University of Virginia Library

14. CHAPTER XIV.
MR. ST. JOHN IS OUT-ARGUED.

A WOMAN has two vernal seasons in her life. One
is the fresh, sweet-brier, apple-blossom spring of
girlhood—dewy, bird-singing, joyous and transient. The
other is the spring of young marriage, before the austere
labors and severe strains of real life commence.

It is the spring of wedding presents, of first housekeeping,
of incipient, undeveloped matronage. If the
young girl is charming, with her dawning airs of womanhood,
her inexperienced naïve assumptions, her grave,
ignorant wisdom, at which elders smile indulgently—so
is the new-made wife with her little matronly graces, her
pretty sense of responsibility in her new world of power.

In the first period, the young girl herself is the object
of attention and devotion. She is the permitted center
of all eyes, the leading star of her own little drama of
life. But with marriage the center changes. Self begins
to melt away into something higher. The girl recognizes
that it is no longer her individuality that is the chief
thing, but that she is the priestess and minister of a family
state. The home becomes her center, and to her home
passes the charm that once was thrown around her person.
The pride that she may have had in self becomes
a pride in her home. Her home is the new impersonation
of herself; it is her throne, her empire. How often
do we see the young wife more sensitive to the adornment
of her house than the adornment of her person,
willing even to retrench and deny in the last, that her

home may become more cheerful and attractive! A
pretty set of china for her tea-table goes farther with her
than a gay robe for herself. She will sacrifice ribbons
and laces for means to adorn the sacred recesses
which have become to her an expansion of her own
being.

The freshness of a new life invests every detail of the
freshly arranged ménage. Her china, her bronzes, her
pictures, her silver, her table cloths and napkins, her
closets and pantries, all speak to her of a new sense of
possession—a new and different hold on life. Once she
was only a girl, moving among things that belonged to
mamma and papa; now she is a matron, surrounded
everywhere by things that are her own—a princess in her
own little kingdom. Nor is the charm lessened that she
no longer uses the possessive singular, but says our. And
behind those pronouns, we and our, what pleasant security!
What innocent pharisaism of self-complacency, as
each congratulates the other on “our” ways, “our” plans,
“our” arrangements; each,the while,sure that they two are
the fortunate among mankind, and that all who are not
blest as they are proper subjects for indulgent pity.
“After all, my dear,” says he, “what can you expect of
poor Snooks?—a bachelor, poor fellow. If he only had a
wife like you, now,” etc., etc. Or, “I can't really blame
Cynthia with that husband of hers, Harry dear. If I
were married to such a man, I should act like a little
fiend. If she had only such a husband as you, now!”
This secret, respectable, mutual admiration society of
married life, of how much courage and hope is it the
parent! For, do not our failures and mistakes often
come from discouragement? Does not every human
being need a believing second self, whose support and
approbation shall reinforce one's failing courage? The
saddest hours of life are when we doubt ourselves. To

sensitive, excitable people, who expend nervous energy
freely, must come many such low tides. “Am I really
a miserable failure—a poor, good-for-nothing, abortive
attempt?” In such crises we need another self to restore
our equilibrium.

Our young friends were just in the second spring of
life's new year. They were as fond and proud of their
little house as a prince of his palace—possibly a good
deal more so. They were proud of each other. Eva felt
sure that Harry was destined to the high places of the
literary world. She read his editorials with sincere admiration,
hid his poems away in her heart, and pasted
them carefully in her scrap-book. Fame and success
she felt sure ought to come to him, and would. He was
“such a faithful, noble-hearted fellow, and worked so
steadily.” And he, with what pride he spoke the words
“my wife”! With what exultation repressed under an
air of playful indifference he brought this and that associate
in to dine, and enjoyed the admiration of her and
her pretty home, and graceful, captivating ways. He
liked to see the effect of her gay, sparkling conversation,
her easy grace, on these new subjects; for Eva was, in
truth, a charming woman. The mixture of innocent
shrewdness, of sprightly insight, of bright and airy fancy
about her, made her society a thing to be longed after,
as people long for a pleasant stimulant. Like all bright,
earnest young men, Harry wanted to “lend a hand” to
make the world around him brighter and better, and had
his ideas of what a charming, attractive home might do
as a center to many hearts in promoting mutual brotherhood
and good fellowship. He had not a doubt of their
little social venture in society, nor that Eva was precisely
the person to make of their house a pleasant resort, to
be in herself the blending and interpreting medium
through whom differing and even discordant natures

should be brought to understand the good that was in
one another.

As a preparation for the first experiment, Eva had
commenced by inviting Mr. St. John to dinner, that she
might enlist his approbation of her scheme and have
time to set it before him in that charming fireside hour,
when spirits, like flowers, open to catch the dews of influence.
After dinner Harry had an engagement at the
printing-office, and left Eva the field all to herself; and
she managed her cards admirably. Mr. St. John had
been little accustomed to the society of cultured, attractive
women; but he had in his own refined nature every
sensibility to respond agreeably to its influences; and
already this fireside had come to be a place where he
loved to linger. And so, when she had him comfortably
niched in his corner, she opened the first parallel of her
siege.

“Now, Mr. St. John, you have been preaching to us
about self-denial, and putting us all up to deeds of self-sacrifice—I
have some self-denying work to propose to
you.”

Mr. St. John opened his blue eyes wide at this exordium,
and looked an interrogation.

“Well, Mr. St. John,” pursued Eva, “we are going to
have little social reunions at our house every Thursday,
from seven till ten, for the purpose of promoting good
feeling and fellowship, and we want our rector to be one
of us and help us.”

“Indeed, Mrs. Henderson, I have not the least social
tact. My sphere does n't lie at all in that direction,” said
Mr. St. John, nervously. “I have no taste for general
society.”

“Yes, but I think you told us last Sunday we were
not to consult our tastes. You told us that if we felt a
strong distaste for any particular course, it might possibly

show that just here the true path of Christian heroism
lay.”

“You turn my words upon me, Mrs. Henderson. I
was thinking then of the distaste that people usually feel
for visiting the poor and making themselves practically
familiar with the unlovely side of life.”

“Well, but may it not apply the other way? You
are perfectly familiar and at home among the poor, but
you have always avoided society among cultured persons
of your own class. May not the real self-denial for you
lie there? You have a fastidious shrinking from strangers.
May it not be your duty to overcome it? There
are a great many I know in our circle who might be the
better for knowing you. Have you a right to shrink
back from them?”

Mr. St. John moved uneasily in his chair.

“Now,” pursued Eva, “there's a young Dr. Campbell
that I want you to know. To be sure, he is n't a believer
in the church—not a believer at all, I fear; but still a
charming, benevolent, kindly, open-hearted man, and I
want him to know you, and come under good influences.”

“I do n't believe I 'm at all adapted,” said Mr. St.
John, hesitatingly.

“Well, dear sir, what do you say to us when we say
the same about mission work? Do n't you tell us that
if we honestly try we shall learn to adapt ourselves?”

“That is true,” said St. John, frankly.

“Besides,” said Eva, “Mr. St. John, Dr. Campbell
might do you good. All your friends feel that you are
too careless of your health. Indeed, we all feel great
concern about it, and you might learn something of Dr.
Campbell in this.”

Thus Eva pursued her advantage with that fluent
ability with which a pretty young woman at her own

fireside always gets the best of the argument. Mr. St.
John, attacked on the weak side of conscientiousness,
was obliged at last to admit that to spend an evening
with agreeable, cultivated, well-dressed people might be
occasionally as much a shepherd's duty as to sit in the
close, ill-smelling rooms of poverty and listen to the
croonings and maunderings of the ill-educated, improvident,
and foolish, who make so large a proportion of the
less fortunate classes of society. It had been suggested to
him that a highly-educated, agreeable young doctor, who
talked materialism and dissented from the thirty-nine
articles, might as properly be borne with as a drinking
young mechanic who talked unbelief of a lower and less
respectable order.

Now it so happened, by one of those unexpected coincidences
that fall out in the eternal order of things,
that Eva was reinforced in her course of argument by
a silent and subtle influence, of which she was herself
scarcely aware. The day seldom passed that one or
other of her sisters did not form a part of her family
circle, and on this day of all others the fates had willed
that Angelique should come up to work on her Christmas
presents by Eva's fireside.

Imagine, therefore, as the scene of this conversation,
a fire-lighted room, the evening flicker of the blaze falling
in flecks and flashes over books and pictures, and
Mr. St. John in a dark, sheltered corner, surveying without
being surveyed, listening to Eva's animated logic,
and yet watching a very pretty tableau in the opposite
corner.

There sat Angelique, listening to the conversation,
with the fire-light falling in flashes on her golden hair
and her lap full of worsteds—rosy, pink, blue, lilac, and
yellow. Her little hands were busy in some fleecy wonder,
designed to adorn the Christmas-tree for the mission

school of his church; and she knit and turned and
twisted the rosy mystery with an air of grave interest,
the while giving an attentive ear to the conversation.

Mr. St. John was not aware that he was looking at
her; in fact, he supposed he was listening to Eva, who
was eloquently setting forth to him all the good points
in Dr. Campbell's character, and the reasons why it was
his duty to seek and cultivate his acquaintance; but
while she spoke and while he replied he saw the little
hands moving, and a sort of fairy web weaving, and the
face changing as, without speaking a word, she followed
with bright, innocent sympathy the course of the conversation.

When Eva, with a becoming air of matronly gravity,
lectured him for his reckless treatment of his own health,
and his want of a proper guide on that subject, Angelique's
eyes seemed to say the same; and sometimes,
when Eva turned just the faintest light of satire on the
ascetic notions to which he was prone, those same eyes
sparkled with that frank gaiety that her dimpled face
seemed made to express. Now the kitten catches at her
thread, and she stops, and bends over and dangles the
ball, and laughs softly to herself, and St. John from his
dark corner watches the play. There is something of
the kitten in her, he thinks. Even her gravest words
have suggested the air of a kitten on good behavior, and
perhaps she may be a naughty, wicked kitten—who
knows? A kitten lying in wait to catch unwary birds
and mice! But she looked so artless—so innocent!—her
little head bent on one side like a flower, and her eyes
sparkling as if she were repressing a laugh!—a nervous
idea shot through the conversation to Mr. St. John's
heart. What if this girl should laugh at him? St. Jerome
himself might have been vulnerable to a poisoned
arrow like this. What if he really were getting absurd

notions and ways in the owl-like recesses and retirements
of his study—growing rusty, unfit for civilized life?
Clearly it was his duty to “come forth into the light of
things,” and before he left that evening he gave his
pledge to Eva that he would be one of the patrons of her
new social enterprise.

It is to be confessed that as he went home that night
he felt that duty had never worn an aspect so agreeable.
It was certainly his place as a good fisher of men to study
the habits of the cultured, refined, and influential portion
of society, as well as of its undeveloped children. Then,
he did n't say it to himself, but the scene where these
investigations were to be pursued rose before him insensibly
as one where Angelique was to be one of the
entertainers. It would give him a better opportunity of
studying the genus and habits of that variety of the
church militant who train in the uniform of fashionable
girls, and to decide the yet doubtful question whether
they had any genuine capacity for church work. Angelique's
evident success with her class was a puzzle to
him, and he thought he would like to know her better,
and see if real, earnest, serious purposes could exist under
that gay exterior.

Somehow, he could not fancy those laughing eyes and
that willful, curly, golden hair under the stiff cap of a
Sister of Charity; and he even doubted whether a gray
cloak would seem as appropriate as the blue robe and
ermine cape where the poor little child had rested her
scarred cheek. He liked to think of her just as she
looked then and there. And why should n't he get acquainted
with her? If he was ever going to form a sisterhood
of good works, certainly it was his duty to
understand the sisters. Clearly it was!