From the Tallmadge point of view, Mason and Dixon's line did no less than divide habitable from uninhabitable America. Voluntarily to cross the kindly boundary was contrary to reason. There was no difficulty in deciding that Italy or the South of France would be more advantageous for the young man's conversance with modern languages, as well as farther away from Almira Marlowe, and more tolerable to his grandfather and guardian than Virginia or Florida.
Mr. Tallmadge's capable junior partner was able to relieve his chief of all active concern in the conduct of business till Ethan should be ready to assume command. To this latter end, a few years' foreign travel, and a thorough re-establishment of the young man's health, were next in order. The plan worked well on the health score. A summer in England and a winter on the Riviera seemed to have set Ethan free from the family infirmity, but also to have whetted his appetite for foreign life, and increased his indifference to the proud post of chief proprietor of the greatest Republican organ in New England. But this might be merely the first effects of Miss Almira's having thrown over her first love and married a lawyer in Poughkeepsie, New York.
After all, Mr. Tallmadge reflected, his grandson was still very young, and intimate knowledge of life in other lands might not come amiss. So the energetic old man went to and fro, joining Ethan, now in Paris, now in London, travelling about with him during the summer, and returning alone to "the great Republican organ" in the autumn, leaving his grandson to new friends, new pursuits, and warmer winter haunts.
The young man was not all this time merely seeing life, he was recording it in desultory fashion. Some of his verses appearing in English periodicals raised a little dust of praise among a set in London calling itself critical. But it was the French point of view that most appealed to him.
He was under that spell which France knows so well how to cast round the young man of artistic instinct. Her tongue was the peerless language of letters. Through no medium less supple, less subtle, could the complexities of modern life and thought hope for adequate literary expression.
And so the pleasant facile days went by in idly roving, idly writing, meeting interrogatively his predestinate experience and setting the more presentable answers down. Where answer there was none, he aped the older men, whom he called "Masters," and made shift with more or less cynical guesses. It was these last that brought him his little meed of precocious success. He had not originality enough to see that the cynicism was not his own. He was not, and seemingly was not to be, of the stature that can wear simple sincerity in the grand manner. That writer, young or old, must have something of true greatness in him who can hold out long in these days against the flattering temptation of hinting that he is laughing in his sleeve at all solemn persons. And yet no doubt seriousness was the dominant note in the young American's character, a seriousness that still looked askance at itself, and smiled oftener at its own gravity than at any other wrinkle in the tragi-comic mask of humanity.
He had seen something of what people in London and Paris called "society," had been very well amused, but not enamoured of it. When men who made letters a profession—perhaps one should say trade—admonished him: "Never refuse a swagger invitation. Your opportunities, considering you're a foreigner, are simply unheard of. Go everywhere, see everything. You must know life before you can write about it," Ethan would say, half impatiently: "As if you could escape from life! As if art kept her treasures in the jewel-cases of the aristocracy, and never displayed them except at social functions!"
Even in indulgent Paris he was a good deal chaffed about his success with the fair. It is a thing other men reconcile themselves to with difficulty. Some one said once to Ethan's old school friend, De Poincy:
"No one but a woman has any business to be as good-looking as that fellow Gano. I couldn't trust a man with a face like that."