VIII
AT half-past four o’clock in a raw January afternoon Frothingham descended from a Pullman fiery furnace to adventure upon Boston. As he drove to Mrs. Staunton’s the rain sifted through the cracks round the windows and doors of the musty cab, and was deposited upon his face in a greasy coating by currents of the iciest air he had felt since he was last in Scotland. It was air that seemed to mangle as it bit, that sent the chilled blood cowering to the depths of the body instead of bringing it to the surface in healthful reaction.
“Loathsome!” he muttered as he looked out on either side. “Looks something like London—no, Liverpool. The people look English, too.” A big, dingy street car with bell wildly clanging darted from a narrow side street into the narrow main street which the cab was following. There was a bare escape from a disastrous collision. “It’s America, right enough,” he said.
The rain was whirling in the savage wind, umbrellas were tossing and twisting, impeding without in the least sheltering the sullen throngs on the sidewalks. Everything looked wet, and sticky, and chilly, and forbidding. “They certainly are English,” he said as he noted the passing faces; and he did not like it. In New York he had been amused by the variety—specimens of all nationalities, often several nationalities struggling for expression in the same face. Here the sameness was tiresome to him, and he missed the alert look of New Yorkers of all kinds.
He began to feel somewhat better, however, when he reached the wide front hall of Mrs. Staunton’s big, old-fashioned, comfortable house on the water side of Beacon Street. And he felt still better when the butler showed him to the room he was to occupy—the furniture and hangings, the woodwork and wall paper, sombre yet homelike in the light and warmth of an open fire. At half-past five he entered the drawing room in fairly good humour now that he and Hutt were established and safe from the weather. He joined Mrs. Staunton and her daughter-in-law at the fire, where they were cosily ensconced with a tea-table between them.
“You must have a cheerful impression of Boston,” said young Mrs. Staunton, called Mrs. Ridgie—her husband’s name was Ridgeway.
“That wind was a bit nasty,” admitted Frothingham. “But I’ve forgiven and forgotten it. I always spill my troubles as soon as ever I can.”
“You’ll detest Boston after New York,” continued Mrs. Ridgie. “I’ve lived here ten years. It’s—it’s a hole.”