His aunt (or his cousin, or whichever of them it had been) was certainly right as to his inheriting a pleasant and pointed gift of speech; and a responsive audience helps us all. Such an audience I certainly was for young John Mayrant, yet beneath the animation that our talk had filled his eyes with lay (I seemed to see or feel) that other mood all the time, the mood which had caused the girl behind the counter to say to me that he was "anxious about something." The unhappy youth, I was gradually to learn, was much more than that--he was in a tangle of anxieties. He talked to me as a sick man turns in bed from pain; the pain goes on, but the pillow for a while is cool.

Here there broke upon us a little interruption, so diverting, so utterly like the whole quaint tininess of Kings Port, that I should tell it to you, even if it did not bear directly upon the matter which was beginning so actively to concern me--the love difficulties of John Mayrant.

It was the letter-carrier.

We had come, from our secluded seats, round a corner, and so by the vestry door and down the walk beside the church, and as I read to myself the initials upon the stones wherewith the walk was paved, I drew near the half-open gateway upon Worship Street. The postman was descending the steps of the post-office opposite. He saw me through the gate and paused. He knew me, too! My face, easily marked out amid the resident faces he was familiar with, had at once caught his attention; very likely he, too, had by now learned that I was interested in the battle of Cowpens; but I did not ask him this. He crossed over and handed me a letter.

"No use," he said most politely, "takin' it away down to Mistress Trevise's when you're right here, sir. Northern mail eight hours late to-day," he added, and bowing, was gone upon his route.

My home letter, from a man, an intimate running mate of mine, soon had my full attention, for on the second page it said:--

"I have just got back from accompanying her to Baltimore. One of us went as far as Washington with her on the train. We gave her a dinner yesterday at the March Hare by way of farewell. She tried our new toboggan fire-escape on a bet. Clean from the attic, my boy. I imagine our native girls will rejoice at her departure. However, n.o.body's engaged to her, at least n.o.body here. How many may fancy themselves so elsewhere I can't say. Her name is Hortense Rieppe."

I suppose I must have been silent after finishing this letter.

"No bad news, I trust?" John Mayrant inquired.

I told him no; and presently we had resumed our seats in the quiet charm of the flowers.

I now spoke with an intention. "What a lot you seem to have seen and suffered of the advanced Newport!"

The intention wrought its due and immediate effect. "Yes. There was no choice. I had gone to Newport upon--upon an urgent matter, which took me among those people."

He dwelt upon the pictures that came up in his mind. But he took me away again from the "urgent matter."

"I saw," he resumed more briskly, "fifteen or twenty--most amazing, sir!--young men, some of them not any older than I am, who had so many millions that they could easily--" he paused, casting about for some expression adequate--"could buy Kings Port and put it under a gla.s.s case in a museum--my aunts and all--and never know it!" He livened with disrespectful mirth over his own picture of his aunts, purchased by millionaire steel or coal for the purposes of public edification.

"And a very good thing if they could be," I declared.

He wondered a moment. "My aunts? Under a gla.s.s case?"

"Yes, indeed--and with all deference be it said! They'd be more invaluable, more instructive, than the cla.s.sics of a thousand libraries."

He was prepared not to be pleased. "May I ask to whom and for what?"

"Why, you ought to see! You've just been saying it yourself. They would teach our bulging automobilists, our unlicked boy cubs, our alcoholic girls who shout to waiters for 'high-b.a.l.l.s' on country club porches--they would teach these wallowing creatures, whose money has merely gilded their bristles, what American refinement once was. The manners we've lost, the decencies we've banished, the standards we've lowered, their light is still flickering in this pa.s.sing generation of yours. It's the last torch. That's why I wish it could, somehow, pa.s.s on the sacred fire."

He shook his head. "They don't want the sacred fire. They want the high-b.a.l.l.s--and they have money enough to be drunk straight through the next world!" He was thoughtful. "They are the cla.s.sics," he added.

I didn't see that he had gone back to my word. "Roman Empire, you mean?"

"No, the others; the old people we're bidding good-by to. Roman Republic! Simple lives, gallant deeds, and one great uniting inspiration. Liberty winning her spurs. They were moulded under that, and they are our true American cla.s.sics. Nothing like them will happen again."

"Perhaps," I suggested, "our generation is uneasily living in a 'bad quarter-of-an-hour'--good old childhood gone, good new manhood not yet come, and a state of chicken-pox between whiles." And on this I made to him a much-used and consoling quotation about the old order changing.

"Who says that?" he inquired; and upon my telling him, "I hope so," he said, "I hope so. But just now Uncle Sam 'aspires to descend.'"

I laughed at his counter-quotation. "You know your cla.s.sics, if you don't know Tennyson."

He, too, laughed. "Don't tell Aunt Eliza!"

"Tell her what?"

"That I didn't recognize Tennyson. My Aunt Eliza educated me--and she thinks Tennyson about the only poet worth reading since--well, since Byron and Sir Walter at the very latest!"

"Neither she nor Sir Walter come down to modern poetry--or to alcoholic girls." His tone, on these last words, changed.

Again, as when he had said "an urgent matter," I seemed to feel hovering above us what must be his ceaseless preoccupation; and I wondered if he had found, upon visiting Newport, Miss Hortense sitting and calling for "high-b.a.l.l.s."

I gave him a lead. "The worst of it is that a girl who would like to behave herself decently finds that propriety puts her out of the running. The men flock off to the other kind."

He was following me with watching eyes.

"And you know," I continued, "what an anxious Newport parent does on finding her girl on the brink of being a failure."

"I can imagine," he answered, "that she scolds her like the d.i.c.kens."

"Oh, nothing so ineffectual! She makes her keep up with the others, you know. Makes her do things she'd rather not do."

"High-b.a.l.l.s, you mean?"

"Anything, my friend; anything to keep up."

He had a comic suggestion. "Driven to drink by her mother! Well, it's, at any rate, a new cause for old effects." He paused. It seemed strangely to bring to him some sort of relief. "That would explain a great deal," he said.

Was he thus explaining to himself his lady-love, or rather certain Newport aspects of her which had, so to speak, jarred upon his Kings Port notions of what a lady might properly do? I sat on my gravestone with my wonder, and my now-dawning desire to help him (if improbably I could), to get him out of it, if he were really in it; and he sat on his gravestone opposite, with the path between us, and the little noiseless breeze rustling the white irises, and bearing hither and thither the soft perfume of the roses. His boy face, lean, high-strung, brooding, was full of suppressed contentions. I made myself, during our silence, state his possible problem: "He doesn't love her any more, he won't admit this to himself; he intends to go through with it, and he's catching at any justification of what he has seen in her that has chilled him, so that he may, poor wretch! coax back his lost illusion."

Well, if that was it, what in the world could I, or anybody, do about it?

His next remark was transparent enough. "Do you approve of young ladies smoking?"

I met his question with another: "What reasons can be urged against it?"

He was quick. "Then you don't mind it?" There was actual hope in the way he rushed at this.

I laughed. "I didn't say I didn't mind it." (As a matter of fact I do mind it; but it seemed best not to say so to him.)

He fell off again. "I certainly saw very nice people doing it up there."

I filled this out. "You'll see very nice people doing it everywhere."

"Not in Kings Port! At least, not my sort of people!" He stiffly proclaimed this.

I tried to draw him out. "But is there, after all, any valid objection to it?"

But he was off on a preceding speculation. "A mother or any parent," he said, "might encourage the daughter to smoke, too. And the girl might take it up so as not to be thought peculiar where she was, and then she might drop it very gladly."

I became specific. "Drop it, you mean, when she came to a place where doing it would be thought--well, in bad style?"