The Europeans | Page 7

vehicles, the blazing blue sky and the muddy crossings, the
hurrying men and the slow-strolling maidens, the fresh red bricks and
the bright green trees, the extraordinary mixture of smartness and
shabbiness. From one hour to another the day had grown vernal; even
in the bustling streets there was an odor of earth and blossom. Felix
was immensely entertained. He had called it a comical country, and he
went about laughing at everything he saw. You would have said that

American civilization expressed itself to his sense in a tissue of capital
jokes. The jokes were certainly excellent, and the young man's
merriment was joyous and genial. He possessed what is called the
pictorial sense; and this first glimpse of democratic manners stirred the
same sort of attention that he would have given to the movements of a
lively young person with a bright complexion. Such attention would
have been demonstrative and complimentary; and in the present case
Felix might have passed for an undispirited young exile revisiting the
haunts of his childhood. He kept looking at the violent blue of the sky,
at the scintillating air, at the scattered and multiplied patches of color.
"Comme c'est bariole, eh?" he said to his sister in that foreign tongue
which they both appeared to feel a mysterious prompting occasionally
to use.
"Yes, it is bariole indeed," the Baroness answered. "I don't like the
coloring; it hurts my eyes."
"It shows how extremes meet," the young man rejoined. "Instead of
coming to the West we seem to have gone to the East. The way the sky
touches the house-tops is just like Cairo; and the red and blue
sign-boards patched over the face of everything remind one of
Mahometan decorations."
"The young women are not Mahometan," said his companion. "They
can't be said to hide their faces. I never saw anything so bold."
"Thank Heaven they don't hide their faces!" cried Felix. "Their faces
are uncommonly pretty."
"Yes, their faces are often very pretty," said the Baroness, who was a
very clever woman. She was too clever a woman not to be capable of a
great deal of just and fine observation. She clung more closely than
usual to her brother's arm; she was not exhilarated, as he was; she said
very little, but she noted a great many things and made her reflections.
She was a little excited; she felt that she had indeed come to a strange
country, to make her fortune. Superficially, she was conscious of a
good deal of irritation and displeasure; the Baroness was a very delicate

and fastidious person. Of old, more than once, she had gone, for
entertainment's sake and in brilliant company, to a fair in a provincial
town. It seemed to her now that she was at an enormous fair-- that the
entertainment and the desagrements were very much the same. She
found herself alternately smiling and shrinking; the show was very
curious, but it was probable, from moment to moment, that one would
be jostled. The Baroness had never seen so many people walking about
before; she had never been so mixed up with people she did not know.
But little by little she felt that this fair was a more serious undertaking.
She went with her brother into a large public garden, which seemed
very pretty, but where she was surprised at seeing no carriages. The
afternoon was drawing to a close; the coarse, vivid grass and the
slender tree-boles were gilded by the level sunbeams-- gilded as with
gold that was fresh from the mine. It was the hour at which ladies
should come out for an airing and roll past a hedge of pedestrians,
holding their parasols askance. Here, however, Eugenia observed no
indications of this custom, the absence of which was more anomalous
as there was a charming avenue of remarkably graceful, arching elms in
the most convenient contiguity to a large, cheerful street, in which,
evidently, among the more prosperous members of the bourgeoisie, a
great deal of pedestrianism went forward. Our friends passed out into
this well lighted promenade, and Felix noticed a great many more
pretty girls and called his sister's attention to them. This latter measure,
however, was superfluous; for the Baroness had inspected, narrowly,
these charming young ladies.
"I feel an intimate conviction that our cousins are like that," said Felix.
The Baroness hoped so, but this is not what she said. "They are very
pretty," she said, "but they are mere little girls. Where are the
women--the women of thirty?"
"Of thirty-three, do you mean?" her brother was going to ask; for he
understood often both what she said and what she did not say. But he
only exclaimed upon the beauty of the sunset, while the Baroness, who
had come to seek her