"Stop it, Basil! You make me feel old, antique, antediluvian. I don't want to. I shan't let myself be pushed back and ignored. I'm going to give Amy and George a rousing big dinner before long; and when the fall term opens I shall entertain as never before. And if that young man from the South turns up here during the summer to see Hortense, I shall do a lot for them."
Hortense Dunton had long since returned, of course, from the Tennessee and North Carolina mountains; but she ignored the convocation. One drop of bitterness, if tasted again—even reminiscently—would have turned everything to gall. Instead, she found a measure of sweetness in the letters which followed on her return from that region. They were addressed in a bold, dashing young hand, and bore the postmark "Nashville." Hortense was inclined to let them lie conspicuously on the front-hall table, for half an hour or so, before she took them up. Little might be absolutely known about her passage with Cope; but there the letters lay, for her aunt's eye and for Carolyn Thorpe's.
Carolyn prattled a little, not indiscreetly, about her meeting with the Freeford family on the campus. As Basil Randolph himself had done months before, she endeavored to construct a general environment for them and to determine their place in the general social fabric. She had, however, the advantage of having seen them; she was not called to make an exiguous evocation from the void. She still held that they were nice, good, pleasant, friendly people: if they had subordinated themselves, docilely and automatically, to the prepotent social and academic figures of the society about them, that in no wise detracted from the favorable impression they had made on her.
"Just the right parents for Bertram," she said fondly, to herself. She made, almost unconsciously, the allowance that is still generally made, among Americans, for the difference between two generations: the elder, of course, continues to provide a staid, sober, and somewhat primitive background for the brilliancy of the younger. Her own people, if they appeared in Churchton, might seem a bit simple and provincial too.
Hortense took Carolyn's slight and fond observations with a silent scorn. When she spoke at all, she was likely to say something about "family"; and it was gathered that the dashing correspondent at Nashville was conspicuously "well-connected." Also, that he belonged to the stirring New South and had put money in his purse. Hortense's contempt for the semi-rustic and impecunious Cope became boundless.
About the middle of July a letter lay on the front-hall table for
Carolyn. It was from Cope.
"Only think!" said Carolyn to herself, in a small private ecstasy within her locked bedchamber; "he wrote on his own account and of his own accord. Not a line from me; not a suggestion!"
The letter was an affair of two small pages. "Yours very sincerely, Bertram L. Cope" simply told "My dear Miss Thorpe" that he had been spending three or four days in Winnebago, Wisconsin, and that he had now returned home for a month of further study, having obtained a post in an important university in the East, at a satisfactory stipend. A supplementary line conveyed regards to Mrs. Phillips. And that was all.
Was it a handful of husks, or was it a banquet? Carolyn took it for the latter and lived on it for days. Little it mattered what or how much he had written: he had written, and of his own accord—as Carolyn made a point of from the first. There is an algebraic formula expressive of the truth that "1" is an infinitely greater number of times than "0." And a single small taper is infinitely greater in point of light and cheer than none at all. Carolyn's little world underwent illumination, and she with it. She promptly soared to a shining infinity.
Medora Phillips could not overlook Carolyn's general glow, nor the sense of elevation she conveyed. Things became clearer still when Carolyn passed on the scanty message which Cope had added at the end. "Best regards to Mrs. Phillips"—there it was, so far as it went. And Medora felt, along with Carolyn, that a slight mention was an immensity of times greater than no mention at all. "Very kind, very thoughtful of him, I'm sure," she said without irony.