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Pandora
by
“I’m not in a hurry to arrive; I’m very happy here,” she said. “I’m afraid I shall have such a time putting my people through.”
“Putting them through?”
“Through the Custom-House. We’ve made so many purchases. Well, I’ve written to a friend to come down, and perhaps he can help us. He’s very well acquainted with the head. Once I’m chalked I don’t care. I feel like a kind of blackboard by this time anyway. We found them awful in Germany.”
Count Otto wondered if the friend she had written to were her lover and if they had plighted their troth, especially when she alluded to him again as “that gentleman who’s coming down.” He asked her about her travels, her impressions, whether she had been long in Europe and what she liked best, and she put it to him that they had gone abroad, she and her family, for a little fresh experience. Though he found her very intelligent he suspected she gave this as a reason because he was a German and she had heard the Germans were rich in culture. He wondered what form of culture Mr. and Mrs. Day had brought back from Italy, Greece and Palestine–they had travelled for two years and been everywhere–especially when their daughter said: “I wanted father and mother to see the best things. I kept them three hours on the Acropolis. I guess they won’t forget that!” Perhaps it was of Phidias and Pericles they were thinking, Vogelstein reflected, as they sat ruminating in their rugs. Pandora remarked also that she wanted to show her little sister everything while she was comparatively unformed (“comparatively!” he mutely gasped); remarkable sights made so much more impression when the mind was fresh: she had read something of that sort somewhere in Goethe. She had wanted to come herself when she was her sister’s age; but her father was in business then and they couldn’t leave Utica. The young man thought of the little sister frisking over the Parthenon and the Mount of Olives and sharing for two years, the years of the school-room, this extraordinary pilgrimage of her parents; he wondered whether Goethe’s dictum had been justified in this case. He asked Pandora if Utica were the seat of her family, if it were an important or typical place, if it would be an interesting city for him, as a stranger, to see. His companion replied frankly that this was a big question, but added that all the same she would ask him to “come and visit us at our home” if it weren’t that they should probably soon leave it.
“Ah, you’re going to live elsewhere?” Vogelstein asked, as if that fact too would be typical.
“Well, I’m working for New York. I flatter myself I’ve loosened them while we’ve been away,” the girl went on. “They won’t find in Utica the same charm; that was my idea. I want a big place, and of course Utica–!” She broke off as before a complex statement.
“I suppose Utica is inferior–?” Vogelstein seemed to see his way to suggest.
“Well no, I guess I can’t have you call Utica inferior. It isn’t supreme–that’s what’s the matter with it, and I hate anything middling,” said Pandora Day. She gave a light dry laugh, tossing back her head a little as she made this declaration. And looking at her askance in the dusk, as she trod the deck that vaguely swayed, he recognised something in her air and port that matched such a pronouncement.
“What’s her social position?” he inquired of Mrs. Dangerfield the next day. “I can’t make it out at all–it’s so contradictory. She strikes me as having much cultivation and much spirit. Her appearance, too, is very neat. Yet her parents are complete little burghers. That’s easily seen.”