Nobody ever knew, you see, until they began, what Miss Haviland did during the long periods she shut herself up in that little apartment of hers in the New Gainsborough. If, as you say, she seemed to burst so suddenly, so authoritatively, into print for you, think what it must have meant for us when we saw such dexterity and finish unfurled all at once in the pages of the Standard. Unbeknownst she had been working and writing and waiting for years, with an indefatigable and indomitable and clear-sighted vision of becoming an author. It was her aim, people have told me since, from the time she was a girl.
She had been to Harvard, summers, and taken all the courses which the vacation curriculum afforded—unnoticed, unapplauded, it is said, by her instructors. She had traveled—not so widely, either, but cleverly, eclectically, domineeringly, with her sole end in view. After five minutes with only—say—a timetable, acquired, let us suppose, at Cook’s, Topica, she could as showily allude to any express de luxe there mentioned—be it for Tonkin or Salamanca—as the most confirmed passenger ever upon it. She had mastered French and Italian. And she had—first and last and betweenwhiles—read Hurrell Oaks. I venture to say there wasn’t a vowel—or consonant, for that matter—of the seventy-odd volumes she hadn’t persistently, enamouredly, and enviously devoured.
At Newfair, people had by this time, of course, compared her “work” with the “works” of Hurrell Oaks; but you know how few people have the patience or the taste to “take him in”? And the result of comparisons almost invariably was that Marian Haviland was better. She had assimilated some of the psychology, much of the method, and a little of the charm; and had crossed all her T’s and dotted her I’s, and revised and simplified the style, as one person put it, for “the use of schools”; and brought what Hurrell Oaks called “the base rattle of the foreground” fully into play.
Instead of being accused of having got so much from him, she was credited, one thought, with having given him a good deal. You might have guessed, to hear people at Newfair talk, that she was partly responsible for the ovations being tendered him over the country during the season of his return—the first time in fifteen years—to his native land.
“Mrs. ——,” Miss Haviland explained, mentioning a well-known metropolitan name, “has written me” (of course she would be the one literary fact at Newfair to write to on such matters) “to ask if we can possibly do with Mr. Oaks overnight.”
I gaped under my handkerchief at the fluency of her “do.”
“But I don’t just know how,” she went on, “we could make him comfortable. Mrs. Edgerton won’t be well in time. And he mustn’t stay at the Greens’.” She waxed indignant at the very possibility. “In her guest-room, my dear? With those Honiton laces, and that scorbutic carpet, and the whirligig pattern on the walls—and the windows giving on the parti-colored slate roof of the gymnasium?”
I tried, in spite of myself, to think commensurately.
“And Mrs. Kneeland’s waitress wears ear-rings!... No. Now I’ve been thinking—don’t hurry along so, George. You never keep in line! It spoils the pleasure of walking when one constantly outsteps you like that.”
“Pardon,” said George, and fell back.