“And do you have other kinds of trouble too? Do your fellers ever go back on you? I don’t mean you; I guess you ain’t in any danger of havin’ your heart broke; but I mean other grand ladies with titles? Do they ever get left like us common folks.”
“I have known a good many to ‘get left,’” I replied, smiling at certain reminiscences, “Human nature is pretty much the same in all spheres—more so, perhaps in ours, where people have so much flung at their feet that fickleness is a natural consequence.”
“I guess men is fickle everywhere. I know several that has gone back on real nice girls just because they seen another girl they liked better. I’d hate to get left! My!”
“You speak for your sex,” I said. “I have known many who looked indifferent, but I never knew one who was.”
“I guess I’d try to look as if I didn’t care, but I guess the louder I laughed the more people’d suspicion I was all water inside. You look real nice now. Your nose ain’t red any more; but your eyes’s got rings under them. I don’t see why you need to set up nights when the Dook’s got that there gentleman, Mr. Parker, to wait on him.”
“Well, I am his sister, you know,” I said lightly, and then, as I was tired, rather, of Jemima, I went back to the house. Bertie seems much better to-night, and is now asleep. I have hung branches of balsam all over his room. They look so brilliantly green against the light-brown varnished wood which defines every spike. And their fragrance! It ought to fill Bertie’s poor lungs with new life. I am going for a row with Mr. Rogers to-morrow morning, and if he says anything characteristic I’ll write it out for your benefit. He has promised already to spend our first autumn in Yorkshire with us, so you will be the more interested when you meet him.
28th.
Our conversation was political and I must relate it to you. But first the morning row. It was so beautiful. It was like drifting through crystal. My distant peak was a monstrous turquoise. The thick woods about us showed every shade of green. The honeysuckle is gone, but the moss is richer than ever, and now and again one glimpses a purple lily. In little bays there are water-lilies, and on the miniature islands a wildness, a tangle of fern and young trees, that is indescribable. In some places there is a good deal of pollen on the water, but the greater part of the lake’s surface is golden-brown and bright. The only blot on the lovely picture is the too frequent dead spruce. A blight attacked them a year or two ago, and they still look like church spires, but crumbling and gray.
We did not talk politics on the lake—Heaven forbid!—we drifted from nature to art, of which he has a delightful knowledge; but I won’t repeat all that as he did not say anything particularly illuminating. It was at luncheon that the subject of politics came up; I forget exactly how, although as I discuss our own with Bertie and Agatha daily, and have lived in a political atmosphere all my life, I suppose they never are far from the surface of my mind. Daddy always took a certain interest in American politics, so I knew something of them before I came, and heaven knows their newspapers would not leave one long in ignorance.
Oh, I remember how the conversation began. After expatiating upon the beauty of the lake and the silence of these mountain-tops—positively when we stopped talking there had not been a sound but the gurgle of water against the boat—I repeated what I remember writing to you about the climate of this country setting, a bad example to the people in the matter of extremes. Mr. Rogers smiled quickly, and looked at me with his steady, and—shall I write it?—approving—gaze.