William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated). William Dean Howells
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after what they did to build it. But it is still quite a French city in everything, even to sympathy with France in this Prussian war, which you would hardly think they would care about. Our landlady says the very boys in the street know about the battles, and explain, every time the French are beaten, how they were outnumbered and betrayed,—something the way we used to do in the first of our war.
I suppose you will think I am crazy; but I do wish Uncle Jack would wind up his practice at Eriecreek, and sell the house, and come to live at Quebec. I have been asking prices of things, and I find that everything is very cheap, even according to the Eriecreek standard; we could get a beautiful house on the St. Louis Road for two hundred a year; beef is ten or twelve cents a pound, and everything else in proportion. Then besides that, the washing is sent out into the country to be done by the peasant-women, and there isn't a crumb of bread baked in the house, but it all comes from the bakers; and only think, girls, what a relief that would be! Do get Uncle Jack to consider it seriously.
Since I began this letter the afternoon has worn away—the light from the sunset on the mountains would glorify our supper-table without extra charge, if we lived here—and the twilight has passed, and the moon has come up over the gables and dormer-windows of the convent, and looks into the garden so invitingly that I can't help joining her. So I will put my writing by till to-morrow. The going-to-bed bell has rung, and the red lights have vanished one by one from the windows, and the nuns are asleep, and another set of ghosts is playing in the garden with the copper-colored phantoms of the Indian children of long ago. What! not Madame de la Peltrie? Oh! how do they like those little fibs of yours up in heaven?
Sunday afternoon.—As we were at the French cathedral last Sunday, we went to the English to-day; and I could easily have imagined myself in some church of Old England, hearing the royal family prayed for, and listening to the pretty poor sermon delivered with such an English brogue. The people, too, had such Englishy faces and such queer little eccentricities of dress; the young lady that sang contralto in the choir wore a scarf like a man's on her hat. The cathedral isn't much, architecturally, I suppose, but it affected me very solemnly, and I couldn't help feeling that it was as much a part of British power and grandeur as the citadel itself. Over the bishop's seat drooped the flag of a Crimean regiment, tattered by time and battles, which was hung up here with great ceremonies, in 1860, when the Prince of Wales presented them with new colors; and up in the gallery was a kind of glorified pew for royal highnesses and governor-generals and so forth, to sit in when they are here. There are tablets and monumental busts about the walls; and one to the memory of the Duke of Lenox, the governor-general who died in the middle of the last century from the bite of a fox; which seemed an odd fate for a duke, and somehow made me very sorry for him.
Fanny, of course, couldn't go to church with me, and Dick got out of it by lingering too late over the newspapers at the hotel, and so I trudged off with our Bostonian, who is still with us here. I didn't dwell much upon him in my last letter, and I don't believe now I can make him quite clear to you. He has been a good deal abroad, and he is Europeanized enough not to think much of America, though I can't find that he quite approves of Europe, and his experience seems not to have left him any particular country in either hemisphere.
He isn't the Bostonian of Uncle Jack's imagination, and I suspect he wouldn't like to be. He is rather too young, still, to have much of an antislavery record, and even if he had lived soon enough, I think that he would not have been a John Brown man. I am afraid that he believes in "vulgar and meretricious distinctions" of all sorts, and that he hasn't an atom of "magnanimous democracy" in him. In fact, I find, to my great astonishment, that some ideas which I thought were held only in England, and which I had never seriously thought of, seem actually a part of Mr. Arbuton's nature or education. He talks about the lower classes, and tradesmen, and the best people, and good families, as I supposed nobody in this country ever did,—in earnest. To be sure, I have always been reading of characters who had such opinions, but I thought they were just put into novels to eke out somebody's unhappiness,—to keep the high-born daughter from marrying beneath her for love, and so on; or else to be made fun of in the person of some silly old woman or some odious snob; and I could hardly believe at first that our Bostonian was serious in talking in that way. Such things sound so differently in real life; and I laughed at them till I found that he didn't know what to make of my laughing, and then I took leave to differ with him in some of his notions; but he never disputes anything I say, and so makes it seem rude to differ with him. I always feel, though he begins it, as if I had thrust my opinions upon him. But in spite of his weaknesses and disagreeabilities, there is something really high about him; he is so scrupulously true, so exactly just, that Uncle Jack himself couldn't be more so; though you can see that he respects his virtues as the peculiar result of some extraordinary system. Here at Quebec, though he goes round patronizing the landscape and the antiquities, and coldly smiling at my little enthusiasms, there is really a great deal that ought to be at least improving in him. I get to paying him the same respect that he pays himself, and imbues his very clothes with, till everything he has on appears to look like him and respect itself accordingly. I have often wondered what his hat, his honored hat, for instance, would do, if I should throw it out of the front window. It would make an earthquake, I believe.
He is politely curious about us; and from time to time, in a shrinking, disgusted way, he asks some leading question about Eriecreek, which he doesn't seem able to form any idea of, as much as I explain it. He clings to his original notion, that it is in the heart of the Oil Regions, of which he has seen pictures in the illustrated papers; and when I assert myself against his opinions, he treats me very gingerly, as if I were an explosive sprite, or an inflammable naiad from a torpedoed well, and it wouldn't be quite safe to oppose me, or I would disappear with a flash and a bang.
When Dick isn't able to go with me on Fanny's account, Mr. Arbuton takes his place in the expeditionary corps; and we have visited a good many points of interest together, and now and then he talks very entertainingly about his travels. But I don't think they have made him very cosmopolitan. It seems as if he went about with a little imaginary standard, and was chiefly interested in things, to see whether they fitted it or not. Trifling matters annoy him; and when he finds sublimity mixed up with absurdity, it almost makes him angry. One of the oddest and oldest-looking buildings in Quebec is a little one-story house on St. Louis Street, to which poor General Montgomery was taken after he was shot; and it is a pastry-cook's now, and the tarts and cakes in the window vexed Mr. Arbuton so much—not that he seemed to care for Montgomery—that I didn't dare to laugh.
I live very little in the nineteenth century at present, and do not care much for people who do. Still I have a few grains of affection left for Uncle Jack, which I want you to give him.
I suppose it will take about six stamps to pay this letter. I forgot to say that Dick goes to be barbered every day at the "Montcalm Shaving and Shampooing Saloon," so called because they say Montcalm held his last council of war there. It is a queer little steep-roofed house, with a flowering bean up the front, and a bit of garden, full of snap-dragons, before it.
We shall be here a week or so yet, at any rate, and then, I think, we shall go straight home, Dick has lost so much time already.
With a great deal of love,
Your Kitty.
VII. Love's Young Dream
With the two young people whose days now lapsed away together, it could not be said that Monday varied much from Tuesday, or ten o'clock from half past three; they were not always certain what day of the week it was, and sometimes they fancied that a thing which happened in the morning had taken place yesterday afternoon.
But whatever it was, and however uncertain in time and character their slight adventure was to themselves, Mrs. Ellison secured all possible knowledge of it from Kitty. Since it was her misfortune that promoted it, she considered herself a martyr to Kitty's acquaintance with Mr. Arbuton, and believed that she had the best claim to any gossip that could come of it. She lounged upon her sofa, and listened with a patience superior to the maiden caprice with which