An episode in the doings of the dualized

by Eveleen Laura Mason

CHAPTER II.

After dinner Reginald seated himself in the office of his hotel. There were the usual number of men about the place, talking and smoking, and watching the women who passed through the office now and then. Hotel life, with its ordinary distractions of seeing and being seen, and newsmongering and time-killing, was rather a bore to Reginald. But he had had little idea of anything else, unless it were a big house on something of the same plan of social divertisement and high hilarity. He had had spells of the blues, of course, in which he longed for something indefinable; and now that his nerves and health were breaking down pretty fast, he had these blues more often than ever. His regular cure for these attacks was a visit to the bar, and then a couple of cigars after it, then more blues, and then more cigars; so, of course, a permanent removal of the cause and the effect did not seem very likely to be secured.

There were one or two women at his hotel, acquaintances of his, who had led the life of dressing, dining, party-going and evening dancing or riding, for an indefinite number of years; women who had tried every popular watering-place in the summer and many southern resorts in the winter, and who were getting stout and flashy, both as to diamonds and general effect; women who had money enough not to need to marry, and knowledge enough of the general quality of some of the men about them, not to care to marry; and such a general sense of loneliness and dissatisfaction with the dullness, staleness, flatness and unprofitableness of life, as made them not to care to live, and quite too keen a certainty of a life to come, to at all desire to risk embarking on that unknown sea on which diamonds and dinners, whist and mature old flirtations, could not be taken as cargo.

Reginald had often wondered as he sat and talked nothing by the hour to these women, whether he or they were the most utter failures and bores. When this problem got too deep for him, he usually went to the bar; in fact, the bar was his grand resort, most of the time. But when these same questions presented themselves to these women, very few of them went to the bar or had the bar brought to them. They usually set to thinking, and then sometimes cried themselves so sick that their suppers were sent up to their rooms and eaten with the salt of tears.

Now the difference in these cases of inanity was, that while the first useless mortal drowned himself in liquor and the second in tears, the result was the inebriation and steady animalization of the faculties of the one, while the other certainly escaped being classed with those who never ate bread in sorrow, and knows not the unseen powers.

The boarders said that there had been what they called “tender passages” in history, between Mrs. Mancredo and Reginald. She had soft Italian eyes, which had cried many passionate hours, but they were always cooled off and black-leaded up; and then with a little pink to make the tear-stain pinker still, Mrs. Mancredo never looked much the worse for the honest but baffled scrutiny which she had made of life in general and her own in particular. But on the reverse, she looked just so much the better, as she was for the time less hard and world encrusted.

At these times, if Reginald had not been too recently to his throne of consolation, the bar, he felt quite impressed by the element of womanliness which was visible in her tear-brightened eyes.

On the evening after he had ventured on Ethelbert’s fuller acquaintance, and had had that ethical and æsthetic conversation, and the interesting tête-a-tête with the rosebud, Petrarch and himself, Mrs. Mancredo had had a good long cry, so-called.

For a young bride had arrived at the hotel, wife of an invalid person; and in the good gossip after dinner, Mrs. Mancredo had chatted about herself (apparently) to this young bride, until she knew all the past history of the girl, and had a pretty clear forecast of her future history as well. Then she commenced with being very sorry for the pretty, ingenuous young thing, and more sorry for herself because of the years in which she was an unenviable wife, and still more sorry for herself in her present mature womanhood. So when she came down to supper she had her pretty round chin well up in the air, while her heavily leaded eyelashes drooped under the languor of her hard weeping. She had that strange sort of expectancy of something better, new, and more satisfactory at last, which sometimes follows on a new discovery of the great disproportion between human aspirations and the ordinary objects, which are palmed off upon them as satisfactory food.

She glanced toward Reginald as she passed his table, and inwardly ejaculated “Horrid thing! Eternally eating, whenever he stops wine-bibbing and smoking long enough.” And then with a flutter and flow of drapery, she permitted the waiter to adjust the paraphernalia of the occasion, as with a flashing of finger-rings and twittering of the pendants in her ears, and heaving of the laces under the diamonds at her breast, she proceeded to practically assert the always conceded fact that she was a splendid-looking woman. Three or four newcomers recognized the fact, and the old habitués were as loyal as ever. She saw all that, while she read and reread the bill of fare, and while the patient John brushed off imaginary crumbs, and did many useless things to remind her he still lived, and lived but to serve. Then—“Oh, anything,” was her order. He had expected that would be all, but he was obliged to wait just the same for its utterance.