April Hopes. William Dean Howells
Читать онлайн книгу.
things, and I had some credit for it as host. Do make it a little compliment, Miss Pasmer; I assure you I'll be very modest about it.”
“Ah, I think it's fully up to the occasion,” said the girl, catching the spirit of his amiable satisfaction. “Is it the usual Class Day weather?”
“You spoil everything by asking that,” cried the young man; “it obliges me to make a confession—it's always good weather on Class Day. There haven't been more than a dozen bad Class Days in the century. But you'll admit that there can't have been a better Class Day than this?”
“Oh yes; it's certainly the pleasantest Class Day I've seen;” said the girl; and now when Mavering laughed she laughed too.
“Thank you so much for saying that! I hope it will pass off in unclouded brilliancy; it will, if I can make it. Why, hallo! They're on the other side of the street yet, and looking about as if they were lost.”
He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket, and waved it at the others of their party.
They caught sight of it, and came hurrying over through the dust.
Mrs. Saintsbury said, apparently as the sum of her consultations with Mrs. Pasmer: “The Tree is to be at half-past five; and after we've seen a few spreads, I'm going to take the ladies hone for a little rest.”
“Oh no; don't do that,” pleaded the young man. After making this protest he seemed not to have anything to say immediately in support of it. He merely added: “This is Miss Pasmer's first Class Day, and I want her to see it all.”
“But you'll have to leave us very soon to get yourself ready for the Tree,” suggested the Professor's lady, with a motherly prevision.
“I shall want just fifteen minutes for that.”
“I know, better, Mr. Mavering,” said Mrs. Saintsbury, with finality. “You will want a good three-quarters of an hour to make yourself as disreputable as you'll look at the Tree; and you'll have to take time for counsel and meditation. You may stay with us just half an hour, and then we shall part inexorably. I've seen a great many more Class Days than you have, and I know what they are in their demands upon the Seniors.”
“Oh; well! Then we won't think about the time,” said the young man, starting on with Miss Pasmer.
“Well, don't undertake too much,” said the lady. She came last in the little procession, with the elder Mavering, and her husband and Mrs Pasmer preceded her.
“What?” young Mavering called back, with his smiling face over his shoulder.
“She says not to bite off more than you can chew,” the professor answered for her.
Mavering broke into a conscious laugh, but full of delight, and with his handkerchief to his face had almost missed the greeting of some ladies who bowed to him. He had to turn round to acknowledge it, and he was saluting and returning salutations pretty well all along the line of their progress.
“I'm afraid you'll think I'm everybody's friend but my own, Miss Pasmer, but I assure you all this is purely accidental. I don't know so many people, after all; only all that I do know seem to be here this morning.”
“I don't think it's a thing to be sorry for,” said the girl. “I wish we knew more people. It's rather forlorn—”
“Oh, will you let me introduce some of the fellows to you? They'll be so glad.”
“If you'll tell them how forlorn I said I was,” said the girl, with a smile.
“Oh, no, no, no! I understand that. And I assure you that I didn't suppose—But of course!” he arrested himself in the superfluous reassurance he was offering, “All that goes without saying. Only there are some of the fellows coming back to the law school, and if you'll allow me—”
“We shall be very happy indeed, Mr. Mavering,” said Mrs. Pasmer, behind him.
“Oh, thank you ever so much, Mrs. Pasmer.” This was occasion for another burst of laughter with him. He seemed filled with the intoxication of youth, whose spirit was in the bright air of the day and radiant in the young faces everywhere. The paths intersecting one another between the different dormitories under the drooping elms were thronged with people coming and going in pairs and groups; and the academic fete, the prettiest flower of our tough old Puritan stem, had that charm, at once sylvan and elegant, which enraptures in the pictured fables of the Renaissance. It falls at that moment of the year when the old university town, often so commonplace and sometimes so ugly, becomes briefly and almost pathetically beautiful under the leafage of her hovering elms and in, the perfume of her syringas, and bathed in this joyful tide of youth that overflows her heart. She seems fit then to be the home of the poets who have loved her and sung her, and the regret of any friend of the humanities who has left her.
“Alice,” said Mrs. Pasmer, leaning forward a little to speak to her daughter, and ignoring a remark of the Professor's, “did you ever see so many pretty costumes?”
“Never,” said the girl, with equal intensity.
“Well, it makes you feel that you have got a country, after all,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer, in a sort of apostrophe to her European self. “You see splendid dressing abroad, but it's mostly upon old people who ought to be sick and ashamed of their pomps and vanities. But here it's the young girls who dress; and how lovely they are! I thought they were charming in the Gymnasium, but I see you must get them out-of-doors to have the full effect. Mr. Mavering, are they always so prettily dressed on Class Day?”
“Well, I'm beginning to feel as if it wouldn't be exactly modest for me to say so, whatever I think. You'd better ask Mrs. Saintsbury; she pretends to know all about it.”
“No, I'm bound to say they're not,” said the Professor's wife candidly. “Your daughter,” she added, in a low tone for all to hear, “decides that question.”
“I'm so glad you said that, Mrs. Saintsbury,” said the young man. He looked at the girl; who blushed with a pleasure that seemed to thrill to the last fibre of her pretty costume.
She could not say anything, but her mother asked, with an effort at self-denial: “Do you think so really? It's one of those London things. They have so much taste there now,” she added yielding to her own pride in the dress.
“Yes; I supposed it must be,” said Mrs. Saintsbury, “We used to come in muslins and tremendous hoops—don't you remember?”
“Did you look like your photographs?” asked young Mavering, over his shoulder.
“Yes; but we didn't know it then,” said the Professor's wife.
“Neither did we,” said the Professor. “We supposed that there had never been anything equal to those hoops and white muslins.”
“Thank you, my dear,” said his wife, tapping him between the shoulders with her fan. “Now don't go any further.”
“Do you mean about our first meeting here on Class Day?” asked her husband.
“They'll think so now,” said Mrs. Saintsbury patiently, with a playful threat of consequences in her tone.
“When I first saw the present Mrs. Saintsbury,” pursued the Professor—it was his joking way, of describing her, as if there had been several other Mrs. Saintsburys—“she was dancing on the green here.”
“Ah, they don't dance on the green any more, I hear,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer.
“No, they don't,” said the other lady; “and I think it's just as well. It was always a ridiculous affectation of simplicity.”
“It must have been rather public,” said young Mavering, in a low voice, to Miss Pasmer.
“It doesn't seem as if it could ever have been in character quite,” she answered.
“We're a thoroughly indoors people,” said