American fiction -- 20th century; Manhattan (New York, N.Y.) -- Fiction; Women artists -- Fiction
They strolled to the Casino. With his accustomed flair for character
Ulick recognized in the girl something out of the usual run of
Americans. The charmless Yankee woman he had encountered to his
discomfiture from the moment his steamer left Havre. She was the "life
of the smoking-room"--on the French line ladies are permitted to invade
the ship's fumoir--and he soon avoided that type. But he found her on
the docks at New York and she fairly swarmed over the hotel, did this
same aggressive, conceited, too well-dressed female. In Paris he had
seen little of his ci-devant countrymen. He never visited the office
of his father, and the recurrent advent of fresh consuls and their
wives at the Embassy left him unmoved. His ideal of the American woman
was the figure of his mother: exquisitely tactful, and of a veiled
charm. And he enjoyed in Henry James the portraiture of the refined,
if somewhat anaemic order, of lovely spinsters. But the raw native who
gadded about Paris, confidently criticizing everything and everybody--
those women were repugnant to his sensibility. Daisy Miller was a
reticent aristocrat in comparison.
Perhaps it was the Old-World texture of her manner, perhaps it was a
brief sight of the exalted soul that peeped out of her timid eyes,
perhaps--! but what reason can a young man or a young woman give for
their first fugitive predilections? Ulick met Mona and liked her; Mona
saw Ulick and liked him. As Paul Bourget would have said, they then and
there "amalgamated their sublimes," which simply meant that they were
two birds limed by nascent love. The sublimities and the mingling might
come later.
But this youthful couple did not pin down their sensations to an
artistic formula. They chatted, laughed, walked, and when the Casino
was arrived at they sat on the Terrace and Ulick told them that the
spot made him homesick for Paris; Paris, his patrie psychique. Mona
incredulously smiled yet wondered; how could anyone prefer Paris to New
York? She had never been in Paris. Ulick lightly reproached Milton
for having kept such a sister locked up, as if in a gaol. Thereat, the
theological student chuckled. Mona was free as a swallow. She preferred
the company of her parents to that of the frivolous chits of her own
social circle. Ulick had known that the Miltons were well-to-do people
who lived without ostentation, a rapidly vanishing species of New
Yorkers. Again he looked at Mona, again their gaze collided. Her eyes
shone. They are the eyes of a rare soul, he commented to himself. And
how different the expression from the calm, objective gaze of Easter.
Toujours Easter!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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