Part 9

“Not exactly; but you could see that she meant it. Do you think it would do for them to change from their hotel, and go to the Grand Union or the States or Congress Hall?”

“Have you been putting them up to that, Isabel?”

“I knew you would suspect me, and I wouldn’t have asked for your opinion if I had cared anything for it, really. What would be the harm of their doing it?”

“None whatever, if you really want my worthless opinion. But what could they do there?”

“They could see something if they couldn’t do anything, and as soon as Miss Gage has got her new gowns I’m going to tell them you thought they could do it. It was their own idea, at any rate.”

“Miss Gage’s?”

“Mrs. Deering’s. She has the courage of a—I don’t know what. She sees that it’s a desperate case, and she wouldn’t stop at anything.”

“Now that her husband has gone home.”

“Well, which hotel shall they go to?”

“Oh, that requires reflection.”

“Very well, then, when you’ve reflected I want you to go to the hotel you’ve chosen, and introduce yourself to the clerk, and tell him your wife has two friends coming, and you want something very pleasant for them. Tell him all about yourself and Every Other Week.”

“He’ll think I want them deadheaded.”

“No matter, if your conscience is clear; and don’t be so shamefully modest as you always are, but speak up boldly. Now, will you? Promise me you will!”

“I will try, as the good little boy says. But, Isabel, we don’t know these people except from their own account.”

“And that is quite enough.”

“It will be quite enough for the hotel-keeper if they run their board. I shall have to pay it.”

“Now, Basil dear, don’t be disgusting, and go and do as you’re bid.”

It was amusing, but it was perfectly safe, and there was no reason why I should not engage rooms for the ladies at another hotel. I had not the least question of them, and I had failed to worry my wife with a pretended doubt. So I decided that I would go up at once and inquire at the Grand Union. I chose this hotel because, though it lacked the fine flower of the more ancient respectability and the legendary charm of the States, it was so spectacular that it would be in itself a perpetual excitement for those ladies, and would form an effect of society which, with some help from us, might very well deceive them. This was what I said to myself, though in my heart I knew better. Whatever Mrs. Deering might think, that girl was not going to be taken in with any such simple device, and I must count upon the daily chances in the place to afford her the good time she had come for.

As I mounted the steps to the portico of the Grand Union with my head down, and lost in a calculation of these chances, I heard my name gaily called, and I looked up to see young Kendricks, formerly of our staff on Every Other Week, and still a frequent contributor, and a great favourite of my wife’s and my own. My heart gave a great joyful bound at sight of him.

“My dear boy, when in the world did you come?”

“This morning by the steamboat train, and I am never, never going away!”

“You like it, then?”

“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—”