“Good-by, Laura,” said the Unknown, taking her plump little hand in his; “won’t you give me a kiss? Ah, that’s a good little girl! One more! And another! Ah!” And he patted her cheek. “Good-by!”
“Dood-by!”
CHAPTER III.
We looked at each other, and, although two-thirds of us were girls, several seconds passed without a word being spoken.
“Oh, here comes Mary!” And, looking across the way, I saw Mary Rolfe briskly tripping down the steps of her father’s residence. Away scampered Alice and Lucy into the hall; not to unlock the front door for Mary, for that, Richmond-fashion, stood wide open; but impelled by that instinctive conviction, never entirely absent from the female breast, that life is short. I followed with all the dignity of a fledgling counsellor-at-law, and possible future supreme justice.
The three met on the sidewalk and it began,—Eurus, Zephyrusque Notusque.
All nature is one. Remove the plug from a basin and see how the water, instead of pouring straight out in a business-like way, spins round and round, just as though it knew you were late for breakfast. Behold, too, the planets in their courses. And as in a tornado, which whirls along through field and forest, across mountain-chain and valley, around its advancing storm-centre, so in one of those lesser atmospheric disturbances set up by the conversation, or rather contemporaneousversation, of three or four girls just met (impossible though it be, in the present state of our knowledge, to determine in advance the precise location of their area of lowest barometric pressure), it is clear, even to the eye, that the movement of the girls themselves is cyclonic. And, further, just as, in a storm, the area of highest barometer is found to be occupied by a more or less tranquil atmosphere, so you shall find that the centre of a contemporancousversation always moves forward around a listener,—some weakling of a girl, with a bronchitis, perhaps, or, in rare cases, a stammerer. And again, just as a body of air, itself capable of levelling houses and uprooting trees, may be forced into quiescence by its environment of storm, so may a really worthy girl, not otherwise inferior, be reduced to silence by despair.
This, in fact, was the case with Lucy in the present instance. As the lovely human cyclone, whose outward sign was a world of fluttering ribbons and waving flounces, came whirling up the steps, through the hall, and into the parlor, it was obvious that she was the pivot around which it revolved.
In plain English, she found it impossible to get in a word.
It appears that Mary had seen, from her window, the Unknown, and watched his strange performances till he was gone. She had not seen us at our window, and tripping across the street to tell her dear Alice what a singular man she had seen sitting on her carriage-block, and talking with Laura, she had found that Alice had seen and heard more than she. And so, with that instinctive dread of loss of time so characteristic of the sex, they both, when they met on the sidewalk, began talking at once. They began talking to each other; but soon, their words, in obedience to that law of which Mr. Herbert Spencer makes so much (that moving bodies always follow the line of least resistance), began flowing into Lucy’s ears. Not that Mary took possession of one ear, Alice of the other. Rather did they, in obedience to law, revolve around her, as the earth around the sun, the moon round the earth, water round its exit, pouring their tidings into either organ with impartial eagerness.