XX
THE STRAWBERRY BLONDE
The year will all be summer weather
When speech and action go together;
When Aucassin's sage words are met
In all his deeds with Nicolette;
And though fair Daphne's words be free,
Look not too soon her swain to be:
The year will all be summer weather,
When speech and action go together.
—Song from The Monarch of Nil.
The reader of this history may have been conscious, from time to time, of a mysterious glow—now baleful, now rather cheerful, like the light from the tap-room of an inn—which has illuminated the horizon of the narrative. It appeared in certain allusions found in Mr. Alvord's conversation with Mr. Amidon during the episode of the Wrong House, and so terrified him as to give him thoughts of flight from Bellevale. It glared more brightly in the chat at the Club. It flamed concretely on our sight when Mr. Brassfield met its source on the street that day he made his fatal escape. Mr. Alvord slangily called it "the Strawberry Blonde." Mr. Brassfield very improperly pinched its elbow, and called it "Daise." It is high time that we put on our smoked glasses and look it in the face in such a formal introduction as will enable us to do it tardy justice—for we may have been guilty of misjudgment!
Miss Daisy Scarlett, sitting on a piano-stool, with one foot curled up under her, was entertaining Doctor Julia Brown and Miss Flossie Smith, who had called on her at the home of Major Pumphrey, her uncle. Miss Scarlett was well and shiveringly known in Bellevale, where she visited often, and was generally esteemed for her many good qualities of heart and mind, and for the infinite variety of her contributions to the sensations of a not over-turbulent social swim. Her entertainment in this instance consisted in readings from a certain book which must be regarded as an early literary imprudence of a most estimable and industrious, as well as improving writer—Poems of Passion. The particular selection rendered by Miss Scarlett was the one (unknown, I presume, to my readers—no, my dear, we haven't it) which informs us what the first person singular feminine, being invited into Paradise, would do if the third person singular masculine, down in the regions infernal, should open his beautiful arms and smile. Miss Scarlett read ill sentiments very well, and Miss Smith laid violent hands on herself and looked shocked.
"Oh, Daisy!" she exclaimed, "don't, please don't!"
"Oh, Flossie!" said Miss Daisy imitatively, "don't pretend! That poem is simply great!"
Doctor Brown laughed, quite in the manner of the bass villain in the comic opera.
"The dissecting table," said she, "brings all these beautiful arms and brows to the same dead level of tissue—unpoetical, but real."