University of Virginia Library

9. CHAPTER IX.
LOVERS AND LOVERS.

ALBERT CHARLTON had little money, and
he was not a man to remain idle. He was good
in mathematics, and did a little surveying now
and then; in fact, with true democratic courage,
he turned his hand to any useful employment.
He did not regard these things as having any bearing on his
career. He was only waiting for the time to come when he
could found his Great Educational Institution on the virgin
soil of Minnesota. Then he would give his life to training
boys to live without meat or practical jokes, to love truth,
honesty, and hard lessons; he would teach girls to forego
jewelry and cucumber-pickles, to study physiology, and to abhor
flirtations. Visionary, was he? You can not help smiling at
a man who has a “vocation,” and who wants to give the world
a good send-off toward its “goal.” But there is something
noble about it after all. Something to make you and me
ashamed of our selfishness. Let us not judge Charlton by his
green flavor. When these discordant acids shall have ripened
in the sunshine and the rain, who shall tell how good the fruit
may be? We may laugh, however, at Albert, and his school
that was to be. I do not doubt that even that visionary street-loafer

known to the Athenians as Sokrates, was funny to
those who looked at him from a great distance below.

During the time in which Charlton waited, and meditated
his plans for the world's advancement by means of a school
that should be so admirable as to modify the whole system of
education by the sheer force of its example, he found it of
very great advantage to unfold his plans to Miss Helen Minorkey.
Miss Holen loved to hear him talk. His enthusiasm
was the finest thing she had found, out of books. It was like
a heroic poem, as she often remarked, this fine philanthropy of
his, and he seemed to her like King Arthur preparing his
Table Round to regenerate the earth. This compliment, uttered
with the coolness of a literary criticism—and nothing
could be cooler than a certain sort of literary criticism—this
deliberate and oft-repeated compliment of Miss Minorkey always
set Charlton's enthusiastic blood afire with love and admiration
for the one Being, as he declared, born to appreciate
his great purposes. And the Being was pleased to be made
the partner of such dreams and hopes. In an intellectual and
ideal fashion she did appreciate them. If Albert had carried
out his great plans, she, as a disinterested spectator, would
have written a critical analysis of them much as she would
have described a new plant.

But whenever Charlton tried to excite in her an enthusiasm
similar to his own, he was completely foiled. She shrunk
from everything like self-denial or labor of any sort. She
was not adapted to it, she assured him. And he who made
fierce war on the uselessness of woman in general came to
reconcile himself to the uselessness of woman in particular,
to apologize for it, to justify it, to admire it. Love is

the mother of invention, and Charlton persuaded himself that
it was quite becoming in such a woman as the most remarkably
cultivated, refined, and intellectual Helen Minorkey, to
shrink from the drudgery of life. She was not intended for
it. Her susceptibilities were too keen, according to him, though
Helen Minorkey's susceptibilities were indeed of a very quiet
sort. I believe that Charlton, the sweeping radical, who
thought, when thinking on general principles, that every human
creature should live wholly for every other human creature,
actually addressed some “Lines to H. M.,” through the columns
of the St. Paul Advertiser of that day, in which he
promulgated the startling doctrine that a Being such as was
the aforesaid H. M., could not be expected to come into contact
with the hard realities of life. She must content herself
with being the Inspiration of the life of Another, who would
work out plans that should inure to the good of man and the
honor of the Being, who would inspire and sustain the Toiler.
The poem was considered very fine by H. M., though the
thoughts were a little too obscure for the general public and
the meter was not very smooth. You have doubtless had occasion
to notice that poems which deal with Beings and Inspirations
are usually of very imperfect fluidity.

Charlton worked at surveying and such other employments as
offered themselves, wrote poems to Helen Minorkey, and plotted
and planned how he might break up little Katy's engagement.
He plotted and planned sometimes with a breaking heart, for
the more he saw of Smith Westcott, the more entirely detestable
he seemed. But he did not get much co-operation from
Isabel Marlay. If he resented any effort to make a match
between him and “Cousin Isa,” she resented it ten times more

vehemently, and all the more that she, in her unselfishness of
spirit, admired sincerely the unselfishness of Charlton, and in
her practical and unimaginative life felt drawn toward the
idealist young man who planned and dreamed in a way quite
wonderful to her. All her woman's pride made her resent the
effort to marry her to a man in love with another, a man who
had not sought her.

“Albert is smart,” said Mrs. Plausaby to her significantly
one day; “he would be just the man for you, Isa.”

“Why, Mrs. Plausaby, I heard you say yourself that his
wife would have to do without silk dresses and new bonnets.
For my part, I don't think much of that kind of smartness
that can't get a living. I wouldn't have a man like Mr.
Charlton on any terms.”

And she believed that she spoke the truth; having never
learned to analyze her own feelings, she did not know that
all her dislike for Charlton had its root in a secret liking for
him, and that having practical ability herself, the kind of ability
that did not make a living was just the sort that she
admired most.

It was, therefore, without any co-operation between them,
that Isabel and young Charlton were both of them putting forth
their best endeavor to defeat the plans of Smith Westcott, and
avert the sad eclipse which threatened the life of little Katy.
And their efforts in that direction were about equally fruitful
in producing the result they sought to avoid. For whenever
Isa talked to little Katy about Westcott, Katy in the goodness
of her heart and the vehemence of her love was set upon
finding out, putting in order, and enumerating all of his good
qualities. And when Albert attacked him vehemently and
called him a coxcomb, and a rake, and a heartless villain, she
cried, and cried, out of sheer pity for “poor Mr. Westcott;”
she thought him the most persecuted man in the world, and
she determined that she would love him more fervently and
devotedly than ever, that she would! Her love should atone
for all the poor fellow suffered. And “poor Mr. Westcott”
was not slow in finding out that “feelin' sorry for a feller

was Katy's soft side, by George! he! he!” and having made
this discovery he affected to be greatly afflicted at the treatment
he received from Albert and from Miss Marlay; nor did
he hesitate to impress Katy with the fact that he endured all
these things out of pure devotion to her, and he told her that
he could die for her, “by George! he! he!” any day, and
that she mustn't ever desert him if she didn't want him to
kill himself; he didn't care two cents for life except for her,
and he'd just as soon go to sleep in the lake as not, “by
George! he! he!” any day. And then he rattled his keys,
and sang in a quite affecting way, to the simple-minded
Kate, how for “bonnie Annie Laurie,” with a look at Katy,
he could “lay him down and dee,” and added touchingly and
recitatively the words “by George! he! he!” which made his
emotion seem very real and true to Katy; she even saw a vision
of “poor Mr. Westcott” dragged out of the lake dead on her
account, and with that pathetic vision in her mind she vowed
she'd rather die than desert him. And as for all the ills which
her brother foreboded for her in case she should marry Smith
Westcott, they did not startle her at all. Such simple, loving
natures as Katy Charlton's can not feel for self. It is such
a pleasure to them to throw themselves away in loving.

Besides, Mrs. Plausaby put all her weight into the scale, and
with the loving Katy the mother's word weighed more even
than Albert's. Mrs. Plausaby didn't see why in the world Katy
couldn't marry as she pleased without being tormented to death.
Marrying was a thing everybody must attend to personally for
themselves. Besides, Mr. Westcott was a nice-spoken man, and
dressed very well, his shirt-bosom was the finest in Metropolisville,
and he had a nice hat and wore levender glvoes on

Sundays. And he was a store-keeper, and he would give
Katy all the nice things she wanted. It was a nice thing to
be a store-keeper's wife. She wished Plausaby would keep a
store. And she went to the glass and fixed her ribbons, and
reflected that if Plausaby kept a store she could get plenty of
them.

And so all that Cousin Isa and Brother Albert said came
to naught, except that it drove the pitiful Katy into a greater
devotion to her lover, and made the tender-hearted Katy cry.
And when she cried, the sentimental Westcott comforted her
by rattling his keys in an affectionate way, and reminding her
that the course of true love never did run smooth, “by George!
he! he! he!”