“Yes, I long to go to housekeeping. We
can afford it now. She says we can get a cheap
little house, or half a house, up at the South End,
and it won’t cost us any more than to board,
hardly; and that’s what I think, too.”
“Go ahead, if you can find the house. I
don’t object to my own fireside. And I
suppose we must.”
“Yes, we must. Ain’t you glad of
it?”
They were in the shadow of a tall house, and he dropped
his face toward the face she lifted to his, and gave
her a silent kiss that made her heart leap toward
him.
With the other news that Halleck’s mother gave
him on his return, she told him of the chance that
had brought his old college comrade to them again,
and of how Bartley was now married, and was just settled
in the little house she had helped his wife to find.
“He has married a very pretty girl,” she
said.
“Oh, I dare say!” answered her son.
“He isn’t the fellow to have married a
plain girl.”
“Your father and I have been to call upon them
in their new house, and they seem very happy together.
Mr. Hubbard wants you should come to see them.
He talks a great deal about you.”
“I’ll look them up in good time,”
said the young man. “Hubbard’s ardor
to see me will keep.”
That evening Mr. Atherton came to tea, and Halleck
walked home with him to his lodgings, which were over
the hill, and beyond the Public Garden. “Yes,
it’s very pleasant, getting back,” he said,
as they sauntered down the Common side of Beacon Street,
“and the old town is picturesque after the best
they can do across the water.” He halted
his friend, and brought himself to a rest on his cane,
for a look over the hollow of the Common and the level
of the Garden where the late September dark was keenly
spangled with lamps. “‘My heart leaps
up,’ and so forth, when I see that. Now
that Athens and Florence and Edinburgh are past, I
don’t think there is any place quite so well
worth being born in as Boston.” He moved
forward again, gently surging with his limp, in a
way that had its charm for those that loved him.
“It’s more authentic and individual, more
municipal, after the old pattern, than any other modern
city. It gives its stamp, it characterizes.
The Boston Irishman, the Boston Jew, is a quite different
Irishman or Jew from those of other places. Even
Boston provinciality is a precious testimony to the
authoritative personality of the city. Cosmopolitanism
is a modern vice, and we’re antique, we’re
classic, in the other thing. Yes, I’d rather
be a Bostonian, at odds with Boston, than one of the
curled darlings of any other community.”
A friend knows how to allow for mere quantity in your
talk, and only replies to the quality, separates your
earnest from your whimsicality, and accounts for some
whimsicality in your earnest. “I didn’t
know but you might have got that bee out of your bonnet,
on the other side,” said Atherton.
