# The Author of Beltraffio, Pandora, Georgina's Reasons, The Path of Duty, Four Meetings/Pandora/Part 2

PART II.
Vogelstein went wherever he was asked, on principle, partly to study American society, and partly because in Washington pastimes seemed to him not so numerous that one could afford to neglect occasions. Of course, at the end of two winters, he had a good many of various kinds, and his study of American society had yielded considerable fruit. When, however, in April, during the second year of his residence, he presented himself at a large party given by Mrs. Bonnycastle, and of which it was believed that it would be the last serious affair of the season, his being there (and still more his looking very fresh and talkative) was not the consequence of a rule of conduct. He went to Mrs. Bonnycastle's simply because he liked the lady, whose receptions were the pleasantest in Washington, and because if he did n't go there he did n't know what he should do; that absence of alternatives having become rather familiar to him in Washington. There were a great many things he did because if he did n't do them he did n't know what he should do. It must be added that in this case, even if there had been an alternative, he would still have decided to go to Mrs. Bonnycastle's. If her ​house was not the pleasantest there, it was at least difficult to say which was pleasanter; and the complaint sometimes made of it that it was too limited, that it left out, on the whole, more people than it took in, applied with much less force when it was thrown open for a general party. Toward the end of the social year, in those soft, scented days of the Washington spring, when the air began to show a southern glow, and the little squares and circles (to which the wide, empty avenues converged according to a plan so ingenious, yet so bewildering) to flush with pink blossom and to make one wish to sit on benches,—at this period of expansion and condonation Mrs. Bonnycastle, who, during the winter, had been a good deal on the defensive, relaxed her vigilance a little, became humorously inconsistent, vernally reckless, as it were, and ceased to calculate the consequences of an hospitality which a reference to the back files—or even to the morning's issue—of the newspapers might easily show to be a mistake. But Washington life, to Vogelstein's apprehension, was paved with mistakes; he felt himself to be in a society which was founded on necessary errors. Little addicted as he was to the sportive view of existence, he had said to himself, at an early stage of his sojourn, that the only way to enjoy the United States would be to burn one's standards and warm one's self at the blaze. Such were the reflections of a theoretic Teuton, who now walked, for the most part, amid the ashes of his prejudices.
​Mrs. Bonnycastle had endeavored more than once to explain to him the principles on which she received certain people and ignored certain others; but it was with difficulty that he entered into her discriminations. She perceived differences where he only saw resemblances, and both the merits and defects of a good many members of Washington society, as that society was interpreted to him by Mrs. Bonnycastle, he was often at a loss to understand. Fortunately she had a fund of good humor which, as I have intimated, was apt to come uppermost with the April blossoms, and which made the people she did not invite to her house almost as amusing to her as those she did. Her husband was not in politics, though politics were much in him; but the couple had taken upon themselves the responsibilities of an active patriotism; they thought it right to live in America, differing therein from many of their acquaintances, who only thought it pleasant. They had that burden some heritage of foreign reminiscence with which so many Americans are saddled; but they carried it more easily than most of their country-people, and you knew they had lived in Europe only by their present exultation, never in the least by their regrets. Their regrets, that is, were only for their ever having lived there, as Mrs. Bonnycastle once told the wife of a foreign minister. They solved all their problems successfully, including those of knowing none of the people they did not wish to, and of finding plenty of occupation in a society supposed to be meagrely ​provided with resources for persons of leisure. When, as the warm weather approached, they opened both the wings of their door, it was because they thought it would entertain them, and not because they were conscious of a pressure. Alfred Bonnycastle, all winter indeed, chafed a little at the definiteness of some of his wife's reserves; he thought that, for Washington, their society was really a little too good. Vogelstein still remembered the puzzled feeling (it had cleared up somewhat now) with which, more than a year before, he had heard Mr. Bonnycastle exclaim one evening, after a dinner in his own house, when every guest but the German secretary (who often sat late with the pair) had departed: "Hang it, there is only a month left; let us have some fun,—let us invite the President."
This was Mrs. Bonnycastle's carnival, and on the occasion to which I began my chapter by referring, the President had not only been invited, but had signified his intention of being present. I hasten to add that this was not the same functionary to whom Alfred Bonnycastle's irreverent allusion had been made. The White House had received a new tenant (the old one, then, was just leaving it), and Otto Vogelstein had had the advantage, during the first eighteen months of his stay in America, of seeing an electoral campaign, a presidential inauguration, and a distribution of spoils. He had been bewildered, during those first weeks, by finding that in the national capital, in the houses that he supposed to be the best, ​the head of the State was not a coveted guest; for this could be the only explanation of Mr. Bonnycastle's whimsical proposal to invite him, as it were, in carnival. His successor went out a good deal, for a President.
The legislative session was over, but this made little difference in the aspect of Mrs. Bonnycastle's rooms, which, even at the height of the congressional season, could not be said to overflow with the representatives of the people. They were garnished with an occasional senator, whose movements and utterances often appeared to be regarded with a mixture of alarm and indulgence, as if they would be disappointing if they were not rather odd, and yet might be dangerous if they were not carefully watched. Vogelstein had grown to have a kindness for these conscript fathers of invisible families, who had something of the toga in the voluminous folds of their conversation, but were otherwise rather bare and bald, with stony wrinkles in their faces, like busts and statues of ancient law-givers. There seemed to him something chill and exposed in their being at once so exalted and so naked; there were lonesome glances in their eyes, sometimes, as if in the social world their legislative consciousness longed for the warmth of a few comfortable laws ready-made. Members of the House were very rare, and when Washington was new to Vogelstein he used sometimes to mistake them, in the halls and on the staircases where he met them, for the functionaries engaged for the evening to ​usher in guests and wait at supper. It was only a little later that he perceived these latter functionaries were almost always impressive, and had a complexion which served as a livery. At present, however, such misleading figures were much less to be encountered than during the months of winter, and, indeed, they never were to be encountered at Mrs. Bonnycastle's. At present the social vistas of Washington, like the vast fresh flatness of the lettered and numbered streets, which at this season seemed to Vogelstein more spacious and vague than ever, suggested but a paucity of political phenomena. Count Otto, that evening, knew every one, or almost every one. There were very often inquiring strangers, expecting great things, from New York and Boston, and to them, in the friendly Washington way, the young German was promptly introduced. It was a society in which familiarity reigned, and in which people were liable to meet three times a day, so that their ultimate essence became a matter of importance.
"I have got three new girls," Mrs. Bonnycastle said. "You must talk to them all."
"All at once?" Yogelstein asked, reversing in imagination a position which was not unknown to him. He had often, in Washington, been discoursed to at the same moment by several virginal voices.
"Oh, no; you must have something different for each; you can't get off that way. Have n't you discovered that the American girl expects something especially adapted to herself? It's very well for ​Europe to have a few phrases that will do for any girl. The American girl is n't any girl; she's a remarkable individual in a remarkable genus. But you must keep the best this evening for Miss Day."
"For Miss Day!" Vogelstein exclaimed, staring. "Do you mean Pandora?"
Mrs. Bonnycastle stared a moment in return, then laughed very hard. "One would think you had been looking for her over the globe! So you know her already, and you call her by her pet name?"
"Oh, no, I don't know her; that is, I have n't seen her, or thought of her, from that day to this. We came to America in the same ship."
"Is n't she an American, then?"
"Oh, yes; she lives at Utica, in the interior."
"In the interior of Utica? You can't mean my young woman, then, who lives in New York, where she is a great beauty and a great belle, and has been immensely admired this winter."
"After all," said Vogelstein, reflecting, and a little disappointed, "the name is not so uncommon; it is perhaps another. But has she rather strange eyes, a little yellow, but very pretty, and a nose a little arched?"
"I can't tell you all that; I have n't seen her. She is staying with Mrs. Steuben. She only came a day or two ago, and Mrs. Steuben is to bring her. When she wrote to me to ask leave she told me what I tell you. They have n't come yet."
Vogelstein felt a quick hope that the subject of ​this correspondence might indeed be the young lady he had parted from on the dock at New York, but the indications seemed to point another way, and he had no wish to cherish an illusion. It did not seem to him probable that the energetic girl who had introduced him to Mr. Lansing would have the entrée of the best house in Washington; besides, Mrs. Bonnycastle's guest was described as a beauty and belonging to the brilliant city.
"What is the social position of Mrs. Steuben?" it occurred to him to ask in a moment, as he meditated. He had an earnest, artless, literal way of uttering such a question as that; you could see from it that he was very thorough.
Mrs. Bonnycastle broke into mocking laughter. "I'm sure I don't know! What's your own?" and she left him to turn to her other guests, to several of whom she repeated his question. Could they tell her what was the social position of Mrs. Steuben? There was Count Vogelstein, who wanted to know. He instantly became aware, of course, that he ought not to have made such an inquiry. Was not the lady's place in the scale sufficiently indicated by Mrs. Bonnycastle's acquaintance with her? Still, there were fine degrees, and he felt a little unduly snubbed. It was perfectly true, as he told his hostess, that with the quick wave of new impressions which had rolled over him after his arrival in America, the image of Pandora was almost completely effaced; he had seen a great many things which were quite as ​remarkable in their way as the daughter of the Days, but at the touch of the idea that he might behold her again at any moment, she became as vivid in his mind as if they had parted but the day before; he remembered the exact shade of the eyes he had described to Mrs. Bonnycastle as yellow; the tone of her voice when, at the last, she expressed the hope that he would judge America correctly. Had he judged it correctly? If he were to meet her again, she doubtless would try to ascertain. It would be going much too far to say that the idea of such an ordeal was terrible to Otto Vogelstein; but it may at least be said that the thought of meeting Pandora Day made him nervous. The fact is certainly singular, but I shall not take upon myself to explain it; there are some things that even the most philosophic historian is not bound to account for.
He wandered into another room, and there, at the end of five minutes, he was introduced by Mrs. Bonnycastle to one of the young ladies of whom she had spoken. This was a very intelligent girl, who came from Boston and showed much acquaintance with Spielhagen's novels. "Do you like them?" Vogelstein asked, rather vaguely, not taking much interest in the matter, as he read works of fiction only in case of a sea-voyage. The young lady from Boston looked pensive and concentrated; then she answered that she liked some of them, but that there were others she did not like, and she enumerated the works that came under each of these heads. ​Spielhagen is a voluminous writer, and such a catalogue took some time; at the end of it, moreover, Vogelstein's question was not answered, for he could not have told you whether she liked Spielhagen or not. On the next topic, however, there was no doubt about her feelings. They talked about Washington as people talk only in the place itself, revolving about the subject in widening and narrowing circles, perching successively on its many branches, considering it from every point of view. Vogelstein had been long enough in America to discover that, after half a century of social neglect, Washington had become the fashion, and possessed the great advantage of being a new resource in conversation. This was especially the case in the months of spring, when the inhabitants of the commercial cities came so far southward to escape that boisterous interlude. They were all agreed that Washington was fascinating, and none of them were better prepared to talk it over than the Bostonians. Vogelstein originally had been rather out of step with them; he had not seized their point of view, had not known with what they compared this object of their infatuation. But now he knew everything; he had settled down to the pace; there was not a possible phase of the discussion which could find him at a loss. There was a kind of Hegelian element in it; in the light of these considerations the American capital took on the semblance of a monstrous, mystical Werden. But they fatigued Vogelstein a little, and it was his preference, as a ​general thing, not to engage the same evening with more than one new-comer, one visitor in the freshness of initiation. This was why Mrs. Bonnycastle's expression of a wish to introduce him to three young ladies had startled him a little; he saw a certain process, in which he flattered himself that he had become proficient, but which was after all tolerably exhausting, repeated for each of the damsels. After separating from his judicious Bostonian, he rather evaded Mrs. Bonnycastle, contenting himself with the conversation of old friends, pitched, for the most part, in a lower and more sceptical key.
At last he heard it mentioned that the President had arrived, had been some half an hour in the house, and he went in search of the illustrious guest, whose whereabouts, at Washington parties, was not indicated by a cluster of courtiers. He made it a point, whenever he found himself in company with the President, to pay him his respects, and he had not been discouraged by the fact that there was no association of ideas in the eye of the great man as he put out his hand, presidentially, and said, "Happy to see you, sir." Vogelstein felt himself taken for a mere subject, possibly for an office-seeker; and he used to reflect at such moments that the monarchical form had its merits; it provided a line of heredity for the faculty of quick recognition. He had now some difficulty in finding the chief magistrate, and ended by learning that he was in the tea-room, a small apartment devoted to light refection, near the entrance of ​the house. Here Vogelstein presently perceived him, seated on a sofa, in conversation with a lady. There were a number of people about the table, eating, drinking, talking; and the couple on the sofa, which was not near it, but against the wall, in a kind of recess, looked a little withdrawn, as if they had sought seclusion and were disposed to profit by the diverted attention of the others. The President leaned back; his gloved hands, resting on either knee, made large white spots. He looked eminent, but he looked relaxed, and the lady beside him was making him laugh. Vogelstein caught her voice as he approached. He heard her say, "Well, now, remember; I consider it a promise." She was very prettily dressed, in rose-color; her hands were clasped in her lap, and her eyes were attached to the presidential profile.
"Well, madam, in that case it's about the fiftieth promise I have given to-day."
It was just as he heard these words, uttered by her companion in reply, that Vogelstein checked himself, turned away, and pretended to be looking for a cup of tea. It was not customary to disturb the President, even simply to shake hands, when he was sitting on a sofa with a lady, and Vogelstein felt it in this case to be less possible than ever to break the rule, for the lady on the sofa was none other than Pandora Day. He had recognized her without her appearing to see him, and even in his momentary look he had perceived that she was now a person to be reckoned with. She had an air of elation, of success; she ​looked brilliant in her rose-colored dress; she was extracting promises from the ruler of fifty millions of people. What an odd place to meet her, Vogelstein thought, and how little one could tell, after all, in America, who people were! He did n't wish to speak to her yet; he wished to wait a little, and learn more; but meanwhile there was something attractive in the thought that she was just behind him, a few yards off, that if he should turn he might see her again. It was she whom Mrs. Bonnycastle had meant, it was she who was so much admired in New York. Her face was the same, yet Vogelstein had seen in a moment that she was vaguely prettier; he had recognized the arch of her nose, which suggested ambition. He took some tea, which he did not want, in order not to go away. He remembered her entourage on the steamer; her father and mother, the silent burghers, so little "of the world," her infant sister, so much of it, her humorous brother with his tall hat and his influence in the smoking-room. He remembered Mrs. Dangerfield's warnings,—yet her perplexities, too,—and the letter from Mr. Bellamy, and the introduction to Mr. Lansing, and the way Pandora had stooped down on the dirty dock, laughing and talking, mistress of the situation, to open her trunk for the customs. He was pretty sure that she had paid no duties that day; that had been the purpose, of course, of Mr. Bellamy's letter. Was she still in correspondence with this gentleman, and had he got over his sickness? All this passed through Vogelstein's ​mind, and he saw that it was quite in Pandora's line to be mistress of the situation, for there was nothing, evidently, on the present occasion, that could call itself her master. He drank his tea, and as he put down his cup he heard the President, behind him, say: "Well, I guess my wife will wonder why I don't come home."
"Why did n't you bring her with you?" Pandora asked.
"Well, she does n't go out much. Then she has got her sister staying with her,—Mrs. Runkle, from Natchez. She's a good deal of an invalid, and my wife doesn't like to leave her."
"She must be a very kind woman," Pandora remarked, sympathetically.
"Well, I guess she is n't spoiled—yet."
"I should like very much to come and see her," said Pandora.
"Do come round. Could n't you come some night?" the President responded.
"Well, I 'll come some time. And I shall remind you of your promise."
"All right. There's nothing like keeping it up. Well," said the President, "I must bid good-by to these folks."
Vogelstein heard him rise from the sofa, with his companion, and he gave the pair time to pass out of the room before him, which they did with a certain impressive deliberation, people making way for the ruler of fifty millions, and looking with a certain ​curiosity at the striking pink person at his side. When, after a few moments, Vogelstein followed them across the hall, into one of the other rooms, he saw the host and hostess accompany the President to the door, and two foreign ministers and a judge of the Supreme Court address themselves to Pandora Day. He resisted the impulse to join this circle; if he spoke to her at all, he wished to speak to her alone. She continued, nevertheless, to occupy him, and when Mrs. Bonnycastle came back from the hall he immediately approached her with an appeal. "I wish you would tell me something more about that girl,—that one, opposite, in pink?"
"The lovely Day,—that is what they call her, I believe? I wanted you to talk with her."
"I find she is the one I have met. But she seems to be so different here. I can't make it out."
There was something in his expression which provoked Mrs. Bonnycastle to mirth. "How we do puzzle you Europeans! You look quite bewildered."
"I am sorry I look so,—I try to hide it. But, of course, we are very simple. Let me ask, then, a simple question. Are her parents also in society?"
"Parents in society? D'où tombez-vous? Did you ever hear of a girl—in rose-color—whose parents were in society?"
"Is she, then, all alone?" Count Vogelstein inquired, with a strain of melancholy in his voice.
Mrs. Bonnycastle stared at him a moment, with her laughter in her face. "You are too pathetic. ​Don't you know what she is? I supposed, of course, you knew."
"It's exactly what I am asking you."
"Why, she's the new type. It has only come up lately. They have had articles about it in the papers. That's the reason I told Mrs. Steuben to bring her."
"The new type? What new type, Mrs. Bonnycastle?" said Vogelstein, pleadingly, and conscious that all types in America were new.
Her laughter checked her reply for a moment, and by the time she had recovered herself the young lady from Boston, with whom Vogelstein had been talking, stood there to take leave. This, for an American type, was an old one, he was sure; and the process of parting, between the guest and her hostess, had an ancient elaboration. Vogelstein waited a little; then he turned away and walked up to Pandora Day, whose group of interlocutors had now been reinforced by a gentleman that had held an important place in the cabinet of the late occupant of the presidential chair. Vogelstein had asked Mrs. Bonnycastle if she were "all alone; " but there was nothing in Pandora's present situation that suggested isolation. She was not sufficiently alone for Vogelstein's taste; but he was impatient, and he hoped she would give him a few words to himself. She recognized him without a moment's hesitation, and with the sweetest smile, a smile that matched the tone in which she said: "I was watching you; I wondered whether you were not going to speak to me."
​"Miss Day was watching him!" one of the foreign ministers exclaimed, "and we flattered ourselves that her attention was all with us."
"I mean before," said the girl, "while I was talking with the President."
At this the gentlemen began to laugh, and one of them remarked that this was the way the absent were sacrificed, even the great; while another said that he hoped Vogelstein was duly flattered.
"Oh, I was watching the President too," said Pandora. " I have got to watch him. He has promised me something."
"It must be the mission to England," the judge of the Supreme Court suggested. "A good position for a lady; they 've got a lady at the head over there."
"I wish they would send you to my country," one of the foreign ministers suggested. "I would immediately get recalled."
"Why, perhaps in your country I would n't speak to you. It's only because you're here," the girl returned with a gay familiarity which, with her, was evidently but one of the arts of defence. "You 'll see what mission it is when it comes out. But I will speak to Count Vogelstein anywhere," she went on. "He is an older friend than any one here. I have known him in difficult days."
"Oh, yes, on the ocean," said the young man, smiling. "On the watery waste, in the tempest!"
"Oh, I don't mean that so much; we had a beautiful voyage, and there was n't any tempest. I mean ​when I was living in Utica. That's a watery waste, if you like, and a tempest there would have been a pleasant variety."
"Your parents seemed to me so peaceful!" Vogelstein exclaimed, with a vague wish to say something sympathetic.
"Oh, you have n't seen them on shore! At Utica they were very lively. But that is no longer our home. Don't you remember I told you I was working for New York? Well, I worked,—I had to work hard. But we have moved."
"And I hope they are happy," said Vogelstein.
"My father and mother? Oh, they will be, in time. I must give them time. They are very young yet; they have years before them. And you have been always in Washington?" Pandora continued. "I suppose you have found out everything about everything."
"Oh, no; there are some things I can't find out."
"Come and see me, and perhaps I can help you. I am very different from what I was on the ship. I have advanced a great deal since then."
"Oh, how was Miss Day on the ship?" asked the cabinet minister of the last administration.
"She was delightful, of course," said Vogelstein.
"He is very flattering; I did n't open my mouth!" Pandora cried. "Here comes Mrs. Steuben, to take me to some other place. I believe it's a literary party, near the Capitol. Everything seems so separate, in Washington. Mrs. Steuben is going to read ​a poem. I wish she would read it here; would n't it do as well?"
This lady, arriving, signified to Pandora the necessity of their moving on. But Miss Day's companions had various things to say to her before giving her up. She had an answer for each of them, and it was brought home to Vogelstein, as he listened, that, as she said, she had advanced a great deal. Daughter of small burghers, as she was, she was really brilliant. Vogelstein turned away a little, and, while Mrs. Steuben waited, asked her a question. He had made her, half an hour before, the subject of that inquiry to which Mrs. Bonnycastle returned so ambiguous an answer; but this was not because he had not some direct acquaintance with Mrs. Steuben, as well as a general idea of the esteem in which she was held. He had met her in various places, and he had been at her house. She was the widow of a commodore, a handsome, mild, soft, swaying woman, whom every one liked, with glossy bands of black hair, and a little ringlet depending behind each ear. Some one had said that she looked like the queen in "Hamlet." She had written verses which were admired in the South, wore a full-length portrait of the commodore on her bosom, and spoke with the accent of Savannah. She had about her a positive odor of Washington. It had certainly been very superfluous in Vogelstein to question Mrs. Bonnycastle about her social position.
"Do kindly tell me," he said, lowering his voice, ​"what is the type to which that young lady belongs? Mrs. Bonnycastle tells me it's a new one."
Mrs. Steuben for a moment fixed her liquid eyes upon the secretary of legation. She always seemed to be translating the prose of your speech into the finer rhythms with which her own mind was familiar. "Do you think anything is really new?" she asked. "I am very fond of the old; you know that is a weakness of we Southerners." The poor lady, it will be observed, had another weakness as well. "What we often take to be the new, is simply the old under some novel form. Were there not remarkable natures in the past? If you doubt it, you should visit the South, where the past still lingers."
Vogelstein had been struck before this with Mrs. Steuben's pronunciation of the word by which her native latitudes were designated; transcribing it from her lips, you would have written it (as the nearest approach) the Sooth. But, at present, he scarcely observed this peculiarity; he was wondering, rather, how a woman could be at once so copious and so unsatisfactory. What did he care about the past, or even about the Sooth? He was afraid of starting her again. He looked at her, discouraged and helpless, as bewildered almost as Mrs. Bonnycastle had found him half an hour before; looked also at the commodore, who, on her bosom, seemed to breathe again with his widow's respirations. "Call it an old type, then, if you like," he said in a moment. "All I want to know is what type it is! It seems impossible to find out."
​"You can find out in the newspapers. They have had articles about it. They write about everything now. But it is n't true about Miss Day. It is one of the first families. Her great-grandfather was in the Revolution." Pandora by this time had given her attention again to Mrs. Steuben. She seemed to signify that she was ready to move on. "Wasn't your great-grandfather in the Revolution?" Mrs. Steuben asked. "I am telling Count Vogelstein about him."
"Why are you asking about my ancestors?" the girl demanded, smiling, of the young German. "Is that the thing that you said just now that you can't find out? Well, if Mrs. Steuben will only be quiet you never will."
Mrs. Steuben shook her head rather dreamily. "Well, it's no trouble for a Southerner to be quiet. There's a kind of languor in our blood. Besides, we have to be, to-day. But I have got to show some energy to-night. I have got to get you to the end of Pennsylvania Avenue." Pandora gave her hand to Count Vogelstein and asked him if he thought they should meet again. He answered that in Washington people were always meeting, and that at any rate he should not fail to come and see her. Hereupon, just as the two ladies were detaching themselves, Mrs. Steuben remarked that if Count Vogelstein and Miss Day wished to meet again, the picnic would be a good chance,—the picnic that she was getting up for the following ​Thursday. It was to consist of about twenty bright people, and they would go down the Potomac to Mount Vernon. Vogelstein answered that, if Mrs. Steuben thought him bright enough, he should be delighted to join the party; and he was told the hour for which the tryst was taken.
He remained at Mrs. Bonnycastle's after every one had gone, and then he informed this lady of his reason for waiting. Would she have mercy on him and let him know, in a single word, before he went to rest—for without it rest would be impossible—what was this famous type to which Pandora Day belonged?
"Gracious, you don't mean to say you have not found out that type yet!" Mrs. Bonnycastle exclaimed, with a return of her hilarity. "What have you been doing all the evening? You Germans may be thorough, but you certainly are not quick!"
It was Alfred Bonnycastle who at last took pity on him. "My dear Vogelstein, she is the latest, freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She is the self-made girl!"
Vogelstein gazed a moment. "The fruit of the great American Revolution? Yes, Mrs. Steuben told me her great-grandfather—" but the rest of his sentence was lost in the explosion of Mrs. Bonnycastle's mirth. He bravely continued his interrogation, however, and, desiring his host's definition to be defined, inquired what the self-made girl might be.
"Sit down, and we 'll tell you all about it," Mrs. ​Bonnycastle said. "I like talking, this way, after a party's over. You can smoke, if you like, and Alfred will open a window. Well, to begin with, the self-made girl is a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place, she isn't self-made at all. We all help to make her; we take such an interest in her."
"That's only after she is made!" Alfred Bonnycastle broke in. "But it's Vogelstein that takes an interest. What on earth has started you up so on the subject of Miss Day?"
Vogelstein explained, as well as he could, that it was merely the accident of his having crossed the ocean in the steamer with her; but he felt the inadequacy of this account of the matter, felt it more than his hosts, who could know neither how little actual contact he had had with her on the ship, how much he had been affected by Mrs. Dangerfield's warnings, nor how much observation at the same time he had lavished on her. He sat there half an hour, and the warm, dead stillness of the Washington night—nowhere are the nights so silent—came in at the open window, mingled with a soft, sweet, earthy smell,—the smell of growing things. Before he went away he had heard all about the self-made girl, and there was something in the picture that almost inspired him. She was possible, doubtless, only in America; American life had smoothed the way for her. She was not fast, nor emancipated, nor crude, nor loud, and there was not in her, of necessity, at least, a grain ​of the stuff of which the adventuress is made. She was simply very successful, and her success was entirely personal. She had not been born with the silver spoon of social opportunity; she had grasped it by honest exertion. You knew her by many different signs, but chiefly, infallibly, by the appearance of her parents. It was her parents that told the story; you always saw that her parents could never have made her. Her attitude with regard to them might vary in different ways. The great fact on her own side being that she had lifted herself from a lower social plane, done it all herself, and done it by the simple lever of her personality,—in this view, of course, it was to be expected that she should leave the authors of her being in the shade. Sometimes she had them in her wake, lost in the bubbles and the foam that showed where she had passed; sometimes, as Alfred Bonnycastle said, she let them slide; sometimes she kept them in close confinement; some times she exhibited them to the public in discreet glimpses, in prearranged attitudes. But the general characteristic of the self-made girl was that, though it was frequently understood that she was privately devoted to her kindred, she never attempted to impose them on society, and it was striking that she was much better than they. They were almost always solemn and portentous, and they were for the most part of a deathly respectability. She was not necessarily snobbish, unless it was snobbish to want the best. She did n't cringe, she did n't make herself ​smaller than she was; on the contrary, she took a stand of her own and attracted things to herself. Naturally, she was possible only in America,—only in a country where certain competitions were absent. The natural history of this interesting creature was at last completely exhibited to Vogelstein, who, as he sat there in the animated stillness, with the fragrant breath of the western world in his nostrils, was convinced of what he had already suspected, that conversation in the United States is much more psychological than elsewhere. Another thing, as he learned, that you knew the self-made girl by, was her culture, which was perhaps a little too obvious. She had usually got into society more or less by reading, and her conversation was apt to be garnished with literary allusions, even with familiar quotations. Vogelstein had not had time to observe this element in a developed form in Pandora Day; but Alfred Bonnycastle said that he would n't trust her to keep it under in a tête-à-tête. It was needless to say that these young persons had always been to Europe; that was usually the first thing they did. By this means they sometimes got into society in foreign lands before they did so at home; it was to be added, on the other hand, that this resource was less and less valuable, for Europe, in the United States, had less and less prestige, and people in the latter country now kept a watch on that roundabout road. All this applied perfectly to Pandora Day,—the journey to Europe, the culture (as exemplified in the books ​she read on the ship), the effacement of the family. The only thing that was exceptional was the rapidity with which she had advanced; for the jump she had taken since he left her in the hands of Mr. Lansing struck Vogelstein, even after he had made all allowance for the abnormal homogeneity of American society, as really considerable. It took all her cleverness to account for it. When she moved her family from Utica, the battle appeared virtually to have been gained.
Vogelstein called on her the next day, and Mrs. Steuben's blackamoor informed him, in the communicative manner of his race, that the ladies had gone out to pay some visits and look at the Capitol. Pandora apparently had not hitherto examined this monument, and the young man wished he had known, the evening before, of her omission, so that he might have offered to be her initiator. There is too obvious a connection for me to attempt to conceal it, between his regret and the fact that in leaving Mrs. Steuben's door he reminded himself that he wanted a good walk, and took his way along Pennsylvania Avenue. His walk had become fairly good by the time he reached the great white edifice which unfolds its repeated colonnades and uplifts its isolated dome at the end of a long vista of saloons and tobacco-shops. He slowly climbed the great steps, hesitating a little, and wondering why he had come there. The superficial reason was obvious enough, but there was a real one behind it which seemed to Vogelstein rather ​wanting in the solidity which should characterize the motives of an emissary of Prince Bismarck. The superficial reason was a belief that Mrs. Steuben would pay her visit first,—it was probably only a question of leaving cards,—and bring her young friend to the Capitol at the hour when the yellow afternoon light would give a tone to the blankness of its marble walls. The Capitol was a splendid building, but it was rather wanting in tone. Vogelstein's curiosity about Pandora Day had been much more quickened than checked by the revelations made to him in Mrs. Bonnycastle's drawing-room. It was a relief to see the young lady classified; but he had a desire, of which he had not been conscious before, to see really to the end how well a girl could make herself. His calculations had been just, and he had wandered about the rotunda for only ten minutes, looking again at the paintings, commemorative of national history, which occupy its panels, and at the simulated sculptures, so touchingly characteristic of early American taste, which adorn its upper reaches, when the charming women he had hoped for presented themselves in charge of a licensed guide. He went to meet them, and did not conceal from them that he had marked them for his own. The encounter was happy on both sides, and he accompanied them through the queer and endless interior, through labyrinths of white, bare passages, into legislative and judicial halls. He thought it a hideous place; he had seen it all before, and he asked himself what he was doing dans cette ​galère. In the lower house there were certain bedaubed walls, in the basest style of imitation, which made him feel faintly sick; there was a lobby adorned with artless prints and photographs of eminent congressmen, which was too serious for a joke and too comical for anything else. But Pandora was greatly interested; she thought the Capitol very fine; it was easy to criticise the details, but as a whole it was the most impressive building she had ever seen. She was very good company; she had constantly something to say, but she never insisted too much; it was impossible to be less heavy, to drag less, in the business of walking behind a cicerone. Vogelstein could see, too, that she wished to improve her mind; she looked at the historical pictures, at the uncanny statues of local worthies, presented by the different States,—they were of different sizes, as if they had been "numbered," in a shop,—she asked questions of the conductor, and in the chamber of the Senate requested him to show her the chairs of the gentlemen from New York. She sat down in one of them, though Mrs. Steuben told her that senator (she mistook the chair, dropping into another State) was a horrid old thing.
Throughout the hour that he spent with her, Vogelstein seemed to see how it was that she had made herself. They walked about afterwards on the magnificent terrace that surrounds the Capitol, the great marble table on which it stands, and made vague remarks (Pandora's were the most definite) about the yellow ​sheen of the Potomac, the hazy hills of Virginia, the far gleaming pediment of Arlington, the raw, confused-looking country. Washington was beneath them, bristling and geometrical; the long lines of its avenues seemed to stretch into national futures. Pandora asked Vogelstein if he had ever been to Athens, and, on his replying in the affirmative, inquired whether the eminence on which they stood did not give him an idea of the Acropolis in its prime. Vogelstein deferred the answer to this question to their next meeting; he was glad (in spite of the question) to make pretexts for seeing her again. He did so on the morrow; Mrs. Steuben's picnic was still three days distant. He called on Pandora a second time, and he met her every evening in the Washington world. It took very little of this to remind him that he was forgetting both Mrs. Dangerfield's warnings and the admonitions—long familiar to him—of his own conscience. Was he in peril of love? Was he to be sacrificed on the altar of the American girl, an altar at which those other poor fellows had poured out some of the bluest blood in Germany and he had declared, himself, that he would never seriously worship? He decided that he was not in real danger,—that he had taken his precautions too well. It was true that a young person who had succeeded so well for herself might be a great help to her husband; but Vogelstein on the whole preferred that his success should be his own; it would not be agreeable to him to have the air of being pushed by ​his wife. Such a wife as that would wish to push him, and he could hardly admit to himself that this was what fate had in reserve for him,—to be propelled, in his career, by a young lady who would perhaps attempt to talk to the Kaiser as he had heard her the other night talk to the President. Would she consent to terminate relations with her family, or would she wish still to borrow plastic relief from that domestic background? That her family was so impossible was to a certain extent an advantage; for, if they had been a little better, the question of a rupture would be less easy. Vogelstein turned over these questions in spite of his security, or, perhaps, indeed, because of it. The security made them speculative and disinterested.
They haunted him during the excursion to Mount Vernon, which took place according to traditions long established. Mrs. Steuben's confederates assembled on the steamer, and were set afloat on the big brown stream which had already seemed to Vogelstein to have too much bosom and too little bank. Here and there, however, he became conscious of a shore where there was something to look at, even though he was conscious at the same time that he had of old lost great opportunities of idyllic talk in not sitting beside Pandora Day on the deck of the North German Lloyd. The two turned round together to contemplate Alexandria, which for Pandora, as she declared, was a picture of Old Virginia. She told Vogelstein that she was always hearing about it during the Civil ​War, years before. Little girl as she had been at the time, she remembered all the names that were on people's lips during those years of reiteration. This historic spot had a certain picturesqueness of decay, a reference to older things, to a dramatic past. The past of Alexandria appeared in the vista of three or four short streets, sloping up a hill and bordered with old brick warehouses, erected for merchandise that had ceased to come or go. It looked hot and blank and sleepy, down to the shabby waterside, where tattered darkies dangled their bare feet from the edge of rotting wharves. Pandora was even more interested in Mount Vernon (when at last its wooded bluff began to command the river) than she had been in the Capitol, and after they had disembarked and ascended to the celebrated mansion she insisted on going into every room it contained. She declared that it had the finest situation in the world, and that it was a shame they did n't give it to the President for his country-seat. Most of her companions had seen the house often, and were now coupling themselves in the grounds, according to their sympathies, so that it was easy for Vogelstein to offer the benefit of his own experience to the most inquisitive member of the party. They were not to lunch for another hour, and in the interval Vogelstein wandered about with Pandora. The breath of the Potomac, on the boat, had been a little harsh, but on the softly curving lawn, beneath the clustered trees, with the river relegated to a mere shining presence far ​below and in the distance, the day gave out nothing but its mildness, the whole scene became noble and genial.
Vogelstein could joke a little on great occasions, and the present one was worthy of his humor. He maintained to his companion that the shallow, painted mansion looked like a false house, a "fly," a structure of daubed canvas on the stage; but she answered him so well with certain economical palaces she had seen in Germany, where, as she said, there was nothing but china stoves and stuffed birds, that he was obliged to admit the home of Washington was after all really gemüthlich. What he found so, in fact, was the soft texture of the day, his personal situation, the sweetness of his suspense. For suspense had decidedly become his portion; he was under a charm which made him feel that he was watching his own life, and that his susceptibilities were beyond his control. It hung over him that things might take a turn, from one hour to the other, which would make them very different from what they had been yet; and his heart certainly beat a little faster as he wondered what that turn might be. Why did he come to picnics on fragrant April days with American girls who might lead him too far? Would not such girls be glad to marry a Pomeranian count? And would they, after all, talk that way to the Kaiser? If he were to marry one of them he should have to give her some lessons. In their little tour of the house, Vogelstein and his companion had had a great many fellow-visitors, who had ​also arrived by the steamer, and who had hitherto not left them an ideal privacy. But the others gradually dispersed; they circled about a kind of showman, who was the authorized guide, a big, slow, genial, familiar man, with a large beard and a whimsical, edifying, patronizing tone, which had immense success when he stopped here and there to make his points,—to pass his eyes over his listening flock, then fix them quite above it with a meditative look, and bring out some ancient pleasantry as if it were a sudden inspiration. He made a cheerful thing even of a visit to the tomb of the pater patriæ. It is enshrined in a kind of grotto in the grounds, and Vogelstein remarked to Pandora that he was a good man for the place, but that he was too familiar. "Oh, he would have been familiar with Washington," said the girl, with the bright dryness with which she often uttered amusing things. Vogelstein looked at her a moment, and it came over him, as he smiled, that she herself probably would not have been abashed even by the hero with whom history has taken fewest liberties. "You look as if you could hardly believe that," Pandora went on. "You Germans are always in such awe of great people." And it occurred to Vogelstein that perhaps, after all, Washington would have liked her manner, which was wonderfully fresh and natural. The man with the beard was an ideal cicerone for American shrines; he played upon the curiosity of his little band with the touch of a master, and drew them away to see the classic ice-house where ​the old lady had been found weeping in the belief that it was Washington's grave. While this monument was under inspection Vogelstein and Pandora had the house to themselves, and they spent some time on a pretty terrace, upon which certain windows of the second floor opened,—a little roofless veranda, which overhung, in a manner, obliquely, all the magnificence of the view, the immense sweep of the river, the artistic plantations, the last-century garden, with its big box hedges and remains of old espaliers. They lingered here for nearly half an hour, and it was in this spot that Vogelstein enjoyed the only approach to intimate conversation that fate had in store for him with a young woman in whom he had been unable to persuade himself that he was not interested. It is not necessary, and it is not possible, that I should reproduce this colloquy; but I may mention that it began as they leaned against the parapet of the terrace and heard the cheerful voice of the showman wafted up to them from a distance with his saying to her, rather abruptly, that he could n't make out why they had n't had more talk together when they crossed the ocean.
"Well, I can, if you can't," said Pandora. "I would have talked, if you had spoken to me. I spoke to you first."
"Yes, I remember that," Vogelstein replied, rather awkwardly.
"You listened too much to Mrs. Dangerfield."
"To Mrs. Dangerfield?"
​"That woman you were always sitting with; she told you not to speak to me. I have seen her in New York; she speaks to me now herself. She recommended you to have nothing to do with me."
"Oh, how can you say such dreadful things?" the young man murmured, blushing very red.
"You know you can't deny it. You were not attracted by my family. They are charming people when you know them. I don't have a better time anywhere than I have at home," the girl went on, loyally. "But what does it matter? My family are very happy. They are getting quite used to New York. Mrs. Dangerfield is a vulgar wretch; next winter she will call on me."
"You are unlike any girl I have ever seen; I don't understand you," said poor Vogelstein, with the color still in his face.
"Well, you never will understand me—probably; but what difference does it make?'
Vogelstein attempted to tell her what difference it made, but I have not space to follow him here. It is known that when the German mind attempts to explain things it does not always reduce them to simplicity, and Pandora was first mystified, then amused, by some of her companion's revelations. At last I think she was a little frightened, for she remarked, irrelevantly, with some decision, that luncheon would be ready and they ought to join Mrs. Steuben. He walked slowly, on purpose, as they left the house ​together, for he had a vague feeling that he was losing her.
"And shall you be in Washington many days yet?" he asked her, as they went.
"It will all depend. I am expecting some news. What I shall do will be influenced by that."
The way she talked about expecting news made him feel, somehow, that she had a career,—that she was active and independent, so that he could scarcely hope to stop her as she passed. It was certainly true that he had never seen any girl like her. It would have occurred to him that the news she was expecting might have reference to the favor she had begged of the President, if he had not already made up his mind—in the calm of meditation after that talk with the Bonnycastles—that this favor must be a pleasantry. What she had said to him had a discouraging, a somewhat chilling, effect; nevertheless it was not without a certain ardor that he inquired of her whether, so long as she stayed in Washington, he might not come and see her.
"You may come as often as you like," she answered; "but you won't care for it long."
"You try to torment me," said Vogelstein.
She hesitated a moment. "I mean that I may have some of my family."
"I shall be delighted to see them again."
She hesitated again. "There are some you have never seen."
In the afternoon, returning to Washington on the ​steamer, Count Vogelstein received a warning. It came from Mrs. Bonnycastle, and constituted, oddly enough, the second occasion on which an officious female friend had, on the deck of a vessel, advised him on the subject of Pandora Day.
"There is one thing we forgot to tell you the other night about the self-made girl," Mrs. Bonnycastle said. "It is never safe to fix your affections upon her, because she has almost always got an impediment somewhere in the background."
Vogelstein looked at her askance, but he smiled and said, "I should understand your information—for which I am so much obliged—a little better if I knew what you mean by an impediment."
"Oh, I mean she's always engaged to some young man who belongs to her earlier phase."
"Her earlier phase?"
"The time before she had made herself,—when she lived at home. A young man from Utica, say. They usually have to wait; he is probably in a store. It's a long engagement."
"Do you mean a betrothal,—to be married?"
"I don't mean anything German and transcendental. I mean that peculiarly American institution, a precocious engagement; to be married, of course."
Vogelstein very properly reflected that it was no use his having entered the diplomatic career if he were not able to bear himself as if this interesting generalization had no particular message for him. He did Mrs. Bonnycastle, moreover, the justice to ​believe that she would not have taken up the subject so casually if she had suspected that she should make him wince. The whole thing was one of her jokes, and the notification, moreover, was really friendly. "I see, I see," he said in a moment. "The self-made girl has, of course, always had a past. Yes, and the young man in the store—from Utica—is part of her past."
"You express it perfectly," said Mrs. Bonnycastle. "I could n't say it better myself."
"But, with her present—with her future, I suppose it's all over. How do you say it in America? She lets him slide."
"We don't say it at all!" Mrs. Bonnycastle cried. "She does nothing of the sort; for what do you take her? She sticks to him; that, at least, is what we expect her to do," Mrs. Bonnycastle added, more thoughtfully. "As I tell you, the type is new. We have n't yet had time for complete observations."
"Oh, of course, I hope she sticks to him," Vogelstein declared, simply, and with his German accent more apparent, as it always was when he was slightly agitated.
For the rest of the trip he was rather restless. He wandered about the boat, talking little with the returning picnickers. Toward the last, as they drew near Washington, and the white dome of the Capitol hung aloft before them, looking as simple as a suspended snowball, he found himself, on the deck, in proximity to Mrs. Steuben. He reproached himself ​with having rather neglected her during an entertainment for which he was indebted to her bounty, and he sought to repair his omission by a little friendly talk. But the only thing he could think of to say to her was to ask her by chance whether Miss Day were, to her knowledge, engaged.
Mrs. Steuben turned her Southern eyes upon him with a look of almost romantic compassion. "To my knowledge? Why, of course I 'd know! I should think you 'd know, too. Did n't you know she was engaged? Why, she's been engaged since she was sixteen."
Vogelstein stared at the dome of the Capitol. "To a gentleman from Utica?"
"Yes, a native of her place. She is expecting him soon."
"Oh, I 'm so glad to hear it," said Vogelstein, who, decidedly, for his career, had promise. "And is she going to marry him?"
"Why, what do people get engaged for? I presume they will marry before long."
"But why have they never done so in so many years?"
"Well, at first she was too young, and then she thought her family ought to see Europe,—of course they could see it better with her,—and they spent some time there. And then Mr. Bellamy had some business difficulties which made him feel as if he did n't want to marry just then. But he has given up business, and I presume he feels more free. Of ​course it's rather long, but all the while they have been engaged. It's a true, true love," said Mrs. Steuben, who had a little flute-like way of sounding the adjective.
"Is his name Mr. Bellamy?" Vogelstein asked, with his haunting reminiscence. "D. F. Bellamy, eh? And has he been in a store?"
"I don't know what kind of business it was: it was some kind of business, in Utica. I think he had a branch in New York. He is one of the leading gentlemen of Utica, and very highly educated. He's a good deal older than Miss Day. He's a very fine man. He stands very high in Utica. I don't know why you look as if you doubted it."
Vogelstein assured Mrs. Steuben that he doubted nothing, and indeed what she told him struck him as all the more credible as it seemed to him eminently strange. Bellamy had been the name of the gentleman who, a year and a half before, was to have met Pandora on the arrival of the German steamer; it was in Bellamy's name that she had addressed herself with such effusion to Bellamy's friend, the man in the straw hat, who was about to fumble in her mother's old clothes. This was a fact which seemed to Vogelstein to finish the picture of her contradictions; it wanted at present no touch to be complete. Yet, even as it hung there before him, it continued to fascinate him, and he stared at it, detached from surrounding things, and feeling a little as if he had been pitched out of an overturned vehicle, till the boat ​bumped against one of the outstanding piles of the wharf at which Mrs. Steuben's party was to disembark. There was some delay in getting the steamer adjusted to the dock, during which the passengers stood watching the process over its side, and extracting what entertainment they might from the appearance of the various persons collected to receive it. There were darkies, and loafers, and hackmen, and also individuals with tufts on their chins, toothpicks in their mouths, their hands in their pockets, rumination in their jaws, and diamond pins in their shirtfronts, who looked as if they had sauntered over from Pennsylvania Avenue to while away half an hour, forsaking for that interval their various slanting postures in the porticos of the hotels and the doorways of the saloons.
"Oh, I am so glad! How good of you to come down!" It was a voice close to Vogelstein's shoulder that spoke these words, and the young secretary of legation had no need to turn to see from whom it proceeded. It had been in his ears the greater part of the day, though, as he now perceived, without the fullest richness of expression of which it was capable. Still less was he obliged to turn to discover to whom it was addressed, for the few simple words that I have quoted had been flung across the narrowing interval of water, and a gentleman who had stepped to the edge of the dock without Vogelstein's observing him tossed back an immediate reply.
"I got here by the three o'clock train. They told ​me in K Street where you were, and I thought I would come down and meet you."
"Charming attention!" said Pandora Day, with her friendly laugh; and for some moments she and her interlocutor appeared to continue the conversation only with their eyes. Meanwhile Vogelstein's, also, were not idle. He looked at Pandora's visitor from head to foot, and he was aware that she was quite unconscious of his own proximity. The gentleman before him was tall, good-looking, well-dressed; evidently he would stand well not only at Utica, but, judging from the way he had planted himself on the dock, in any position which circumstances might compel him to take up. He was about forty years old; he had a black mustache and a business-like eye. He waved a gloved hand at Pandora, as if, when she exclaimed, "Gracious, ain't they long!" to urge her to be patient. She was patient for a minute, and then she asked him if he had any news. He looked at her briefly, in silence, smiling, after which he drew from his pocket a large letter, with an official-looking seal, and shook it jocosely above his head. This was discreetly, covertly done. No one appeared to observe the little interview but Vogelstein. The boat was now touching the wharf, and the space between the pair was inconsiderable.
"Department of State?" Pandora asked, dropping her voice.
"That's what they call it."
"Well, what country?"
​"What's your opinion of the Dutch?" the gentleman asked, for an answer.
"Oh, gracious!" cried Pandora.
"Well, are you going to wait for the return trip?" said the gentleman.
Vogelstein turned away, and presently Mrs. Steuben and her companions disembarked together. When this lady entered a carriage with Pandora the gentleman who had spoken to the girl followed them; the others scattered, and Vogelstein, declining with thanks a "lift" from Mrs. Bonnycastle, walked home alone, in some intensity of meditation. Two days later he saw in a newspaper an announcement that the President had offered the post of Minister to Holland to Mr. D. F. Bellamy, of Utica; and in the course of a month he heard from Mrs. Steuben that Pandora's long engagement had terminated at the nuptial altar. He communicated this news to Mrs. Bonnycastle, who had not heard it, with the remark that there was now ground for a new induction as to the self-made girl.