Then Basil said he really must run down to the office that afternoon, and he issued all aglow upon the street. He was so full of having been long away and of having just returned, that he unconsciously tried to impart his mood to Boston, and the dusty composure of the street and houses, as he strode along, bewildered him. He longed for some familiar face to welcome him, and in the horse-car into which he stepped he was charmed to see an acquaintance. This was a man for whom ordinarily he cared nothing, and whom he would perhaps rather have gone out upon the platform to avoid than have spoken to; but now he plunged at him with effusion, and wrung his hand, smiling from ear to ear.
The other remained coldly unaffected, after a first start of surprise at his cordiality, and then reviled the dust and heat. “But I'm going to take a little run down to Newport, to-morrow, for a week,” he said. “By the way, you look as if you needed a little change. Aren't you going anywhere this summer?”
“So you see, my dear,” observed Basil, when he had recounted the fact to Isabel at tea, “our travels are incommunicably our own. We had best say nothing about our little jaunt to other people, and they won't know we've been gone. Even if we tried, we couldn't make our wedding-journey theirs.”
She gave him a great kiss of recompense and consolation. “Who wants it,” she demanded, “to be Their Wedding Journey?”
XI. NIAGARA REVISITED, TWELVE YEARS AFTER THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.
Life had not used them ill in this time, and the fairish treatment they had received was not wholly unmerited. The twelve years past had made them older, as the years must in passing. Basil was now forty-two, and his moustache was well sprinkled with gray. Isabel was thirty-nine, and the parting of her hair had thinned and retreated; but she managed to give it an effect of youthful abundance by combing it low down upon her forehead, and roughing it there with a wet brush. By gaslight she was still very pretty; she believed that she looked more interesting, and she thought Basil's gray moustache distinguished. He had grown stouter; he filled his double-breasted frock coat compactly, and from time to time he had the buttons set forward; his hands were rounded up on the backs, and he no longer wore his old number of gloves by two sizes; no amount of powder or manipulation from the young lady in the shop would induce them to go on. But this did not matter much now, for he seldom wore gloves at all. He was glad that the fashion suffered him to spare in that direction, for he was obliged to look somewhat carefully after the out-goes. The insurance business was not what it had been, and though Basil had comfortably established himself in it, he had not made money. He sometimes thought that he might have done quite as well if he had gone into literature; but it was now too late. They had not a very large family: they had a boy of eleven, who took after his father, and a girl of nine, who took after the boy; but with the American feeling that their children must have the best of everything, they made it an expensive family, and they spent nearly all Basil earned.
The narrowness of their means, as well as their household cares, had kept them from taking many long journeys. They passed their winters in Boston, and their summers on the South Shore, cheaper than the North Shore, and near enough for Basil to go up and down every day for business; but they promised themselves that some day they would revisit certain points on their wedding journey, and perhaps somewhere find their lost second-youth on the track. It was not that they cared to be young, but they wished the children to see them as they used to be when they thought themselves very old; and one lovely afternoon in June they started for Niagara.