On the occasion of the first performance of Parsifal at the Metropolitan, Jeannette, through Mr. Corey, was able to secure one ten-dollar seat for her mother. It was the greatest event in little Mrs. Sturgis’ life. She longed for Ralph, and wept all through the Good Friday music.
Frequently on Sunday afternoons Jeannette’s mother made her daughter accompany her to Carnegie Hall for a concert or a recital. Then, she declared, it was her turn to treat and she would not allow the girl to pay for anything. Her entertainments were never as “grand” as her daughter’s, but she took a keen delight in playing hostess, and after the music always suggested tea. They were both exceedingly fond of toasted crumpets, and Mrs. Sturgis was ever on the lookout for new places where they were served. But neither of her daughters inherited her love for music. Jeannette went to the concerts dutifully, but the satisfaction derived from these afternoons came from giving her mother pleasure rather than from the jumble of sound made by the wailing strings, tooting wood-winds and blaring trumpets. She could make nothing out of it all. When there was a soloist she was interested, especially if it was a woman, of whose costume she made careful notes.
Mother and daughter also went to church sometimes. Doctor Fitzgibbons had made a deep impression upon Mrs. Sturgis when he officiated at the marriage of Roy and Alice. She had been “flattered out of her senses” when the clergyman called upon her a few weeks after the ceremony to inquire for the young couple. He had talked to her about “parish work,” and expressed the hope that she would see her way clear “to join the church” and become interested in his “guild.” Mrs. Sturgis had laughed violently at everything he said, and had promised all he suggested. Thereafter she referred to him as her “spiritual adviser,” and Jeannette was aware she called occasionally at the rectory to discuss what she termed her “spiritual problems.”
Sunday evenings, Mrs. Sturgis and Jeannette usually invited Alice and Roy to dinner, and sometimes they were the guests of the young couple in the little Bronx apartment. Roy and Alice were like two children playing at keeping house, Mrs. Sturgis said with one of her satisfied chuckles. Jeannette, too, thought of them as children. Alice had always seemed younger to her than she really was, and even when her own thoughts had been filled with Roy, he had always impressed her as a “boy.” She often wondered nowadays, when he and his happy, dimpling, brown-eyed bride sat side by side on the sofa, their arms around one another, their hands linked, exchanging kisses every few minutes in accepted newly-wed fashion, what she had ever seen in him that had made her own senses swim and her heart pound. He was just a sweet, amiable boy to her now, with a fresh, eager manner, and rather an attractive face. She still liked his quaint mouth, his whimsical smile, his quick flashing blue eyes, but they no longer stirred her. She could kiss him in affectionate sisterly fashion without a tremor.
Jeannette and Mrs. Sturgis took great delight in observing the young couple together, in watching them in their diminutive but pretty home, and in discussing them afterwards. They were ideally happy,—laughing, romping, playing little jokes upon one another, deriving vast amusement from words, signs and phrases, the meaning of which were known to them alone. Both were affectionately demonstrative, forever holding hands, caressing one another and kissing. Jeannette said it made her sick, was disgusting, but her mother scolded when she betrayed her distaste, and reminded her it was “only right and proper.”
Roy, against the prospect of his marriage to Jeannette, had saved money; Mrs. Sturgis, urged by her older daughter, had once again placed a loan of five hundred dollars upon the nest-egg in the savings bank; Jeannette had contributed another hundred, and Roy’s father had shipped from San Francisco a half car-load of family furniture which had been in storage for many years. The wedding had awaited the arrival of this freight, and as soon as it came the stuff had been uncrated, and installed in the little Bronx apartment. The ceremony then followed and Roy took his blushing, laughing, excited bride from her mother’s arms, from the old-fashioned apartment where she had lived almost since she could remember, and from the wedding supper, direct to the new home in the Bronx which together they had furnished with such joy and hours of planning and discussion.
They had nearly a thousand dollars to spend, but Alice wisely decided, so her mother thought, that only half of it should go into house-furnishing. The furniture shipped by the Reverend Dwight Beardsley was designed in the style of an earlier day and much of it was too large for the snug little rooms of the Bronx flat. A large sideboard with a marble slab top and huge mirror could not be brought into the apartment at all, and was sold to a second-hand furniture dealer on Third Avenue for fifteen dollars. But most of the furniture from California was usable, and all of it good and substantial. Alice made the curtains for the dining and living rooms herself; she and Roy, on their hands and knees, painted the floors a warm walnut tone. They bought three or four rugs, a fine second-hand sofa with a rich but not too gaudy brocaded cover, bed and table linen, and everything needed for the kitchen. Horatio Stephens and his family sent them a colored glass art lamp, and Mr. Corey, consulting Jeannette, presented a beautiful clock with silvery chimes.
No young husband and wife ever took greater delight in their first home. They were always “fixing” things, arranging and rearranging them, cleaning and dusting. Roy bought a Boston fern during an early week of the marriage, paid three dollars for a brass jardiniere at a Turkish vendor’s to hold it, and the plant flourished on a small taboret in the front windows. They took the most assiduous care of this, watering it several times a day and digging about its roots with an old table knife whenever either of them had an idle moment. When one of the curling fronds began to turn brown, they had long discussions as to whether it should be trimmed off or not. They acquired a canary, too, which shared with the fern the young couple’s devotion. Alice had bought the bird because she was so “miserably lonely” without Roy all day long that she would “go out of her senses wanting him” unless there was something alive ’round the house to keep her company. The fact that the canary never opened his throat to make a sound,—although Alice had been assured by the man in the bird-store that he would “sing his head off”—did not in any wise detract from her love for the little feathered creature that hopped about in his cage and made a great fuss over giving himself a bath in the mornings. They called him “Sonny-boy” and took turns at the pleasure of feeding him.
Alice was a good cook. She had a gift for the kitchen, and Jeannette and her mother would exclaim in admiration over the delicious meals she prepared when they came to dinner. Roy would glance from mother to sister-in-law when the roast appeared or when a particularly appetizing-looking pudding was brought in, and at their exclamations of delight, he would say:
“Guess I’ve got a pretty smart wife,—hey? Guess I know a good cook when I see one, huh? Why, Alice’s got most women I know skinned a mile! She’s just a wonder; she can do anything. I only wish I was good enough for her. She’s a wonder, all right—all right.”