“Well, he looked sort of down I thought, so I said: ‘You wouldn’t let me worship you, even if I could.’ ‘I’d let you love me,’ he said.”
“Oh-h. What else?”
“We went in after that.”
“And he was just as funny as ever,” said Bella, clutching at frail comfort.
“Oh, quite,” agreed Hildegarde.
It was small consolation to Miss Bella that Cheviot was singular in his obduracy. Before she was eighteen she was uncommonly well accustomed to seeing the stoutest masculine defenses go down before her. The two Mar boys had long been her devoted slaves. And Bella had flirted with both of them impartially, taking what she felt was only a becoming share in the interest all Valdivia felt in those go-ahead young men, whenever they came home for a visit. They were pointed to as models. Look how they “got on”—they did it visibly—while you looked they seemed to have to restrain themselves from rising out of your sight. They kept Miss Bella supplied with candy and flowers and they corresponded with her when she went abroad. Secretly dreading the fascinations of the Britisher, they asked in scoffing postscripts how the effete nations were getting on. Bella’s view of all this was that, provided the young men were “nice,” a girl could hardly have too many of them contending for her favor. It was what they were there for. Each time she came home, she brought the Mar boys a scarf-pin apiece, and pleased them still more by invariably demanding a cent in return. “I can’t give you a thing with a point. Something dreadful would happen! you must buy them.” That looked, they felt, as if she were “taking it seriously”—but which was she taking?
The year that Bella was eighteen, after a summer in England, she arrived at Staten Island just in time to celebrate her birthday. She was full of joy at getting back.
The conscious approval that she bestowed on the greater splendor of the American autumn had been generously extended to the profusion of fine fruit that greets one here at breakfast, to the individual bathrooms, even to the spacious, drawered, behooked, and shelved clothes-closets so agreeably numerous in the American house. The same satisfaction with which she had noted these things consciously revisited her as she trod the wide, shallow steps of the staircase, that in its descent halted leisurely upon two broad landings, having each a large unglazed window opening upon the hall below. The observant young eyes paid a flitting tribute to the beautiful woodwork of the balusters and the great tall doors of the rooms she passed, deciding as she went, there’s nothing nicer than a new American house, unless it’s an old (and a very old) English one. Even then, to live in, give her the American.
Like so many of the first generation born in “the States,” this child of an old-world father was more American in tastes and spirit than any daughter of the Revolution. But, partly as a matter of physical inheritance, partly, perhaps, because of her frequent visits to England, she bore about her still a good deal of the peculiar stamp of a certain type of English girl. As she came trailing slowly down the wide staircase of Tom Wayne’s country house on Staten Island, the practised eye would have little difficulty in detecting a difference between the figure on the stair and the typical “American beauty,” a something less sumptuous and more distinguished. Her head held not quite so high, and yet in her carriage something indefinably more aloof. The longer waist, not quite so ruthlessly stayed and belted, giving an effect of greater ease; the longer neck, the shoulders a little more sloping, the eyes less eager and yet with more vision in them—something in the whole, gracious as the aspect was, a little reluctant and more than a little elusive. The Paquin gown Bella had brought back and wore to-night for the first time, was long, and straight, and plainer than prescribed by the New York fashion of the moment—a gauze, discreetly iridescent, showing over a white satin petticoat shifting lights of pink, and pearl, and silver, a gown that shimmered as the wearer walked, and clothed her in glancing light and soft-hued shadows.