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A Round of Visits
by
There was nothing like a crowd, this unfortunate knew, for making one feel lonely, and he felt so increasingly during the meal; but he got thus at least in a measure away from the terrible little lady; after which, and before the end of the hour, he wanted still more to get away from every one else. He was in fact about to perform this manoeuvre when he was checked by the jolly young woman he had been having on his left and who had more to say about the Hotels, up and down the town, than he had ever known a young woman to have to say on any subject at all; she expressed herself in hotel terms exclusively, the names of those establishments playing through her speech as the leit-motif might have recurrently flashed and romped through a piece of profane modern music. She wanted to present him to the pretty girl she had brought with her, and who had apparently signified to her that she must do so.
“I think you know my brother-in-law, Mr. Newton Winch,” the pretty girl had immediately said; she moved her head and shoulders together, as by a common spring, the effect of a stiff neck or of something loosened in her back hair; but becoming, queerly enough, all the prettier for doing so. He had seen in the papers, her brother-in-law, Mr. Monteith’s arrival–Mr. Mark P. Monteith, wasn’t it?–and where he was, and she had been with him, three days before, at the time; whereupon he had said “Hullo, what can have brought old Mark back?” He seemed to have believed–Newton had seemed–that that shirker, as he called him, never would come; and she guessed that if she had known she was going to meet such a former friend (“Which he claims you are, sir,” said the pretty girl) he would have asked her to find out what the trouble could be. But the real satisfaction would just be, she went on, if his former friend would himself go and see him and tell him; he had appeared of late so down.
“Oh, I remember him”–Mark didn’t repudiate the friendship, placing him easily; only then he wasn’t married and the pretty girl’s sister must have come in later: which showed, his not knowing such things, how they had lost touch. The pretty girl was sorry to have to say in return to this that her sister wasn’t living–had died two years after marrying; so that Newton was up there in Fiftieth Street alone; where (in explanation of his being “down”) he had been shut up for days with bad grippe; though now on the mend, or she wouldn’t have gone to him, not she, who had had it nineteen times and didn’t want to have it again. But the horrid poison just seemed to have entered into poor Newton’s soul.
“That’s the way it can take you, don’t you know?” And then as, with her single twist, she just charmingly hunched her eyes at our friend, “Don’t you want to go to see him?”
Mark bethought himself: “Well, I’m going to see a lady—–“
She took the words from his mouth. “Of course you’re going to see a lady–every man in New York is. But Newton isn’t a lady, unfortunately for him, to-day; and Sunday afternoon in this place, in this weather, alone—–!”
“Yes, isn’t it awful?”–he was quite drawn to her.
“Oh, you’ve got your lady!”
“Yes, I’ve got my lady, thank goodness!” The fervour of which was his sincere tribute to the note he had had on Friday morning from Mrs. Ash, the only thing that had a little tempered his gloom.
“Well then, feel for others. Fit him in. Tell him why!”
“Why I’ve come back? I’m glad I have–since it was to see you!” Monteith made brave enough answer, promising to do what he could. He liked the pretty girl, with her straight attack and her free awkwardness–also with her difference from the others through something of a sense and a distinction given her by so clearly having Newton on her mind. Yet it was odd to him, and it showed the lapse of the years, that Winch–as he had known him of old–could be to that degree on any one’s mind.