“Yes, but you weren’t over here.”
“No, I wasn’t over here. I shouldn’t have been where I was three years ago if I had spent my time travelling round Europe. I was in a very advantageous position. I did a very large business. I was considerably interested in lumber.” He paused, bending, though a little hopelessly, about to me again. “Have you any business interests yourself?” I answered that I had none, and he proceeded slowly, mildly and deliberately. “Well, sir, perhaps you’re not aware that business in the United States is not what it was a short time since. Business interests are very insecure. There seems to be a general falling-off. Different parties offer different explanations of the fact, but so far as I’m aware none of their fine talk has set things going again.” I ingeniously intimated that if business was dull the time was good for coming away; whereupon my compatriot threw back his head and stretched his legs a while. “Well, sir, that’s one view of the matter certainly. There’s something to be said for that. These things should be looked at all round. That’s the ground my wife took. That’s the ground,” he added in a moment, “that a lady would naturally take.” To which he added a laugh as ghostly as a dried flower.
“You think there’s a flaw in the reasoning?” I asked.
“Well, sir, the ground I took was that the worse a man’s business is the more it requires looking after. I shouldn’t want to go out to recreation—not even to go to church—if my house was on fire. My firm’s not doing the business it was; it’s like a sick child—it requires nursing. What I wanted the doctors to do was to fix me up so that I could go on at home. I’d have taken anything they’d have given me, and as many times a day. I wanted to be right there; I had my reasons; I have them still. But I came off all the same,” said my friend with a melancholy smile.
I was a great deal younger than he, but there was something so simple and communicative in his tone, so expressive of a desire to fraternise and so exempt from any theory of human differences, that I quite forgot his seniority and found myself offering him paternal advice. “Don’t think about all that. Simply enjoy yourself, amuse yourself, get well. Travel about and see Europe. At the end of a year, by the time you’re ready to go home, things will have improved over there, and you’ll be quite well and happy.”
He laid his hand on my knee; his wan kind eyes considered me, and I thought he was going to say “You’re very young!” But he only brought out: “You’ve got used to Europe anyway!”
III
At breakfast I encountered his ladies—his wife and daughter. They were placed, however, at a distance from me, and it was not until the pensionnaires had dispersed and some of them, according to custom, had come out into the garden, that he had an opportunity of carrying out his offer.
“Will you allow me to introduce you to my daughter?” he said, moved apparently by a paternal inclination to provide this young lady with social diversion. She was standing with her mother in one of the paths, where she looked about with no great complacency, I inferred, at the homely characteristics of the place. Old M. Pigeonneau meanwhile hovered near, hesitating apparently between the desire to be urbane and the absence of a pretext. “Mrs. Ruck, Miss Sophy Ruck”—my friend led me up.
Mrs. Ruck was a ponderous light-coloured person with a smooth fair face, a somnolent eye and an arrangement of hair, with forehead-tendrils, water-waves and other complications, that reminded me of those framed “capillary” tributes to the dead which used long ago to hang over artless mantel-shelves between the pair of glass domes protecting wax flowers. Miss Sophy was a girl of one-and-twenty, tiny and pretty and lively, with no more maiden shyness than a feminine terrier in a tinkling collar. Both of these ladies were arrayed in black silk dresses, much ruffled and flounced, and if elegance were all a matter of trimming they would have been elegant.