Marriage à la mode. Mrs. Humphry Ward
General said no more. Cecilia Boyson looked out of the window at the darkening landscape, thinking with malice of Daphne's dealings with the male sex. It had been a Sleeping Beauty story so far. Treasure for the winning—a thorn hedge—and slain lovers! The handsome Englishman would try it next, no doubt. All young Englishmen, according to her, were on the look-out for American heiresses. Music teacher indeed! She would have given a good deal to hear the conversation of the uncle and nephew when the party broke up.
The General and young Barnes made their farewells at the railway station, and took their way on foot to their hotel. Washington was steeped in sunset. The White House, as they passed it, glowed amid its quiet trees. Lafayette Square, with its fountains and statues, its white and pink magnolias, its strolling, chatting crowd, the fronts of the houses, the long vistas of tree-lined avenues, the street cars, the houses, the motors, all the openings and distances of the beautiful, leisurely place—they saw them rosily transfigured under a departing sun, which throughout the day had been weaving the quick spells of a southern spring.
"Jolly weather!" said Roger, looking about him. "And a very nice afternoon. How long are you staying here, Uncle Archie?"
"I ought to be off at the end of the week; and of course you want to get back to New York? I say, you seemed to be getting on with that young lady?"
The General turned a rather troubled eye upon his companion.
"She wasn't bad fun," said the young man graciously; "but rather an odd little thing! We quarrelled about every conceivable subject. And it's queer how much that kind of girl seems to go about in America. She goes everywhere and knows everything. I wonder how she manages it."
"What kind of girl do you suppose she is?" asked the General, stopping suddenly in the middle of Lafayette Square.
"She told me she taught singing," said Roger, in a puzzled voice, "to a class of girls in New York."
The General laughed.
"She seems to have made a fool of you, my dear boy. She is one of the great heiresses of America."
Roger's face expressed a proper astonishment.
"Oh! that's it, is it? I thought once or twice there was something fishy—she was trying it on. Who told you?"
The General retailed his information. Miss Daphne Floyd was the orphan daughter of an enormously rich and now deceased lumber-king, of the State of Illinois. He had made vast sums by lumbering, and then invested in real estate in Chicago and Buffalo, not to speak of a railway or two, and had finally left his daughter and only child in possession of a fortune generally estimated at more than a million sterling. The money was now entirely in the girl's power. Her trustees had been sent about their business, though Miss Floyd was pleased occasionally to consult them. Mrs. Phillips, her chaperon, had not much influence with her; and it was supposed that Mrs. Verrier advised her more than anyone else.
"Good heavens!" was all that young Barnes could find to say when the story was told. He walked on absently, flourishing his stick, his face working under the stress of amused meditation. At last he brought out:
"You know, Uncle Archie, if you'd heard some of the things Miss Floyd was saying to me, your hair would have stood on end."
The General raised his shoulders.
"I dare say. I'm too old-fashioned for America. The sooner I clear out the better. Their newspapers make me sick; I hate the hotels—I hate the cooking; and there isn't a nation in Europe I don't feel myself more at home with."
Roger laughed his clear, good-tempered laugh. "Oh! I don't feel that way at all. I get on with them capitally. They're a magnificent people. And, as to Miss Floyd, I didn't mean anything bad, of course. Only the ideas some of the girls here have, and the way they discuss them—well, it beats me!"
"What sort of ideas?"
Roger's handsome brow puckered in the effort to explain. "They don't think anything's settled, you know, as we do at home. Miss Floyd doesn't. They think they've got to settle a lot of things that English girls don't trouble about, because they're just told to do 'em, or not to do 'em, by the people that look after them!"
"'Everything hatched over again, and hatched different,'" said the General, who was an admirer of George Eliot; "that's what they'd like, eh? Pooh! That's when they're young. They quiet down, like all the rest of the world."
Barnes shook his head. "But they are hatching it over again. You meet people here in society you couldn't meet at home. And it's all right. The law backs them up."
"You're talking about divorce!" said the General. "Aye! it's astounding! The tales one hears in the smoking-room after dinner! In Wyoming, apparently, six months' residence, and there you are. You prove a little cruelty, the husband makes everything perfectly easy, you say a civil good-bye, and the thing's done. Well, they'll pay for it, my dear Roger—they'll pay for it. Nobody ever yet trifled with the marriage law with impunity."
The energy of the old man's bearing became him.
Through Roger's mind the thought flashed: "Poor dear Uncle Archie! If he'd been a New Yorker he'd never have put up with Aunt Lavinia for thirty years!"
They turned into their hotel, and ordered dinner in an hour's time. Roger found some English letters waiting for him, and carried them off to his room. He opened his mother's first. Lady Barnes wrote a large and straggling hand, which required many sheets and much postage. It might have been observed that her son looked at the sheets for a minute, with a certain distaste, before he began upon them. Yet he was deeply attached to his mother, and it was from her letters week by week that he took his marching orders. If she only wouldn't ride her ideas quite so hard; if she would sometimes leave him alone to act for himself!
Here it was again—the old story:
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