"And I may live with you, and add up your bills, and bring you your slippers, and dream all day of that Golden Young Man who doesn't exist?"
"Oh, don't say that--He does, Phyllis."
"Papa, he doesn't, he doesn't, he doesn't!"
CHAPTER VI
Socially speaking Carthage was as distant from Washington as is Timbuctoo. While the Von Piller hurricane was raging in the nation's capital, the Carthage barometer showed "fair and rising." To a storm-tossed little mariner, it was like gaining the lee of some palmy isle, and casting anchor in still water. The islanders, too, if a trifle homespun and provincial, were the most delightful people, and unspoiled by any intrusion of a higher civilization. Phyllis had not realized how entirely her outlook had changed until she returned to her own home. She saw her former school fellows with new eyes, and while she could not forbear smiling at some of their ways, she liked them better than ever before.--They, on their side, regarded with awe this fashionable young beauty, who had jilted a Pastor, and given the mitten to a real, live, guaranteed baron, and who had descended in their midst, like a racer in a paddock of donkeys.
Some of them felt very donkeyfied indeed. Tom Fergus, a gelatinous young man, somewhat forward and familiar, who was alluded to in the local papers as "one of the leaders of the younger set" said she was "raving pretty, but, my stars, what was a fellow to talk to her about?" Billy Phillpots, who worked in his father's store (many of the young fellows "worked in his father's store") vetoed her as "insufferably stuck up," he having escorted her home one night, and failed to extort the usual toll at the garden-gate.--The good night kiss at the garden-gate was quite a Carthage institution, and as innocent as the kiss of an early Christian.
Life in Carthage was altogether Early Christian--for the young people of the better families. They met every night, and moved in flocks, like sparrows, alighting first in one house and then another--taking up the carpets for dancing, improvising suppers, crowding round the fireplaces to sing, and tell stories. Presumably there was some social line drawn somewhere; but money at least counted for little, and anybody that was "nice" was allowed in. And it must be said, on the whole, that they were remarkably "nice," and very much a credit to high-class democracy. The boys were well-mannered, brotherly and respectful; the girls charming in their blitheness and gaiety. Occasionally there was a match, and a couple disappeared as completely as though they had fallen into the river and been swept away. You couldn't marry, and still be a sparrow. No, indeed! You passed into another world, and six months after the sparrows would hardly know you on the street. One would not venture to say this was cruel--though it always came as a shock to the newly-wedded pair--it was just the sparrow way, that's all.
Phyllis was soon flying with the rest of them, and her ready adaptability caused her to be accepted in their midst without more than a passing hesitation. Hiding her riper and more womanly nature, and absorbing herself in this animated triviality, she pretended to be as much a sparrow as any of the flock, and no less lively and empty-headed. She was lonely, heart-tired, and very much adrift on the sea of life; and in the engaging childishness of these girls and boys, who, though of her own age, were mentally only up to her elbow, she found a sort of solace, a sort of peace. They kept her from thinking; their chatter and good spirits were exhilarating; the naïve admiration of the young men warmed, and yet did not disturb her.--Before her long flight to other skies, the little bird might well be thankful for the sparrows.
Spring came--summer. Her twenty-first birthday passed in the Adirondacks, where her father had a cottage in that wilderness of woods and lakes. She was in her twenty-second year now, and knew what it was to feel old--oh, so old! That she was able, by the laws of the land, to buy and hold real-estate seemed but a poor set-off to this encroachment of time--though her father repeatedly pointed out this new privilege the years had brought. She could marry, too, without his consent--another empty concession to maturity, considering there was no one to marry with or without it. Of course, there were a few silly babies running after her as though she were a woolly sheep--but no one that the wildest stretch of imagination could consider a man. Some of their fathers ran, too--stout widowers panting with the unaccustomed exertion,--but that was grotesque and disgusting. Far or wide, high or low, there wasn't a pin feather of the Golden Young Man. His noble race was extinct. He lived in books, but you never met him. Never, never. He had died out a million years ago, leaving nothing save a tradition for poets and novelists to paw over.
Quite convinced that it was a wretched world, Phyllis danced and rode, picnicked and camped out after deer in a bewitching Wild West costume, and was always the first to a party, and the last to leave it--all very much like one who found it tolerable enough. Some would have called her an insatiable little pleasure-seeker, and been wholly misled. "What are any of us doing except waiting for a man?" she once announced with shocking candor. "It's the fashion to talk of 'other interests' and we girls are all graduating, and slumming, and teaching little foreign Jews to sing 'My Country 'Tis of Thee, and Columbia, Gem of the Ocean, and learning to be trained nurses and bacteriologists--just in the effort to save our poor little self-respect. We ruin our complexions, dim our eyes, and spoil our nice hands--all the property of some future lord and master, whom we really are pilfering--and who's deceived? Who takes it seriously? We don't, who do it. Poof, what a pretense it is!--If you have to wait, why not two-step through it as I do, and be as happy as you can, like people snowed up in a train. That's what a young girl is--snowed up--and I only wish some one would come with a spade and dig me out!"