A Philanthropist | Page 4

she had planned went unspoken that day.
But her desire could not rest, and as to her strict notions the continual visits from her side to his seemed unsuitable, she gave in self-defence her own invitation, and Wednesday and Saturday afternoons saw her lodger across the hall drinking her own tea with wine and plum-cake by the shining kettle.
If she could command his admiration in no other way, she felt, she might safely rely on his deferential respect for the owner of that pewter tea-service--velvety, shimmering, glistening dully, with shapes that vaguely recalled Greek lamps and Etruscan urns. And she piled wedges of ambrosial plum-cake with yellow frosting on sprigged china, and set out wine in her great-grandfather's long-necked decanter, and, with what she considered a gracious tact, overlooked the flippancy of her guest's desultory conversation, and sincerely tried to discover the humorous quality in her conversation that forced a subdued chuckle now and then from her listener.
She confided most of her schemes to him, sometimes unconsciously, and grew to depend more than she knew upon his common sense and experience; for, though openly cynical of her works, he would give her what she often realized to be the best of practical advice, and his amusing generalities, though to her mind insults to humanity, had been so bitterly proved true that she looked fearfully to see his lightest adverse prophecy fulfilled.
After a cautious introduction of the subject by asking his advice as to the minimum of hours in the week one could conscientiously allow a doubtful member of the Weekly Culture Club to spend upon Browning, she endeavored to get his idea of that poet. Her famous theory as to her ability to place any one satisfactorily in the scale of culture according to his degree of appreciation of "Rabbi ben Ezra" was unfortunately known to her lodger before she could with any verisimilitude produce the book, and he was wary of committing himself. The exquisite effrontery with which she finally brought out her gray-green volume was only equalled by the forbearing courtesy with which he welcomed both it and her. Nor did he offer any other comment on her opening the book at a well-worn page than an apologetic removal to the only chair in the room more comfortable than the one he was at the time occupying. He listened in silence to her intelligent if somewhat sonorous rendering of selected portions of "Saul," thanking her politely at the close, and only stipulating that he should be allowed to return the favor by a reading from one of his own favorite poets. With a shocked remembrance of certain yellow-covered volumes she had often cleared away from the piazza, Miss Gould inquired if the poet in question were English. On his hearty affirmative she resigned herself with no little interest to the opportunity of seeing her way more clearly into this baffling mind, horrified at his criticism of the second reading--for she had brought the "Rabbi" forward at last,
"Then welcome each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go!"
she had intoned; and, fixing her eye sternly on the butterfly in white flannels, she had asked him with a telling emphasis what that meant to him? With the sweetest smile in the world, he had leaned forward, sipped his tea, gazed thoughtfully in the fire, and answered, with a polite apology for the homeliness of the illustration, that it reminded him most strongly of a tack fixed in the seat of a chair, with the attendant circumstances! After a convulsive effort to include in one terrible sentence all the scorn and regret and pity that she felt, Miss Gould had decided that silence was best, and sat back wondering why she suffered him one instant in her parlor. He took from the floor beside him at this point a neat red volume, and, murmuring something about his inability to do the poet justice, he began to read. For one, two, four minutes Miss Gould sat staring; then she interrupted him coldly:
"And who is the author of that doggerel, Mr. Welles?"
"Edward Lear, dear Miss Gould--and a great man, too."
"I think I might have been spared--" she began with such genuine anger that any but her lodger would have quailed. He, however, merely smiled.
"But the subtlety of it--the immensity of the conception--the power of characterization!" he cried. "Just see how quietly this is treated."
And to her amazement she let him go on; so that a chance visitor, entering unannounced, might have been treated to the delicious spectacle of a charming middle-aged gentleman in white flannels reading, near a birch fire and a priceless pewter tea-service, to a handsome middle-aged woman in black silk, the following pregnant lines:
"There was an old person of Bow, Whom nobody happened