William Dean Howells

“ Kenton broke off, “I talk as if there was nothing to bind her; and yet there is what poor Richard did! What would she say if she knew that? I have been cautioning Lottie and Boyne, but I know it will come out somehow. Do you think it’s wise to keep it from her? Hadn’t we better tell her? Or shall we wait and see—”
Kenton would not allow to her or to himself that his hopes ran with hers; love is not business with a man as it is with a woman; he feels it indecorous and indelicate to count upon it openly, where she thinks it simply a chance of life, to be considered like another. ”

“ Ellen spoke into her pillow. “You know that. You know that I have got to go. You know that if I saw him—Oh, why do you make me talk?”
“Yes, I understand, child.” Then, in the imperious necessity of blaming some one, Mrs. Kenton added: “You know how it is with your father. He is always so precipitate; and when he heard what you said, last night, it cut him to the heart. He felt as if he were dragging you away, and this morning he could hardly wait to get through his breakfast before he rushed down to the steamship office. ”

“ But go away, momma, go away! You’re all against me—you, and poppa, and Lottie, and Boyne. Oh, dear! oh, dear!” She threw herself down in her berth and covered her face with the sheet, sobbing, while her mother stood by in an anguish of pity and anger. She wanted to beat the girl, she wanted to throw herself upon her, and weep with her in the misery which she shared with her. ”

“ It is the privilege of a woman, whether she wills it or not, to put a man who is in the wrong concerning her much further in the wrong than he could be from his offence. Breckon did not know whether he was suffering more or less because he was suffering quite hopelessly, but he was sure that he was suffering justly, and he was rather glad, if anything, that he must go on suffering. His first impulse had been to go at once to Judge Kenton and own his wrong, and take the consequences—in fact, invite them. ”

“ It appeared to him that Kenton was held not only in the subjection to his wife’s, judgment, which befalls, and doubtless becomes, a man after many years of marriage, but that he was in the actual performance of more than common renunciation of his judgment in deference to the good woman. She in turn, to be sure, offered herself a sacrifice to the whims of the sick girl, whose worst whim was having no wish that could be ascertained, and who now, after two days of her mother’s devotion, was cast upon her own resources by the inconstant barometer. ”

“ He could have waited as much longer, but he liked her pleasure in the place, and with the homesickness always lurking at his heart he went about with her to the amusements which she frequented, as she said, to help Ellen take her mind off herself. At the play and the opera he sat thinking of the silent, lonely house at Tuakingum, dark among its leafless maples, and the life that was no more in it than if they had all died out of it; and he could not keep down a certain resentment, senseless and cruel, as if the poor girl were somehow to blame for their exile. ”

“ So far from pretending not to see her mother’s manoeuvres, Julia invited public recognition of them; in the way of joking, which she kept within the limits of filial fondness, she made fun of her mother’s infatuation to Breckon himself, and warned him against the moment when her wiles might be too much for him. Before other people she did not hesitate to save him from her mother, so that even those who believed her in the conspiracy owned that no girl could have managed with more cleverness in a situation where not every one would have refused to be placed. ”

“ You men don’t think your wives are sacred. That’s it!”
“No, no, Sarah! It’s because I don’t think of you as apart from myself, that I can’t think of you as I do of Ellen. I beg your pardon if I seemed to set her above you. But when I kissed you we were very young, and we lived in a simple day, when such things meant no harm; and I was very fond of you, and you were the holiest thing in the world to me. Is Ellen holy to that fellow?”
“I know,” Mrs. Kenton relented. “I’m not comparing him to you. And there is a difference with Ellen. She isn’t like other girls. ”

“ One Dutch lady talked with such manly freedom, and with such untrammelled intimacy, that she was obliged to send Boyne and Lottie about their business, upon an excuse that was not apparent to the Dutch lady. She only complimented Mrs. Kenton upon her children and their devotion to each other, and when she learned that Ellen was also her daughter, ventured the surmise she was not long married.
“It isn’t her husband,” Mrs. Kenton explained, with inward trouble. “It’s just a gentleman that came over with us,” and she went with her trouble to her own husband as soon as she could. ”

“ She did not know where else to go, and she beat along the sides of the corridor as far as the dining-saloon. She had a dim notion of trying to go up into the music-room above, but a glance at the reeling steep of the stairs forbade. With her wraps on her arm and her sea-cap in her hand, she stood clinging to the rail-post.
Breckon came out of the saloon. “Oh, Miss Kenton,” he humbly entreated, “don’t try to go on deck! It’s rougher than ever.” ”

“ Kenton could have answered his censure, if she had known it, that daughters, like sons, were not what their mothers but what their environments made them, and that the same environment sometimes made them different, as he saw. She could have told him that Lottie, with her slangy pertness, had the truest and best of the men she knew at her feet, and that Ellen, with her meekness, had been the prey of the commonest and cheapest spirit in her world, and so left him to make an inference as creditable to his sex as he could. ”

“ Mr. Breckon gave a peal of delight, and answered, “Yes, I certainly do.” He controlled himself so far as to say: “Now I think I’ve been pretty open with you, and I wish you’d answer me a question. Will you?”
“Well, I will—one,” said Lottie.
“It may be two or three; but I’ll begin with one. Why do you think a minister ought to be more serious than other men?” ”

“ All at once the Kentons began to be acquainted in the hotel, as often happens with people after they have long ridden up and down in the elevator together in bonds of apparently perpetual strangeness. From one friendly family their acquaintance spread to others until they were, almost without knowing it, suddenly and simultaneously on smiling and then on speaking terms with the people of every permanent table in the dining-room. Lottie and Boyne burst the chains of the unnatural kindness which bound them, and resumed their old relations of reciprocal censure. ”

“ This was announced by the mounting of the elevator to their landing, and then by low, rapid pleading in a man’s voice outside. Kenton was about to open the door, when there came the formless noise of what seemed a struggle, and Ellen’s voice rose in a muffed cry: “Oh! Oh! Let me be! Go away! I hate you!” Kenton the door open, and Ellen burst in, running to hide her face in her mother’s breast, where she sobbed out, “He—he kissed me!” like a terrified child more than an insulted woman. Through the open door came the clatter of Bittridge’s feet as he ran down-stairs. ”

“ When Lottie joined her family in the dining-saloon she carelessly explained that Ellen had said she wanted to be alone. Before the young man, who was the only other person besides the Kentons at their table, her mother could not question her with any hope that the bad would not be made worse, and so she remained silent. Judge Kenton sat with his eyes fixed on his plate, where as yet the steward had put no breakfast for him; Boyne was supporting the dignity of the family in one of those moments of majesty from which he was so apt to lapse into childish dependence. ”

“ He did not believe that she resented the levity he had shown; but he had reason to fear that she had finally accepted it as his normal mood, and in her efforts to meet him in it, as if he had no other, he read a tolerance that was worse than contempt. When he tried to make her think differently, if that was what she thought of him, he fancied her rising to the notion he wished to give her, and then shrinking from it, as if it must bring her the disappointment of some trivial joke. ”

“ You fairly teased him to come. The way Lottie goes on with men is a shame, momma.”
“What time does the boat sail, momma!” Lottie blandly persisted. “I promised to let Mr. Plumpton know.”
“Yes, so as to get a chance to write to him,” said Boyne. “I guess when he sees your spelling!”
“Momma! Do wake up! What time does our steamer sail?”
A light of consciousness came into Mrs. Renton’s eyes at last, and she sighed gently. “We’re not going, Lottie.” ”

“ Kenton seemed an exemplary father and mother with Ellen as well as with their other children. It is easy to be exemplary with a sick girl, but they increasingly affected Breckon as exemplary with Ellen. He fancied that they acted upon each other beneficially towards her. At first he had foreboded some tiresome boasting from the father’s tenderness, and some weak indulgence of the daughter’s whims from her mother; but there was either never any ground for this, or else Mrs. Kenton, in keeping her husband from boasting, had been obliged in mere consistency to set a guard upon her own fondness. ”

“ There was a higher average of intelligence than in any other place of its size, and a wider and evener diffusion of prosperity. Its record in the civil war was less brilliant, perhaps, than that of some other localities, but it was fully up to the general Ohio level, which was the high-water mark of the national achievement in the greatest war of the greatest people under the sun. It, was Kenton’s pride and glory that he had been a part of the finest army known in history. ”

“ Breckon assented, with a smile for the gravity of their discourse. “We shouldn’t have the atomic theory without it.” She did not say anything, and he decided that the atomic theory was beyond the range of her reading. He tried to be more concrete. “We have to make-believe in ourselves before we can believe, don’t we? And then we sometimes find we are wrong!” He laughed, but she asked, with tragical seriousness:
“And what ought you to do when you find out you are mistaken in yourself?” ”

“ She was polite to them all, but to Boyne she was flattering, and he was too little used to deference from ladies ten years his senior not to be very sensible of her worth in offering it. To be unremittingly treated as a grown-up person was an experience so dazzling that his vision was blinded to any possibilities in the behavior that formed it; and before the day ended Boyne had possessed Miss Rasmith of all that it was important for any fellow-being to know of his character and history. ”

“ Boyne was first aware that it was a humorous crowd when, at a turn of the street, their equipage was greeted with ironical cheers by a group of gay young Dutchmen on the sidewalk. Then he saw that the sidewalks were packed with people, who spread into the street almost to the tram, and that the house fronts were dotted with smiling Dutch faces, the faces of pretty Dutch girls, who seemed to share the amusement of the young fellows below. ”

“ He had not fully formulated his reproach when the ship righted herself with a counter-roll and plunge, and they were swung staggering back together against the bulkhead. The door of the gangway was within reach, and Breckon laid hold of the rail beside it and put the girl within. “Are you hurt?” he asked.
“No, no; I’m not hurt,” she panted, sinking on the cushioned benching where usually rows of semi-sea-sick people were lying.
“I thought you might have been bruised against the bulkhead,” he said. “Are you sure you’re not hurt that I can’t get you anything? From the steward, I mean?” ”

“ Is there ever anything to laugh at? If we looked closely enough at things, oughtn’t we rather to cry?” He laughed in retreat from the serious proposition. “But it wouldn’t do to try making each other cry instead of laugh, would it? I suppose your sister would rather have me cry.”
“I don’t believe Lottie thought much about it,” said Ellen; and at this point Mr. Breckon yielded to an impulse.
“I should think I had really been of some use if I had made you laugh, Miss Kenton.” ”

“ Even with the growth of his respect for their intelligence and his love of their kindliness, he had not been able to keep a certain patronage from mingling, and it was not till they evinced not only entire ability, but an apparent wish to get on without his approval, without his acquaintance even, that he had conceived a just sense of them. The like is apt to happen with the best of us, when we are also the finest, and Breckon was not singular in coming to a due consciousness of something valuable only in the hour of its loss. ”

“ Ellen said.
“Yes, that’s what I mean. If a person was to take a fancy to some one that was above him, that was richer, or older, he wouldn’t be to blame for it, would he?”
“Was that what you wanted to ask me about?”
Borne hesitated. “Yes” he said. He was in for it now.
Ellen had not noticed Boyne’s absorption with Miss Rasmith on the ship, but she vaguely remembered hearing Lottie tease him about her, and she said now, “He wouldn’t be to blame for it if he couldn’t help it, but if the person was much older it would be a pity!” ”

“ In one of those dramatic reveries which we all hold with ourselves when fortune has pressingly placed us, Ellen Kenton had imagined it possible for her to tell her story to the man who had so gently and truly tried to be her friend. ”

“ It is this peculiar power of rejuvenescence which perhaps makes so many women outlive their husbands, who at the same age regard this world as an accomplished fact. Mrs. Kenton had kept up their reading long after Kenton found himself too busy or too tired for it; and when he came from his office at night and fell asleep over the book she wished him to hear, she continued it herself, and told him about it. When Ellen began to show the same taste, they read together, and the mother was not jealous when the father betrayed that he was much prouder of his daughter’s culture than his wife’s. ”

“ Kenton, wishing to be justified further, “think she ought to have had a chaperon. I didn’t think of that; it isn’t the custom at home; but Lottie was very saucy about it, and I had to send Boyne to bed. I don’t think our children are very much comfort to us.”
“They are good children,” Kenton said, said—provisionally.
“Yes, that is the worst of it. If they were bad, we wouldn’t expect any comfort from them. Ellen is about perfect. She’s as near an angel as a child can be, but she could hardly have given us more anxiety if she had been the worst girl in the world.” ”

“ Lottie, in fact, was not having a bit good time in New York, which she did not find equal in any way to Tuskingum for fun. She hated the dull propriety of the hotel, where nobody got acquainted, and every one was as afraid as death of every one else; and in her desolation she was thrown back upon the society of her brother Boyne. They became friends in their common dislike of New York; and pending some chance of bringing each other under condemnation they lamented their banishment from Tuskingum together. ”