Was she quite sure of that truth, after this day?
When that father died, the demand for sacrifice had come through her mother, and she had not questioned it. What she had gone to Bryn Mawr for was not personal gratification—at least, she thought not—but equipment. She must respond to events, as her father had done many years ago when he took the Anthon affairs in hand, without disguising the unpleasant consequences to herself.
It was a primitive religion blindly taught and blindly followed.
Just what could she do for her mother, now that she had made this sacrifice of her independence? Her brothers had expected it; in the general emotional drawing together of the family after Mr. Anthon’s death, it had not seemed so impossible. Had her father, however, expected it? He had left her an independent fortune. There might be an implication in that fact.
St. Louis, without that father and without any definite goal except to make herself companionable to her mother, had soon become intolerable. The college youths, home for vacation, appeared more childish than ever; the staid young men in business, more wooden. In desperation, one day, she found herself on the point of accepting a young lawyer, for the sole reason, when she paused to reflect, that he agreed with her in finding St. Louis arid. The fathers and mothers of the present turbulent generation had toiled out their days, and at night had been content to sit dully on the great stone stoops, or in the stuffy parlours, merely idle, until the morrow of renewed effort. The children had their energy, and yet refused the old task. So, naturally enough, she had entered into Sebastian Anthon’s plan of a year in Europe,—a convenient solution for every American family in doubt or distress.
The file of carriages had thinned out; the theatres had opened. Waiters were standing listlessly in the doors of the cafés. Mrs. Anthon was saying,—
“Don’t be a fool, Sebastian, over that fellow. He is a worthless young man. I told you five years ago, ‘Sebastian, you are perverting that young man. Give him a place in the brick company, and let him earn his salt, as you have done, as John did.’ But you were weak and amiable, and the Erard kind get around you.”
Miss Anthon smiled at the idea of Erard in bricks. Moreover, wasn’t all this talk about Mr. Simeon Erard’s manner of livelihood rather vulgar and impertinent? Here in Paris it was easy to slip away from her harsh creed of common prejudices. Erard seemed to her the most interesting figure on her horizon, and she was tempted to accept him for what he could give her, for what he had given her already.
She rose hastily, stifled, eager to step out on the boulevard, to follow the throng. “I will walk back to the hotel, mamma, if Mr. Wilbur will go with me.”
The young man got up with an air of relief, and the two started down the boulevard in the direction of the Avenue de l’Opera. He offered her his arm awkwardly, noticing that the other men and women were promenading linked together. Miss Anthon laughed: “We’re Americans and needn’t do it!”