“Well, I like frivolities, as such,—but only as such, mind you. From now on I ignore them the minute they try to be anything more. I think I’m going in for human souls. I’m already tired of looking at people as Adèle looks at them, or as if they were books in a shop window. I’m going to open a few and see what they’re all about. . . . The worst of it is, you can’t look at the last chapter of people and see how they end. You can only read them, as you can only read yourself, in maddeningly short instalments. They’re always on the brink of new doings when you come to a ‘to be continued’. And I’ve reached a point where I must have gists and summaries, must see what things are leading to, what’s being driven at in this infuriating universe,—this multi-verse.”
They had by this time reached their rooms, and Miriam was making a preliminary sorting of objects to be packed. “Don’t you think,” she ventured, “that you are inclined to be a little headlong as a philosopher?”
Louise was deftly choosing the articles of her toilette for the evening. “Oh, no doubt of it! But I’m too deep in my sea now to care. I simply swim on and on, after a shoal of notions.”
“And splash a little,” commented Miriam, with an abstracted air that saved the remark from being censorious. She was wondering whether she had been over-scrupulous in refusing the gown that Adèle had privately offered her by way of commission. And a little resentful that Adèle should dare offer it to her. Miriam was old enough to remember a day when such transactions were considered off-color, and it bothered her that she should be so old-fashioned as to be unable to accept the place assigned her in the callous new order, as some of her former friends, with the greatest complacence, seemed to have done. Suddenly, bereft of credit in a society to which she had once felt herself a necessary adjunct, catching occasional glimpses of faces that recalled school-days to her, and Newport and Paris, faces now hard, bright and mercenary, Miriam felt abandoned.
Her thoughts strayed westward and hovered. In Alberta she had been an exile; but not so acutely alone as here.
5
The remaining weeks of their holiday accomplished even more towards Louise’s worldly initiation, for she found herself dining and dancing and matching opinions in private palaces among an anomalous assortment of men and women. Before proceeding to Florida they paused in Washington, where friends of Miriam and Walter Windrom whirled them into the routine of that unique conglomeration of the provincial and the sophisticated. Left alone among them, Louise might for a while have been awed by pompous ladies whose husbands were senators from western states, and unimpressed by young men whose shoulders bore no trace of the burdens laid upon them by foreign governments. But Miriam’s polite negativity towards the conspicuously grand, and her full and ready response to some of the unassuming furnished Louise with useful cues, and when Walter was of the party she was even more secure, for he had a faculty of accepting everything at its face value, while privately adding to or subtracting from the offering, with a twinkle in his eye, or a twinkle in his speech.
Walter’s good-natured technique, Louise reflected, was more nearly akin to her own temperament than were Miriam’s precisely graduated coolness and cordialities. Certain importunate people Miriam simply ignored, as though declining to give them a seat in her coach. Walter, while he was equally exclusive, got over the necessity of inviting them into his coach by stepping out and walking a short distance with them. This method seemed to Louise not only more humane, but also braver than Miriam’s, and certainly no less dignified. It was gentlemanly, too; and she objected, as only a woman can object, to feminine tactics.
At Palm Beach they were greeted by a free, open, careless life that suited Louise’s mood better than anything their excursion had afforded her. She had decided that there was no hurry about “going in for human souls” and consequently spent many hours in roaming through deep-chaired hotel lounges, marble and wicker sun parlors, porches, pergolas, and terraces; and in strolling along the hot sands or across lawns shaded by flowering trees and edged with lotus pools. She also swam, played tennis, and chatted ad libitum with strangers.
On her return to Canada, under the escort of Keble, who had accepted her invitation to come and fetch them, she was brimming over with ideas for the embellishment of their projected home. Yet, though she knew Keble was eager to have her offer suggestions, she deliberately held them back. By declining to participate in it she would lessen its hold on her. It should be his castle, not hers.