“Well?”
“Isn’t she a stunner?” And he nodded towards a group of girls who stood about the piano.
“Which one?”
He dug me in the ribs and passed into the Hall.
CHAPTER XXXV.
With the assembling of our friends in the Hall on that Christmas afternoon our story enters upon a new phase,—one, too, in which Mary Rolfe will figure more prominently than she has hitherto done. Of her friend Alice—Alice with the merry-glancing hazel eyes—the reader has, I trust, a tolerably clear conception. The picture we have of her is a pleasant one, I think,—a picture drawn not by me, but by herself. But from Mary—shy, reserved, and shrinking as she is—we can expect no such boon. Her portrait must be my work.
And first, I must repeat that she was Alice’s closest friend. When their acquaintance began, it would be hard to say. Their mothers before them were warm friends, and had been so fortunate as to have their homes, after marriage, separated only by one of Richmond’s peaceful streets; so that, even in long clothes, Alice and Mary, introduced by their respective nurses, had contracted such intimacy as might be gained by a reciprocal fumbling of each other’s noses and the poking of pink fingers into blinking eyes. Across this street, a few years later, these little crafts had made voyages innumerable; beneath its branching trees trundled their unsteady hoops, and along its not very crowded sidewalk had swung proudly, hand in hand, one bright October day, going to their first school. And ever since that day they have been going, so to speak, hand in hand. One circumstance, no doubt, that contributed much to binding their hearts together, was the fact that they were only daughters; so that each was, as it were the adopted sister of the other. But what, above all things, as I have suggested elsewhere, rendered a warm friendship between them both possible and lasting, was the singularly sharp contrasts presented by their characters. Two girls more radically unlike in disposition it would be hardly possible to find.
Now, among other traits of Mary’s character, totally lacking in Alice, was one of importance for my purposes, in that it was destined to make her play a considerable rôle amid the scenes to be pictured in the ensuing pages. It was a trait that goes by different names. According to some of her acquaintance,—kindred spirits they were,—Mary was full of enthusiasms, while to others of the hard-headed, practical type, she seemed sentimental. I, as umpire, must compromise by admitting that she was certainly what is called romantic. And I was about to bring in a little cheap philosophy to explain that this was due to the vast amount of novels and poetry with which she had stuffed her head, when I recalled the fact that some of the most clear-headed, energetic, and every way admirable women that I have known devoured every novel that they could lay their hands on. I, therefore, abandon the reflection, uncopyrighted, to such moralizers and others as have leisure to explain things of which they know nothing. But the fact was as I have stated it; Mary was a thoroughly romantic, or, if you will, sentimental young person, though I regret to have to say so. For it will lower her in your estimation, I fear, when I make known to you, by a few illustrations, what I mean by saying she was romantic.
It is more necessary for me to do this than would appear to the average contemporary reader. For it is more than likely that the expression, a romantic young female, will be totally unintelligible in your day, or, rather, that it will have an entirely different meaning from that which those words convey to us. You, too, of course, will not be without your romantic virgins,—that is to say, maidens of tender years, who, standing upon the hither brink of that dark and troublous sea called life, and watching the pitching and tossing of the numberless barks that have gone before,—who, seeing some struggling amid the breakers, others going to pieces on the reefs, still others drifting, dismantled and shattered, upon a shore already thick-strewn with wrecks,—yet love to dream of smooth and sunny paths across that pitiless waste of waters,—if—if only the Ideal Pilot may be found.
Yes, your girls will have their ideals,—but what ideals?