II.
The winter did not renew for Christine and Mela the social opportunity which the spring had offered.After the musicale at Mrs.Horn's,they both made their party-call,as Mela said,in due season;but they did not find Mrs.Horn at home,and neither she nor Miss Vance came to see them after people returned to town in the fall.They tried to believe for a time that Mrs.Horn had not got their cards;this pretence failed them,and they fell back upon their pride,or rather Christine's pride.Mela had little but her good-nature to avail her in any exigency,and if Mrs.
Horn or Miss Vance had come to call after a year of neglect,she would have received them as amiably as if they had not lost a day in coming.
But Christine had drawn a line beyond which they would not have been forgiven;and she had planned the words and the behavior with which she would have punished them if they had appeared then.Neither sister imagined herself in anywise inferior to them;but Christine was suspicious,at least,and it was Mela who invented the hypothesis of the lost cards.As nothing happened to prove or to disprove the fact,she said,"I move we put Coonrod up to gittun'it out of Miss Vance,at some of their meetun's.""If you do,"said Christine,"I'll kill you."Christine,however,had the visits of Beaton to console her,and,if these seemed to have no definite aim,she was willing to rest in the pleasure they gave her vanity;but Mela had nothing.Sometimes she even wished they were all back on the farm.
"It would be the best thing for both of you,"said Mrs.Dryfoos,in answer to such a burst of desperation."I don't think New York is any place for girls.""Well,what I hate,mother,"said Mela,"is,it don't seem to be any place for young men,either."She found this so good when she had said it that she laughed over it till Christine was angry.
"A body would think there had never been any joke before.""I don't see as it's a joke,"said Mrs.Dryfoos."It's the plain truth.""Oh,don't mind her,mother,"said Mela."She's put out because her old Mr.Beaton ha'r't been round for a couple o'weeks.If you don't watch out,that fellow 'll give you the slip yit,Christine,after all your pains.""Well,there ain't anybody to give you the slip,Mela,"Christine clawed back.
"No;I ha'n't ever set my traps for anybody."This was what Mela said for want of a better retort;but it was not quite true.When Kendricks came with Beaton to call after her father's dinner,she used all her cunning to ensnare him,and she had him to herself as long as Beaton stayed;Dryfoos sent down word that he was not very well and had gone to bed.The novelty of Mela had worn off for Kendricks,and she found him,as she frankly told him,not half as entertaining as he was at Mrs.
Horn's;but she did her best with him as the only flirtable material which had yet come to her hand.It would have been her ideal to have the young men stay till past midnight,and her father come down-stairs in his stocking-feet and tell them it was time to go.But they made a visit of decorous brevity,and Kendricks did not come again.She met him afterward,once,as she was crossing the pavement in Union Square to get into her coupe,and made the most of him;but it was necessarily very little,and so he passed out of her life without having left any trace in her heart,though Mela had a heart that she would have put at the disposition of almost any young man that wanted it.Kendricks himself,Manhattan cockney as he was,with scarcely more out look into the average American nature than if he had been kept a prisoner in New York society all his days,perceived a property in her which forbade him as a man of conscience to trifle with her;something earthly good and kind,if it was simple and vulgar.In revising his impressions of her,it seemed to him that she would come even to better literary effect if this were recognized in her;and it made her sacred,in spite of her willingness to fool and to be fooled,in her merely human quality.After all,he saw that she wished honestly to love and to be loved,and the lures she threw out to that end seemed to him pathetic rather than ridiculous;he could not join Beaton in laughing at her;and he did not like Beaton's laughing at the other girl,either.It seemed to Kendricks,with the code of honor which he mostly kept to himself because he was a little ashamed to find there were so few others like it,that if Beaton cared nothing for the other girl--and Christine appeared simply detestable to Kendricks--he had better keep away from her,and not give her the impression he was in love with her.He rather fancied that this was the part of a gentleman,and he could not have penetrated to that aesthetic and moral complexity which formed the consciousness of a nature like Beaton's and was chiefly a torment to itself;he could not have conceived of the wayward impulses indulged at every moment in little things till the straight highway was traversed and well-nigh lost under their tangle.
To do whatever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likes,even though one continues to do what one will;but Kendricks,though a sage of twenty-seven,was still too young to understand this.
