II
Miss Adgate received calls for a month; paid them—was dined—was less wined than vastly cocktailed,—in simple or elaborate New England fashion. She returned these hospitalities and she discovered that Oldbridge New and Oldbridge Old held agreeable people. If they treated her a little as an Egeria she accepted the rôle without fuss and gave to modesty its due.
Some of these new acquaintances, of a pretty taste in letters, on far more than nodding terms with art, had, after years spent abroad—fallen like herself alack, upon a day! Alack the day on which we come to the disputably sage conclusion that East,—West.... We know, we learn—too late, sometimes alas, the fatal rest! And they had cast behind them the dust of the East, and they had turned Westward with a very lively sense of the superior enchantments of Europe. But once at home a devout appreciation of the sweet repose ('tis the just phrase), an imperceptible abandonment to that soothing peace which hovers insidious over a New England homestead, ah, ye rewards of Virtue! these had quietly engulfed in sodden well-being, the finer European impressions.
Miss Adgate a little later, perceived that these wise people—settled ere long unblushingly to New Englandism, never again intended to budge. They had accepted, deliberately, the prose of life. And Miss Adgate, enamoured of New England, still kept her head enough to wonder, with some dismay, whether she, too, if she stayed here, she, too, would end by looking upon Oldbridge New and Oldbridge Old as the be-all and end-all of existence! So many things spoke here to her heart. Her tender spirit basked here, all day, in good will. But wasn't Oldbridge just a trifle lacking in effervescence? And yes—didn't Oldbridge take itself a bit solemnly? Ah, yes! And—yes—it had a distressing tendency to be very serious about everything. To none of these states of mind had Ruth been initiated, and every good Catholic knows that mirth is from God, dullness from the Devil.
Miss Adgate, who had hitherto lived on the plane of an impersonal, if somewhat facetious consideration of public matters,—of wit, persiflage; Miss Adgate found when it came to small gossip that she was an irritated listener. Carping criticism made her yawn, she became dumb, had nothing to say. It is indeed a stupid trade! Moreover her soul had ever disported in innocent folly, in gaiety and witty conversation. She soon attracted those who cared for the same light stuff and Barracks Hill became, ere long, the centre of a coterie of frolic, music, and laughter, where personalities except in the ways of honest chaff were tabooed—and no one's affairs, wonder of wonders! were commented upon behind his back.