The Booming of Acre Hill by John Kendrick Bangs (the best books to read .TXT) 📖

a matinee," he said, "is one part affection and nine parts enthusiasm."

"And love on the return from church is in all ten parts temporary aberration," I returned. "It is what you might call Seventh Day affection. Quiet, and no doubt sincere, but it is dissipated by the rising of the Monday sun. It is like our good resolutions on New Year's Day, which barely last over a fortnight. Some little word spoken by the rector may have aroused in her breast a spark of love for you, but one spark does not make a conflagration. Properly fanned it may develop into one, but in itself it is nothing more than a spark. Who can say that it was not pity that led Maude to speak so to you? Your necktie may have been disarranged without your knowing it, and at a time when she could not tell you of it. That sort of thing inspires pity, and you know as well as I do that pity and love are cousins, but cousins who never marry. You are favored, but not to the extent that I am."

"You argue well," returned Harry, "but you ignore the moon. In the solemn presence of the great orb of night no woman would swear falsely."

"You prick your argument with your point," I answered. "There were no extraneous arguments brought to bear on Maude when she confessed to me that she loved me. It was done in the cold light of day. There was no moon around to egg her on when she confessed her affection for me. I know the moon pretty well myself, and I know just what effect it has on truth. I have told falsehoods in the moonlight that I knew were falsehoods, and yet while Luna was looking on, no creature in the universe could have convinced me of their untruthfulness. The moon's rays have kissed the Blarney-stone, Harry. A moonlight truth is a noonday lie."

"Doesn't the genial warmth of the sun ever lead one from the path of truth?" queried Harry, satirical of manner.

"Yes," I answered. "But not in a horse-car with people treading on your feet."

"What has that to do with it?" Harry asked.

"It was on a Broadway car that Maude confessed," I answered.

Harry looked blue. His eyes said: "Gad! How she must love you!" But his lips said: "Ho! Nonsense!"

"It is the truth," said I, seeing that Harry was weakening. "As we were waiting for the car to come along I said to her: 'Maude, I am not the man I ought to be, but I have one redeeming quality: I love you to distraction.'

"She was about to reply when the car came. We were requested to step lively. We did so, and the car started. Then as we stood in the crowded aisle of the car we spoke in enigmas.

"'Did you hear what I said, Maude?' I asked.

"'Yes,' said she, gazing softly out of the window, and a slight touch of red coming into her cheeks. 'Yes, I heard.'

"'And what is your reply?' I whispered.

"'So do I,' she answered, with a sigh."

Harry laughed, and so irritatingly that had his name been Thomas I should have struck him.

"What is the joke?" I asked.

"You won't think it's funny," Harry answered.

"Then it must be a poor joke," I retorted, a little nettled. "Well, it's on you," he said. "You have simply shown me that Maude never told you she loved you. That's the joke."

I was speechless with wrath, but my eyes spoke. "How have I shown that?" they asked in my behalf.

"You say that you told Maude that _you_ loved _her_ to distraction. To which declaration she replied, 'So do I.' Where there is in that any avowal that _she_ loves _you_ I fail to see. She simply stated that she too loved herself to distraction, and I breathe again."

"Hair-splitting!" said I, wrathfully.

"No--side-splitting!" returned Harry, with a roar of laughter. "Now my declaration was very different from yours. It was made when Maude and I were walking home from church. It was about nine o'clock, and the streets were bathed in mellow moonlight. I declared myself because I could not help myself. I had no intention of doing so when I started out earlier in the evening, but the uplifting effect of the service of song at church, combined with the most romantic kind of a moon, forced me into it. I told her I was a struggler; that I was not yet able to support a wife; and that while I did not wish to ask any pledge from her, I could not resist telling her that I loved her with all my heart and soul."

_I_ began to feel blue. "And what did she say?" I asked, a little hoarsely.

"She said she returned my affection."

I braced up. "Ha, ha, ha!" I laughed. "This time the joke is on you."

"I fail to see it," he said.

"Of course," I retorted. "It is not one of your jokes. But say, Harry, when you send a poem to a magazine and the editor doesn't want it, what does he do with it?"

"Returns it. Ah!"

The "ah" was a gasp.

"You are the hair-splitter this time," said he, ruefully.

"I am," said I. "I could effectually destroy a whole wig of hairs like that. If you are right in your reasoning as to Maude's love for me, I am right as regards her love for you. We are both splitting hairs in most unprofitable fashion."

"We are," said Harry, with a sigh. "There is only one way to settle the matter."

"And that?"

"Let's call around there now and ask her."

"I am agreeable," said I.

"Often," said Harry, ringing for our coats.

In a few moments we were ready to depart; and as we stepped out into the night, whom should we run up against but that detestable Jimmie Brown!

"Whither away, boys?" he asked; in his usual bubblesome manner.

"We are going to make a call."

"Ah! Well, wait a minute, won't you? I have some news. I'm in great luck, and I want you fellows to join me in a health to the future Mrs. B."

"Engaged at last, eh, Brown?" said Harry.

I did not speak, for I felt a sudden and most depressing sinking of the heart.

"Yes," said Brown; and then he told us to whom.

It is not necessary to mention the lady's name. Suffice it to say that Harry and I both returned to our corner in the club, discarded our overcoats, and talked about two subjects.

The first was the weather.

The second, the fickleness of women.

Incidentally we agreed that there was something irritating about certain names, and on this occasion James excited our ire somewhat more than was normal.

But we did not lick James. We had too much regard for some one else to split a hair of his head.



AN AFFINITIVE ROMANCE

I

MR. AUGUSTUS RICHARDS'S IDEAL

Mr. Augustus Richards was thirty years of age and unmarried. He could afford to marry, and he had admired many women, but none of them came up to his ideals. Miss Fotheringay, for instance, represented his notions as to what a woman should be physically, but intellectually he found her wofully below his required standard. She was tall and stately--Junoesque some people called her--but in her conversation she was decidedly flippant. She was interested in all the small things of life, but for the great ones she had no inclination. She preferred a dance with a callow youth to a chat with a man of learning. She worshipped artificial in-door life, but had no sympathy with nature. The country she abominated, and her ideas of rest consisted solely in a change of locality, which was why she went to Newport every summer, there to indulge in further routs and dances when she wearied of the routs and dances of New York.

Miss Patterson, on the other hand, represented to the fullest degree the intellectual standard Mr. Augustus Richards had set up for the winner of his affections. She was fond of poetry and of music. She was a student of letters, and a clever talker on almost all the arts and sciences in which Mr. Augustus Richards delighted. But, alas! physically she was not what he could admire. She was small and insignificant in appearance. She was pallid-faced, and, it must be confessed, extremely scant of locks; and the idea of marrying her was to Mr. Augustus Richards little short of preposterous. Others, there were, too, who attracted him in some measure, but who likewise repelled him in equal, if not greater measure.

What he wanted Mrs. Augustus Richards to be was a composite of the best in the beautiful Miss Fotheringay, the intellectual Miss Patterson, the comfortably rich but extremely loud Miss Barrows, with a dash of the virtues of all the others thrown in.

For years he looked for such a one, but season after season passed away and the ideal failed to materialize, as unfortunately most ideals have a way of doing, and hither and yon Mr. Augustus Richards went unmarried, and, as society said, a hopelessly confirmed old bachelor--more's the pity.


II

MISS HENDERSON'S STANDARD

Miss Flora Henderson was born and bred in Boston, and, like Mr. Augustus Richards, had reached the age of thirty without having yielded to the allurements of matrimony. This was not because she had not had the opportunity, for opportunity she had had in greatest measure. She made her first appearance in society at the age of seventeen, and for every year since that interesting occasion she had averaged four proposals of marriage; and how many proposals that involved, every person who can multiply thirteen by four can easily discover. Society said she was stuck up, but she knew she wasn't. She did not reject men for the mere love of it. It was not vanity that led her to say no to so many adoring swains; it was simply the fact that not one in all the great number of would-be protectors represented her notions as to the style of man with whom she could be so happy that she would undertake the task of making him so.

Miles Dawson, for instance, was the kind of man that any ordinary girl would have snapped up the moment he declared himself. He had three safe-deposit boxes in town, and there was evidence in sight that he did not rent them for the purpose of keeping cigars in them. He had several horses and carriages. He was a regular attendant upon all the social functions of the season, and at many of them he appeared to enjoy himself hugely. At the musicals and purely literary entertainments, however, Miles Dawson always looked, as he was, extremely bored. Once Miss Henderson had seen him yawn at a Shelley reading. He was, in short, of the earth earthy, or perhaps, to be more accurate, of the horse horsey. Intellectual pleasures were naught to him but fountains of ennui, and being a very honest, frank sort of a person, he took no pains to conceal the fact, and it ruined his chances with Miss Henderson, at whose feet he had more than once laid the contents of the deposit-boxes--figuratively, of course--as well as the use of his stables and himself. The fact that he looked like a Greek god did not influence her in the least; she knew he