The Street Called Straight | Page 3

a time when the Sussex Rangers were stationed there. Her engagement to Captain Gerald Fane--son of the Very Reverend the Dean of Silchester--was the result of a series of dances given chiefly in the Hamilton hotels. Marriage brought the girl born and bred in a New England college town into a kind of life for which she had had no preparation; but she adapted herself as readily as she would have done had she married a Russian prince or a Spanish grandee. In the effort she made there was a mingling of the matter-of-fact and the tour de force. Regimental life is not unlike that of a large family; it has the same sort of claims, intimacies, and quarrels, the same sort of jealousies within, combined with solidarity against the outsider. Perceiving this quickly, Drusilla proceeded to disarm criticism by being impeccable in dress and negatively amiable in conduct. "With my temperament," she said to herself, "I can afford to wait." Following her husband to Barbados, the Cape, and India, she had just succeeded in passing all the tests of the troop-ship and the married quarters when he died. For a while her parents hoped she would make her widowed home in Boston; but her heart had been given irrevocably to the British army--to its distinguished correctness, to its sober glories, its world-wide roving, and its picturesque personal associations. Though she had seen little of England, except for occasional visits on leave, she had become English in tastes and at heart. For a year after Gerald's death she lived with his family at Silchester, in preference to going to her own. After that she settled in the small house at Southsea, where from time to time she had her girlhood's companion, Olivia Guion, as a guest.
"Perhaps that'll do us good," Miss Guion ventured, in reply to Drusilla's observations at her expense. "To see ourselves as others see us must be much like looking at one's face in a spoon."
"That doesn't do us any good," Rodney Temple corrected, "because we always blame the spoon."
"Don't you mind them, dear," Mrs. Temple cooed. She was a little, apple-faced woman, with a figure suggestive of a tea-cozy, and a voice with a gurgle in it, like a dove's. A nervous, convulsive moment of her pursed-up little mouth made that organ an uncertain element in her physiognomy, shifting as it did from one side of her face to the other with the rapidity of an aurora borealis. "Don't mind them, dear. A woman can never do more than reflect 'broken lights' of her husband, when she has a good one. Don't you love that expression?--'broken lights'? 'We are but broken lights of Thee!' Dear Tennyson! And no word yet from Madame de Melcourt."
"I don't expect any now," Olivia explained. "If Aunt Vic had meant to write she would have done it long ago. I'm afraid I've offended her past forgiveness."
She held her head slightly to one side, smiling with an air of mock penitence.
"Dear, dear!" Mrs. Temple murmured, sympathetically. "Just because you wouldn't marry a Frenchman!"
"And a little because I'm going to marry an Englishman. To Aunt Vic all Englishmen are grocers."
"Horrid old thing!" Drusilla said, indignantly.
"It's because she doesn't know them, of course," Olivia went on. "It's one of the things I never can understand--how people can generalize about a whole nation because they happen to dislike one or two individuals. As a matter of fact, Aunt Vic has become so absorbed in her little circle of old French royalist noblesse that she can't see anything to admire outside the rue de l'Université and chateau life in Normandy. She does admit that there's an element of homespun virtue in the old families of Boston and Waverton; but that's only because she belongs to them herself."
"The capacity of the American woman for being domesticated in an alien environment," observed Rodney Temple, "is only equaled by the dog's."
"We're nomadic, father," Drusilla asserted, "and migratory. We've always been so. It's because we're Saxons and Angles and Celts and Normans, and--"
"Saxon and Norman and Dane are we," Mrs. Temple quoted, gently.
"They've always been fidgeting about the world, from one country to another," Drusilla continued, "and we've inherited the taste. If we hadn't, our ancestors would never have crossed the Atlantic, in the first place. And now that we've got here, and can't go any farther in this direction, we're on the jump to get back again. That's all there is to it. It's just in the blood. Isn't it, Peter? Isn't it, Cousin Henry?"
Drusilla had a way of appealing to whatever men were present, as though her statements lacked something till they had received masculine corroboration.
"All the same, I wish you could have managed the thing without giving offence to Aunt Vic."
The words were Henry Guion's first since