“Oh, but my mother’s different.”
“Only because she’s less able to afford it than I am,” Sylvia pointed out. “Look, she’s sent you fifty pounds. Think how jolly it would be for her suddenly to receive fifty pounds for herself.”
Arthur warmed to the idea; he could not resist the picture of his mother’s pleasure, nor the kind of inverted generosity with which it seemed to endow himself. He talked away about the arrival of the money in England till it almost seemed as if he were sending his mother the accumulation of hard-earned savings to buy herself a new piano; that was the final purpose to which, in Arthur’s expanding fancy, the fifty pounds was to be put. Sylvia found his attitude rather boyish and charming, and they had an argument, on the way to cable the money back, whether it would be better for Mrs. Madden to buy a Bechstein or a Blüthner.
Sylvia’s contract with the Plutonian expired with the first fortnight of October, and they decided to see what likelihood there was of work in New York before they thought of returning to Europe. They left Sulphurville with everybody’s good wishes, because everybody owed to their romantic meeting an opportunity of telling a really good ghost story at first hand, with the liberty of individual elaboration.
New York was very welcome after Sulphurville. They passed the wooded heights of the Hudson at dusk in a glow of somber magnificence softened by the vapors of the river. It seemed to Sylvia that scarcely ever had she contemplated a landscape of such restrained splendor, and she thought of that young New-Yorker who had preferred not to travel more than fifty miles west of his native city, though the motive of his loyalty had most improbably been the beauty of the Hudson. She wondered if Arthur appreciated New York, but he responded to her enthusiasm with the superficial complaints of the Englishman, complaints that when tested resolved themselves into conventional formulas of disapproval.
“I suppose trite opinions are a comfortable possession,” Sylvia said. “But a good player does not like a piano that is too easy. You complain of the morning papers’ appearing shortly after midnight, but confess that in your heart you prefer reading them in bed to reading a London evening paper, limp from being carried about in the pocket and with whatever is important in it illegible.”
“But the flaring head-lines,” Arthur protested. “You surely don’t like them?”
“Oh, but I do!” she avowed. “They’re as much more amusing than the dreary column beneath as tinned tongue is nicer than the dry undulation for which you pay twice as much. Head-lines are the poetry of journalism, and, after all, what would the Parthenon be without its frieze?”
“Of course you’d argue black was white,” Arthur said.
“Well, that’s a better standpoint than accepting everything as gray.”