“Of course! But what can we old fellows
hope to know of what’s going on in any young
one? Talk of strangeness! I’d undertake
to find more in common with a florid old fellow of
fifty from the red planet Mars than with any young
Bostonian of twenty.”
“Yes; but it’s the youth of my sires that
I find so strange in Barker. Only, theoretically,
there’s no Puritanism. He’s a thorough
believer in Sewell. I suspect he could formulate
Sewell’s theology a great deal better than Sewell
could.”
Statira and ’Manda Grier had given up their
plan of getting places in a summer hotel when Lemuel
absolutely refused to take part in it, and were working
through the summer in the box-factory. Lemuel
came less regularly to see them now, for his Sunday
nights had to be at Mr. Corey’s disposition;
but Statira was always happy in his coming, and made
him more excuses than he had thought of, if he had
let a longer interval than usual pass. He could
not help feeling the loveliness of her patience, the
sweetness of her constancy; but he disliked ’Manda
Grier more and more, and she grew stiffer and sharper
with him. Sometimes the aimlessness of his relation
to Statira hung round him like a cloud, which he could
not see beyond. When he was with her he contented
himself with the pleasure he felt in her devotion,
and the tenderness this awakened in his own heart;
but when he was away from her there was a strange disgust
and bitterness in these.
Sometimes, when Statira and ’Manda Grier took
a Saturday afternoon off, he went with them into the
country on one of the horse-car lines, or else to
some matinee at a garden-theatre in the suburbs.
Statira liked the theatre better than anything else;
and she used to meet other girls whom she knew there,
and had a gay time. She introduced Lemuel to
them, and after a few moments of high civility and
distance they treated him familiarly, as Statira’s
beau. Their talk, after that he was now used
to, was flat and foolish, and their pert ease incensed
him. He came away bruised and burning, and feeling
himself unfit to breathe the refined and gentle air
to which he returned in Mr. Corey’s presence.
Then he would vow in his heart never to expose himself
to such things again; but he could not tell Statira
that he despised the friends she was happy with; he
could only go with a reluctance it was not easy to
hide, and atone by greater tenderness for a manner
that wounded her. One day toward the end of August,
when they were together at a suburban theatre, Statira
wandered off to a pond there was in the grounds with
some other girls, who had asked him to go and row
them, and had called him a bear for refusing, and
told him to look out for Barnum. They left him
sitting alone with ’Manda Grier, at a table where
they had all been having ice-cream at his expense;
and though it was no longer any pleasure to be with
her, it was better than to be with them, for she was
not a fool, at any rate. Statira turned round
at a little distance to mock them with a gesture and
a laugh, and the laugh ended in a cough, long and
shattering, so that one of her companions had to stop
with her, and put her arm round her till she could
recover herself and go on.
