Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905

“My dear,” she said, “why should your charming sister be treated as a prisoner over whom somebody must perpetually keep watch? I have had six children – they were all healthy and had their full complement of legs and arms – except Bob, who lost an arm in the Spanish war, but that doesn’t count – and I never was shut up in my room before I had to be – nor put on a milk diet – nor forbidden reasonable exercise – and I think the modern doctors are full of fads and greed. Their bills! I don’t know who is rich enough to be ill nowadays!” Here she shut her eyes and trembled to think of the portion of her own great fortune that might have transferred itself to the doctor’s pockets if her nursery had not antedated the present school. “It may not seem very expensive to young Mrs. Minthrop to lie on her sofa and drink milk – but just wait till she comes to pay for it!”

“I don’t believe anyone will care about the bill, Mrs. Star,” said Deena, “so long as Polly keeps well.”

“It is bad enough to have food and exercise taken away from the young mothers,” continued Mrs. Star, who was evidently mounted on a hobby, “but when helpless infants are deprived of their natural sustenance and fed from bottles filled in a laboratory and stuffed with cotton, it is time for the Gerry Society to interfere. Cruelty to children is practiced far more by the rich than by the poor, in my opinion, and if you want to see cases of inanition and feeble spines, I’ll show you where to look for them, and it won’t be in the tenements!”

Deena wanted to laugh, but didn’t dare to; the old lady proclaimed her fierce sentiments with such earnest gravity. She managed, however, to say politely:

“You think that science has not improved upon nature in rearing the race, but you must remember that it finds the higher classes existing under unnatural conditions.”

“The conditions would do very well if we could banish the doctors,” said the old lady, testily. “I am out of patience with their incubators and their weighing machines and their charts and their thermometers – yes, and their baby nurses! What do you suppose I heard a mother say to her own servant the other day: ‘Please, nurse, may I take the baby up? He is crying fearfully,’ and the nurse, who had reluctantly put down the morning paper, said: ‘No, m’am, when he cries in that angry way, he must learn that it is useless!’ His age was six weeks.”

Deena burst into a hearty laugh.

“My dear Mrs. Star,” she said, “I am a convert.”

Mrs. Star wagged her head in approbation.

“Just tell your sister what I have said, will you?” she pursued, afraid that so much wisdom might be lost. “And, my dear, since your brother-in-law has gone home, suppose you come along to the opera with me. I sent some tickets to a few stray men, and I must look in before the last act.”

At this point they were joined by the gentlemen, and as soon as decency would permit, Mrs. Star made her adieux, followed by Deena. The Minthrop brougham was dismissed, and the ladies whirled away in Mrs. Star’s electric carriage. She at once took up her parable, but this time the topic was not the care of infants.

“I think a great deal of the scenic effect of an opera box,” she said. “I always dress with respect to the hangings, and I never take a discordant color beside me if I can help it. You happen to please me very much this evening; I like the simplicity of the white dress. Still, it wouldn’t be anything if you didn’t have such a neck – it gives an air to any low gown.”

“It was my wedding dress,” said Deena, frankly, “and my sister’s maid rearranged it for me. I am glad you like it.”

“Your wedding dress,” said Mrs. Star, reflectively. “I think I heard you had married a naturalist – prehistoric bones, is it not? Very interesting subject – so inspiring. Milliken” – to the footman, who opened the door on their arrival at the opera house – “you may keep the carriage here. I shall not be more than half an hour.”

Half an hour for the enjoyment of a pleasure that cost her, yearly, a moderate fortune!

On their way through the foyer to the box, Deena ventured to disclaim for her husband a peculiar interest in fossils.

“My husband is a botanist,” she began, and then desisted when she saw her companion’s attention was barely held by a desire to be civil.

“Ah, indeed!” Mrs. Star vaguely responded. “Delightful topic. I went into it myself quite extensively when I was a girl.”

Deena was not often malicious, but she couldn’t help wishing Simeon could have stood by to hear this announcement of a girlish mastery of his life’s work. She tried to think in what dry words he would have rebuked the levity, but before she could arrange a phrase quite in character, they were in the front of the box, and in the obscurity some one took her hand, and Stephen French’s voice murmured:

“What a piece of luck that I should see you to-night! I have only been in town a few hours, and obeyed my aunt’s summons to the opera as a means of keeping myself from Ben’s house till the morning. You can’t think how eager I have been to see you again, Mrs. Ponsonby.”

There was a strange break in his voice, as if he were trying to restrain the rush of happiness.

All the six mighty artists who made the opera the marvel it was were combining their voices in the closing sextet of the fourth act, and Deena, thrilled by the loveliness of the music and, perhaps, by the surprise of French’s presence, felt she was trembling with excitement.

“Fancy meeting you here!” she kept repeating, the stupid phrase concealing the great joy that was puzzling her conscience.

“What is so wonderful in my being in my aunt’s opera box?” Stephen demanded. “Cannot a professor of zoology like music, or do you object to a bachelor owning an aunt?”

How pleasant it was to hear his kind voice, with its good-natured raillery! But that was sub-conscious pleasure – her immediate attention was busy with the first part of his speech about his aunt’s opera box; she never supposed he had any relations.

“Who is your aunt?” she asked, abruptly.

“Mrs. Star,” he answered. “Don’t you see the family likeness?”

And oddly enough, in the half light, there was a distinct resemblance in the profile of the bewigged old lady to her handsome young kinsman’s. Deena regretted both the likeness and the relationship; it made her uncomfortable to know that Stephen was the nephew of this worldly-minded old lady, with her fictitious standards and her enormous riches; it seemed to place a barrier between them and to lift him out of the simplicity of his college setting.

“Have I become a snob in this Relentless City’?” she exclaimed. “I find my whole idea of you changed by this announcement. It depresses me! You seem to me a different person here, with these affiliations of fashion and grandeur, than when I thought of you simply as Simeon’s friend.”

“Don’t think of me simply as Simeon’s friend,” he pleaded, half in fun, half in sinful earnest.

“I never shall again,” she said, sadly. “Your greatest charm is eclipsed by this luxury – I want you to belong to Harmouth only.”

Stephen’s lips were twitching with suppressed amusement.

“There is a proverb, my dear lady,” he said, “of the pot and the kettle, that you may recall. I am not sure but what I may find a word to say to you upon the cruelty of disturbing associations.”

“To me!” she said, turning to him with the gentle dignity that was her crowning charm. “Surely there are no surprises in me.”

Stephen shook his head in mock disapproval as he allowed his eyes to sweep from the topmost curl of her head to her slipper points, and then he said:

“Go home, Mrs. Ponsonby, and take off that white lace evening dress, and perhaps the wreath of holly might come, too – and that diamond star on your bodice; and put on, instead – let me see – the dark blue frock you wore the evening I told Simeon about the Patagonian expedition, and then you will be in a position to reproach me for any relapse from the simplicity of Harmouth. If you disapprove of me as the nephew of my aunt, how do you suppose I feel about you? And oh! my stars! what would Simeon say?”

“Simeon,” she said, faintly. “You are right; Simeon might not understand – ” and before French had time to protest that he had only been teasing her, the curtain went down, strange men came flocking into the box, Mrs. Star was introducing a Russian grand duke, and Stephen, surrendering his chair, withdrew to the other side of his aunt.

Deena could not but admire the old lady’s admirable manner. She kept up an easy chatter, sometimes in French, sometimes in English, with the Russian and with a Spanish artist; she never allowed Deena to feel out of touch with the conversation, and in the midst of it all she managed to welcome her nephew.

“You are stopping at my house, of course, Stephen? No – at the Savoy? That is uncharitable to a lonely old woman. Where did you know that pretty creature, Mrs. Ponsonby?” she asked, seeing that the two foreigners were absorbing the attention of her beautiful protégée. “You should learn to guard the expression of your face, my dear boy. I begin to understand why you cling so obstinately to Harmouth. I see the place has advantages outside the work of the college.”

Here she wagged her head in self-congratulation at her own astuteness, and Stephen flushed angrily.

“Hush!” he said. “She will hear you. You have little knowledge of Mrs. Ponsonby if you think she would permit the attentions of any man. She is not in the least that kind of person. She is one of the most dignified, self-respecting, high-minded women I ever knew.”

Mrs. Star cut him short with a wave of her fan.

“Spare me the rhapsodies,” she laughed. “You merely mark the stage of the disease you have arrived at. The object of your love sits enthroned! If the husband is wise he will throw his fossils into the sea and come back to look after this pretty possession. Flesh and blood is worth more than dry bones.”

“Ponsonby is a botanist,” Stephen corrected, grimly, while his inward thought was that the dry bones were Simeon’s own; and then, ashamed of the disloyal – though unspoken – sneer, he went back to Deena and began talking volubly of his last letter from her husband.

They had both had letters from Simeon, now safely arrived in the Straits of Magellan. He had written to Deena when they first cast anchor off the Fuegian shore. He described to her the visits of the Indians in their great canoes, containing their entire families and possessions, and the never-dying fire of hemlock on a clay hearth in the middle of the boat; how they would sell their only garment – a fur cloak – for tobacco and rum, and how friendly they seemed to be, in spite of all the stories of cannibalism told by early voyagers.

In the midst of this earnest conversation, Mrs. Star rose to go, escorted by the grand duke, and Stephen, following with Deena, was able to let his enthusiasm rise above a whisper when they gained the corridor.

“Didn’t he tell you that they were all going guanaco hunting?”

“Simeon!” in a tone of incredulity.

“Greatest fun in the world, I am told,” pursued French; “something like stag hunting, only more exciting – done with the bolas. You whirl it round your head and let it fly, and it wraps itself round a beast’s legs and bowls him over before he knows what hit him.”

“Does it kill him?” asked Deena, shrinking from the miseries of the hunted.