No; it was no use telling herself to be a brave girl. She was a brave girl and she knew it. In the face of the heartless world she could bear herself as jauntily as if she were heartless, too; but in the privacy of her own room, with Mama fast asleep on the verandah below, she could not see the slightest use in humbugging herself. She was perfectly miserable, and the rest of her reflections might have been summed up in the simple phrase of early girlhood, “So there!”
It was no consolation to poor Carmelita’s feelings that her little private tragedy was of a most business-like, commonplace, unromantic complexion. It only made her more disgusted with herself for having made up her mind to do the right thing. She was not torn from her chosen love by the hands of cruel parents. Her parents had never denied her anything in her life, and if she had really wanted to wed a bankrupt bashaw with three tails and an elephant’s head, she could have had her will. Nor did picturesque poverty have anything to do with the situation. She was rich and so was Jack. Nor could she rail against a parental code of morality too stern for tender hearts. There was not the least atom of objection to Jack in any respect. He was absolutely as nice as could be—and, unless I am greatly misinformed, a good-looking young man, deeply in love, can be very nice indeed.
And yet there was no doubt in Carmelita’s mind that it was her plain duty to refuse Jack. To marry him would mean to utterly give up and throw aside a plan of life, which, from her earliest childhood, she had never imagined to be capable of the smallest essential alteration. If a man who had devoted his whole mind and soul to the business of manufacturing overshoes were suddenly invited to become a salaried poet on a popular magazine, he could not regard the proposed change of profession as more preposterously impossible than the idea of marriage with Jack Hatterly seemed to Miss Carmelita Billington.
For Miss Billington occupied a peculiar position. She was the Diana of a small but highly prosperous city in the South-West; a city which her father had built up in years of enterprising toil. To mention the town of Los Brazos to any capitalist in the land was to call up the name of Billington, the brilliant speculator who, ruined on the Boston stock-market, went to Texas and absolutely created a town which for wealth, beauty and social distinction had not its equal in the great South-West. It was colonized with college graduates from New York, Boston and Philadelphia; and, in Los Brazos, boys who had left cane-rushes and campus choruses scarce ten years behind them had fortunes in the hundred thousands, and stood high in public places. As the daughter of the founder of Los Brazos, Miss Billington’s fortunes were allied, she could not but feel, to the place of her birth. There must she marry, there must she continue the social leadership which her mother was only too ready to lay down. The Mayor of the town, the District Attorney, the Supreme Court Judge and the Bishop were all among her many suitors; and six months before she had wished, being a natural-born sport, if she was a girl, that they would only get together and shake dice to see which of them should have her. But then she hadn’t come East and met Jack Hatterly.
She thought of the first day she had seen the Atlantic Ocean and Jack, and she wished now that she had never been seized with the fancy to gaze on the great water. And yet, what a glorious day that was! How grand
she had thought the ocean! And how grand she had thought Jack! And now she had given him up forever, that model of manly beauty and audacity; Jack with his jokes and his deviltries and his exhaustless capacity for ever new and original larks. Was it absolutely needful? Her poor little soul had to answer itself that it was. To leave Los Brazos and the great house with the cool quiet court-yard and the broad verandahs, and to live in crowded, noisy New York, where she knew not a soul except Jack—to be separated from those two good fairies who lived only to gratify her slightest wish—to “go back” on Los Brazos, the pride of the Billingtons—no; it was impossible, impossible! She must stick to her post and make her choice between the Mayor and the Judge and the District Attorney and the Bishop. But how dull and serious and business-like they all seemed to her now that she had known Jack Hatterly, the first man she had ever met with a well-developed sense of humor!
What made it hardest for poor Carmelita was, perhaps, that fate had played her cruel pranks ever since the terrible moment of her act of renunciation. Thirty-six hours before, at the end of the dance in the great hotel parlors, Jack had proposed to her. For many days she had known what was coming, and what her answer must be, and she had given him no chance to see her alone. But Jack was Jack, and he had made his opportunity for himself, and had said his say under cover of the confusion at the end of the dance; and she had promised to give him his answer later, and she had given it, after a sleepless and tearful night; just a line to say that it could never, never be, and that he must not ask her again. And it had been done in such a commonplace, unromantic way that she hated to think of it—the meagre, insufficient little note handed to her maid to drop in the common letter-box of the hotel, and to lie there among bills and circulars and all sorts of silly every-day correspondence, until the hotel-clerk should take it out and put it in Jack’s box. She had passed through the office a little later, and her heart had sunk within her as she saw his morning’s mail waiting for him in its pigeon-hole, and thought what the opening of it would bring to him.
But this was the least of her woe. Later came the fishing trip on the crowded cat-boat. She had fondly hoped that he would have the delicacy to excuse himself from that party of pleasure; but no, he was there, and doing just as she had asked him to, treating her as if nothing had happened, which was certainly the
