The figures were those of a man and a girl, and their conversation had a peculiar air of absorption which seemed to make them alone together in the crowd. Billy could see only the backs of this couple, save when one turned a little sideways to the other, and the round curve of a cheek and a fluff of fair hair became visible, or the bend of an aquiline nose and a dark mustache—the nose and the mustache turned sideways much oftener than the fairer profile. Once or twice Billy caught sight of a pink throat and ear; on such occasions the girl bent her head and fingered nervously at a music-roll she held upright in her hand, and Billy swore under his breath.
When the train had rolled into the station, he went with the other passengers as far as the door of the ferry-house to see—yes, they were going over the same ferry together, he still bending toward her as they walked, she with a charming, shy hesitancy in her manner, as of one unaccustomed to her position. Bill said bitterly, “The gall of him!” and walked away to the humiliating trolley which showed that he was still “going to Stevens’.” If he had been out of bondage, he would have been quick to follow and take his place on the other side of the girl, and show to all men that she was not making one of an intimate duet.
It was after this that his mother noticed that on certain days his accustomed spirits flagged. Her keen ear detected that he no longer whistled cheerily all the time he was dressing, but only when he heard her foot upon the stairs; and although he still chaffed his admiring sisters at dinner, there was a bitter and realistic strain in the jesting that made them all sure that Willie could not feel well. He found fault with his food, also a thing unprecedented. His mother brought him pills which he refused to take, towering above her—she was a little woman—tense and aloof. When she taxed him with having something on his mind, he admitted it at once, in a tone that bade her go no further.
“It is nothing to do with myself,” he conceded, with the spirit of a man looking at her from his baby-blue eyes. The woman in her bowed to it as she went down-stairs, with pride in him rampant in her heart, to deliver her report to the two sisters waiting below.
The Snow family had been settled in the town from its beginning as a suburb, some thirty years back; Mr. Snow having died—after losing money largely on his real-estate investments there—twelve years later, when Billy was an infant, leaving many unproductive tracts of land with large taxes appertaining to them. The Snows knew everybody in the place, rich and poor, and were consequently regarded somewhat in the light of a directory; the woman by the day, the cheap dressmaker, and the handy man or boy could always be achieved by applying to them, for they had an invariable acquaintance with respectable persons temporarily forced into filling these positions. They themselves, while adding to their own finances in various ways, neither concealed nor obtruded the fact; their affairs could interest no one but themselves. They lived in a very small old-fashioned white frame house with a narrow entrance-hall nearly level with the street; and the little low-ceiled parlor and sitting-room, with their narrow doorways and slightly uneven floors, were crowded with large mahogany and walnut furniture and bedecked with the birthday and Christmas gifts of the family for the last thirty years, from the cherry-stone basket once carved by Father to the ornamental hanging calendar of the past season. In the autumn the ladies potted plants with such accumulative energy that the rooms became more and more a jungle of damp pots and tubs, topped by overflowing showers and spikes and flat blobs of green. Only the family knew exactly where to sit without encroaching perilously on these; Billy’s friends always dropped first into a certain chair and rocked into a dangling mass of Wandering Jew on the marble-topped table behind.
The Snows had the recognized position in society of being Asked to Everything. When they went to entertainments, it was in the dark, quiet garments of every-day life, or the one often remodeled state robe belonging to each, irrespective of what other people wore. Their circumstances and their birth were too well known to need pretense.
Ada, the second daughter, taught in a school. She was twenty-seven, tall like her brother, and with a fair, babyish face like his. It seems to be the rule in the pages of fiction, even at the present day, to depict unmarried women of this age as both feeling and looking no longer young—as a matter of fact, a girl of twenty-seven is rarely distinguishable from one of twenty-three, and is often more attractive. Ada Snow had been, besides, one of those immature young persons who grow up late, and become graceful and natural in society only after long custom; at twenty, shy and awkward, she had usually been mistaken for sixteen. She was her brother’s favorite, secretly aiding and abetting him in many evasions of the maternal law; she tied his cravats for him now, and got up little suppers for him, and he posed as her elder, in view of his height and large experience.
The other sister, Bertha, was a delicate and much older woman, dark-haired, lined and sallow, given to intermittent nerve-prostrations and neuralgia, yet keeping a certain sanity and strength of mind hidden beneath an accumulation of small interests. She seldom went out, but sat by a window in the sitting-room all day, screened by the steaming plants, embroidering on linen, and keeping tally of the persons who went up and down the street, the number of oranges bought out of a cart, and the frequency of the meetings of two servants over a boundary fence—incidents of note in themselves without further connection. She seemed almost inconceivably petty in conversation and idea, but if one were strong enough to speak only to the truth that was in her, she could answer. She was honest and she was loyal; she knew a friend. She had worked hard for her mother in her early youth—that little mother who now looked almost younger than she, as she came into the room from her interview with William, and sat down by her daughter to say, in a tone of the mother who believes no secret is hid from her: “William won’t tell me what’s the matter, but I know it’s something to do with that girl at the Alexanders’. Willie is growing up so fast!”
“Oh, yes, if you mean Miss Linden,” said Miss Bertha, in comfortable corroboration. “That’s been going on for some weeks.”
“Yes, I know; but he acts differently this time. Perhaps she’s snubbed him in some way.”