"Why should you be rude? It is incumbent on you as a gentleman to respond to the invitation so frankly given. Besides, the writer who aspires to influence society must know society; and how can one know society unless one studies it? A hermit in his cell is no judge of what is going on in the world. Besides, he does not overcome the world who runs away from it, but he who meets it bravely. It is the part of a coward to be afraid of meeting wealth and luxury and indolence on their own grounds. He really conquers who can keep awake, walking straight through the enchanted ground; not he who makes a detour to get round it."
All which I had arrayed in good set terms as I rode back to my room, and went up to Bolton to look up in his library the authorities for an article I was getting out on the Domestic Life of the Ancient Greeks. Bolton had succeeded in making me feel so thoroughly at home in his library that it was to all intents and purposes as if it were my own.
As I was tumbling over the books that filled every corner, there fell out from a little niche a photograph, or rather ambrotype, such as were in use in the infancy of the art. It fell directly into my hand, so that taking it up it was impossible not to perceive what it was, and I recognized in an instant the person. It was the head of my cousin Caroline, not as I knew her now, but as I remembered her years ago, when she and I went to the Academy together.
It is almost an involuntary thing, on such occasions, to exclaim, "Who is this?" But Bolton was so very reticent a being that I found it extremely difficult to ask him a personal question. There are individuals who unite a great winning and sympathetic faculty with great reticence. They make you talk, they win your confidence, they are interested in you, but they ask nothing from you, and they tell you nothing. Bolton was all the while doing obliging things for me and for Jim, but he asked nothing from us; and while we felt safe in saying anything in the world before him, and while we never felt at the moment that conversation flagged, or that there was any deficiency in sympathy and good fellowship on his part, yet upon reflection we could never recall anything which let us into the interior of his own life-history.
The finding of this little memento impressed me, therefore, oddly,—as if a door had suddenly been opened into a private cabinet where I had no right to look, or an open letter which I had no right to read had been inadvertently put into my hands. I looked round on Bolton, as he sat quietly bending over a book that he was consulting, with his pen in hand and his cat at his elbow; but the question I longed to ask stuck fast in my throat, and I silently put back the picture in its place, keeping the incident to ponder in my heart. What with the one pertaining to myself, and with the thoughts suggested by this, I found myself in a disturbed state that I determined to resist by setting myself a definite task of so many pages of my article.
In the evening, when Jim came in, I recounted my adventure and showed him the card.
He surveyed it with a prolonged whistle. "Good now!" he said; "the ticket sent by the Providence Express. I see—"
"Who are these Van Arsdels, Jim?"
"Upper tens," said Jim, decisively. "Not the oldest Tens, but the second batch. Not the old Knickerbocker Vanderhoof, and Vanderhyde, and Vanderhorn set that Washy Irving tells about,—but the modern nobs. Old Van Arsdel does a smashing importing business—is worth his millions—has five girls, all handsome—two out—two more to come out, and one strong-minded sister who has retired from the world, and isn't seen out anywhere. The one you saw was Eva; they say she's to marry Wat Sydney,—the greatest match there is going in New York. How do you say—shall you go, Wednesday?"
"Do you know them?"