Mrs. Spring Fragrance
She laughed—a pretty infectious laugh which exorcised all his gloom. He
looked down upon her as they stood together under the cluster of
electric lights in her cozy little sitting-room. Such a slender, girlish
figure! Such a soft cheek, red mouth, and firm little chin! Often in his
dreams of her he had taken her into his arms and coaxed her into a good
humor. But, alas! dreams are not realities, and the calm friendliness of
this young person made any demonstration of tenderness well-nigh
impossible. But for the shy regard of her eyes, you might have thought
that he was no more to her than a friendly acquaintance.
“I hear,” said she, taking up some needlework, “that your Welland case
comes on tomorrow.”
“Yes,” answered the young lawyer, “and I have all my witnesses ready.”
“So, I hear, has Mr. Greaves,” she retorted. “You are going to have a
hard fight.”
“What of that, when in the end I’ll win.”
He looked over at her with a bright gleam in his eyes.
“I wouldn’t be too sure,” she warned demurely. “You may lose on a
technicality.”
He drew his chair a little nearer to her side and turned over the pages
of a book lying on her work-table. On the fly-leaf was inscribed in a
man’s writing: “To the dear little woman whose friendship is worth a
fortune.”
Another book beside it bore the inscription: “With the love of all the
firm, including the boys,” and a volume of poems above it was dedicated
to the young person “with the high regards and stanch affection” of some
other masculine person.
Will Carman pushed aside these evidences of his sweetheart’s popularity
with his own kind and leaned across the table.
“Alice,” said he, “once upon a time you admitted that you loved me.”
A blush suffused the young person’s countenance.
“Did I?” she queried.
“You did, indeed.”
“Well?”
“Well! If you love me and I love you—”
“Oh, please!” protested the girl, covering her ears with her hands.
“I _will_ please,” asserted the young man. “I have come here tonight,
Alice, to ask you to marry me—and at once.”
“Deary me!” exclaimed the young person; but she let her needlework fall
into her lap as her lover, approaching nearer, laid his arm around her
shoulders and, bending his face close to hers, pleaded his most
important case.
If for a moment the small mouth quivered, the firm little chin lost its
firmness, and the proud little head yielded to the pressure of a lover’s
arm, it was only for a moment so brief and fleeting that Will Carman had
hardly become aware of it before it had passed.
“No,” said the young person sorrowfully but decidedly. She had arisen
and was standing on the other side of the table facing him. “I cannot
marry you while your mother regards me as beneath you.”
“When she, knows you she will acknowledge you are above me. But I am not
asking you to come to my mother, I am asking you to come to me, dear. If
you will put your hand in mine and trust to me through all the coming
years, no man or woman born can come between us.”
But the young person shook her head.
“No,” she repeated. “I will not be your wife unless your mother welcomes
me with pride and with pleasure.”
The night air was still sweet with the perfume of roses as Will Carman
passed out of the little cottage door; but he drew in no deep breath of
inspiration. His impetuous Irish heart was too heavy with
disappointment. It might have been a little lighter, however, had he
known that the eyes of the young person who gazed after him were misty
with a love and yearning beyond expression.
III
“Will Carman has failed to snare his bird,” said Mr. Spring Fragrance
to Mrs. Spring Fragrance.
Their neighbor’s son had just passed their veranda without turning to
bestow upon them his usual cheerful greeting.
“It is too bad,” sighed Mrs. Spring Fragrance sympathetically. She
clasped her hands together and exclaimed:
“Ah, these Americans! These mysterious, inscrutable, incomprehensible
Americans! Had I the divine right of learning I would put them into an
immortal book!”
“The divine right of learning,” echoed Mr. Spring Fragrance, “Humph!”
Mrs. Spring Fragrance looked up into her husband’s face in wonderment.
“Is not the authority of the scholar, the student, almost divine?” she
queried.
“So ’tis said,” responded he. “So it seems.”
The evening before, Mr. Spring Fragrance, together with several Seattle
and San Francisco merchants, had given a dinner to a number of young
students who had just arrived from China. The morning papers had devoted
several columns to laudation of the students, prophecies as to their
future, and the great influence which they would exercise over the
destiny of their nation; but no comment whatever was made on the givers
of the feast, and Mr. Spring Fragrance was therefore feeling somewhat
unappreciated. Were not he and his brother merchants worthy of a little
attention? If the students had come to learn things in America, they,
the merchants, had accomplished things. There were those amongst them
who had been instrumental in bringing several of the students to
America. One of the boys was Mr. Spring Fragrance’s own young brother,
for whose maintenance and education he had himself sent the wherewithal
every year for many years. Mr. Spring Fragrance, though well read in the
Chinese classics, was not himself a scholar. As a boy he had come to the
shores of America, worked his way up, and by dint of painstaking study
after working hours acquired the Western language and Western business
ideas. He had made money, saved money, and sent money home. The years
had flown, his business had grown. Through his efforts trade between his
native town and the port city in which he lived had greatly increased. A
school in Canton was being builded in part with funds furnished by him,
and a railway syndicate, for the purpose of constructing a line of
railway from the big city of Canton to his own native town, was under
process of formation, with the name of Spring Fragrance at its head.
No wonder then that Mr. Spring Fragrance muttered “Humph!” when Mrs.
Spring Fragrance dilated upon the “divine right of learning,” and that
he should feel irritated and humiliated, when, after explaining to her
his grievances, she should quote in the words of Confutze: “Be not
concerned that men do not know you; be only concerned that you do not
know them.” And he had expected wifely sympathy.
He was about to leave the room in a somewhat chilled state of mind when
she surprised him again by pattering across to him and following up a
low curtsy with these words:
“I bow to you as the grass bends to the wind. Allow me to detain you for
just one moment.”
Mr. Spring Fragrance eyed her for a moment with suspicion.
“As I have told you, O Great Man,” continued Mrs. Spring Fragrance, “I
desire to write an immortal book, and now that I have learned from you
that it is not necessary to acquire the ‘divine right of learning’ in
order to accomplish things, I will begin the work without delay. My
first subject will be ‘The Inferior Woman of America.’ Please advise me
how I shall best inform myself concerning her.”
Mr. Spring Fragrance, perceiving that his wife was now serious, and
being easily mollified, sat himself down and rubbed his head. After
thinking for a few moments he replied:
“It is the way in America, when a person is to be illustrated, for the
illustrator to interview the person’s friends. Perhaps, my dear, you had
better confer with the Superior Woman.”
“Surely,” cried Mrs. Spring Fragrance, “no sage was ever so wise as my
Great Man.”
“But I lack the ‘divine right of learning,’” dryly deplored Mr. Spring
Fragrance.
“I am happy to hear it,” answered Mrs. Spring Fragrance. “If you were a
scholar you would have no time to read American poetry and American
newspapers.”
Mr. Spring Fragrance laughed heartily.
“You are no Chinese woman,” he teased. “You are an American.”
“Please bring me my parasol and my folding fan,” said Mrs. Spring
Fragrance. “I am going out for a walk.”
And Mr. Spring Fragrance obeyed her.
IV
“This is from Mary Carman, who is in Portland,” said the mother of the
Superior Woman, looking up from the reading of a letter, as her daughter
came in from the garden.
“Indeed,” carelessly responded Miss Evebrook.
“Yes, it’s chiefly about Will.”
“Oh, is it? Well, read it then, dear. I’m interested in Will Carman,
because of Alice Winthrop.”
“I had hoped, Ethel, at one time that you would have been interested in
him for his own sake. However, this is what she writes:
“I came here chiefly to rid myself of a melancholy mood which has
taken possession of me lately, and also because I cannot bear to see
my boy so changed towards me, owing to his infatuation for Alice
Winthrop. It is incomprehensible to me how a son of mine can find any
pleasure whatever in the society of such a girl. I have traced her
history, and find that she is not only uneducated in the ordinary
sense, but her environment, from childhood up, has been the sordid and
demoralizing one of extreme poverty and ignorance. This girl, Alice,
entered a law office at the age of fourteen, supposedly to do the work
of an office boy. Now, after seven years in business, through the
friendship and influence of men far above her socially, she holds the
position of private secretary to the most influential man in
Washington—a position which by rights belongs only to a well-educated
young woman of good family. Many such applied. I myself sought to have
Jane Walker appointed. Is it not disheartening to our woman’s cause to
be compelled to realize that girls such as this one can win men over
to be their friends and lovers, when there are so many splendid young
women who have been carefully trained to be companions and comrades of
educated men?”
“Pardon me, mother,” interrupted Miss Evebrook, “but I have heard
enough. Mrs. Carman is your friend and a well-meaning woman sometimes;
but a woman suffragist, in the true sense, she certainly is not. Mark my
words: If any young man had accomplished for himself what Alice Winthrop
has accomplished, Mrs. Carman could not have said enough in his praise.
It is women such as Alice Winthrop who, in spite of every drawback, have
raised themselves to the level of those who have had every advantage,
who are the pride and glory of America. There are thousands of them, all
over this land: women who have been of service to others all their years
and who have graduated from the university of life with honor. Women
such as I, who are called the Superior Women of America, are after all
nothing but schoolgirls in comparison.”
Mrs. Evebrook eyed her daughter mutinously. “I don’t see why you should
feel like that,” said she. “Alice is a dear bright child, and it is
prejudice engendered by Mary Carman’s disappointment about you and Will
which is the real cause of poor Mary’s bitterness towards her; but to my
mind, Alice does not compare with my daughter. She would be frightened
to death if she had to make a speech.”
“You foolish mother!” rallied Miss Evebrook. “To stand upon a platform
at woman suffrage meetings and exploit myself is certainly a great
recompense to you and father for all the sacrifices you have made in my
behalf. But since it pleases you, I do it with pleasure even on the
nights when my beau should ‘come a courting.’”
“There is many a one who would like to come, Ethel. You’re the
handsomest girl in this Western town—and you know it.”
“Stop that, mother. You know very well I have set my mind upon having
ten years’ freedom; ten years in which to love, live, suffer, see the
world, and learn about men (not schoolboys) before I choose one.”