Thomas A. Janvier

“ But we’re not having a nice time, here at this noisy hotel, Uncle Hutchinson, where the band can’t keep quiet for half an hour at a time, and where the only notion that people seem to have of amusement is to overdress themselves and wear diamonds to dinner and sit in crowds on the verandas and dance at night with any stranger who can get another stranger to introduce him and to drive over on fine afternoons to that place by the lake and drink mixed drinks until some of them actually get tipsy. ”

“ What I mean is: what do people do here to have a good time?”
“In the morning,” replied Mr. Port, “they bathe, and in the afternoon they drive to the Point. This morning we shall bathe, Dorothy—bathing is an admirable liver tonic—and this afternoon we shall drive to the Point.”
“Good heavens! Is that all?” exclaimed Miss Lee. “Why, it’s worse than Saratoga. Do you mean to say, Uncle Hutchinson, that people don’t dance here, and don’t go yachting, and don’t have lunch-parties, and don’t play tennis, and don’t even have afternoon teas?” ”

“ Only if she does stay,” and there was a warning tone of deep meaning in Miss Lee’s well-modulated voice, “her heart, of course, will be broken, and she will have to ask you to travel” with her for two or three years into out-of-the-way parts of the world (Mr. Port shuddered) “until her poor broken heart gets well. Not that it ever will get quite well again, you know; but she will be brave, and try to pretend for your sake that it has. So it shall be just as you say, dear; only for Pennington’s sake, who loves me so much, Uncle Hutchinson, I hope that perhaps you may be willing to let me go.” ”

“ Marriage, she decided, was the only way by which she could score a final victory over her uncle, and at the same time spike his guns; but it did not necessarily follow that her marriage must be with Livingstone. Indeed, as her coolly intelligent mind perceived, marrying an unmanageable young man in order to be free of an unmanageable old one would be simply walking out of the frying-pan into the fire—and that was not at all the resolution of her difficulties that Dorothy sought. ”

“ Pennington Brown, that the subject of his perplexities herself appeared upon the scene; and her arrival at so critical a juncture seemed to suggest as a remote possibility that she had been all the while snuffing this particular battle from not very far off.
“Dear Uncle Hutchinson,” said Miss Lee, with affectionate fervor, “do you think that your angel is most cruel and horrid because she is willing to go off in this way after her own selfish happiness and leave you all alone? But she won’t do it, dear, if you would rather have her stay. ”

“ And you’ll take your angel to the dances, and to see the tennis, and you’ll give her lunch-parties, and you’ll take her yachting, won’t you, you dear? But I know you will; and if this were not such a very conspicuous place, and might make a scandal, I’d give you a very sweet kiss to pay you in advance for all the trouble that you are going to take to make your angel enjoy herself. You needn’t bother about the teas, Uncle Hutchinson—for the most part they’re only women, and stupid. ”

“ He believed, to be sure, that in a stand-up fight he could conquer Dorothy; but he had his doubts as to how long she would stay conquered—and between constant fighting and constant travel there is not much choice; for Mr. Port knew from experience how acute is that form of biliousness which results from rage. After all, self-preservation is the first law of nature; and under the stress thus put upon him, therefore, it is not surprising that Mr. Port’s qualms of conscience incident to his failure to do his duty to his neighbor vanished to the winds. ”

“ Really, you haven’t given your angel a single chance to be affectionate—and unless she can be affectionate and sweet and clinging, and things like that, you know, your poor angel is not happy at all. Suppose we try the tennis for just half an hour or so? It won’t be much of a sacrifice for you, and it will make your angel so happy that she will make herself dearer to you than ever, you precious thing. ”

“ You forget that my rheumatism is hereditary, Port. Why, I had an attack of it when I was only five-and-twenty.”
“All the same, you wouldn’t have it now if you had spent your afternoons sensibly with me here on a dry veranda, or properly wrapped up in a dry carriage, instead of on damp rocks, with that baggage. What on earth has got into you I can’t imagine. If you were twenty years younger, Brown, I should think, yes, positively, I should think that you were in love with her.” ”

“ Port, in a tone that implied that such frivolities were quite beyond the lines of his own personal interests. “Yes,” he continued, “I am sure that all of them are done here now—for the Pier is not what it used to be, Dorothy. The quiet air of intense respectability that characterized Narragansett when it was the resort only of a few of the best families of Philadelphia has departed from it—I fear forever! But, thank Heaven, its climatic characteristics remain intact. When you are older, Dorothy, and your liver asserts itself, you will appreciate this incomparable climate at its proper value.” ”

“ Encouraged by the success that was attending her unselfish efforts to harmonize her own and her uncle’s conceptions of the temporal fitness of things, Miss Lee began to find life at the Pier quite supportable. “There’s not much to do here,” she declared, with her customary candor, “and the hotels—all ugly and all in a row—make it look like an overgrown charitable institution; and most of the people, I must say, are such a dismal lot that they might very well be the patients out for an airing. But, on the whole, I’ve been in several worse places, Uncle Hutchinson ”

“ Brown was too warm to notice the cynical tone of his friend’s rejoinder—“and I have been thinking, Port, that we are a pair of selfish old wretches to monopolize every evening in the way that we have been doing this bright young flower. It is a shame for us to keep her in our stupid company—though she tells me that she finds our talk about old people and old times exceedingly interesting—instead of letting her have a little of the young society and a little of the excitement and pleasure of watering-place life. ”

“ And of course, Uncle Hutchinson, even if I didn’t care about it at all, I should go all the same; for I want to fall in exactly with your plans and put you to as little trouble as possible, you know. For if your angel wasn’t willing to be self-sacrificing, she really wouldn’t be an angel at all. ”

“ That’s the doctrine that I always preached to poor dear mamma—she had an hereditary liver too, you know—and it’s a very good one.
“Anyhow, I’ve heard mamma say countless times that Saratoga was a wonderfully good place for livers; now why can’t we go there? Mamma always said that Saratoga was simply delightful—horse-racing going on all the time, and lovely drives, and rowing on the lake, and dancing all night long, and all sorts of lovely things. Let’s go to Saratoga, Uncle Hutchinson! ”

“ Port. “I have a tolerably fair cook, and ice isn’t the only thing in the ice-chest, I assure you.”
“How very kind you are, Mr. Livingstone,” Dorothy hastened to say, in order to head off her uncle’s inevitable refusal. “Of course we will go, with the greatest possible pleasure. It is very odd how things fall out sometimes. Now only this morning I was begging Uncle Hutchinson to take me off yachting, and he was saying how much he enjoyed being at sea, and how he really thought that if it wasn’t for his age—wasn’t it absurd of him to talk about his age? ”

“ Port, with a colloquial disregard of grammatical construction, and with perhaps unnecessary emphasis, “I don’t think she has.”
“But from this moment onward,” Dorothy continued, courteously ignoring her uncle’s not too courteous interpolation, and airily relegating into oblivion the recent past, “she expects to manifest her angelic qualities to an extent that will make her appear unfit for earth. Very possibly she may even grow a pair of wings and fly quite away from you, sir—right up among the clouds, where the other angels are! And how would you like that, Uncle Hutchinson?” ”

“ Pennington Brown, I might have rather a good time here.”
“You will oblige me, Dorothy,” replied Mr. Port, “by refraining from using such a word as ‘stuffy’ in connection with a gentleman who belongs to one of the oldest and best families in Philadelphia, and who, moreover, is one of my most esteemed friends.”
“But he is stuffy, Uncle Hutchinson. He never talks about anything but who peoples’ grandfathers and grandmothers were; and Watson’s Annals seems to be the only book that he ever has heard of. ”

“ For persons possessing delicate livers—”
“Oh, bother delicate livers—at least, I beg your pardon, Uncle Hutchinson,” for an expression of such positive pain had come into Mr. Port’s face at this irreverent reference to an organ that he regarded as sacred that even Dorothy was forced to make some sort of an apology. “Of course I don’t want to bother your poor liver more than it is bothered anyway; but, you know, I haven’t got a liver, and I don’t care for climates a bit. ”

“ Port went on—keenly regretting the unfortunate beginning that he had given to his declaration of independence, but judiciously ignoring Dorothy’s shrewd perversion of it—“that your several suggestions literally are impossibilities. I admit that dancing for a short period, at about an hour after each meal, is an admirable exercise that produces a most salutary effect upon the digestive apparatus; but persistent dancing until an unduly late period of the night is a practice as unhygienic as, in the mixed company of a watering-place, it is socially objectionable. ”

“ Miss Lee continued, with increasing animation, “is Carlsbad. Yes, that’s what you really want—and while you are drinking the horrid waters I can be having a nice time, you know. Then, when you have finished your course, we can take a run into Switzerland; and after that, in the autumn, we might go over to Vienna—you will be delighted with the Vienna restaurants, and they do have such good white wines there. And then, from Vienna, we really can go on and have a winter in Russia. Just think how perfectly delightful it will be to drive about in sledges, all wrapped up in furs”—Mr. Port shuddered ”

“ Her only wish, you know, has been to make you comfortable and happy; and you have been so good and so kind to her that she is ready to sacrifice even her love for your sake. Yes, if you would rather keep her to yourself she will stay. ”

“ Fortune, however, favors the resolute even more decidedly than she favors the brave. This fact Dorothy comprehended thoroughly, and uniformly acted upon. Each time that even a remote possibility of a yacht cruise presented itself she instantly brought her batteries to bear ”

“ In regard to Narragansett Pier, Miss Lee’s opinions, the which she was neither slow in forming nor unduly cautious in expressing, at first were unfavorable.
“And so this is ‘the Pier,’ is it?” she observed in a tone by no means expressive of approval as she stood on the hotel veranda on the day of her arrival, and contemplated the rather limited prospect that was bounded at one end by the Casino and at the other by the coal-elevator. “If those smelly little stones out there are ‘the Rocks’ that people talk about at such a rate I must confess that I am disappointed in them”—Mr. ”

“ Brown continued:
“She certainly is one of the most charming girls I have met in a long time, Port. She is not a bit like the average of young girls nowadays. I rarely have known a young person of either sex to be so genuinely interested in genealogy, especially in Philadelphia genealogy ”

“ It is within the bounds of possibility that Miss Lee had arrived at a just estimate of her relative’s intellectual peculiarities, and that she even sometimes framed her discourses with a view to taking advantage of them.
The direct question being the simplest section of Dorothy’s complex utterance, Mr. Port abandoned his intended remonstrance and reproof and proceeded to answer it. “Yes,” he said, “I know him. It’s Van Rensselaer Livingstone. His cousin, Van Ruy-ter Livingstone, married your cousin Grace—Grace Winthrop, you know. He’s a great scamp—this one, I mean ”

“ Port’s mind, and also to his digestion—for Dorothy’s grumpiness produced an effect distinctly bilious—when the end of July arrived and his own and his charming ward’s views once more were brought into harmony by the move to Narragansett Pier. Fortunately, while somewhat disposed to stand upon her own rights, Miss Lee was not a person who bore malice ”

“ The fact must be admitted that she contrived to make her uncle’s life so much of a burden to him that his staying powers were strained to the utmost Indeed, he admitted to himself that he could not have held out against such tactics for another week ”

“ Port’s firm determination still to figure before the world as a youngish, middle-aged man.
To say that Miss Lee deliberately set herself to playing upon this weakness of her guardian’s, possibly, remotely possibly, would be doing her injustice. But the fact is obvious that she succeeded by her cleverly turned discourse in landing her esteemed relative fairly between the horns of an exceedingly awkward dilemma: either Mr. ”