So spoke Anita Hartridge as she and Mary Kenton took their places in the Broadway stage on their way to a matinee at the French Theatre. Anita's father was a Baltimore merchant. He was often in the city buying goods, but this was the first time he had brought his daughter with him. The two girls were warm friends. They had been educated together, and it was not yet a year since they had bidden adieu to the convent walls, the one to thread, motherless, the gay mazes of Baltimore society; the other to come home as a household angel to the father and mother, who were already beginning to grow old. It has been a happy week, a week all too soon coming to an end; and Mary Kenton sits thinking sadly, so wrapped in her reveries that she does not even raise her eyes when the stage stops to take in more passengers.
She is thinking of Anita, of her beauty and brilliancy, her quick, flashing, Southern gayety, and yet deep, true, sympathetic heart; and she wonders what will become of her friend, with no mother to restrain her impulsiveness and a father who thinks only of gratifying her lightest wish. How gladly she would share with her her own mother's tender care; and if she could but be taken from this whirl of amusement for a short time; but no; they return to-morrow. Well, here they are at Union Square, and Anita is speaking softly.
"Mary, did you ever see so beautiful a face? No, not opposite; over there in the corner next the door—that younger Sister of Mercy. She looks like Elizabeth of Hungary. I have been watching her all this time, and she has never looked up once. She seems inspired. Do you believe any one can be so happy as she looks, I mean any one who leads so self-denying a life?"
But there is no time to reply. They leave the omnibus and are soon entranced under the magic power of the great tragedian.
"I wish I were Ristori," said Anita, as they left the theatre. "To have her power and to be admired as she is admired; oh! that were grand. That were a life worth living. What is it to live as we do—to-day as yesterday, and to-morrow as to-day again—no grand purpose; and when we die, have the world go on just the same as before? Such lives are not worth living. I wish I could be great as Madame de Staël, or beautiful as Madame Recamier."
"'O world! so few the years we live,
Would that the life that thou dost give
Were life indeed!'"
repeated Mary slowly; "and yet, there are other lives that I had rather take for my model than any of these."
"Yes, I know, Mary. You would take rather the life of some saint, St. Elizabeth herself, perhaps; you are always so good and gentle; and Sister Agnes used to say that she knew you would come back to her some time as a sister yourself. But I am not at all so; I love the world, and society, and amusement, and am only dissatisfied because I am neither so brilliant nor beautiful as I should like to be. I feel that your ideal is the better one, but I have not strength of character enough to live anything but a gay, butterfly life. You know my favorite song is, 'I'd be a butterfly,' and indeed I do wish for beauty more than anything else in the world. And yet, after all, that face that I saw under the plain black bonnet was of a heavenly beauty that I cannot forget. Page's copy of the Madonna della Seggiola that we admired so much yesterday is scarcely more beautiful."
"And her life has been as beautiful as her face, they say. But there is our stage. Let us hurry a little; mother will be waiting dinner for us already."