'Are we very sure that we need a foreign house?' Mr. Wentworth inquired. 'Do you think it desirable to establish a foreign house—in this quiet place?'
'You speak,' said Acton, laughing, 'as if it were a question of the poor Baroness opening a wine-shop or a gaming-table.'
'It would be too lovely!' Gertrude declared again, laying her hand on the back of her father's chair.
'That she should open a gaming-table?' Charlotte asked, with great gravity.
Gertrude looked at her a moment, and then, 'Yes, Charlotte,' she said, simply.
'Gertrude is growing pert,' Clifford Wentworth observed, with his humorous young growl. 'That comes of associating with foreigners.'
Mr. Wentworth looked up at his daughter, who was standing beside him; he drew her gently forward. 'You must be careful,' he said. 'You must keep watch. Indeed, we must all be careful. This is a great change; we are to be exposed to peculiar influences. I don't say they are bad. I don't judge them in advance. But they may perhaps make it necessary that we should exercise a great deal of wisdom and self-control. It will be a different tone.'
Gertrude was silent a moment, in deference to her father's speech; then she spoke in a manner that was not in the least an answer to it. 'I want to see how they will live. I am sure they will have different hours. She will do all kinds of little things differently. When we go over there it will be like going to Europe. She will have a boudoir. She will invite us to dinner—very late. She will breakfast in her room.'
Charlotte gazed at her sister again. Gertrude's imagination seemed to her to be fairly running riot. She had always known that Gertrude had a great deal of imagination—she had been very proud of it. But at the same time she had always felt that it was a dangerous and irresponsible faculty; and now, to her sense, for the moment, it seemed to threaten to make her sister a strange person who should come in suddenly, as from a journey, talking of the peculiar and possibly unpleasant things she had observed. Charlotte's imagination took no journeys whatever; she kept it, as it were, in her pocket, with the other furniture of this receptacle—a thimble, a little box of peppermint, and a morsel of court-plaster. 'I don't believe she would have any dinner—or any breakfast,' said Miss Wentworth. 'I don't believe she knows how to do anything herself. I should have to get her ever so many servants, and she would n't like them.'
'She has a maid,' said Gertrude; 'a French maid. She mentioned her.'
'I wonder if the maid has a little fluted cap and red slippers,' said Lizzie Acton. 'There was a French maid in that play that Robert took me to see. She had pink stockings; she was very wicked.'
'She was a soubrette,' Gertrude announced, who had never seen a play in her life. 'They call that a soubrette. It will be a great chance to learn French.' Charlotte gave a little soft, helpless groan. She had a vision of a wicked, theatrical person, clad in pink stockings and red shoes, and speaking, with confounding volubility, an incomprehensible tongue, flitting through the sacred penetralia of that large, clean house. 'That is one reason in favor of their coming here,' Gertrude went on. 'But we can make Eugenia speak French to us, and Felix. I mean to begin—the next time.'
Mr. Wentworth had kept her standing near him, and he gave her his earnest, thin, unresponsive glance again. 'I want you to make me a promise, Gertrude,' he said.
'What is it?' she asked, smiling.
'Not to get excited. Not to allow these—these occurrences to be an occasion for excitement.'
She looked down at him a moment, and then she shook her head. 'I don't think I can promise that, father. I am excited already.'
Mr. Wentworth was silent a while; they all were silent, as if in recognition of something audacious and portentous.
'I think they had better go to the other house,' said Charlotte, quietly.
'I shall keep them in the other house,' Mr. Wentworth subjoined, more pregnantly.
Gertrude turned away; then she looked across at Robert Acton. Her cousin Robert was a great friend of hers; she often looked at him this way instead of saying things. Her glance on this occasion, however, struck him as a substitute for a larger volume of diffident utterance than usual, inviting him to observe, among other things, the inefficiency of her father's design—if design it was—for diminishing, in the interest of quiet nerves, their occasions of contact with their foreign relatives. But Acton immediately complimented Mr. Wentworth upon his liberality. 'That 's a very nice thing to do,' he said, 'giving them the little house. You will have treated them handsomely, and, whatever happens, you will be glad of it.' Mr. Wentworth was liberal, and he knew he was liberal. It gave him pleasure to know it, to feel it, to see it recorded; and this pleasure is the only palpable form of self-indulgence with which the narrator of these incidents will be able to charge him.
'A three days' visit at most, over there, is all I should have found possible,' Madame Munster remarked to her brother, after they had taken possession of the little white house. 'It would have been too intime—decidedly too intime. Breakfast, dinner, and tea en famille—it would have been the end of the world if I could have reached the third day.' And she made the same observation to her maid Augustine, an intelligent person, who enjoyed a liberal share of her confidence. Felix declared that he would willingly spend his life in the bosom of the Wentworth family; that they were the kindest, simplest, most amiable people in the world, and that he had taken a prodigious fancy to them all. The Baroness quite agreed with him that they were simple and kind; they were thoroughly nice people, and she liked them extremely. The girls were perfect ladies; it was impossible to be more of a lady than Charlotte Wentworth, in spite of her little village air. 'But as for thinking them the best company in the world,' said the Baroness, 'that is another thing; and as for wishing to live porte-a-porte with them, I should as soon think of wishing myself back in the convent again, to wear a bombazine apron and sleep in a dormitory.' And yet the Baroness was in high good humor; she had been very much pleased. With her lively perception and her refined imagination, she was capable of enjoying anything that was characteristic, anything that was good of its kind. The Wentworth household seemed to her very perfect in its kind—wonderfully peaceful and unspotted; pervaded by a sort of dove-colored freshness that had all the quietude and benevolence of what she deemed to be Quakerism, and yet seemed to be founded upon a degree of material abundance for which, in certain matters of detail, one might have looked in vain at the frugal little court of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein. She perceived immediately that her American relatives thought and talked very little about money; and this of itself made an impression upon Eugenia's imagination. She perceived at the same time that if Charlotte or Gertrude should ask their father for a very considerable sum he would at once place it in their hands; and this made a still greater impression. The greatest impression of all, perhaps, was made by another rapid induction. The Baroness had an immediate conviction that Robert Acton would put his hand into his pocket every day in the week if that rattle-pated little sister of his should bid him. The men in this country, said the Baroness, are evidently very obliging. Her declaration that she was looking for rest and retirement had been by no means wholly untrue; nothing that the Baroness said was wholly untrue. It is but fair to add, perhaps, that nothing that she said was wholly true. She wrote to a friend in Germany
