"I could see that he had never regarded the matter in that light before," she went on gaily, encouraged by my laughter, "but he braced himself for the conflict, and said `I wonder that you didn't stay a little longer while you were about it. Milton and Ben Jonson were still alive; Bacon's Novum Organum was just coming out; and in thirty or forty years you could have had L'Allegro, Il Penseroso and Paradise Lost; Newton's Principia, too, in 1687. Perhaps these were all too serious and heavy for your national taste; still one sometimes likes to claim things one cannot fully appreciate. And then, too, if you had once begun to stay, waiting for the great things to happen and the great books to be written, you would never have gone, for there would still have been Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne to delay you.'
"'If we couldn't stay to see out your great bards, we certainly couldn't afford to remain and welcome your minor ones,' I answered frigidly; `but we wanted to be well out of the way before England united with Scotland, knowing that if we were uncomfortable as things were, it would be a good deal worse after the Union; and we had to come home anyway, and start our own poets. Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell had to be born.'
"'I suppose they had to be if you had set your mind on it,' he said, `though personally I could have spared one or two on that roll of honour.'
"'Very probably,' I remarked, as thoroughly angry now as he intended I should be. `We cannot expect you to appreciate all the American poets; indeed, you cannot appreciate all of your own, for the same nation doesn't always furnish the writers and the readers. Take your precious Browning, for example! There are hundreds of Browning Clubs in America, and I never heard of a single one in Scotland.'
"'No,' he retorted, `I dare say; but there is a good deal in belonging to a people who can understand him without clubs!'"
"O Francesca!" I exclaimed, sitting bolt upright among my pillows.
"How could you give him that chance! How COULD you! What did you say?"
"I said nothing," she replied mysteriously. "I did something much more to the point,--I cried!"
"CRIED?"
"Yes, cried; not rivers and freshets of woe, but small brooks and streamlets of helpless mortification."
"What did he do then?"
"Why do you say `do'?"
"Oh, I mean `say,' of course. Don't trifle; go on. What did he say then?"
"There are some things too dreadful to describe," she answered, and wrapping her Italian blanket majestically about her she retired to her own apartment, shooting one enigmatical glance at me as she closed the door.
That glance puzzled me for some time after she left the room. It was as expressive and interesting a beam as ever darted from a woman's eye. The combination of elements involved in it, if an abstract thing may be conceived as existing in component parts, was something like this:-One-half, mystery.
One-eighth, triumph.
One-eighth, amusement.
One-sixteenth, pride.
One-sixteenth, shame.
One-sixteenth, desire to confess.
One-sixteenth, determination to conceal.
And all these delicate, complex emotions played together in a circle of arching eyebrow, curving lip, and tremulous chin,--played together, mingling and melting into one another like fire and snow; bewildering, mystifying, enchanting the beholder!
If Ronald Macdonald did--I am a woman, but, for one, I can hardly blame him!
