As one moon after another waxed baby-faced and then pined away to a wan shadow the friends became more inseparable than ever. And, behold! seeing these things, all the masculine boarders and the "girls" of the manor-house looked at each other obliquely with an expression that consorts best with paganism and pig-tails, while the lady-boarders smiled with that exasperating significance which when given to one's own affairs makes one yearn for the smiler's scalp. But in spite of these oblique glances and significant smiles, in spite of everything indicative of the contrary, they were not an atom in love with each other.
Unless they both of them fibbed! Which young people in their circumstances were never known to do.
Nevertheless, one day Annie Deane was sitting in an embrasured window writing, school-girl fashion, upon an atlas in her lap. She wore a blue gingham dress in the style of a loose blouse. The skirt was short, and had no scruples about revealing two nicely-booted feet crossed one over the other, the toe of one pointing to the zenith, the other toward the coast of Europe. This was her sketching-costume, and she had not found time to change it for the more conventional one in which she usually took tea, as she was hurrying to finish a letter in time for the butcher, who would soon pass by on his return from Mansfield, to take to the post-office at Baysville.
The room was spacious, and tried its best to be gloomy. The canopied bed against the wall was hung with funereal drapery, and reminded one somehow of a Cinque-cento tomb. When an occupant was extended there the resemblance could not but be dolorously striking. A tremendous old chest of drawers opposite, mighty among furniture as Goliath among men, hung its brass rings massively downward; and I was forcibly reminded of that chest of drawers the other day when I saw how the sainted dead of imperial Rome were packed away in the Catacombs of St. Calixtus. Imagine a chest of drawers which gives an impression that upon pulling its brass rings one will see, not dainty garments frothy with lace and ruffles, but a spectacle of rich animal mould and white holy bones! There were one or two dignified old chairs—judicial, majestic chairs, which evidently imagined that they impressed the vulgar radicals of this New World with the idea that in their own country they had been thrones or something of that sort. It was a most dignified and impressive room in spite of its rag carpet, its cane-seated rockers, camp-stools, books, the sketches pinned upon the walls, flowers, and all the odds and ends of feminine finery that betrayed the levity of its modern habit. That is, perhaps one might better say it would have been dignified and impressive had one ever been able to see it otherwise than as merely an architectural background, like the chairs behind Giovanni Bellini's gracious Madonnas, to the pretty picture of youth and content writing there by the seaward window. Everybody always spoke of Annie Deane as "little," although she was five feet four in her stockings. Everybody always ran away with the impression—and treated her accordingly—that she was very young, although she had seen every day of twenty-five years. "I was born young, and have never learned much of anything since," she would laughingly say when somebody had called her "child" and advised her about her manners.
She was a child spiritually, and it certainly seemed as if she would never be spiritually grown up. Her father had died at sixty, so springy of step, so airy of movement, so jaunty, so natty, so nice in his No. 3 gaiters and his nobby hats, that to see him ten paces off one would have sworn he had not twenty years upon his canary-bird head. Annie was like him, and her head swung and swayed, fluttered and tiptilted on its graceful neck, as much as his had done as a young canary-bird's ways are like an old one's.
"Ef the air of that girl ain't enough to make a hoss larf!" said, with edifying perseverance, the youngest and burnt-umberest of the burnt-umber maidens with whom they boarded.
Miss Roberta Editha was sentimental and thirty-five. She pressed a vision of beauty to her virginal breast. Years before she had cut from some illustrated paper a very pretty picture representing some strolling actor who played Hamlet and Claude Melnotte upon the boards of rural theatres. It had miraculously large eyes, a small mouth with downward curves, and flat rings of hair upon its pallid brow. Its air was generally cankered and worm-eaten, but Miss Roberta ("Old Bob," some of the graceless artists called her behind her back) interpreted that air as expressive of a soul which found this life of too rank and coarse a flavor for its daily food. She had cut out this woodcut, and had worn it for years in a massive heirloom locket around her long, brown neck.
It was the Ideal of her Yearning Soul. "Never till I meet a Being like this will I give my heart," she had said, now these many years. Once she thought she had met that Being: it was the natty clerk who sold her calico and clothes-pins at Mansfield. But when that mercenary Hylas married a Baysville widow with money she wept a while, and then saw clearly through her tears that the deceiver looked not in the least like a Being, but only like a very commonplace man. Once again it was an artist who had boarded with them a summer, and whose red hair fell over his rosy brow in a manner that indicated a possible Being. But it turned out that this artist was married and the father of a thriving family; whereupon he too faded out of Roberta Editha's ideal world into the prosaic region where are not Beings, but only men and women. After that it was several artists, all of whom in turn had died, under some blight, out from the thoughts of the burnt-umber maiden. Latterly she had been bending soulful eyes upon Ben Shaw, sure that at last in his lineaments she could trace the adored image. Ben's eyes were neither miraculously large nor superlatively dark: neither had he a small mouth with downward curves. He was blond and robust, inclined to be rather high-colored, especially after dinner, which proved his digestion defective or that appetite outran it; but, setting such little discrepancies aside, she was sure her Ideal was there.
But while Roberta Editha described Annie Deane's airy manners in such unflattering terms, it is more than probable that Ben Shaw would be saying to the latter at that very moment, "Never lose your youthful nature, and always preserve your young ways, Annie: they are your greatest charm." For this was a habit with Ben Shaw.