our corner of the world, certainly. We all felt, delightedly, as if we were living in an English novel—one of "The Duchess'" for choice.
"You know we're going to have private theatricals in the ballroom," Mazie told everybody. "The girls and men in the house will all be in it, so we can have rehearsals any time. And papa is going to have a stage built with footlights and a curtain. ”

“ That's like a woman!" said Steven in strong disgust. "A little! Don't you pay any attention to 'em, Gwynne!"
"Do you need money, Cousin Eleanor?" asked Gwynne gently.
Mollie began to cry hysterically again.
"We don't want you to advance any, Gwynne," said old Eleanor, trembling and turning very pale. "You've done that before, and—and now you will need all your money for poor Sam. And—and besides, Gwynne, I—I—we're not fit to be trusted with money—I—I was going to tell you, only it's so hard—but we're—we're—we've been very wicked women!" She burst out sobbing. ”