For an instant Mr. Spence looked bewildered; and as for me I was inwardly convulsed, so much so that I betrayed my feelings in a smile at the moment when Paul Barr was reciting a bloodcurdling piece of poetry of his own composing,—an indiscretion which offended the artist-poet to such an extent that in my efforts to mollify him I failed to catch Mr. Spence's reply. He rose to take his leave at this point; but it chanced that just then my father entered the room, and I was obliged to repeat the introductions. While I was saying a few last words to Mr. Spence in regard to the sort of instruction I was to receive from Mr. Fleisch, Paul Barr conversed with my father, laying down the law in his most superb fashion regarding the immense fortune in store for any one who would start what he called a fig farm in this country. Although I had never heard him broach a business matter before, he seemed entirely familiar with his subject, and fairly bristled with statistics and calculations to prove the soundness of his theory, gardeners to the contrary notwithstanding. My father listened to him patiently, and seemed to be amused. Aunt Helen sat apart with a reserved, patrician air.
My two callers took their leave together; and when the front door closed, my father said jocosely,—
"Who are your friends, Virginia? I hope they have not been persuading you to invest in a fig farm."
I blushed, remembering my former design of speculating with Mr. Dale,—of which, however, my father had no knowledge.
"Both are literary men of high reputation," I answered quietly, though I had an instinctive feeling that my father would make sport of this assertion. But experience had taught me that with him it was best to call a spade a spade.
"That accounts for it. I thought the gentleman in velveteen had a screw loose somewhere," he said as he passed out of the room.
"Well, Virginia," exclaimed Aunt Helen when we were alone, "whom have you picked up now?"
"I don't understand you," said I.
"Who are those young men who were here just now? They are foreigners, on their own admission,—Bohemians. My own belief is that they have gypsy blood in their veins, for what can one know of the antecedents of persons who come from a small German principality? They don't even claim to be counts, and any one with the smallest pretext to respectability in that part of the world is a count, at least. They look to me as if they had been on the stage, especially the one to whom you were talking. I will do him the justice to say he is a handsome wretch, but like all those foreign adventurers he has a dissipated air. As for the other, he is simply commonplace and vulgar, with little upstart radical notions."
I waited for her to finish before replying. "I have already said that Mr. Spence and Mr. Barr are both literary men of high standing. They are neither of them foreigners, but were born in this State. By 'Bohemian' Mr. Spence meant the literary and artistic fraternity in general, Aunt Helen. He is a philosopher as well as a poet; and Mr. Barr paints pictures in addition to his other work."