Mae Madden | Page 6

place," cried Edith, and Albert, and Mrs. Jerrold from her camp-chair.
"O, how dreadful! The only way to prevent it will be for us to stand firm, boys, and make it a tie."
"But Norman is especially eager to go to Rome," said Edith, "and that makes us four strong at once in favor of that city."
"But is not Rome a fearful mixture of dead Caesar's bones and dirty beggars? And mustn't one carry hundreds of dates at one's fingertips to appreciate this, and that, and the other? Is it not all tremendously and overwhelmingly historical, and don't you have to keep exerting your mind and thinking and remembering? I would rather go down to Southern Italy and look at lazzaroni lie on stone walls, in red cloaks, as they do in pictures, and not be obliged to topple off the common Italian to pile the gray stone with old memories of some great dead man. Everything is ghostly in Rome. Now, there must be some excitement in Southern Italy. There's Vesuvius, and she isn't dead--like Nero--but a living demon, that may erupt any night, and give you a little red grave by the sea for your share."
"She's not nearly through yet," laughed Edith, as Mae paused for breath.
"I'm only afraid," said Mae, "that after I had been down there a week, I should forget English, buy a contadina costume, marry a child of the sun, and run away from this big world with its puzzles and lessons, and rights and wrongs. Imagine me in my doorway as you passed in your travelling carriage, hot and tired on your way-- say to Sorrento. I would dress my beautiful Italian all up in scarlet flowers and wreathe his big hat and kiss his brown eyes and take his brown hand, and then we would run along by the bay and laugh at you stiff, grand world's folks as we skipped past you."
"We shall know where to look for you, if ever you do disappear," said Norman Mann.
"But, my dear Mae," added Albert, "though this is amusing, it is utterly useless."
"Amusing things always are," said Mae.
"The question is, shall we or shall we not go to Rome for the winter?"
"Certainly, by all means, and if I don't like it, I'll run away to Sorrento," and Mae shook her sunny head and twinkled her eyes in a fascinating sort of way, that made Eric feel a proud brotherly pleasure in this saucy young woman, and that gave Norman Mann a sort of feeling he had had a good deal of late, a feeling hard to define, though we have all known it, a delicious concoction of pleasure and pain. His eyes were fixed on Mae, now. "What is it?" she asked. "You will like Rome, I am sure." "No, I never like what I think I shall not."
"It might save some trouble, then, if I ask you now if you expect to like me," said he, in a lower tone. "Why certainly, I do like you very much," she replied, honestly. "What a stupid question," he thinks, vexedly. "Why did I tell him I liked him?" she thinks, blushingly. So the waves of anxiety and doubt begin to swell in these two hearts as the outside waves beat with a truer sea-motion momently against the steamer's side.
Between days of sea-sickness come delightful intervals of calm sea and fresh breezes, when the party fly to the hurricane deck to get the very quintessence of life on the ocean wave. One morning Mrs. Jerrold and Edith were sitting there alone, with rugs and all sorts of head devices in soft wools and flannels, and books and a basket of fruit. The matron of the party was a tall, fine-looking woman, a good type of genuine New England stock softened by city breeding. New Englanders are so many propositions from Euclid, full of right angles and straight lines, but easy living and the dressmaker's art combine to turn the corners gently. Edith was like her mother, but softened by a touch of warm Dutch blood. She was tall, almost stately, with a good deal of American style, which at that time happened to be straight and slender. She was naturally reserved, but four years of boarding-school life had enriched her store of adjectives and her amount of endearing gush-power, and she had at least six girl friends to whom she sent weekly epistles of some half-dozen sheets in length, beginning, each one of them, with "My dearest ----" and ending "Your devoted Edith."
As Edith and her mother quietly read, and ate grapes, and lolled in a delightfully feminine way, voices were heard,--Mae's and?Norman's. They were in the middle of a conversation. "Yes," Mae was saying, "you do away with individuality altogether nowadays, with your dreadful classifications. It is