She did not even go often to church. The Rev. Mr. Collins was "a person of no education," she decided, "and spoke with a vile Western accent." But she rented a pew, and with rigid regularity sent the children to sit in it. Her children! As she called them, so she treated them—John, six feet two, doing a man's work in the world, with a man's spirit, and the tall, grave Valeria.
The girl was an enigmatic creature, silent, self-absorbed, shrinking from the give-and-take of social life. It was not the cross to her that it was to her more genial brother that their mother's craving for solitude, and not too Christian contempt for her well-meaning neighbors, precluded asking people to the house. But the young man, after the young man's fashion, escaped to some extent the tyranny of home conditions. He had come forth from his juvenile predilection for pious observances. He had developed a passion for natural science, and yet was content to work hard all day in the bank, and to spend his free evenings in a rapidly acquired circle of new friends. In summer there were moonlight drives and walks; there was boating on the Mioto, and singing songs and discreet love-making on the "stoops" of the houses of the prettiest girls. In the mild weather, too, sometimes combining a picnic with the pursuit of knowledge, he would make up a party to go to Black Hand or Cedar Rock, where the hills were rich in fossils, and sometimes he would go farther afield to find specimens in the coal seams of the region. In winter there were church sociables, "taffy-pulls," sleigh-rides, and skating-parties. He was, in short, living an active and healthy life under conditions not intrinsically inspiring, perhaps, except to the inner vision of ardent youth.
His mother offered no objection to his amusing himself in New Plymouth's somewhat crude society, but took quick alarm at a piece of chance gossip repeated by the privileged factotum, Aunt Jerusha.
"Massa John done got a reel truly-truly sweetheart dis time. He'll be marryin' her berry soon, by all 'counts."
It came out that the lady in question was Miss Hattie Fox. Who was Miss Hattie Fox? Valeria had seen her at church. She was very pretty, and her father was senior warden at St. Thomas's on Sundays, and attorney-at-law at 114 Main Street on week-days. To Mrs. Gano's evident annoyance, nothing obviously objectionable could be urged against the girl. The next Sunday, Mrs. Gano went to church. Coming out, the impulsive John went forward, and had a precious whispered word with the lady in question. As the young people reached the bottom of the church steps, his mother touched him on the shoulder.
"Introduce Miss Fox to me," she said.
John performed the ceremony with the air of one who lights a powder-train, and against all canons of prudence stands waiting to see the explosion. But, behold! his mother was most gracious.
"Your family have been very hospitable to my son," she said. "I am an invalid, and do not entertain, but if you will come to supper some evening, my daughter and I will be glad to see you. Could you come to-night?"
"Oh yes; do come," urged the smiling and unwary John.
She came. She was certainly a beautiful and amiable creature, but nevertheless John found himself fighting valiantly against the sudden temptation to judge her by a brand-new standard. His mother's soft Southern voice made Hattie's Western burr sound curiously common, and the manners he had thought delightfully vivacious seemed boisterous on a sudden. As he listened through his mother's ears, it dawned upon him for the first time that the girl laughed too loudly and too constantly. He set his acute discomfort down to his humiliating lack of discernment in the past, and too easy conquest by mere good looks. He did not realize that Hattie's gaucheries were intensified by her nervous awe of Mrs. Gano. She had never known any one in the least like her hostess, and so far from failing in respect, she was so deeply impressed that in her wonder and veneration she was driven to adopt the juvenile device for the working off of oppressive emotion—pretending to be extravagantly at her ease.