Short stories, American; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
Except a dispute between the Doctor and Osgood concerning a slouched
hat, which the Doctor would not wear, the party succeeded in starting
and arriving amicably at the Union in Saratoga. In a few hours Mrs.
Formica knew who was there. The Trees were at the Union. Mrs. Senator
Conch had taken a cottage; but the Senator himself had stopped at
Albany for a day to confer with the Governor. Old Madam Funchal of
Philadelphia was at Congress Hall, with her train, and Mrs. Romeo
Pipps Bovis and husband, from Boston. All her friends were round her;
that is, the traveling set she was in the habit of meeting; and her
spirits rose to the occasion. These particulars she detailed, in a
white muslin morning-dress, to Osgood, who, dressed in a new
cream-colored suit, lounged in the doorway of a small parlor off the
hall. He shouldered round just in time to come face to face with Lily
Tree, who was passing on the arm of Barclay Dodge. She stopped, of
course, to shake hands with Mrs. Formica, whose apparently warm kiss
fell on the edge of a braid of her chestnut hair with the weight and
coldness of a snow-flake. Her face settled into rigidity when she
turned to speak to Osgood, and, like a transparent boy, he looked,
with all the earnestness his gray eyes were capable of, straight into
hers. Aunt Formica and Barclay read a story at once upon the text his
countenance furnished; but they both made the mistake of believing
that Lily had rejected him. Lily was too much occupied in managing her
own feelings to divine Osgood's. The imperative necessity of
concealment, which all tutored women feel, governed her. She laughed a
great deal, though nobody said a witty thing, and kept her eyes going
between Mrs. Formica and Barclay with a steadiness which equaled the
movements of the wax women in the Broadway shop windows. Mr. Formica
and Dr. Black added themselves to the party, and the relief of an
introduction to the Doctor came to Lily. She approached him, and his
honest face induced her to skirmish lightly with him; but not a word
did he utter of the whys and wherefores of his being with Osgood. He
would not, at any rate, extend his self-elected office of chorus so
far as to include her. He felt a dislike toward her. She was too thin,
he thought; there was an air of wear and tear about her which was not
pleasant. He felt, too, that she knew more than Osgood; and a woman,
in his estimation, should never be the intellectual superior of a man
she might make choice of. But the Doctor was an Englishman; his ideas
of women had been developed by the cynical Thackeray and the material
Dickens. There was a line between the two classes of women he only
believed to exist--the bad capable woman and the good foolish
woman--which could never be crossed by one or the other. The elements
which go to make up a man, of good and evil mixed, never enter into
the composition of the women of Englishmen of the present time. It is
possible that Lily discovered Dr.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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