LXXVIII

IMMEDIATELY AFTER CHAPEL

THERE was a great deal of pleasure in the house of the three sisters that evening. The widow asked March to stay to tea, and when he opened his mouth to decline, the wrong word fell out and he accepted. He confided to Barbara his fear that in so doing he had blundered, but she softly scouted the idea, and with a delicious reproachfulness in her murmur "wondered if he supposed they "

etc.

At table he sat next to her, in the seat the sisters had intended for Henry Fair. Neither Miss Garnet nor Mr. March gave the other's proximity more than its due recognition; they talked with almost everyone about almost everything, and as far as they knew, said and did nothing to betray the fact that they were as happy as Psyche in a swing with Cupid to push and run under.

Nobody went to evening service. They sang hymns at the piano, selecting oftenest those which made best display of Miss Garnet's and Mr. March's voices. Hers was only mezzo-soprano and not brilliant, but Mr. March and a very short college girl, conversing for a moment aside, agreed that it was "singularly winsome." Another college girl, very tall, whispered Barbara that his was a "superb barrytone!" The young man entered deeper and deeper every moment into the esteem of the household, and they into his. The very best of the evening came last, when, at the widow's request, the two Southerners sang, without the instrument, a hymn or two of the Dixie mountaineers: "To play on the golden harp" and "Where there's no more stormy clouds arising." Being further urged for a negro hymn, John began "Bow low a little bit longer," which Barbara, with a thrill of recollection and an involuntary gesture of pain, said she couldn't sing, and they gave another instead, one of the best, and presently had the whole company joining in the clarion refrain of "O Canaan! bright Canaan!" Barbara heard her college mates still singing it in their rooms on either side of her after she

had said her prayers with her cheek on John March's photograph.

To her painful surprise when she awoke next day she found herself in a downcast mood. She could not even account for the blissful frame in which she had gone to bed. She had not forgotten one word or tone of all John March had said to her while carried away from his fine resolutions by the wave of ecstasy which followed their unexpected meeting, but the sunset light, their thrilling significances, were totally gone from them. Across each utterance some qualifying word or clause, quite overlooked till now, cast its morning shadow. Not so much as one fond ejaculation of his impulsive lips last evening but she could explain it away this morning, and she felt a dull, half-guilty distress in the fear that her blissful silences had embarrassed him into letting several things imply more than he had intended. Before she was quite dressed one of her fellow-students came in with an anguished face to show what a fatal error she had made in the purchase of some ribbons.

Barbara held them first in one light and then in another, and at length shook her head over them in compassionate despair and asked:

"How could you so utterly mistake both color and quality?"

"Why, my dear, I bought them by lamplight! and, besides, it was an auction and I was excited."

"Yes," said Barbara, and took a long breath. "I know how that is."

Their eyes rested on one of the dispersing throng, who came last and alone, with a slow step and manifestly under some burdensome preoccupation, through the high iron gateway of the campus. She passed them with drooping eyelashes and walked in the same tardy pace before them. Presently she turned from the sidewalk, crossed a small grassplot, and stood on the doorstep with her hand on the latch while they went by.

"Her?" said the one who thought he had quoted Shakespeare, "of course it's her; who else could it be? Ah, hmm! 'so near and yet so far!' Tom, I believe in heaven when I look at that girl -heaven and holiness! I read Taylor's 'Holy Living' when a boy!"

Presently they returned and passed again. She was still standing at the door. A few steps away the speaker looked over his shoulder and moaned : "Not a glimpse of me does she get! There, she's gone in; but sure's you live she didn't want to!" They walked on. In front of their hotel he clutched his companion again. A young man of commanding figure stood near, deeply immersed in a telegram. The drummer whispered an oath of surprise.

"That's him now! the young millionaire she rejected on the trip we all made together! What's he here for?George! he looks as worried as her!"

"How do you know she rejected him?"

"How do- Now, look here! If I didn't know it do you s'pose I'd say so? Well, then! Come, I'll introduce you to him- O he's all right! he's just as white and modest as either of us; come on!" March proved himself both modest and white, and as he walked away,

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This's a stra-a-ange world!" moralized the commercial man. ""Tain't him I'm thinking of, it's her! She's in trouble, Tom; in trouble. And who knows but what, for some mysterious reason, I may be the only one on earth who can-O Lord!-Look here; I'm not goin' to do any business to-day; I'm not goin' to be fit; you needn't be surprised if you hear to-night that I've gone off on a drunk.”

Meantime Barbara had lifted the latch and gone in. No hat was on the rack,

but when she turned into the parlor a sickness came to her heart as she smiled and said good-morning to Henry Fair. He, too, smiled, but she fancied he was pale.

They mentioned the weather, which was quite pleasant enough. Fair said the factories that used water-power would be glad of rain, and Barbara seemed interested, but when he paused she asked, in the measured tone he liked so well:

"Who do you think took us all by surprise and spent last evening with us?"

Fair's reply came tardily and was disguised as a playful guess. 66 Mister-" "Yes-"

He sobered. "March!" he softly exclaimed, and let his gaze rest long on the floor. "I thought-really I thought Mr. March was in New York."

"So did we all," was the response, and both laughed, without knowing just why.

"He ought to have had a delightful time," said Fair.

Barbara meditated pleasedly. "Mr. March always lets one know what kind of time he's having, and I never saw him more per-fect-ly sat-is-fied," she said, and allowed her silence to continue so long and with such manifest significance that at length the suitor's low voice asked:

"Am I to understand that that visit alters my case?"

"No," responded Barbara, but without even a look of surprise. "I'm afraid, Mr. Fair, that you'll think me a rather daring girl, but I want you to be assured that I know of no one whose visit can alter-that." She lifted her eyes bravely to his, but they filled. "As for Mr. March," she continued, and the same amusement gleamed in them which so often attended her mention of him, "there's always been a perfect understanding between us. We're the very best of friends, but no one knows better than he does that we can never be more, though I don't see why we need ever be less.

"I should call that hard terms, for myself," said Fair; "I hope-" And there he stopped.

"Mr. Fair," the girl began, was still,

"O Mr. Fair, no, no! You have every right to be answered now, and I have no right to delay beyond your wish. Only, I believe also that, matters standing as they do, you have a perfect right to wait for a later answer from me if you choose. I can only beg you will not. O you who are so rational and brave and strong with yourself, you who know so well that a man's whole fate cannot be wrapped up in one girl unless he weakly chooses it so, take your answer now! I don't believe I can ever look upon you-your offer-differently. Mr. Fair, there's one thing it lacks which I think even you overlook."

fresh,' as the girls say, and fantastical, but I can't help believing that in a matter like this there's something wrongsome essential wanting-in whatever's not good-good

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Romance?" asked Fair; "do you think the fact that a thing is good romance

"No! O no, no, no! I don't say being good romance is enough to commend it; but I do think not being good romance is enough to condemn it! Is that so very foolish?"

The lover answered wistfully. "No. No." Then very softly: "Barbara"he waited till she looked up-"if this thing should ever seem to you to have become good poetry, might not your answer be different?"

Barbara hesitated. "I-you-O-I only know how it seems now !"

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Never mind," said Fair, very gently. They rose and he took her hand, speaking again in the same tone. "You really believe I have the right to wait for a later answer?"

Her head drooped. "The right?" she murmured, "yes-the right-" "So also do I. I shall wait. Goodby."

She raised her glance, her voice failed to a whisper. "Good-by."

Gaze to gaze, one stood, and the other, with reluctant step, backed away; and at the last moment, with his foot leaving the threshold, lover and maiden said again, still gaze to gaze : "Good-by." "Good-by."

My friend and coeval Ajax, a person of much intellectual activity and some discernment, spends his summers far down in Maine, and has told me of the pleasure he finds there in observation of the Yankee character. He does not do his observing in any meagre fortnight, or even month, wrung from the exactions of business, but devotes whole summers to it-summers that begin late in the spring and merge liberally into autumn. The Maine village which he affects he describes as a place curiously, and, he thinks, providentially shielded from the contamination of the modern spirit by its geographical location. It had a vigorous marine life of its own before railroads were invented, and is so placed that, though a railroad might come to it, it could not advantageously pass through it. So the life was not run out it, as it was out of many once prosperous New England villages, and it has kept much of its old Yankee stock in something like its old Yankee vigor. Ajax says for one thing that the Yankee voice, as he hears it there, has not the nasal tones that are commonly credited to it, but is clear and agreeable, but still Yankee in its inflections, and perhaps in its drawl. Besides that, he finds Yankee humor and Yankee independence very sturdy in quality, but qualified with a philosophical spirit and a patient, thrifty unwillingness to allow sentimental considerations to stand overmuch in the way of lawful gain. But what interests him as much as anything is the survival of the old Puritan conscientiousness, modified in its manifestations and transmogrified in its aims, but still persistent and effectual. As usual it is more obvious in the women than in the men, and it compels VOL. XVI-71

them rather to intellectual than spiritual flights. He complains that in their passion for self-improvement they set themselves awful tasks of reading, and labor through long, hard books with very much of the dreary persistence with which their forebears sat in cold meeting-houses under interminable discourses. Ajax is a product of Bos. ton, and has come to middle life without any very protracted evasions of the atmosphere of his nativity. I have known him to read long books himself, but it seems to distress him that these Yankee women should devote to such tasks so much time and toil that, he thinks, might be more profitably employed in having some sort of fun. He told me that one of them said to him, "Oh, Mr. Ajax, I do so envy you the opportunities for intellectual society that Boston must afford," whereat he had the grace to blush, remembering that almost the only overt indication of intellectuality that he gave at home was a constant and outspoken dissatisfaction with Boston newspapers, and a greedy preference for those of New York. And as for intellectual companionship she assured me that his mind had been stimulated more in a week by conversation with a house-painter down at his Maine village than by a whole winter's communion with most of his intimates.

I confess I do not share all his ideas about the betterment of his Maine neighbors, and would rather have them as he describes them than improved to fit his preferences. To anyone busied in any measure with the work of capturing stray ideas and carrying them to market, it is bound to be a comforting thought that in remote places there are folks who have time

and energy to improve their minds for the simple sake of improvement, and without any immediate purpose of the more vulgar sort of gain. That this austere pursuit of intellectual discipline still exists down East helps one to understand how it happens that the origins of writers and prima donnas, and people who win renown in various branches of art as well as in commerce, are still so frequently traceable to the soil of that saeva mater leonum the State of Maine.

ANOTHER thing which I dare say they do better at that village in Maine where Ajax goes is to sing hymus. Your experience may be different, but the social circle in which I move is self-contained and unemotional to a degree that seems to preclude hymns, and I never hear them any more, except when I go to church. Then they are not sung, but "rendered" by surpliced specialists into whose harmonies my ear may venture but not my voice. We are superior to a good many things in our set, and to hymns among others. Are hymns out of fashion, do you know, among the best people? When I was young we had them at home as regularly as bread and butter; but then we had family prayers too, and observed other ceremonies which now seem to be growing obsolete. I don't visit in any family where they sing hymns, except, to be sure, the family where I first heard them. I confess that I visit comparatively few families, and those comparatively worldly; but I often go out to supper on Sunday night with people who have been to church during the day, and I hear no hymns. The impression I gather is that there is more beer and champagne in the world than there was twentyfive years ago, and not so much devotional music; but one has always to be on his guard not to confuse personal changes with terrestrial movement, and especially not to mistake the signs of one's own individual degeneration for marks of the world's progress. I do not especially deprecate the beer, but I regret the hymns. They echo very pleasantly in the memory, and if the habit of singing them still holds out in that village where Ajax goes, that should be reckoned as one of the advantages of the aspiring Yankees who still lead simple lives there.

I think we are quite as pious in this generation as our forebears were, but our manifestations, though not less sincere than theirs, seem to be less overt. Most of us go to church, but we do not seem to attach the same importance to it as they did, nor go quite so conscientiously. It is more of a habit with us and less of a duty, and if we find what seems a better occupation for a particular Sunday morning, our consciences do not smite us as sharply as consciences did thirty years ago. We are more apt than our fathers were to think that we know more about religion than the preacher does; and it may be that our impressions in that regard have foundation, for the latest news about matters of faith comes to us just as promptly as it does to him, and if it recommends itself to our belief there is less to retard our acceptance of it.

But if we are less sure than our parents were of getting our hymns in church, we ought to be less willing to forego them at home. It is painful to think of one's children growing up without hymns or hymn tunes in their heads, but that very thing may happen to them unless fit measures are taken betimes. The words of many modern popular hymus are absurd, and do violence to any reasonable person's intelligence; but the great hymns are sound poetry set to sound music, and though the sentiments of some of them do not altogether accord with the religious convictions of this enlightened generation, the greater number are as available now as they ever were, and the sanest singer need not mumble the words or make mental reservations as he sings them.

I AM Conscious of a want which most of my fellow readers of this magazine might, I should say, hesitate to acknowledge, and yet which I am sure they share with me-the want of a political newspaper. Of such, it may be said, in a sense, that we have a surfeit. It is not in that sense that I speak. We have plenty and to spare of newspapers, largely given up to what is generally called politics, and of politics of that sort in nearly all our newspapers. But let me divide the word of which the lazy hurry of our race has run together the elements. We have no political news paper; that is to say, with all due respect to my numerous