The first person King encountered on the piazza of the Grand Union was not the one he most wished to see, although it could never be otherwise than agreeable to meet his fair cousin, Mrs. Bartlett Glow. She was in a fresh morning toilet, dainty, comme il faut, radiant, with that unobtrusive manner of “society” which made the present surroundings, appear a trifle vulgar to King, and to his self-disgust forced upon him the image of Mrs. Benson.
“You here?” was his abrupt and involuntary exclamation.
“Yes—why not?” And then she added, as if from the Newport point of view some explanation were necessary: “My husband thinks he must come here for a week every year to take the waters; it's an old habit, and I find it amusing for a few days. Of course there is nobody here. Will you take me to the spring? Yes, Congress. I'm too old to change. If I believed the pamphlets the proprietors write about each other's springs I should never go to either of them.”
Mrs. Bartlett Glow was not alone in saying that nobody was there. There were scores of ladies at each hotel who said the same thing, and who accounted for their own presence there in the way she did. And they were not there at all in the same way they would be later at Lenox. Mrs. Pendragon, of New Orleans, who was at the United States, would have said the same thing, remembering the time when the Southern colony made a very distinct impression upon the social life of the place; and the Ashleys, who had put up at the Congress Hall in company with an old friend, a returned foreign minister, who stuck to the old traditions—even the Ashleys said they were only lookers-on at the pageant.
Paying their entrance, and passing through the turnstile in the pretty pavilion gate, they stood in the Congress Spring Park. The band was playing in the kiosk; the dew still lay on the flowers and the green turf; the miniature lake sparkled in the sun. It is one of the most pleasing artificial scenes in the world; to be sure, nature set the great pine-trees on the hills, and made the graceful little valley, but art and exquisite taste have increased the apparent size of the small plot of ground, and filled it with beauty. It is a gem of a place with a character of its own, although its prettiness suggests some foreign Spa. Groups of people, having taken the water, were strolling about the graveled paths, sitting on the slopes overlooking the pond, or wandering up the glen to the tiny deer park.
“So you have been at the White Sulphur?” said Mrs. Glow. “How did you like it?”
“Immensely. It's the only place left where there is a congregate social life.”
“You mean provincial life. Everybody knows everybody else.”