Mrs. Pasmer

“ She was gone two or three minutes, and when she came back it was in quite a different mood, as often happens with women in a little lapse of time.
“Dan, I think Miss Pasmer is a beautiful girl, and I know we shall all like her, if you don't set us against her by your arrogance. Of course we don't know anything about her yet, and you don't, really; but she seems a very lovable little thing, and if she's rather silent and undemonstrative, why, she'll be all the better for you: you've got demonstration enough for twenty. And I think the family are well enough. Mrs. Pasmer is thoroughly harmless ”

“ Mrs. Pasmer abandoned herself to laughter. “O Dan! Dan! You will be the death of me.”
“We will die together, then, Mrs. Pasmer. Alice will kill me.” He regarded her with a sad sympathy in his eye as she laughed and laughed with delicious intelligence of the case. The intelligence was perfect, from their point of view; but whether it fathomed the girl's whole intention or aspiration is another matter. Perhaps this was not very clear to herself. At any rate, Mavering did not go any more to see Mrs. Brinkley, whose house he had liked to drop into. ”

“ But I can't believe all those things,” said Mrs. Pasmer, flinging off the shadow of this lurid social condition. “Isn't this a pretty scene?”
“Yes, it is,” Mr. Mavering admitted, withdrawing his mind gradually from a consideration of Mrs. Pasmer's awful instances. “Yes!” he added, in final self-possession. “The young fellows certainly do things in a great deal better style nowadays than we used to.”
“Oh yes, indeed! And all those pretty girls do seem to be having such a good time!”
“Yes; they don't have the despised and rejected appearance that you'd like to have one believe.” ”

“ The line of the oval in the nave was broken into groups of lingering talkers, who were conspicuous to each other, and Mrs. Pasmer felt that she and her daughter were conspicuous to all the rest where they stood apart, with the two Maverings converging upon them from different points, the son nodding and laughing to friends of both sexes as he came, the father wholly absorbed in not spilling the glass of claret punch which he carried in one hand, and not falling down on the slippery floor with the plate of salad which he bore in the other. She had thoughts of feigning unconsciousness ”

“ Well, I'll come to Campobello if you'll come to New London. Do come, Mrs. Pasmer!”
The mother stood watching the two young men from the window as they made their way across the square together. She had now, for some reason; no apparent scruple in being seen to do so.
“How ridiculous that stout little Mr. Boardman is with him!” said Mrs. Pasmer. “He hardly comes up to his shoulder. Why in the world should he have brought him?”
“I thought he was very pleasant,” said the girl. ”

“ Pasmer, with a sigh of the same irony, “only a poor, despised young girl, Mr. Mavering.”
“You speak,” said Mr. Mavering, beginning to catch on a little, “as if it were a misfortune,” and his, dignity broke up into a smile that had its queer fascination.
“Why, isn't it?” asked Mrs. Pasmer.
“Well, I shouldn't have thought so.”
“Then you don't believe that all that old-fashioned chivalry and devotion have gone out? You don't think the young men are all spoiled nowadays, and expect the young ladies to offer them attentions?” ”

“ You needn't bring the whole Pasmer family home to live with you, if you do marry them all.”
“No,” said Dan, and suddenly he became very distraught. It flashed through him that his mother was expecting him to come home with Alice to live, and that she would not be at all pleased with his scheme of a European sojourn, which Mrs. Pasmer had so cordially adopted. He was amazed that he had not thought of that, but he refused to see any difficulty which his happiness could not cope with. ”

“ He looked at Mrs. Pasmer again, and she said: “I don't believe you are, in the least. You can't tell what is trying to a girl.”
“No,” said Dan pensively, “I can't.” Mrs. Pasmer tried to render the interest in her face less vivid. “I can't tell where she's going to bring up. Talk about tacking!”
“Do you mean the abstract girl; or Alice?”
“Oh, the abstract girl,” said Dan, and they laughed together. “You think Alice is very straightforward, don't you?”
“Very,” said Mrs. Pasmer, looking down with a smile—“for a girl.” ”

“ If marriage is a sacrament, why shouldn't an engagement be?”
“It is,” said Dan, and he felt that it was holy; till then he had never realised that marriage was a sacrament, though he had often heard the phrase.
At the end of an hour they took a tender leave of each other, hastened by the sound of Mrs. Pasmer's voice without. Alice escaped from one door before her mother entered by the other. Dan remained, trying to look unconcerned, but he was sensible of succeeding so poorly that he thought he had better offer his hand to Mrs. Pasmer at once. ”

“ Alice went on musingly. “Their minds are so different. Everything they say and do is so unexpected, and yet it seems to be just right.”
Mrs. Pasmer asked herself if this single-mindedness was to go on for ever, but she had not the heart to treat it with her natural levity. Probably it was what charmed Mavering with the child. Mrs. Pasmer had the firm belief that Mavering was not single-minded, and she respected him for it. ”

“ Pasmer know something of her feeling in the shortness with which she answered, “I saw him in Washington the other day—for a moment.” She shortened the time she had spent in Dan's company so as to cut Mrs. Pasmer off from as much comfort as possible, and she stared at her in open astonishment.
Mrs. Pasmer dropped her eyes and fingered the edge of her fan with a submissiveness that seemed to Mrs. Brinkley the perfection of duplicity; she wanted to shake her. “I knew,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer, “that you had always been such a friend of his.”
It is the last straw which breaks the camel's back; Mrs. ”

“ You must get on without Mr. Pasmer; he's going back to Europe with his son-in-law.”
“Do you mean that their girl's married?”
“No-engaged. It's just out.”
“Well, I must say Mrs. Pasmer has made use of her time.” He too liked to imply that it was all an effect of her manoeuvring, and that the young people had nothing to do with it; this survival from European fiction dies hard. “Who is the young man?”
Mrs. Brinkley gave him an account of Dan Mavering as she had seen him at Campobello, and of his family as she just heard of them. “Mr. Munt was telling me about them as you came up.” ”

“ Pasmer. “It's very good of you.” And Mrs. Brinkley fancied she smiled rather bitterly.
Mrs. Brinkley went out upon the seaward verandah of the hotel with this bitterness of Mrs. Pasmer's smile in her thoughts; and it disposed her to feel more keenly the quality of Miss Pasmer's smile. She found the girl standing there at a remote point of that long stretch of planking, and looking out over the water; she held with both hands across her breast the soft chuddah shawl which the wind caught and fluttered away from her waist. She was alone, said as Mrs. ”

“ I shall go into a sisterhood.”
“You will do nothing of the kind, with my consent,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “I will have no such nonsense. Don't flatter yourself that I will. Even if I approved of such a thing, I should think it wicked to let you do it. You're always fancying yourself doing something very devoted, but I've never seen you ready to give up your own will, or your own comfort even, in the slightest degree. And Dan Mavering, if he were twice as temporising and circuitous”—the word came to her from her talk with him—“would be twice too good for you. I'm going to breakfast.” ”

“ Saintsbury, lecturing upon him to her friend.
“I'm afraid you're too amiable altogether, Mr. Mavering. I'm sure you let people impose upon you,” said the other lady. “You have been letting us impose upon you.”
“Ah! now that proves you're all wrong, Mrs. Pasmer.”
“It proves that you know how to say things very prettily.”
“Oh, thank you. I know when I'm having a good time, and I do my best to enjoy it.” He ended with the nervous laugh which seemed habitual with him.
“He, does laugh a good deal;” thought Mrs. Pasmer, surveying him with smiling steadiness. “I suppose it tires Alice. ”

“ Pasmer.
“Yes, at New London,” Mavering broke in. “Don't you know? The University race—Harvard and Yale.”
“Oh—oh yes,” cried Mrs. Pasmer, wondering how her daughter should know about the race, and she not. “Had they talked it over together on Class Day?” she asked herself. She felt herself, in spite of her efforts to keep even with them; left behind and left out, as later age must be distanced and excluded by youth. “Are you gentlemen going to row?” she asked Mavering. ”

“ Pasmer. “But if Alice feels something inimical—antipatico—in her atmosphere, it's no use talking.”
“Oh no, it's no use talking, and I don't know that I want to talk.” After a pause, Mavering asked, “Mrs. Pasmer, don't you think that where two people are going to be entirely devoted to each other, and self-sacrificing to each other, they ought to divide, and one do all the devotion, and the other all the self-sacrifice?”
Mrs. Pasmer was amused by the droll look in Dan's eyes. “I think they ought to be willing to share evenly,” she said. ”

“ Everybody seems to be so,” suggested Munt.
“Oh Yes,” Mrs. Pasmer assented; “he appears to be a universal favourite.”
“We used to expect great things of Elbridge Mavering in college. We were rather more romantic than the Harvard men are nowadays, and we believed in one another more than they do. Perhaps we idealised one another. But, anyway, our class thought Mavering could do anything. You know about his taste for etchings?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a sigh of deep appreciation. “What gifted people!” ”

“ Now stop! Here, bathe your eyes; they're all red. Though I don't know that it matters. Yes, they'll expect you to have been crying,” said Mrs. Pasmer, seeing the situation more and more clearly. “It's perfectly natural.” But she took some cologne on a handkerchief, and recomposed Alice's countenance for her. “There, the colour becomes you, and I never saw your eyes look so bright.”
There was a pathos in their brilliancy which of course betrayed her to the Mavering girls. It softened Eunice, and encouraged Minnie, who had been a little afraid of the Pasmers. ”

“ Pasmer's way. “We've not only survived, we've taken a new lease of life from Class Day. I'd for gotten how charming it always was. Or perhaps it didn't use to be so charming? I don't believe they have anything like it in Europe. Is it always so brilliant?”
“I don't know,” said Mavering. “I really believe it was rather a nice one.”
“Oh, we were both enraptured,” cried Mrs. Pasmer.
Alice added a quiet “Yes, indeed,” and her mother went on—
“And we thought the Beck Hall spread was the crowning glory of the whole affair. We owe ever so much to your kindness.” ”

“ Oh, how wonderful it is! I wanted to hate you, but I couldn't. I couldn't do anything but love you. Yes, now I understand what love is, and how it can do everything, and last for ever.”
XLI.
Mavering came to lunch the next day, and had a word with Mrs. Pasmer before Alice came in. Mr. Pasmer usually lunched at the club.
“We don't see much of Mrs. Saintsbury nowadays,” he suggested.
“No; it's a great way to Cambridge,” said Mrs. Pasmer, stifling, in a little sigh of apparent regret for the separation, the curiosity she felt as to Dan's motive in mentioning Mrs. Saintsbury. ”

“ Mrs. Pasmer joined him. “No, Mr. Mavering. In France you don't need a biggin. I set mine up when we went to England.”
Alice looked darkly from one of these light spirits to the other, and then they all shrieked together.
They went on talking volubly from that, and they talked as far away from what they were thinking about as possible. They talked of Europe, and Mrs. Pasmer said where they would live and what they would do when they all got back there together. Dan abetted her, and said that they must cross in June. Mrs. Pasmer said that she thought June was a good month. ”

“ They began to ask themselves what it was for, and to question whether, if she could not marry a noble Englishman, Alice had not better marry a good American.
Even with Mrs. Pasmer this question was tacit, and it need not be explained to any one who knows our life that in her most worldly dreams she intended at the bottom of her heart that her daughter should marry for love. It is the rule that Americans marry for love, and the very rare exception that they marry for anything else ”

“ She had seen them cease gradually from the romantic reverence which once clothed them, and decline through a gathering indifference into something like slight and compassion, as people who have not been able to make their place or hold their own at home; and she had taught herself so well how to pocket the superiority natural to the Europeanised American before arriving at consciousness of this disesteem, that she paid a ready tribute to people who had always stayed at home.
In fact Mrs. Pasmer was a flatterer, and it cannot be claimed for her that she flattered adroitly always. ”

“ She longed for some chance to scold the girl, and tell her that it would not do, and make her talk. Mr. Mavering was merely a friendly acquaintance, and there could be no question of anything personal. She forgot that between young people the social affair is always trembling to the personal affair.
In the little pause which these reflections gave her mother, the girl struck in, with the coolness that always astonished Mrs. Pasmer, and as if she had been merely waiting till some phase of the talk interested her.
“Are many of the students going to the race?” she asked Boardman. ”