“Yes—her father was a convert, and a mighty fervent and eloquent one, too,” Ponty replied nowise loth to pursue the subject. “That was what first brought us together. We were staying at the same inn in one of the Protestant cantons of Switzerland, and on Sunday morning all three of us tramped off nine miles to hear Mass, Ruth being then about ten. He was a man who never went in for general society. He never went in for anything usual or conventional. His life was extraordinarily detached. But he had his own little group of friends, of old cronies and young disciples, in pretty nearly every town of Europe, so that he never needed to be lonely. And he had a brother, an elder brother, whom he was always going out to America to see; General Adgate, United States Army, retired, residing at Oldbridge, Connecticut. Every spring, every summer, every autumn, old Tom Adgate made his plans to go and visit the General, and then he put the visit off. I think he'd never really got over his grief for the death of his wife, and that he dreaded returning to the places that were associated with her.”
Bertram did not want to ask questions—yet now he asked another.
“But Miss Adgate herself—has she never been to America?”
“No, she won't go,” Pontycroft said. “We've urged her, pressed her to go, Lucilla and I—not to stop, of course—but to see the place, to faire acte de presence. Lucilla has even offered to go with her. And the General has written fifty times begging her to come and stay with him at Oldbridge. She really ought to go. It's her native country, and she ought to make its acquaintance. But she seems to have imbibed a prejudice against it. She's been unfortunate in getting hold of some rather terrible American newspapers, printed in all the colours of the rainbow, in which the London correspondents made her and her affairs the subject of their prose. And then she's read some American novels. I'm bound to confess that I can understand her shrinking a bit, if American society is anything like what American novelists depict. The people seem entirely to lack manners,—and the novelists seem ingenuously oblivious of the deficiency. They present the most unmitigated bounders, and appear in all good faith to suppose they are presenting gentlemen and ladies.”
“Yes,” agreed Bertram, smiling, “one has noticed that.” Then, thoughtful-eyed, pacing the floor, the world-traveller spoke: “But America is very big, and very heterogeneous in its elements, and the novelists leave a good deal out. There's no such thing as American society,—there are innumerable different societies, unassimilated, unaffiliated, and one must pick and choose. Besides, Oldbridge—didn't you say—is in New England? New England is an extraordinary little world apart, as unlike the rest of the country as—as a rural dean is unlike a howling dervish. The rest of the country is in the making, a confusion of materials that don't match; New England is finished, completed; and of a piece. Take Boston, for instance,—I really don't know a more interesting town. It's pretty, it's even stately; it's full of colour and character; it's full of expression,—it expresses its race and its history. And as for society, Boston society is as thoroughbred as any I have ever encountered—easy, hospitable, with standards, with traditions, and at the same time with a faint breath of austerity, a little remainder of Puritanism, that is altogether surprising and amusing, and in its effect rather tonic. No, no, there's nothing to shrink from in New England—unless, perhaps, its winter climate. It can't be denied that they sometimes treat you to sixty degrees of frost.”
Pontycroft blew a long stream of smoke, “I'll ask you to repeat that sermon to Ruth herself.”
Bertram halted, guiltily hung his head. “I beg your pardon—my text ran away with me. But why doesn't—if Miss Adgate won't go to America, why doesn't America come to her? Why doesn't General Adgate come to Europe?” Pontycroft's brows knotted themselves again. “Ah, why indeed?” he echoed. “Hardly for want of being asked, at any rate. Ruth has asked him, my sister has asked him, I have asked him. And it seems a smallish enough thing to do. But in his way, I imagine he's as unlike other folk as his brother was in his. He's a bachelor—wedded, apparently, to his chimney-corner. There's no dislodging him—at least by the written word. So Ruth, you see, is rather peculiarly alone in the world, as I'm afraid she sometimes rather painfully feels. She has Lucilla and me, a kind of honorary sister and brother, and in England she has her old governess, Miss Nettleworth, a cousin of Charlie Nettleworth, who lives with her, and might be regarded as a stipendiary aunt. And that's all, unless you count heaps of acquaintances, and scores of wise youths who'd like to marry her. But she appears to have devoted herself to spinsterhood. One and all, she refuses 'em as fast as they come up. She's even refused a duke, which is accounted, I suppose, the most heroic thing a girl in England can do.”
“Oh——?” said Bertram, in a tone that by no means disguised his eagerness to hear more.
“Yes—Newhampton,” said Ponty. “As he tells the story himself, there's no reason why I shouldn't repeat it. His people—mother and sister—had been at him for months to propose to her, and at last (they were staying in the same country house) he took her for a walk in the shrubberies and did his filial and fraternal duty. I'm not sure whether you know him? The story isn't so funny unless you do. He's a tiny little chap, only about six-and-twenty, beardless, rosy-gilled—looks for all the world like a boy fresh from Eton. 'By Jove, I thought my hour had struck,' says he. 'I'd no idea I should come out of it a free man. Well, it shows that honesty is the best policy, after all. I told her honestly that my heart was a burnt-out volcano—that I hoped I should make a kind and affectionate husband—but that I had had my grande passion, and could never love again; if she chose to accept me on that understanding—well, I was at her disposal. After which I stood and quaked, waiting for my doom. But she—she simply laughed. And then she said I was the honestest fellow she'd ever known, and had made the most original proposal she'd ever listened to, which she wouldn't have missed for anything; and to reward me for the pleasure I'd given her, she would let me off—decline my offer with thanks. Yes, by Jove, she regularly rejected me—me, a duke—with the result that we've been the best of friends ever since.' And so indeed they have,” concluded Ponty with a laugh.
Bertram laughed too—and thought of Stuart Seton.