Captain Macklin | Page 8

later I was able to obtain a few hours' leave, and I wasted

no time in running down from the Point to make the acquaintance of
my cousin, and to see how the home looked under the new regime. I
found it changed, and, except that I felt then and afterward that I was a
guest, it was changed for the better.
I found that my grandfather was much more comfortable in every way.
The newcomers were both eager and loving, although no one could
help but love my grandfather, and they invented wants he had never felt
before, and satisfied them, while at the same time they did not interfere
with the life he had formerly led. Aunt Mary is an unselfish soul, and
most content when she is by herself engaged in the affairs of the house
and in doing something for those who live in it. Besides her
unselfishness, which is to me the highest as it is the rarest of virtues,
hers is a sweet and noble character, and she is one of the gentlest souls
that I have ever known.
I may say the same of my cousin Beatrice. When she came into the
room, my first thought was how like she was to a statuette of a Dresden
shepherdess which had always stood at one end of our mantel-piece,
coquetting with the shepherd lad on the other side of the clock. As a
boy, the shepherdess had been my ideal of feminine loveliness. Since
then my ideals had changed rapidly and often, but Beatrice reminded
me that the shepherdess had once been my ideal. She wore a broad
straw hat, with artificial roses which made it hang down on one side,
and, as she had been working in our garden, she wore huge gloves and
carried a trowel in one hand. As she entered, my grandfather rose
hastily from his chair and presented us with impressive courtesy.
"Royal," he said, "this is your cousin, Beatrice Endicott." If he had not
been present, I think we would have shaken hands without restraint.
But he made our meeting something of a ceremony. I brought my heels
together and bowed as I have been taught to do at the Academy, and
seeing this she made a low courtesy. She did this apparently with great
gravity, but as she kept her eyes on mine I saw that she was mocking
me. If I am afraid of anything it has certainly never proved to be a girl,
but I confess I was strangely embarrassed. My cousin seemed somehow
different from any of the other girls I had met. She was not at all like
those with whom I had danced at the hotel hops, and to whom I gave
my brass buttons in Flirtation Walk. She was more fine, more illusive,
and yet most fascinating, with a quaint old- fashioned manner that at

times made her seem quite a child, and the next moment changed her
into a worldly and charming young woman. She made you feel she was
much older than yourself in years and in experience and in knowledge.
That is the way my cousin appeared to me the first time I saw her,
when she stood in the middle of the room courtesying mockingly at me
and looking like a picture on an old French fan. That is how she has
since always seemed to me--one moment a woman, and the next a child;
one moment tender and kind and merry, and the next disapproving,
distant, and unapproachable.
[Illustration: He made our meeting something of a ceremony.]
Up to the time I met Beatrice I had never thought it possible to consider
a girl as a friend. For the matter of that, I had no friends even among
men, and I made love to girls. My attitude toward girls, if one can say
that a man of eighteen has an attitude, was always that of the devoted
admirer. If they did not want me as a devoted admirer, I put them down
as being proud and haughty or "stuck up." It never occurred to me then
that there might be a class of girl who, on meeting you, did not desire
that you should at once tell her exactly how you loved her, and why.
The girls who came to Cranston's certainly seemed to expect you to set
their minds at rest on that subject, and my point of view of girls was
taken entirely from them. I can remember very well my pause of
dawning doubt and surprise when a girl first informed me she thought a
man who told her she was pretty was impertinent. What bewildered me
still more on that occasion was that this particular girl was so extremely
beautiful that to talk about