National Avenue by Booth Tarkington (book recommendations website .txt) 📕

me,” said George. “Then maybe you’d be willing to come to the house to dinner and go to this show with the family. Heaven knows I’d like to have you; it might help me to sneak out after we get ’em there. You sure you could stand it?”

“I should consider it the greatest privilege of my life,” said Dan.

“Heavens, but you’re solemn!” his caller exclaimed. “You make me feel at home⁠—I mean, as if I were at home with my solemn family. Wait till you meet some of the others⁠—and my father. He’s the solemnest. In fact, they’re all solemn except Lena. There’s only one trouble with Lena.”

“What is it?”

“The poor thing hasn’t got any sense,” Lena’s brother said lightly. “Never did. Never will have. Otherwise she’s charming⁠—when she’s in a mood to be!”

Evidently Lena was in a mood to be charming that night; she sat next to Dan at the solemn dinner and chattered to him gayly, though in a lowered voice, for George had not exaggerated when he spoke of his father. If she was a French doll, she was at least a radiant one in her ball gown of heavy ivory silk, and it was a thrilled young Midlander indeed who took her lightly in his arms for a two-step when they came out upon the dancing floor that had been laid over the chairs at the opera house. “It was nice of you to send me these flowers,” she said, as he dexterously moved her through the crowd of other two-steppers. “They’d tell anybody you’re Western, if nothing else would. Western men always send orchids. But then, of course, nobody’d need to be told you’re from out there. You tell them yourself.”

“You mean I always mention it?”

“No,” she laughed;⁠—“your dialect does. The way you pronounce r and a, and slide your words together.”

“I’ve got a brother that doesn’t,” said Dan. “He talks the way you and your family do; he says ‘lahst’ and ‘fahst’ and calls father ‘fathuh’ and New York ‘New Yawk,’ and keeps all his words separated. He began it when he was about fifteen and he’s stuck to it ever since. Says he doesn’t do it to be English, but because it’s correct pronunciation. I expect you’d like him.”

At that she looked up at him suddenly, and he was shown an inscrutable depth of dark blue glance that shook his heart. “I like you!” she said.

“Do you?” he gasped. “You didn’t seem to, that day I met you.”

She laughed. “I didn’t decide I liked you till after you’d gone. You aren’t quite cut to the pattern of most of the men I know. There’s something hearty about your looks; and I like your broad shoulders and your not seeming to have put a sleek surface over you. At least it’s pleasant for a change.”

“Is that all?” he asked, a little disappointed. “Just for a change?”

“Never mind. Is there anybody else in your family besides your brother?”

“Heavens, yes! To begin with, I’ve got a grand old grandmother; she’s over ninety, but she’s the head of the family all right! Then there’s my father and mother⁠—”

“What are they like?”

“My mother’s beautiful,” Dan said. “She’s just the loveliest, kindest person in the world, and so’s my father. He’s a lawyer.”

“What are you?”

“I’m nothin’ at all yet. So far, I’ve just been helpin’ my grandmother settle up my grandfather’s estate. Somebody had to, and my brother’s in my father’s office.”

“And do your grandmother and your mother have sitting-rooms with sewing-machines in them?”

“I wish you’d come and see.”

“Do you?” She had continued to look at him, and now her eyes almost deliberately became dreamy. “I might⁠—if you keep on asking me,” she said gravely. “I’m sure I’d hate the West, though.”

“Yet, you might come?”

“Ask me again tomorrow.”

He was but too glad to be obedient, and asked her again the next day. This was over a table for two at a restaurant on Lafayette Place, where she met him as a surreptitious adventure, suggested by herself and undertaken without notifying her mother. It was a Lochinvar courtship, she said afterward, thus implying that her share in it was passive, though there were indeed days when the young man out of the West found her not merely passive, but dreamily indifferent. And once or twice she was more than that, puzzling and grieving him by an inexplicable coldness almost like anger, so that he consulted George McMillan to find out what could be the matter.

“Moods,” George told him. “She’s nothing but moods. Just has ’em; that’s all. It doesn’t matter how you are to her; sometimes she’ll treat you like an angel and sometimes like the dickens. It doesn’t depend on anything you do.”

Dan thought her all the more fascinating, and put off his return home another month, to the increasing mystification of his family, for this month included the Christmas holidays, and Mrs. Oliphant wrote that they all missed him, and that Mrs. Savage really needed him. The McMillans, on the other hand, were not mystified, and Lena appeared to be able to control them. The manner of her parents and her sister toward the suitor was one of endurance⁠—an endurance that intended to be as thoroughbred as it could, but was nevertheless evident. It had no discouraging effect on the ardent young man, who took it as a privilege to be endured by beings so close to her. Besides, George McMillan was helpful with the exalted family, for he showed both tact and sympathy, though the latter sometimes appeared to consist of a compassionate amusement; and once he went so far as to ask Dan, laughingly, if he were quite sure he knew what he was doing.

“Am I sure?” Dan repeated incredulously. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean about Lena.”

“To me,” Dan said, with the solemnity he had come to use in speaking of her, “your sister Lena is the finest flower of womanhood ever created!”

Upon that, his friend stared at him and saw that his eyes