“Like it! It’s the most delightful thing in the universe. Why, I’m simply wild about it, Mr. March. I go round saying to myself, Why have I thrown away my life? Why have I never come to Saratoga before? It’s simply supreme, and it’s American down to the ground. Yes; that’s what makes it so delightful. No other people could have invented it, and it doesn’t try to be anything but what we made it.”
“I’m so glad you look at it in that way. We like it. We discovered it three or four years ago, and we never let a summer slip, if we can help it, without coming here for a week or a month. The place,” I enlarged, “has the charm of ruin, though it’s in such obvious repair; it has a past; it’s so completely gone by in a society sense. The cottage life here hasn’t killed the hotel life, as it has at Newport and Bar Harbour; but the ideal of cottage life everywhere else has made hotel life at Saratoga ungenteel. The hotels are full, but at the same time they are society solitudes.”
“How gay it is!” said the young fellow, as he gazed with a pensive smile into the street, where all those festive vehicles were coming and going, dappled by the leaf-shadows from the tall trees overhead. “What air! what a sky!” The one was indeed sparkling, and the other without a cloud, for it had rained in the night, and it seemed as if the weather could never be hot and close again.
I forgot how I had been sweltering about, and said: “Yes; it is a Saratoga day. It’s supposed that the sparkle of the air comes from the healthful gases thrown off by the springs. Some people say the springs are doctored; that’s what makes their gases so healthful.”
“Why, anything might happen here,” Kendricks mused, unheedful of me. “What a scene! what a stage! Why has nobody done a story about Saratoga?” he asked, with a literary turn I knew his thoughts would be taking. All Gerald Kendricks’s thoughts were of literature, but sometimes they were not of immediate literary effect, though that was never for long.
“Because,” I suggested, “one probably couldn’t get his young lady characters to come here if they were at all in society. But of course there must be charming presences here accidentally. Some young girl, say, might come here from a country place, expecting to see social gaiety—”
“Ah, but that would be too heart-breaking!”
“Not at all. Not if she met some young fellow accidentally—don’t you see?”
“It would be difficult to manage; and hasn’t it been done?”
“Everything has been done, my dear fellow. Or, you might suppose a young lady who comes on here with her father, a veteran politician, delegate to the Republican or Democratic convention—all the conventions meet in Saratoga,—and some ardent young delegate falls in love with her. That would be new ground. There you would have the political novel, which they wonder every now and then some of us don’t write.” The smile faded from Kendricks’s lips, and I laughed. “Well, then, there’s nothing for it but the Social Science Congress. Have a brilliant professor win the heart of a lovely sister-in-law of another member by a paper he reads before the Congress. No? You’re difficult. Are you stopping here?”