“Walter wouldn’t think it nice if we were to go,” Miss Anthon answered. “I will go some other time,—when we are all developed.”
Walter looked at his sister suspiciously. “They are doing that kind of thing in London, but it’s safer not. I shouldn’t care to meet my friends—”
Miss Anthon waved her hand deprecatingly. She had heard a good deal about her brother’s friends. He had started “a literary career” in London, very favorably, with a thin volume of verse, some good letters of introduction, and a pleasant manner.
“Well, you won’t come, Wilbur? I shall be busy to-morrow, mother. Will see you some time this week. Good-night.”
Walter Anthon selected his coat and stalked off. Mrs. Anthon looked after him wistfully, as if half inclined to follow her boy. Instead the party drifted into a cab and were put down by the boulevards. Their evenings usually concluded like this at a café, or, more rarely, at the opera.
The boulevard resounded, like an animated river, coursing on swiftly, temptingly. The crowd, even on this dull November evening, was hurrying past, keenly alive about something,—but Miss Anthon was obliged to sit at the little table beside the throng, an ignorant outsider. The scene was perpetually alluring her to experiment in new fields, yet she could never tread the pavement, mistress of herself. This life of idly running hither and thither was merely irritating. The longing to escape from her mother, who lived in another kind of world, even from her uncle and Wilbur, who were not quite in place in Paris, increased until her nerves were sore.
She had never felt this rebellion in St. Louis. Out of the general blur of her past life one important figure loomed everywhere, dominated everything,—her father, John Anthon. That angular, hard-headed man had in many ways substituted his daughter for his wife. She could comprehend, now that her mother was cut off from the usual outlets of neighbourly gossip, how wearisome Mrs. Anthon must have become to the silent persistent man, who had engineered all their fortunes to such comfortable ends. She realized that she had gone to this father for understanding. He was her confidant in her experiences in the little social pool of St. Louis. He had taught her to read intelligently, had provided her with tutors; to escape the nonsense of girls’ schools, he had sent her to Bryn Mawr “in the hope that when middle-life came she would have a few more resources than her mother.” His standards of vitriolic common sense had influenced her girlish choice of friends, had carried her safely through the silly years.
He was honest, she knew, he was direct; he believed in the gospel of work; he endured much in the family; he never had an idea devoid of effort. His life had been one prolonged battle that wrung him to the last reserve of strength. There had been little joy in it but the joy of success.
It was gaunt, that ideal!
Yet all this she had accepted as a type of what a man should be, of how he should treat himself. Moreover, she reasoned that a woman should not be spared the full rigours of the game. Of course the actualities of daily living were disagreeable, but any one who sought to shirk those necessities, who sought to take his existence out of the mill where fate had fixed him, was a mere trifler.