Vane was touched, and found it hard to answer.
“My child,” the old man went on, “I love you like my own son—my own son, see you? You are not noble de naissance—mais, le cœur—d’ailleurs, neither are you rôturier, non plus. I have spoken of you to Madame la Comtesse de la Roche-aigue, and Madame la Comtesse veut bien. Her daughter is charming—but a child adorable! You will let me present you comme futur—what say you?”
Vane bent over and took the hand of his old friend. “My father,” he said, “I would do more for you than for any one living. You have been more than a father to me. God bless you for it! But this I cannot do. I shall never marry.” Vane spoke seriously and with some tragic effect, like a Manfred or a Werther.
The old man sighed deeply. He knew Vane too well to press the matter. “Ah!” said he, “you say you will never marry. I know better. You have seen some American—quelque petite Américaine rusée. Hélas! and we might all have been so happy.” The doctor said no more on the subject, but was sad and quiet during the rest of Vane’s visit.
He said nothing afterwards, except on Vane’s departure. Then he pressed his hand: “Ah, consider, my child. A young girl of the most charming—of the most charming—and two hundred thousand livres of dot!” Vane could only press his hand in return. And the last he saw of the doctor, he was standing still upon the Dieppe pier, rubbing his nose with an immense silk pocket-handkerchief.
This was Vane’s fifth trip across the Atlantic; and for the first time, he felt glad when the vessel’s prow turned westward. Brittany, for him, represented the past; America the future. He was an American, after all. A day after his arrival he would be immersed in Wall Street—up in all the mysteries of exchange and rates, the stock-list his breviary and the ribbon of telegraph paper his oracle. Meanwhile, however, he dozed on the deck and essayed metrical translations of Boccaccio. He was reading the tale of the pot of basil one day, and thought for about half a morning of Miss Thomas. What she had to do with his reading, he could not see. But she was quite the most interesting figure in his mental gallery. A curious jumble was this modern state of society. Bare flowers sprang up in strange parterres; exotics grew outside of hot-houses, and common whiteweed inside. There ought to be some method of social transplanting; some way of grafting new blossoms on an old stock. But all American stock was good; American society was like a world of rounded pebbles grating on a beach; the buried pebbles were quite as fine as those on top; only these were more stirred and polished, so their colors came out best. And yet what common, poor stuff most of them were, after all! A pleasant trade, that of social lapidary! And Vane, perhaps for the first time, took note of the women around him. There was a Philadelphia girl, pretty and voluble; there was a young lady from Michigan, who had been to “college” in Massachusetts and finished herself abroad, alone, or in company with a dear friend from Connecticut. There was a girl from Cleveland, wealthy, marvellous, indescribable; and a young lady from New Orleans, with all the fire drawn from her cheeks into her eyes. There was a girl—a young woman, a young lady—a being feminine, from Boston, weighing and analyzing all things within her somewhat narrow mental horizon; and a social entity from New York, also of the feminine variety, but of orbit predicable and conventional eccentricities, her life a function of two variables, money and fashion. All these women were fair, and strange to him; and this, perhaps, was the only day of his life that he had definitely considered women from a contemporary point of view. His assured income was now eight thousand a year. Four of this went to his mother, three he spent; the rest he saved.
Coming back to New York, he plunged into a mass of accumulated duties; it was a week before he found time to see anything of John; and two weeks before he called on Miss Thomas. He found her in a rather different mood than usual; a little sadder, a shade more self-conscious. “It is two weeks before you come to see me, and you did not answer my letter,” she said.
Vane could only bow. “If I had only known you wished me to,” he said.
“Ah, well! And what have you seen abroad?”
“Nothing of interest to me now.”