Kate Douglas Wiggin

“ It was a foolish little love-story, that of Dorothea Valentine. Her mother was a mass of polite and unnecessary conventions; a pretty sort of person with a clear profile like that of a cold, old little bird. Her small, sharp nose resembled a beak; her eyes were like two black beads; and her conversation was a lengthy series of twitterings. Charlotte Clifford used to tell Miss Winthrop that if Mrs. Valentine had been a canary, people would have forever been putting a towel over her cage to secure silence. ”

“ Such a view from Diana’s deck as we crept into the wonderful harbor! A background of towering green hills and a dazzling blue of velvet sky and crystal sea, like that of Algiers, greeted our enchanted gaze! Like some of the coast towns of Italy, Charlotte Amalia is gay with color, and its white, red-roofed villas nestle among their luxuriant gardens and tropical foliage, standing out in a perfect riot of orange and yellow, blue and red. ”

“ By this time Dorothea was asleep. Her book slid to the floor, I shaded her face with my green umbrella, pulled down her muslin frock over her pretty ankles, and gave myself up to vagrant thoughts of her probable future.
Sunday on shipboard is a good day for reflections and heart-searchings. My own problem, after all, is not so baffling as Dolly’s. She is as loyal as a charming and sensible girl can be to a mother like Mrs. Valentine, whose soul, if the truth were told, is about the size of a mustard-seed. A frivolous, useless, bird-minded woman is Dolly’s mother ”

“ Valentine loftily. “I wish I could convince you, Dorothea, that there are no perfect husbands. You are looking for the impossible! Indeed, I have always found men singularly imperfect, even as friends and companions, and in a more intimate relation they leave still more to be desired. You dismissed Sir Thomas Scott because he was too dictatorial, although you knew he intended to have the family diamonds reset for you.” ”

“ Dorothea gave a deep sigh.
“It is all so peaceful, Charlotte! One day just like another and all beautiful and tranquil. We haven’t seen anybody hurry since we left New York. Do you remember Rudyard Kipling saying, when he came back there after a long absence, that he was afraid to step slowly lest the man behind him should walk up his back? Nobody ever seems nervous in these islands. The natives can be ragged and hungry without being much concerned. Work never appears to be a delight to them for its own sake, but only as a means to get food. ”

“ She thinks constantly what people will say of this, that, or the other trifling thing, and in that way perpetually loses sight of the realities of life. There is a great deal of good in her that you have never seen because for the moment she is absolutely obsessed by her objection to your name and her conviction that Dorothea might and should marry a title. My sister married Reginald Valentine more for the effect on her future visiting-card than anything else, but Dorothea’s father bequeathed his good looks, his sunny disposition, his charm, and his generous nature to his daughter. ”

“ Your mother gazed at him, astounded that his noble tongue could utter the name. Then she actually and gracefully “fell” for the dinner, lured by the bait of the post-prandial coffee with the distinguished trio, and the Philadelphia aunt kept things going serenely. She is a delightful person and will be a perfect companion for your mother when—you know when—when she needs one—and I no longer do!
(“There never was a man who said things like Duke!” interpolated Dolly ecstatically.) ”

“ I expostulated. “There is nothing between you and happiness but a little cloud so diaphanous that a breath of common sense would blow it away. Now read your magazine and let me write in my log-book. It is intended to be an informal report to my chief, of the islands we are to visit. We shall be at St. Thomas to-morrow morning and in the four days we have been journeying from New York the only topic of conversation in which you have shown the slightest enthusiasm is whether you should or should not marry Marmaduke Hogg!”
“Don’t call him all of it, Charlotte,” and she shuddered. ”

“ You have chosen wisely, my dear Mr.—boy, but not more wisely, to my mind, than Dorothea has!”
So it ended, but I somehow hope that I may have converted your mother from an enemy alien to an armed neutral!
“There is nothing more of—of—general interest,” said Dolly tearfully, as she slipped the letter in the envelope. “Aunt Maggie is a trump. Oh, Charlotte! if only you had ever had a love-problem like mine and could advise me! Duke always wondered that you never married.” ”

“ I suppose flesh calls to flesh and she loves her without too much analysis, but they seem to have come to the parting of the ways. It is Dolly’s highest self that is in love with Marmaduke Hogg, and I don’t believe she will sacrifice it to a maternal whim and call it filial obedience. Perhaps the absence that makes the heart grow fonder is working like a philter in this journey planned by Mrs. Valentine with a far different purpose.
“Let her go with you, Charlotte,” she begged me with tears in her eyes. “I must get her away from this attractive but undesirable young man! ”

“ I feel slip—slip—slipping into a heavenly state of coma. Does anything ever stir the tropics except hurricanes and earthquakes, I wonder? How can women fight for suffrage in this climate? How can a man be awakened to great ambitions?”
“Alexander Hamilton was born on Nevis and passed all his boyhood and youthful days on what is now our own St. Croix,” I said.
“Yes, but he was n’t Washington’s aide-de-camp nor secretary of the treasury in the tropics!” ”

“ At length, however, it burst upon Dolly, who went off into irrepressible gales of laughter.
“You have lived so continuously in a rarefied Winthrop atmosphere, Charlotte, that you have n’t any modern vocabulary. He is telling you the pet name of his car, to give you confidence. Nobody ever dies in a tin ‘Lizzie.’ Not only is the machine indestructible, but the people that ride in it. Is n’t the driver a witty, reckless darling?” ”

“ Now that that experience is over, with the many others, we are at sea and quiet again, with one tranquil day just like the other.
“What a honeymoon journey it would make, Charlotte!” said Dolly one moonlight evening on deck. “It is so difficult to grow in knowledge of people in New York or Washington. One does n’t even know one’s self.” ”

“ Even the Winthrops could climb my family tree and find no bad fruit on it, but the world will say: “What a splendid match for Charlotte Clifford.” ... “I wonder how Ellen Winthrop will take it?” ... “I should n’t have thought Clive Winthrop would marry his secretary, somehow, though there’s nothing against her; but he could look higher!”
The world would be quite right. It is a splendid marriage for Charlotte Clifford, and Clive Winthrop could look higher. He is my superior and that is the reason I love him. That he loves me proves that there is something in me that will rise to his level. ”

“ After a long wait Dolly and I took a small mongrel sort of motor that had been refused by all the Diana’s passengers. The Creole driver, handsome, debonair, persuasive, and fluent, though unintelligible, assured us that he had ascended and descended the mountain hundreds of times, a fact only too obvious to one who examined his means of transportation. ”

“ I had n’t the slightest clue as to when he would receive my message or the sailing dates of steamers from New York, everything is so changed in war-times. I know only that the time is slipping away, and Duke may leave the Shipping Board at any moment for the training-camp. I intend to have one brief, straightforward talk with mother, and declare my purpose. We are going to get your Mr. Winthrop to intercede for us, too. I shall be of age in March, and I don’t intend to let a mere name stand between me and happiness. ”

“ Men are ships; figureheads, about the same in a storm or a calm, and not too handsome, thanks to the ocean.” The last phrases are peculiarly true of Clive Winthrop, who is sometimes called the ugliest man in Washington, yet who commands attention in any room that he enters because of his fine physique, his noble head, and his distinction of bearing and speech. Rugged he is, “thanks to the ocean,” but he looks as if he could swim against the strongest current. On the other hand, it cannot be said that Dolly Valentine varies. ”

“ It is just possible that the young man may not be greedy, and so belie his name.” This was Mrs. Valentine’s last shaft as Dorothea walked out of the room with her chin in the air.
S.S. Diana, January 26, 1918 St. Thomas, and Charlotte Amalia, the little town for which I was named, looked so lovely when we landed early this morning that I felt a positive thrill of pride.
This halfway house of the sea, this gateway of the Caribbean, as it has been picturesquely called, seemed, as Dolly and I climbed the hills and the stone stairways, to materialize into a birthplace instead of a vague dream. ”

“ My youth excludes me from any hope of immediate preferment, but I mean to prepare the way for futurity.’ You see the yeast was stirring, even in the tropics, Dolly!”
“Well, I feel no yeast stirring in me,” she said languidly. “All the morning I have been trying to recapture a certain ‘Ode to a Cow’ written by a man of action in a country hotel where mother and I were sojourning last summer. I could have echoed it when I first regarded the inhabitants of these islands, and now anybody might say it of me, for I grow more and more cow-like with every passing day. ”

“ Valentine, a widow of large means but a stranger in the Capital. Clive Winthrop is a person of distinction and influence, and Miss Ellen Winthrop, an old friend of my mother’s, is one of the most charming hostesses in Washington, while I am in reality nothing but a paid scribe; the glad, willing, ardent, but silent assistant of a man who is serving the Administration with all his heart ”

“ Dorothea was enchanted with Dominica, and kept exclaiming every few minutes: “Oh, if only Great Britain would sell us this island! I think I’d choose to live in Dominica, because if I had a sausage-tree in my garden I should laugh every day, and the children would n’t need any playthings.”
S.S. Diana, February 1, 1918 We have had a glimpse of France through a day at Martinique. The principal feature of our visit was a wild motor-drive up an eighteen-hundred-foot mountain. It was a steady climb from glory to glory, with tropical forests on every side. ”

“ In London the lady would have been criticized as marrying beneath her; on the desert island it actually appeared as if she were doing particularly well for herself; indeed, Dolly confessed that though she would prefer marrying Marmaduke Hogg she would rather be wrecked in the company of the St. Kitts boatmaster.
S.S. Diana, Sunday, January 27 After breakfast, on our way to anchor at Antigua for the night, we saw in the distance the towering cone of Nevis, the “Gorgeous Isle” of Alexander Hamilton’s birth and the famous scene of Lord Nelson’s marriage. ”

“ That was dull enough in all conscience, but she was married in her high-school graduating dress, and went to her grandmother’s house, ten miles away, for her wedding-journey. I think it required considerable inward felicity to exalt that situation!”
I sat upright in my steamer chair. “Dorothea,” I said sharply, “you have been manufacturing conversation for the last five minutes—just killing time for fear that I should ask you questions. Is there anything on your mind? You have been absent-minded and nervous for days.”
“Your imagination is working overtime, Charlotte,” she answered. ”

“ Sometimes there are two welcoming faces at a window and sometimes the indistinct figure of a woman stretching out a forbidding hand, my chief’s sister, who may not want a third person in the family!
S.S. Diana, February 13, 1918 Dolly went on the bridge this afternoon and stayed a half-hour with the captain, giving no reason save that she liked to talk with him, which seemed plausible, but did not satisfy me. At bedtime I discovered her unpacking and laying out in her upper berth a dazzling toilet for our landing at St. Thomas to-morrow. ”

“ Thomas with the Winthrops. He is elderly, of course, as all the middle-aged and young butlers are in khaki; and wonderful to relate, there is also an aged but well-preserved footman. He dwells on the lower floor, and communicates with the butler on the floor above, where the drawing- and dining-rooms are, by means of a speaking-tube. The moment the footman approached me with his ‘What name, sir?’ and bawled ‘Mr. Hogg!’ through the tube, the butler repeating it resonantly to the boudoir where Mrs. Valentine was sitting ”

“ Duke is so conscientious that until we succeed in melting mother—that would be a good title for a story, ‘Melting Mother’!—and until she sanctions an engagement he won’t let himself go, even on paper. ”

“ Miss Dorothea Valentine, on the contrary, is a wholly unexpected, I will not say an unwelcome, companion, although when I wish to be thinking of my own problems she generally desires to discuss hers, which are trivial, though interesting and unique.
Everything about the girl piques interest; her beauty, her charm, her childlike gayety and inconsequence, which are but the upper current of a deeper sea of sincerity and common sense. Somebody says: “Ladies vary in looks ”

“ You will come to your senses some time and realize that no one is likely to bear with your perversities more patiently than Arthur Wilde or Lee Wadsworth, who have both wasted a winter dangling about you. ”