A Philanthropist | Page 4

she had criticised him
for the effeminacy. And his smiling explanation had sent a sudden flush
across her smooth, firm cheeks. Was she provincial? Did she seem to
him a New England villager and nothing more? She bit her lip, and the
appeal 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