National Avenue, Booth Tarkington [8 ebook reader .txt] 📗

He made the best of it and was philosophic, thinking that the McMillans had given tea to a great many stray young men of whom they knew nothing, and saw once but usually never again. Also, it was a pleasure to look at Lena McMillan, even though she was so genuinely unaware of him.

Outwardly, at least, she was unlike her mother and older sister. Mrs. McMillan was a large woman, shapely, but rather stony⁠—or so she appeared to Dan⁠—and her hair rose above her broad pink forehead as a small dome of trim gray curls, not to be imagined as ever being disarranged or uncurled or otherwise than as they were. She and her older daughter, who resembled her, both wore black of an austere fashionableness; but the younger Miss McMillan had alleviated her own dark gown with touches of blue⁠—not an impertinent blue, but a blue darkly effective; and, with what seemed almost levity in this heavy old drawing-room, she wore Italian earrings of gold and lapis lazuli. Her mother did not approve of these; no one except opera singers wore earrings, Mrs. McMillan had told her before the arrival of the two young men.

Lena was sometimes defined as a “petite brunette,” and sometimes as a “perfectly beautiful French doll”; for she had to perfection a doll’s complexion and eyelashes; but beyond this point the latter definition was unfair, since dolls are usually thought wanting in animation, a quality she indeed possessed. Dan Oliphant, watching her, thought he had never before met so sparkling a creature; and a glamour stole over him. He began to think she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.

Possibly she became aware of the favour with which he was regarding her, for although her shoulder and profile were toward him, and for twenty minutes and more she seemed to be as unconscious of his presence as her mother and older sister really were, she finally gave him a glance and spoke to him. “George tells me you’re from the West,” she said.

“No. Not very,” he returned.

“Not very west?”

“I mean not from the Far West,” Dan explained. “Out there they’d call me an Easterner, of course.”

“Gracious!” she cried incredulously. “Would they, really?”

Already he thought her a wonderful being, but at this he showed some spirit. “I’m afraid so,” he said.

She laughed, not offended, and exclaimed: “Oh, so you don’t mind being a Westerner! I only meant you people are so funny about rubbing in the letter r and overdoing the short a that no one can ever make a mistake about which of the provinces you belong in. I’ve been in the West, myself⁠—rather west, that is. I didn’t care for it much.”

“Where was it?”

“Rochester. I believe you’re from farther out, aren’t you? Perhaps you can tell me if it’s true, what we hear things are like beyond Rochester.”

“Things beyond Rochester?” he asked, mystified. “What sort of things do you mean?”

“All sorts,” she answered. “I’ve always heard that when you get west of Rochester every house has a room you people call a ‘sitting-room,’ and you always keep a sewing-machine in it and apples on a centre table, and all the men keep tobacco in their cheeks and say, ‘Wa’al, no, ma’am,’ and ‘Why, certainly, ma’am,’ and ‘Yes, ma’am!’ Isn’t that what it’s like?”

“Who told you so?”

“Oh, I had a cousin who used to visit people out there. She said it was funny but dreadful. Isn’t it?”

“I wish you’d come and see,” he said earnestly. “I wish you and your brother’d come and let me show you.”

“Good heavens,” she cried;⁠—“but you’re hospitable! Do you always ask everybody to visit you after they’ve said two words to you?”

“No, not everybody,” he returned, and on the impulse continued: “I’d ask you, though, after you’d said one word to me.” And because he meant it, he instantly became red.

“Good heavens!” she cried again, and stared at him thoughtfully, perceiving without difficulty his heightened colour. “Is that the way they talk in the West, Mr.⁠—uh⁠—”

“Oliphant,” he said.

“What?”

“My name’s Oliphant,” he informed her apologetically. “You called me Mister Uh.”

“I see,” she said, and as her attention was caught just then by something her sister was saying about Milly and Anna and Charlotte and Oliver, she turned from him to say something more, herself, about Milly and Anna and Charlotte and Oliver. Then, having turned away from him, she turned not back again, but seemed to have forgotten him.

The son of the house presently took him away, the mother and her older daughter murmuring carelessly as the two young men rose to go, while Lena said more distinctly, “Good afternoon, Mister Uh.” But the unfortunate Daniel carried with him a picture that remained tauntingly before his mind’s eye; and he decided to stay in New York a little longer, though he had written his father that he would leave for home the next day. He had been stricken at first sight.

He could not flatter himself that she had bestowed a thought upon him. On the contrary, he told himself that his impetuosity had made headway backwards; and he was as greatly astonished as he was delighted when George McMillan came to see him two afternoons later, at the Holland House, and brought him a card for a charity ball at the Metropolitan. “We had some extra ones,” George said. “Lena thought you might like to come.”

“She did? Why, I⁠—I⁠—” Dan was breathless at once.

“What?”

“Why, I didn’t think she noticed I was on earth. This is perfectly beautiful of her!”

“Why, no,” George assured him; “it’s nothing at all. We had four or five cards we really didn’t know what to do with. There’ll be an awful crowd there, all kinds of people.”

“Yes, I know; but it was just beautiful of her to think of me.” And Dan added solemnly: “That sister of yours reminds me of a flower.”

“She does?” George said, visibly surprised. “You mean Lena?”

“Yes, I do. She’s like the most perfect flower that ever blossomed.”

“That’s strange news to