"American letters!" exclaimed Laura, turning the packet over eagerly. "Some rainy afternoon—which means, probably, this afternoon, even if the sun is shining smokily now—I am going to write a brief but enthusiastic essay, 'for private distribution,' on how good American stamps look on American letters addressed to Americans who are not in America—long may she wave!" and she sorted over the just-brought letters with fluttering fingers.
"What a lot of America in one sentence!" said Louise, her own eyes alight at the bulgy little packet of letters from overseas. "I wish," she added a little wistfully, "America were as near as your patriotism is genuine."
"Don't I!" heartily agreed Laura. "Could anything be better calculated to inspire patriotism in the American bosom than an occasional inspection of Europe—and particularly an occasional residence in London? All Americans possessed of the steamship fare should be forced by law to visit Europe—particularly London—at least once. Then there would be no further trouble in getting soldiers for our army. All of the tourists by mandate would become so patriotic that they would enlist just as soon as they got back to the United States!"
Then they fell upon their United-States-stamped mail as if the envelopes had contained anxiously awaited reprieves or dispensations, and for the next quarter of an hour the only sounds in the room were the crackling of paper and the absorbed, subdued ejaculations to which women give utterance in perusing letters.
The murk-modified morning sunshine of early June in London filtered wanly through the windows of their rooms at the Savoy. Very close to the consciousness of both women was the keen recollection of glorious Junes in the United States, with over-arching skies of sapphire, unstained for days at a stretch even by the fleeciest of golden clouds. Louise was confessedly lonesome. Laura, who had her London almost at her fingers' ends, was lonesome, too, but not confessedly so. It would be too much to ask a seasoned Londoner from New York to admit such a departure from the elemental rule of cosmopolitanism. Laura, in London or anywhere else in Europe, was lonesome in the abstract, so to speak. Her method of giving expression to her feeling was to comment—when no Europeans were of her audience, of course—upon the superior comforts and joys of life in the United States, which, to her, meant New York almost exclusively.
Louise shared the almost inevitable feeling of genuine lonesomeness and unanalyzable oppression which overcomes, to the point of an afflictive nostalgia, most Americans of whatever degree who find themselves for the first time in European capitals. They had spent their first fortnight in London; and Louise had only been saved from complete dejection during that period by the gayety—somewhat studied and reserved, but still gayety—of Laura's troops of friends, English and American, in the city that, for the socially unacclimated American, is the dullest and most hopeless in all Europe. Paris, whence they had gone from London for a month's stay, had been made endurable to Louise by her close fellowship with Laura in the older woman's incessant battlings with the milliners and makers of dresses. Victory had never failed eventually to perch upon Laura's banners at the termination of these conflicts; but the intervening travail had given her young companion more than enough to think about and thus to ward off an ever-recurring depression. She did not call it "homesickness," even to herself; for by this time she had become, if not used, at least reconciled to the thought that she had no real home.
One of the least true maxims of all of those having perennial currency is that which declares that "All good Americans go to Paris when they die." Most Americans, if the truth could be tabulated, are poignantly disappointed with Paris. It is a city where American men of a certain type feel that they have almost a Heaven-bestowed license to "throw off responsibility." But "the morning after" knows neither latitude nor longitude, and it is just as dismal and conducive to remorse and good resolutions in Paris as it is in any other quarter of the irresponsible world. It takes an American man about a week to become thoroughly disillusioned as to Paris. The American woman, who, like women the world over, must preserve her sense of responsibility at all times, even in the French capital, discovers her disappointment with and her weariness of the over-lauded Paris in considerably less time than a week. Louise found it unutterably tiresome, artificial, insincere, absurdly over-praised. Now they had been back in London for three weeks, and she was beginning to wonder when Laura would give the "pack-up signal" for the return to New York. Whenever she circuitously led up to such a suggestion, however, Laura told her how ridiculous it would be to return to New York in June, at the height of the London season; besides, there were thousands upon thousands of people in London whom Laura wanted Louise to meet; and Louise (Laura would go on) must fight to overcome her Londonphobia, because, after all, London probably would be on the map as a sort of meeting place for peripatetic folk for quite a long time to come; whereupon, with fine feminine inconsistency, Laura would round upon London for its primitiveness in the supplying of ordinary comforts, for its incurable smudginess, for the mediæval complaisance of its populace, and for a hundred other matters that made it a mere "widely-spraddled" hamlet in comparison with her beloved New York.
Additionally, there had been an utter absence of the querulous note, and an unwonted tone of positive sadness, in her mother's letters that gravely disquieted Louise. Her mother's self-revelations on paper hitherto had been characterized by a sort of acidulous recklessness; her letters to Louise while the girl was at school had been long-drawn out epistolary complaints, the pages running over with the acridness of a woman at variance not only with her world but with herself. But the half dozen and odd letters which Louise had received from her mother since leaving New York had been of an entirely different character. Their tone denoted, not the indifference which proceeds from the callousness of surrender, but the long-deferred awakening of a maternal instinct and a maternal conscience. They were filled with reproaches, not for others, but for herself. In them, too, Louise perceived a vein of hopelessness, as of one who has been aroused all too late to the evils and dangers of a self-wrought environment, a self-created peril, which sorely disturbed her daughter.
Louise's parting with her mother had been tender enough on both sides. The girl had said, simply enough, that she was going away for a while in the hope that there would be an adjustment, a righting, of all things awry with her mother before her return. She felt her helplessness, she added, even to make herself a helpful instrument toward such an adjustment by remaining near her mother; but she hoped and believed that before she came back—And Louise had been able to progress no further. Nor was there any need. Her mother, troubled even beyond the relief of tears by her daughter's words, had taken Louise in her arms and cuddled her as if she had been again a child; and her last words had been, "Everything will be changed, dear—the slate will be cleansed, and we shall start hand in hand again—before you get back. Depend upon that. It is odd, I suppose, that I am beginning to remember my duty to you as a mother before I have made a start toward seeing my duty to myself as a woman. But the two awakenings go together, Louise, I find—as you shall see when you return." Louise had been quick to detect the implied promise in her mother's words; and her main reason for not being insistent with Laura upon an earlier return was that she wanted to give her mother plenty of time to redeem the tacit pledge bound up in her parting words.
Her letters from Blythe had been perfervid variations—the effort at restraint being almost humorously visible between the lines—upon the one theme, the leit motif of which was: "We are to be married: when?" The fact itself, it will be observed, was masterfully taken for granted; the time only remained to be mutually agreed upon, so it appeared to Blythe.