"And then there are the rich Americans who want to buy everything and do buy everything, and go away empty-handed. And the kind who want to be what they think is sophisticated, who feel it's really worth spending your life learning how to order a meal with the right manner in the most expensive restaurants in every city, and to know how to find the horridest café-chantants that don't dare advertise in the papers, and that the people of the country never go to see.
"And then the other kind, who come over, the whole family of them, and go to register at the New York Herald—you know the sort, 'Mr. Jehoshaphat Jones, President of the J. Jones Farm Implement Company of Broken Ridge, Indiana, together with Mrs. Jones, Miss Elizabeth Jones, Miss Margaret Jones and Master J. Jones Jr. are stopping at the Hotel Vouillemont. They will shortly start on a tour of the château Country, and after that expect to travel in Switzerland.' You can see Mrs. Jones cutting that notice out and sending it home to Broken Ridge. They're nice, I like that kind, when they don't get too tired and begin to snap at each other. I always feel such a deep sympathy for Jehoshaphat when I see him dragging his sore feet around over a hard, hard museum floor; and such a sympathy for Mrs. Jones, when he makes them all stand around at an Alpine railway station while he delightedly figures out and explains how the funicular works."
There were times when she ran on, mirthful, flashing, keen, droll, amusing herself and making him laugh as nothing had ever made him laugh before, out of sheer, light-hearted hilarity. As he watched her, talking animatedly in her beautiful, clearly articulated English, her plastic face a comic mask, fooling and bantering till she had him shouting, and yet with that core of shrewd observation and real intelligence underlying all she said, sometimes he remembered with a start his first sight of her up there on the roof—what was the meaning of that unearthly sadness the moon had shown him?
She was not, it is true, by any means always gay on these stolen talks together. She could be stern and brief, as when he asked her challengingly, one day, "Well, you've been in Europe all your life, nearly. What have you got out of it?" She answered, "To work hard and not to expect much from anything—except from music."
Her face that was sometimes as meltingly soft as a Correggio girl-saint, looked dark and set. He had been so disconcerted by her look and accent, that like the lump he was, he had found nothing to say before she hailed her tram-car and left him.
Often she made him talk, talk as he had never dreamed of talking to any one, leading him on to flight of wordy self-expression, such as he blushed afterwards to remember, sure that he must have bored and wearied her. And yet there never was such a listener as she, attentive, silent, except for just the occasional comment that launched him off on further talk, when his self-consciousness coming warningly forward bade him stop before he seemed a solemn ass. She made him intensely desire to share with her everything that was in his mind. Helpless before the compelling personal look with which she listened to him, he poured it all out pell-mell, what he had been struggling to lay hold of, ever since he had left Hoosick Junction.
"One of the things that keeps coming over me, is the variousness of folks. We don't begin to take enough account of that. Plants now, they're various too—sure they are. An Alpine harebell is as different from an oleander as I am from a natural-born artist. But everybody that has any sense knows that an oleander would freeze and starve to death if you planted it up near a glacier. You can tell that much, just by looking at it. But you can't tell a thing, not a doggoned thing about a human being just by looking at him, can you?"
Marise agreed with intense conviction that you can tell less than nothing by looking at a human being.
"And then the human race has got itself so mixed up. There isn't the slightest chance, not one in a million, that a harebell will spring up in a Roman garden, and be burned to a crisp by sunlight that just makes an oleander feel good and comfortable. But that's what happens the whole enduring time with folks."
"Why, I wonder," cried Marise, with a startled look, "if that is what happened to me."