THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE
Yes, Hanny Underhill was a little girl again in gaiter-length dresses, and her braids tied across at the back of her head. They let her sleep until the latest moment; and then she had to hurry off to school. But her eyes were bright; and she could have danced along the street, if it had been the proper thing to do.
Daisy did not fare so well. She had a headache, and was very languid. Joe said Hanny had better not go down; and that Daisy would be all right to-morrow. So Hanny studied her lessons, and began to read "Vanity Fair" aloud to grandmother. But grandmother said she didn't care about such a silly girl as Amelia; and though there were wretched women in the world, she didn't believe any one ever was quite so scheming and heartless as Becky.
Then Hanny told her father about the dancing, and the partners she had, and Mr. Andersen, who was going back to Germany to marry some distant cousin. Altogether, it was a splendid time, only she felt as if there had been some kind of a Cinderella transformation; and that she was safe only as long as she wore short frocks.
A week afterward, Mr. Andersen returned to the city, and Hanny was invited down to tea at the Jaspers. They had a nice time, only the talk was not quite so charming as when it was interspersed with dancing.
He was to go to Paris also. And now Louis Napoleon had followed in the footsteps of his illustrious uncle, and was really Emperor of France. What a strange, romantic history his had been!
After this, life went on with tolerable regularity. There was plenty of amusement. Old New York did not suffer. Laura Keene thrilled them with the "Hunchback," and many another personation. Matilda Heron was doing some fine work in Milman's "Fazio," and the play of "The Stranger" held audiences spell-bound. Then there were lectures for the more sober-minded people; and you heard youngish men who were to be famous afterward. Spirit-rappings had fallen a trifle into disfavour; and phrenology was making converts. It was the proper thing to go to Fowler's and have your head examined, and get a chart, which sort of settled you until something else came along. Young ladies were going into Combe's physiology and hygiene and cold bathing. Some very hardy and courageous women were studying medicine. Emerson was in a certain way rivalling Carlyle. Wendell Phillips was enchanting the cities with his silver tongue. There had been Brooke Farm; and Margaret Fuller had flashed across the world, married her Italian lover, who fought while she wrote for liberty; and husband, wife, and child had met their tragic death in very sight of her native land.
People were thinking really great thoughts; and there was a ferment of moral, transcendental, and æsthetical philosophy. Women met to discuss them in each other's parlours, prefiguring the era of clubs. Alice and Ph[oe]be Cary's receptions had grown to be quite the rage; and Anne C. Lynch was another figure in the social-literary world. Beecher was drawing large audiences in Brooklyn, and telling the old truths in a new fashion. There is always a great seething and tumult before the water fairly boils and precipitates the dregs to the bottom.
But whatever comes and goes, young girls are always growing up with the flush and fragrance and elusive fascinations of spring. To-day, a credulous tenderness and overwhelming faith in the past; to-morrow, a little doubtful, hesitatingly anticipative, with the watchwords of "The True, the Good, and the Beautiful;" and still concerned in the latest style of doing one's back hair, and if silver combs and gilt pins would keep in fashion; and flushing celestial rosy red, yet with an odd sense of importance, when men began to lift their hats in a gravely polite manner, as if the laughing, hoydenish girl of yesterday, who strung herself out four or five wide on the sidewalk with books in hand, was the shy, refined, hesitating, utterly delicious young woman of to-day.
There were times when Hanny stood on the mysterious borderland. She used to steal up and look at the wraith of a ball-dress hanging in the third-floor closet, put away with the "choice" garments. The skirt looked so long, almost uncanny. She could see the girl who had gone to the banquet, who had danced with young men who asked "the pleasure" with the politest inclination of the head. And, oh, the lovely dances she had with Mr. Andersen! The bewitching Spanish movement floated through her brain; and the young man's voice—what a curious, lingering sweetness it had—went over her like a wave of music. Of course his German cousin would fall in love with him,—how could she help it?—and they would marry. They would go to Paris once a year or so, when business took him; they would go over to London; but their real home would be in some German town, or maybe in the castle from which the pretty grandmother had run away with her American lover. She was so glad there were real romances left in the world. It wasn't likely any would happen to her. She was not tall, nor elegant, nor handsome; and though she could sing "Bonnie Doon," "Annie Laurie," "A Rose-tree in Full Bearing," and "The Girl I Left behind me," for her father, she was not a company singer. But she really didn't mind. Her father would want her. She wasn't quite resigned to being an old maid; but then she need not worry until she was twenty-five. And when you came to that, half the relatives were fighting for Miss Cynthia Blackfan; and Mr. Erastus Morgan had invited her over to Paris to see the new Emperor, who was copying in every way his granduncle who had ruled half Europe.