Part 13

“I have just got back from accompanying her to Baltimore. One of us went as far as Washington with her on the train. We gave her a dinner yesterday at the March Hare by way of farewell. She tried our new toboggan fire-escape on a bet. Clean from the attic, my boy. I imagine our native girls will rejoice at her departure. However, nobody’s engaged to her, at least nobody here. How many may fancy themselves so elsewhere I can’t say. Her name is Hortense Rieppe.”

I suppose I must have been silent after finishing this letter.

“No bad news, I trust?” John Mayrant inquired.

I told him no; and presently we had resumed our seats in the quiet charm of the flowers.

I now spoke with an intention. “What a lot you seem to have seen and suffered of the advanced Newport!”

The intention wrought its due and immediate effect. “Yes. There was no choice. I had gone to Newport upon--upon an urgent matter, which took me among those people.”

He dwelt upon the pictures that came up in his mind. But he took me away again from the “urgent matter.”

“I saw,” he resumed more briskly, “fifteen or twenty--most amazing, sir!--young men, some of them not any older than I am, who had so many millions that they could easily--” he paused, casting about for some expression adequate--“could buy Kings Port and put it under a glass case in a museum--my aunts and all--and never know it!” He livened with disrespectful mirth over his own picture of his aunts, purchased by millionaire steel or coal for the purposes of public edification.

“And a very good thing if they could be,” I declared.

He wondered a moment. “My aunts? Under a glass case?”

“Yes, indeed--and with all deference be it said! They’d be more invaluable, more instructive, than the classics of a thousand libraries.”

He was prepared not to be pleased. “May I ask to whom and for what?”

“Why, you ought to see! You’ve just been saying it yourself. They would teach our bulging automobilists, our unlicked boy cubs, our alcoholic girls who shout to waiters for ‘high-balls’ on country club porches--they would teach these wallowing creatures, whose money has merely gilded their bristles, what American refinement once was. The manners we’ve lost, the decencies we’ve banished, the standards we’ve lowered, their light is still flickering in this passing generation of yours. It’s the last torch. That’s why I wish it could, somehow, pass on the sacred fire.”

He shook his head. “They don’t want the sacred fire. They want the high-balls--and they have money enough to be drunk straight through the next world!” He was thoughtful. “They are the classics,” he added.

I didn’t see that he had gone back to my word. “Roman Empire, you mean?”

“No, the others; the old people we’re bidding good-by to. Roman Republic! Simple lives, gallant deeds, and one great uniting inspiration. Liberty winning her spurs. They were moulded under that, and they are our true American classics. Nothing like them will happen again.”

“Perhaps,” I suggested, “our generation is uneasily living in a ‘bad quarter-of-an-hour’--good old childhood gone, good new manhood not yet come, and a state of chicken-pox between whiles.” And on this I made to him a much-used and consoling quotation about the old order changing.

“Who says that?” he inquired; and upon my telling him, “I hope so,” he said, “I hope so. But just now Uncle Sam ‘aspires to descend.’”

I laughed at his counter-quotation. “You know your classics, if you don’t know Tennyson.”

He, too, laughed. “Don’t tell Aunt Eliza!”

“Tell her what?”

“That I didn’t recognize Tennyson. My Aunt Eliza educated me--and she thinks Tennyson about the only poet worth reading since--well, since Byron and Sir Walter at the very latest!”

“Neither she nor Sir Walter come down to modern poetry--or to alcoholic girls.” His tone, on these last words, changed.

Again, as when he had said “an urgent matter,” I seemed to feel hovering above us what must be his ceaseless preoccupation; and I wondered if he had found, upon visiting Newport, Miss Hortense sitting and calling for “high-balls.”

I gave him a lead. “The worst of it is that a girl who would like to behave herself decently finds that propriety puts her out of the running. The men flock off to the other kind.”

He was following me with watching eyes.

“And you know,” I continued, “what an anxious Newport parent does on finding her girl on the brink of being a failure.”

“I can imagine,” he answered, “that she scolds her like the dickens.”