Jewel Weed. Alice Ames Winter
who Dædalus was, now that you have been a few weeks out of college—when he had worked like Dædalus, I say, and got the hardest of it done, he began to look at something besides the Falls and to pine for means of dalliance. Behold then at his hand, Lake Imnijaska! And now Madeline Elton is the best thing on its shore. Gee up, old motor!”
They sped along and Dick took up the tale. He was used to talking while Norris listened and appreciated.
“Evidently you don’t know who Dædalus was or you would have answered back. What kind of an omniscient editor are you going to make, think you? Never mind, Dædalus is dead; and, anyway, Edison has beaten him by six holes.
“The lake, as I was saying, twists and turns so that it gets in more shore to the square inch than any other known sheet of water. Therefore the real-estate dealer loves it. And if you elevate your longshore nose and sniff at our lake because no salt codfish dry upon smelly wharves and no sea anemones or crabs appear and disappear with the tides, then will the entire population of St. Etienne rise and howl anathemas at you. They will run you out of town on the Chicago Express, and as you fly for your life they will shriek after you, ‘Well, anyway, we feed the world with flour!’ Yes, sir, that is the way we Westerners argue.”
Dick halted at the top of the hill up which the faithful motor had coughed, and the two looked down on the shimmering blue that stretched below them with arms of broken opals sprawling for miles, now here, now there. Long tortuous passages opened out anew into ever more bays, as though the water were greedy to explore. Around it rolled the woodland in billows of intense green with sandy beaches in the troughs and straight cliffs at the crests. The green islands were vivid in color. So was the sky above, like the flash in a sapphire. A half-dozen sails fluttered gull-like, and as many launches darted along, suggesting living water creatures.
“By Jove!” Ellery exclaimed, moving uneasily. “When you sniff this air it makes you want to stand on tiptoe on a hilltop and shout. And when you look at these colors, they are too brilliant to be true.”
“Even you, you old conservative slow-poking duffer!” cried Dick. “This is the land to wake you up. It calls ‘harder—harder!’ every-day.”
“It’s a different kind of beauty from what I’m used to.” Ellery sobered down again. “I’ve been trying to analyze it ever since I came West. It wouldn’t appeal to the tired or the world-weary. Its charm is for the vigorous and the confident and the hopeful—for the young.”
“For us, my boy,” Dick said.
“At Madeline’s,” as Dick called it, with that obliviousness of the older generation shown by the younger, Norris felt as they entered, as he had felt at Mrs. Percival’s, that he was in a candid, human, refined home, with a full appreciation of the finer sides of life. They passed through the drawing-room and by long glass doors to the broad piazza, with every invitation to laziness, easy chairs, cushions, magazines, all made fragrant by a huge jar of roses and another of sweet peas. And there was not too much. The veranda in turn gave upon a wide expanse of green that stretched steeply down to that cool wet line where the lapping waters met the lawn. The trees whispered softly around. Every prospect was pleasing, and only man was vile; for there was another man, sitting in the most comfortable of chairs and engaging Madeline all to himself, as he contentedly sipped the cup of tea that he had taken from her hand. This other man, whose name was Davison, was making himself agreeable after the fashion of his kind, a fashion quite familiar to every girl who has been so unfortunate as to get a reputation, however little deserved, for superior brains.
“Afternoon,” he said, “I didn’t suppose any other fellows except myself were brave enough, to call on Miss Elton. I hear she’s so awfully clever, you know. Taken degrees and all that sort of thing. Give you my word it comes out in everything around her. Why, this very napkin she gave me has a Greek border. Everything has to be classic now.”
“Not everything, Mr. Davison,” said Madeline indulgently. “You know I am delighted to have you here.” She turned abruptly to the new-comers as though she had already had a surfeit of this subject. It is a pleasant thing to have had a good education, but one does not care to spend one’s time thinking about it, any more than about how much money there is in one’s pocket.
“You had a fine ride out?” Madeline asked.
“Great!” answered Dick. “To be young, on a summer day, seated in a good motor with a thoroughly tamed and domesticated gasoline engine, and to be coming to see you—what more could we ask of the gods?”
“You see Percival feels that he must lard the gods into his intercourse with you, Miss Elton,” Mr. Davison interjected.
“That’s because the gods have become nice homey things,” retorted Dick. “Even in the West we couldn’t keep house without Dionysius assisted by Hebe to superintend our afternoon teas, and Hercules as a patron of baseball.”
Madeline laughed and cast a grateful look in his direction.
“You see how pleasant it is to feel familiar with the gods so that you can use them freely,” she said.
“So you don’t think it’s necessary, in order to be clever, to despise everything that’s done nowadays, because the Greeks used up all the ideas first?” asked Davison.
“Not at all. Nature conducts a vast renovating and cleaning establishment, and whenever any old ideas look the least bit frayed or soiled around the edges, pop, in they go, and come out French dry-cleaned and as fresh as ever. They’re sent home in a spick-span box and you couldn’t tell ’em from new.”
“If we don’t get anything new I hope that we, at least, get rid of some of the old things—fears and superstitions,” said Madeline. “Things that are holy rites in one age are so apt to be holy frights in the next.”
“Say, did you ever go down the streets of Boston and notice the number of signs of palmists and astrologers and vacuum cures?” exclaimed Davison. “But perhaps it ain’t fair to take Boston for a standard.”
Ellery, a true New Englander, stared at him in astonishment, as one who heard sacred things lightly spoken of.
“Most of us can see how funny we are,” Davison pursued.
“Can we?” murmured Dick.
“But Boston,” he went on calmly, “has lost her sense of humor. She peers down at everything she does and says, ‘This is very serious.’ That’s why she takes astrologers in earnest. They’re in Boston. Anyway, I think you were mighty sensible to come back to us, Miss Elton, rather than to stay in the unmarried state, alias Massachusetts. A girl really has a much better chance in the West.”
“Yes, that’s where Miss Elton showed a long head,” said Dick with evident glee.
“But really now, joking apart,” Davison went on, having made his opening, “don’t you think it’s unsettling to a girl to do too much studying?”
“I hope you are not deeply agitated over the eradication of womanliness,” Madeline remonstrated. “Really, Mr. Davison, it isn’t an easy thing to stop being a woman—when you happen to be born one.”
“But there are plenty of unwomanly women,” he objected.
“That’s true,” she answered, “but I believe womanliness is killed—when it is killed—not through the brain, but through the heart. It’s not knowledge, but hard-heartedness that makes the unwomanly woman.”
She glanced up and met Norris’ eyes. It was not easy for him to join in the chatter of the others, but he was thinking how she illuminated her own words. Manifestly she was not lacking in mind, and quite as evidently her brain was only the antechamber of her nature. She gave him the impression of “the heart at leisure from itself”. There was the unconsciousness of sheltered girlhood, but already, in bud, the suggestion of that big type of woman who, as years mellow her, touches with sympathy every life with which she comes in contact. What she now was, promised more in the future, as though