Bella had known that Mrs. Mar would sit in the half-light till even she could see no longer. But Hildegarde was not suffered to make her entrance in the dusk. Bella ran in first and “lit up.” She did not stop to draw the blinds, she was in too great a hurry; besides, it was nice to let in the mild and beautiful night. “Now, Hildegarde! Look, Mrs. Mar,” and Bella ushered in a living page from an old Icelandic Saga; “isn’t she glorious?”
Mrs. Mar pecked at the regal figure with her hard, bright eyes, “White doesn’t make her any slimmer,” she said.
“Oh, it wouldn’t do for Brunhild to be a mean, little, narrow creature.”
“That helmet, too! It makes her look ten feet high.”
“She wants to look high!—and ‘mighty!’ and she does. No, no, stop Hildegarde, you mustn’t take it off.”
“Just till we hear the boys coming. It—it’s—” Hildegarde contracted her broad brows under the helmet’s weight.
But Bella flew to the rescue. “Don’t, don’t! Hands off! What does it matter if it is heavy? You must get used to it. You’ve got to be a heroine!” she wound up severely, “so don’t expect to be comfortable!” and Bella pulled a chair under the drop-light. “Sit here where Trenn and Harry can see you the minute they open the door. Now we can go on with the last dragon while we’re waiting.”
Mrs. Mar cleared her throat, “‘Acte Cinquième. La Noce.’” And the two girls, raising their eyes from the work, saw through the open window, in front of them, not the close-massed syringa underneath, nor the soft Californian night above, but “une terrasse du palais d’Aragon,” in the town of Saragossa, four hundred years ago. And no sense visited them of any jarring contrast between the picture of the world in the yellow-backed book, and the picture of life as they knew it best. Thanks to the poet that lives in most young hearts, even Victor Hugo’s gallant vision of a civilization that was old before California was discovered, brought no envious sense of the difference between then and now—rather a naïve surprise that those others so far away, so long ago, should have understood so well.
Older, more self-critical, they might have lost this sense of comradeship—might have gone over to the gray majority that insists only the past is picturesque, or that if any grace remains unto this day, it must needs be far removed from places we know well, precariously surviving under other skies, speaking an alien tongue. Those who would persuade us there is no scene in our every-day life but what is sordid, barren, or at best (and worst) meanly commonplace—stuff unfit for poetry or even for noble feeling—what do the carpers by such comment on our times but confess an intellect abject, slavish, blind. To find the beauty and the dignity that lie in the difficult familiar days that we ourselves are battling through, to detect high courage in the common speech, to get glimpses of the deathless face of romance as we go about the common streets, is merely to know life as it is, and yet to walk the modern world as gloriously companioned as any Viking or Hidalgo of the past.
So true is early youth’s apprehension of these things, that not even Mrs. Mar could make wide enough for envy or embarrassment the gulf in the two girls’ minds between an Old World bandit chief, and a New World soldier of fortune. The transition, that to the sophisticated seems grotesque, between the Hernani of 1519 and the modern American pursuing perilous ways to the Pole—this feat was accomplished without misgiving, although in Saragossa, “on entend des fanfares éloignées,” and in Valdivia an indefatigable woman, on the other side of the street, was strumming the old tune, renamed, “The Boulanger March”; and now Mrs. Mar was beginning Scene III with an air of cold distrust, that Bella foresaw would mount by well-known degrees to a climax of scorn.