I say, on looking at these: “Avanel, I desire to meet your father, the honorable Black Hawk Boone. I darkly suspect he is one of those who go about in unpressed clothes and will doubtless furnish me with words to say to you. I should say that the daughter of such a father should be willing to dye her left hand crimson, for him, proudly.”
Avanel answers with a tearful solemnity, positively babyish:—“If you truly love me you will not use my father against me. While I respect him, I cannot respect all his clan and ideas and I am even more vexed over his way of mixing with mussy people. If I must have that kind of thing, I go to the saint who does it for religion and not from philosophy. I want you to meet St. Friend.”
March 10:—Late this evening I buy a sack of popcorn and walk about the shopping district alone, eating the well-buttered corn from my pocket, and swinging my cane, and observing the beauty of the ladies as they go into the theatre with their escorts. Many of them remind me of girls I used to eye with breathless reverence in Springfield. I am glad to wonder over beauty without being vexed with it, and I stand in the shadow, inwardly defying Miss Avanel. And having defied her about an hour, I call at nine o’clock, feeling perfectly emancipated, and tell her the following story:—
“Avanel, last night we went abroad into Dreamland together, hand in hand and heart in heart, looking with equal guilt for the Golden Pool of the Handsome Medicine Man, Devil’s Gold. It was way past midnight when we found him, in the midst of the black prairies of Dreamland I well know. He was making his medicine, and dishonoring our souls, by calling our names across the plain. We did not flinch. We walked straight to his yellow campfire, and looked into his gilded face and admired his yellow blanket, and right by his fire we satisfied our wicked desire by admiring ourselves in his golden pool.
“Our faces were close together, and as we looked into the pool, we saw ourselves in a mundane world, so perfect that its materialism became magical.
“We walked down through the pool, as though into an underground house, and we looked into each others faces again. And we were moving, gilded images from head to feet, and we were satisfied with each other at last, and I knew I wanted you to be gilded as much as you desired me to be so, and we took the wickedest pleasure in looking upon the yellow world around us.”
“Yes,” said Avanel, “I walked there with you in my dream last night, and I hope we will walk in houses of holiness together and I am sorry we walked in the pool of gold. Come with me to St. Friend.” After that, Avanel is more of a Christian.
CHAPTER VI
THE TWO FACTIONS:—MAYOR SLICK SLACK KOPENSKY AND HIS BOSS, MAYO SIMS; VERSUS BOONE, PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF EDUCATION.
April 3, 2018:—It is a sunny April morning. I note some tiny spring beauties in the patches of snow. Every cloud threatens, but every cloud rolls by. I begin to apprehend April’s pretty promise of final deliverance from frost and snow. I am loafing around the coffee houses, listening to the talk, and being received as one of the more obscure inhabitants. Occasionally some one asks, with an effort at interest, if I am starting my art classes soon. But the most lofty and the most humble call me “cousin,” as they do one another. I am sounded a bit as to whether I share the political opinions of Sparrow Short, and incidentally if we belong to the same school of art teaching, and if he will give my classes a criticism from time to time. I write down the name of the youth who seeks me out desiring to enroll and am for the first time flattered.
By putting fugitive bits of loud talk with observations of the last few mornings, I begin to get the social fabric, and take a lesson in New Springfield’s politics.