It Pays to Smile

by Nina Wilcox Putnam

And laughingly she took the coin and slipped it inside her girdle. I found it there that night, and it had made an ugly red mark which must have been painful. But girls are such absurdly sentimental things that it is quite—quite, well, charming. And as for the little gold knife, we had later good cause to remember that it was in his possession.

What a gay month it was! Such festas, such expeditions into the country, such evenings of excitement, with the beautiful romance between Alicia and the duke weaving in and out through all our adventures like a golden thread in a bright embroidery! The duke was as care free and gorgeous a lover as any princess could have desired.

Only two things marred what would otherwise have been a perfect period, and one was the absurd way in which Abby set her cap for Mr. Pegg. The other was my personal discomfort in becoming accustomed to the strait-jacket furnished by the corsetiere to whom Abby sent me. But the effect unquestionably justified the means, and they did make me look younger. Not that Mr. Pegg seemed to observe the circumstances. He was monopolized in the most outrageous way by that unscrupulous cousin of mine. Not that I cared in the least, but the way men can be taken in by a lot of falderals and clothes and artificial aids to beauty is certainly astonishing; and Abby made no scruple of using them all. Indeed, she was a most worldly woman and was infecting us all with her worldliness. Perhaps the culmination of this tendency occurred at a garden party which she gave, and at which a great many things happened that had far-reaching consequences.

I may say at once that wine was one of the primary causes for the phenomenon which developed during the course of the evening. I recall that my dear father had a very concise philosophy concerning wine and its effect upon the human system, though, of course, the feminine portion of his household never partook of it with the possible exception of a glass of port at Christmas; or a portion of gin upon the occasion of a fainting spell, when it was considered most beneficial in its medicinal effect. But outside of its uses as a restorative for the vapors, we never used it, and I may state in the interests of accuracy that though my father referred to the substance which he imbibed in the masculine seclusion of the dining room after the departure of the ladies as "wine," it was in truth rum, imported direct from Jamaica, in which he indulged, if indeed so lax a term may be properly employed in connection with him. Nevertheless, "wine" was a sort of generic term with him for all alcoholic stimulants, and he believed in its judicious usage and even quoted from the Old Testament in its behalf, referring in particular and most frequently to the incident of Noah's having planted a vineyard immediately upon the opportunity for so doing having arisen.

"Wine," my dear father would often remark, especially when in argument with our worthy pastor—the subject was often debated between them—"wine is the immemorial link which man has made with which to hitch himself to the gods; it is the weak man's courage, the poor man's wealth, the coward's glory and the failure's apology. Through wine man becomes the things he dreams of being—great, strong, powerful. The grape absorbs the sun, and the wine puts sunshine into men's hearts; without it the world would begin to look for vices to take the place of conviviality."

It will thus be seen that we were reared in a proper attitude toward Bacchus—indulging mildly ourselves, but properly condemning any misuse on the part of our neighbors. Of course we knew how to use it, but so, too, did we know how to act toward those weaker ones who could not discriminate between discretion and Saturday night.

This is not a digression. It is rather an explanation of how and why I came to be a participant in the festival which Abby gave in the gardens of her villa at San Remo.

Up to the date of her entertainment I had never touched a drop of any alcoholic stimulant except in poundcake or ignited upon plum pudding, partially because I had not felt that my dear father's dissertations applied to the gentler sex but were intended principally for what Peaches was wont to term an "alibi" for his own.

But in Europe things were so different. Women smoked without loss of reputation, and even mere babes were given claret in their drinking water in the superstition that it prevented fever or bowlegs, I forget which. At any rate the taboo was lifted—I mean the lid, again to quote my charge—and being so near Rome I thought it no harm to do as the, as it were, Romans did.

And hard indeed must the heart have been to refuse any part of the conviviality upon such a night as this was. The moon was marvelous beyond words. All the flowers in the world seemed to have gathered together in that little pleasance between the gleaming whitewashed, vine-burdened walls. Lanterns hung like strings of dull golden moons from tree to tree. Dear Mr. Pegg walking with me beneath them compared them most poetically to oranges.