“Pumping? He asked nothing better than to flow. He would put to shame the provoked spontaneity of any spring in Saratoga.”
“Well, did he say that he was going to leave them here?”
“He would like to do it—yes. He was very sweet and simple and kind, too, Isabel. He complained bitterly of the goddess, and all but said she sulked.”
“Why, I don’t know,” said my wife. “I think, considering, that she is rather amiable. She brightened up more and more.”
“That was prosperity, or the hope of it, my dear. Nothing illumines us like the prospect of pleasant things. She took you for society smiling upon her, and of course she smiled back. But it’s only the first smile of prosperity that cheers. If it keeps on smiling it ends by making us dissatisfied again. When people are getting into society they are very glad; when they have got in they seem to be rather gloomy. We mustn’t let these things go too far. Now that you’ve got your friends in good humour, the right way is to drop them—to cut them dead when you meet them, to look the other way. That will send them home perfectly radiant.”
“Nonsense! I am going to do all I can for them. What do you think we can do? They haven’t the first idea how to amuse themselves here. It’s a miracle they ever got that dress the girl is wearing. They just made a bold dash because they saw it in a dressmaker’s window the first day, and she had to have something. It’s killingly becoming to her; but I don’t believe they know it, and they don’t begin to know how cheap it was: it was simply thrown away. I’m going shopping with them in the morning.”
“Oh!”
“But now the question is, what we can do to give them some little glimpse of social gaiety. That’s what they’ve come for.”
We were passing the corner of a large enclosure which seems devoted in Saratoga to the most distracting of its pleasures, and I said: “Well, we might give them a turn on the circular railway or the switchback; or we could take them to the Punch and Judy drama, or get their fortunes told in the seeress’s tent, or let them fire in the shooting-gallery, or buy some sweet-grass baskets of the Indians; and there is the pop-corn and the lemonade.”
“I will tell you what,” said Mrs. March, who had not been listening to a word I said; for if she had heard me she would not have had patience with my ironical suggestions.