Through the Eye of the Needle: A Romance

by William Dean Howells

He took my hand again and held it in his soft old hands, as if hesitating whether to transfer it to her, and my heart melted towards him. You may think it very odd, Dolly, but it was what he said of my dear, dead husband that softened me. It made him seem very fatherly, and I felt the affection for him that I felt for my husband, when he seemed more like a father. Aristides and I often talk of it, and he has no wish that I should forget him.

Mrs. Thrall made no motion to take my hand from him, but she said, “I think I have met Mr. Strange,” and now I saw in the background, sitting on a camp-stool near a long, lank young man stretched in a hammock, a very handsome girl, who hastily ran through a book, and then dropped it at the third mention of my name. I suspected that the book was the Social Register, and that the girl's search for me had been satisfactory, for she rose and came vaguely towards us, while the young man unfolded himself from the hammock, and stood hesitating, but looking as if he rather liked what had happened.

Mr. Thrall bustled about for camp-stools, and said, “Do stop and have some breakfast with us, it's just coming in. May I introduce my daughter, Lady Moors and—and Lord Moors?” The girl took my hand, and the young man bowed from his place; but if that poor old man had known, peace was not to be made so easily between two such bad-tempered women as Mrs. Thrall and myself. We expressed some very stiff sentiments in regard to the weather, and the prospect of the yacht getting off with the next tide, and my husband joined in with that manly gentleness of his, but we did not sit down, much less offer to stay to breakfast. We had got to the door of the tent, the family following us, even to the noble son-in-law, and as she now realized that we are actually going, Mrs. Thrall gasped out, “But you are not leaving us? What shall we do with all these natives?”

This was again too much, and I flamed out at her. “Natives! They are cultivated and refined people, for they are Altrurians, and I assure you you will be in much better hands than mine with them, for I am only Altrurian by marriage!”

She was one of those leathery egotists that nothing will make a dint in, and she came back with, “But we don't speak the language, and they don't speak English, and how are we to manage if the yacht doesn't get afloat?”

“Oh, no doubt you will be looked after from the capital we have just left. But I will venture to make a little suggestion with regard to the natives in the mean time. They are not proud, but they are very sensitive, and if you fail in any point of consideration, they will understand that you do not want their hospitality.”

“I imagine our own people will be able to look after us,” she answered quite as nastily. “We do not propose to be dependent on them. We can pay our way here as we do elsewhere.”

“The experiment will be worth trying,” I said. “Come, Aristides!” and I took the poor fellow away with me to our van. Mr. Thrall made some hopeless little movements towards us, but I would not stop or even look back. When we got into the van, I made Aristides put on the full power, and fell back into my seat and cried a while, and then I scolded him because he would not scold me, and went on in a really scandalous way. It must have been a revelation to him, but he only smoothed me on the shoulder and said, “Poor Eveleth, poor Eveleth,” till I thought I should scream; but it ended in my falling on his neck, and saying I knew I was horrid, and what did he want me to do?

After I calmed down into something like rationality, he said he thought we had perhaps done the best thing we could for those people in leaving them to themselves, for they could come to no possible harm among the neighbors. He did not believe from what he had seen of the yacht from the shore, and from what the Altrurians had told him, that there was one chance in a thousand of her ever getting afloat. But those people would have to convince themselves of the fact, and of several other facts in their situation. I asked him what he meant, and he said he could tell me, but that as yet it was a public affair, and he would rather not anticipate the private interest I would feel in it. I did not insist; in fact, I wanted to get that odious woman out of my mind as soon as I could, for the thought of her threatened to poison the pleasure of the rest of our tour.

I believe my husband hurried it a little, though he did not shorten it, and we got back to the Maritime Region almost a week sooner than we had first intended. I found my dear mother well, and still serenely happy in her Altrurian surroundings. She had begun to learn the language, and she had a larger acquaintance in the capital, I believe, than any other one person. She said everybody had called on her, and they were the kindest people she had ever dreamed of. She had exchanged cooking-lessons with one lady who, they told her, was a distinguished scientist, and she had taught another, who was a great painter, a peculiar embroidery stitch which she had learned from my grandmother, and which everybody admired. These two ladies had given her most of her grammatical instruction in Altrurian, but there was a bright little girl who had enlarged her vocabulary more than either, in helping her about her housework, the mother having lent her for the purpose. My mother said she was not ashamed to make blunders before a child, and the little witch had taken the greatest delight in telling her the names of things in the house and the streets and the fields outside the town, where they went long walks together.