"The Baltimore ladies may have what you call grace and ease," said she, with the same delicious hauteur, "and the Boston ladies are very 'strong-minded,'" she continued, in a tone intended for consuming satire, the more unhappy that it was clear she could make no claim to either of the qualities—"but the New York women have air," she concluded, and sailed away with what "might be air," said Herbert, who heard her remark, "but certainly very bad air."
Learn from this passage of my experience, beloved reader, you who are for the first time encountering that Sphinx, a New York belle, that she is not terrible. You shall find her irreproachable in tournure, but it is no more exclusively beautiful or admirable, than New York is exclusively the fine city of the country. I am a young man, of course, and inexperienced; but I prefer that lovely languor of the Southern manners, which is expressed in the negligence, and sometimes even grotesqueness of dress, to the vapid superciliousness, which is equally expressed in the coarse grass cloth that imparts the adorable Je ne sais quoi of style. "It is truly amusing," Herbert says, who has been a far traveler, "to see these nice New Yorkers assuming that the whole country outside their city is provincial." A Parisian lady who should affect to treat a Florentine as a provincial, would be exiled by derision from social consideration. Fair dames of New York, I am but an anonymous valedictorian; yet why not make your beauty more beautiful, by that courtesy which is loftier than disdain, and superior to superciliousness?
Ah, well! it was an aromatic evening. Disraeli says that Ferdinand Armine had a Sicilian conversation with Henrietta Temple, in the conservatory. You know how it ended, and they knew how it would end,—they were married. But if Ferdinand had plunged into that abyss of excitement, knowing that however Sicilian his conversation might be, it would all end in a bachelor's quarters, with Henrietta as a lay figure of memory, which he might amuse himself in draping with a myriad rainbow fancies—if he had known this, ought he to have advanced farther in the divine darkness of that prospect? Ought he not to have said, "Dear Miss Temple, my emotions are waxing serious, and I am afraid of them, and will retire."
You will say, "certainly," of course. We all say, "certainly," when we read or talk about it quietly. Young men at Saratoga and Newport say, "certainly," over their cigars. But when the weed is whiffed away, they dress for conquest, and draw upon the Future for the consequences. Unhappily, the Future is perfectly "good," and always settles to the utmost copper.
At least, so Herbert says, and he is older than I am. I only know—in fact, I only cared, that the evening fled away like a sky-lark singing up to the sun at daybreak—(that was a much applauded sentence in my valedictory). I deliberately cut every cable of remorse that might have held me to the "ingenuous course," as it is called, and drove out into the shoreless sea of enjoyment. I revelled in Lulu's beauty, in her grace, in her thousand nameless charms. I was naturally sorry for her. I knew her young affections would "run to waste, and water but the desert." But if a girl will do so! Summer and the midsummer sun shone in a cloudless sky. There was nothing to do but live and love, and Lulu and I did nothing else. Through the motley aspects of Watering-Place existence, our life shot like a golden thread, embroidering it with beauty. We strolled on the piazza at morning and evening. During the forenoon we sat in the parlor, and Lulu worked a bag or a purse, and I sat by her, gossiping that gossip which is evanescent as foam upon champagne—yes, and as odorous and piercing, for the moment it lasts. We only parted to dress for dinner. I relinquished the Vivian Grey style, and returned to my own. Every day Lulu was more exquisitely dressed, and when the band played, after dinner, and the sunlight lay, golden-green, upon the smooth, thick turf, our conversation was inspired by the music, as on the first day, which seemed to me centuries ago, so natural and essential to my life had Lulu become. Toward sunset we drove to the lake. Sometimes in a narrow little wagon, not quite wide enough for two, and in which I sat overdrifted by the azure mist of the dress she wore—nor ever dreaming of the Autumn or the morrow; and sometimes with Herbert and his new horses.
Young America sipping cobblers, and roving about in very loose and immoral coats, voted it "a case." The elderly ladies thought it a "shocking flirtation." The old gentlemen who smoke cigars in the easy chairs under the cool colonnade, watched the course of events through the slow curling clouds of tobacco, and looked at me, when I passed them, as if I were juvenile for a Lothario; while the great dancing, bowling, driving, flirting, and fooling mass of the Saratoga population thought it all natural and highly improper.
It is astonishing to recur to an acquaintance which has become a large and luminous part of your life, and discover that it lasted a week. It is saddening to sit among the withered rose-leaves of a summer, and remember that each rose in its prime seemed the sweetest of roses. The old ladies called it "shocking," and the young ladies sigh that it is "heartless," and the many condemn, while the few wrap themselves in scornful pride at the criminal fickleness of men.
One such I met on a quiet Sunday morning when Lulu had just left me to go and read to her mother.
"You are a vain coxcomb," was the promising prelude of my friend's conversation. But she was a friend, so I did not frown nor play that I was offended.