“Naturally. We can get him glasses if they don’t,” said Julian. “What an absurd baby you are in your demands! Beauty and muscle never go together in a horse. Some of the best goers on the turf are a mere mass of wires when you look at them from an æsthetic standpoint.”
It was really enough to have any kind of power, except our own, trundling us along the pleasant roads. I grew to feel no solicitude whatever about Leander’s ribs while he stood cooling them in the creek, and Julian and I in the high cart watched the sunlight come down the woods’ aisles, and long festoons of grapevine dipping and reflecting their leaves in water. When we met anybody I tried complacently to imagine we were an English farm-couple very well-to-do and what they call smart in our turnout; or that we were Italian peasants, basking in the sun as we jogged royally to some festa. But Julian became very critical on the proportions of horses and vehicles to each other. He ridiculed a combination of tall horse and low phaeton, the top of which barely reached up to the horse’s back; or of pony and double-seated carriage, looking like a tug drawing a steamer. In short, we were satisfied with our own goods and chattels: and when Julian graciously lent Lena the turnout to go to town in, and she filled the cart bed with ripe tomatoes and the seat with her blue person and Fritz, its perfect adaptation to her uses convinced me what a versatile and valuable bargain ours was.
The time came for me to meet and bring home Jennie Purdy from the Avenue station. She had been one of my special chums at school. I always loved women; there seems to me something unwholesome and unsound in the woman who proclaims that she hates and distrusts all of her own sex. At school I was Jennie Purdy’s easily-moulded slave: she dictated what I should wear and how I should conduct myself. I denied myself many a game of croquet, when that pastime was fresh, to sit and fan her while she slept off some slight indisposition. And in return she petted and instructed me in all the niceties of etiquette. She was half a dozen years my senior, and at that time enjoying a small fortune of her own; but this was afterward lost, and she had many a struggle before deciding upon and mastering the profession of medicine.
Jennie Purdy was one of the most fastidious creatures alive, an epicure, and unsparing of herself as a student. Years did not age, but rather ground her down to finer delicacy. I felt considerable pride in her, and counted on having her at hand when T’férgore came. She did not lack the eccentricities which always cluster around any woman living outside of intimate family life. She professed to dislike men; but I, knowing her warm heart, knew also her self-deception. All isolated women fall into one of two errors about the opposite sex: they count mankind a vast monster, to be avoided and suspected, or a vast angel to be worshiped in secrecy and silence; whereas, men are only good, comfortable souls, very much like ourselves, but made a little stouter so they can hold us and spread out their shoulders for irrigation when we want to cry.
Though Jennie Purdy held dark views of mankind, I suspected that under the surface she was one of the worshiping ones. Still, I was not prepared to have her tell me, an hour after our arrival at home, that she was on the point of marriage.
We sat down in T’férgore’s room, where I had been showing her the appointments, and I pulled a hassock to her side, eager for particulars. She should be married from the little farm instead of a boarding-house, if she could be content with such a wedding as we could give. But I upbraided her for keeping her secret from me, almost as seriously as she once upbraided me for daring to marry at all.
“You won’t want me to be married here,” said Jennie, with a snap. “You’ll have too many prejudices.”
“But I always thought you were the person with prejudices, dear,” I remonstrated, “and that Julian and I were too unconventional for you.”
“I am going to marry a divorced man,” disclosed Jennie.
I caught my breath and said “Oh!”