The Little Lady of the Big House / Маленькая хозяйка большого дома. Книга для чтения на английском языке

It was a real world, he pondered as he rode slowly along; and Paula, and Dick, and he were real persons in it, were themselves conscious realists who looked the facts of life squarely in the face. This was no affair of priest and code, of other wisdoms and decisions. Of themselves must it be settled. Some one would be hurt. But life was hurt. Success in living was the minimizing of pain. Dick believed that himself, thanks be. The three of them believed it. And it was nothing new under the sun. The countless triangles of the countless generations had all been somehow solved. This, then, would be solved. All human affairs reached some solution.

He shook sober thought from his brain and returned to the bliss of memory[376], reaching his hand to another caress of his knee, his lips breathing again to the breathing of hers against them. He even reined Selim to a halt in order to gaze at the hollow resting place of his bent arm which she had filled.

Not until dinner did Graham see Paula again, and he found her the very usual Paula. Not even his eye, keen with knowledge, could detect any sign of the day’s great happening, nor of the anger that had whitened her face and blazed in her eyes when she half-lifted her whip to strike him. In everything she was the same Little Lady of the Big House. Even when it chanced that her eyes met his, they were serene, untroubled, with no hint of any secret in them. What made the situation easier was the presence of several new guests, women, friends of Dick and her, come for a couple of days.

Next morning, in the music room, he encountered them and Paula at the piano.

“Don’t you sing, Mr. Graham?” a Miss Hoffman asked.

She was the editor of a woman’s magazine published in San Francisco, Graham had learned.

“Oh, adorably,” he assured her. “Don’t I, Mrs. Forrest?” he appealed.

“It is quite true,” Paula smiled, “if for no other reason that he is kind enough not to drown me quite[377].”

“And nothing remains but to prove our words,” he volunteered. “There’s a duet we sang the other evening —” He glanced at Paula for a sign. “ – Which is particularly good for my kind of singing.” Again he gave her a passing glance and received no cue to her will or wish. “The music is in the living-room. I’ll go and get it.”

“It’s the ‘Gypsy Trail,’ a bright, catchy thing,” he heard her saying to the others as he passed out.

They did not sing it so recklessly as on that first occasion, and much of the thrill and some of the fire they kept out of their voices; but they sang it more richly, more as the composer had intended it and with less of their own particular interpretation. But Graham was thinking as he sang, and he knew, too, that Paula was thinking, that in their hearts another duet was pulsing all unguessed by the several women who applauded the song’s close.

“You never sang it better, I’ll wager,” he told Paula.

For he had heard a new note in her voice. It had been fuller, rounder, with a generousness of volume that had vindicated that singing throat.

“And now, because I know you don’t know, I’ll tell you what a patteran is,” she was saying…

Chapter XXII

“Dick, boy, your position is distinctly Carlylean[378],” Terrence McFane said in fatherly tones.

The sages of the madroño grove were at table, and, with Paula, Dick and Graham, made up the dinner party of seven.

“Mere naming of one’s position does not settle it, Terrence,” Dick replied. “I know my point is Carlylean, but that does not invalidate it. Hero-worship is a very good thing. I am talking, not as a mere scholastic, but as a practical breeder with whom the application of Mendelian methods is an every-day commonplace.”

“And I am to conclude,” Hancock broke in, “that a Hottentot[379] is as good as a white man?”

“Now the South speaks, Aaron,” Dick retorted with a smile. “Prejudice, not of birth, but of early environment, is too strong for all your philosophy to shake. It is as bad as Herbert Spencer’s[380] handicap of the early influence of the Manchester School.”

“And Spencer is on a par with the Hottentot?” Dar Hyal challenged.

Dick shook his head.

“Let me say this, Hyal. I think I can make it clear. The average Hottentot, or the average Melanesian, is pretty close to being on a par with the average white man. The difference lies in that there are proportionately so many more Hottentots and negroes who are merely average, while there is such a heavy percentage of white men who are not average, who are above average. These are what I called the pace-makers that bring up the speed of their own race average-men. Note that they do not change the nature or develop the intelligence of the average-men. But they give them better equipment, better facilities, enable them to travel a faster collective pace.