“Well, nobody exactly knows. She thawed their ice, I suppose, by having a typhoid fever here, summer before last, when she first came; they nursed her through it, and did her no end of kindness, and of course that made them fond of her—so perverse is human nature. Besides, I think she fascinates their straight-up-and-downness by the graceful convolutions of her circuitous character; that’s human nature, too.”
Gilbert laughed again, but did not say anything; and his sister-in-law, after waiting for him to speak, returned to what she had been saying of Rachel Woodward.
“You had better tell Mr. Easton about our artist. He may be on the lookout for another beneficiary, now Rogers is gone, and would like her for a protégée. If some one could only marry her, poor girl, and put her out of her misery in that way! As it stands, it’s a truly deplorable case.”
“I’m sorry you still think so meanly of woman, Susan,” said Gilbert, rising.
“Yes, it is sorrowful; but it’s an old story to you. I take my cue from Nature; she never loses an occasion to show her contempt for us; she knows us so well. Do you see anything hopeful in Miss Woodward’s predicament?”
“I’m a man. If I were a woman I would never go back on my sex.”
“Oh, you can’t tell; a man can have no idea how very little women think of one another. Is Robert really so very busy? I don’t blame him for finding a substitute for West Pekin when he can; but I do blame him for trying to spare my feelings now, when he hasn’t been here but twice this summer. Of course, he hates to come, and I’m going to give him his freedom for the rest of the season.”
“I think he’ll like it,” said Gilbert. He offered his hand for good night, and his sister-in-law allowed him to go, like a wise invalid who knows her own force and endurance.
Gilbert found Easton waiting for him on the upper gallery of the hotel, which overlooked a deep, broad hollow. At the bottom of this the white mist lay so dense that it filled the space of the valley like a shallow lake, and the clumps of trees stood out of it here and there like little isles. The friends sat looking at the pretty illusion in the silence which friends need not break, and Easton’s cigar flashed and darkened in the shadow like the spark of a farseen revolving light. He often lamented this habit of his in vigorous self-reproach, not chiefly as a thing harmful to himself, but as a public wrong and an oppression to many other people; if any one had asked him to give it up, he would gladly have done so; but no one did, and he clung to his cigar with a constancy which Gilbert, who did not smoke, praised as the saving virtue of his character, the one thing that kept him from being a standing rebuke to humanity.
After a while Easton drew the last shameful solace from his cigar and flung the remaining fragment over the rail. He rose to look after it and see that it set nothing on fire; then he returned to his seat and, clasping his hands outside his knees, said, “I’ve been thinking over that encounter of ours with that girl to-day, and I believe you are right. She did leave the book there that she might have an excuse to come back and see what we were like.”