The Kentons | Page 9

was growing gayer and seemed to be growing younger in the
inspiration of the great, good-natured town. They had first come to
New York on their wedding journey, but since that visit she had always
let him go alone on his business errands to the East; these had grown
less and less frequent, and he had not seen New York for ten or twelve
years. He could have waited as much longer, but he liked her pleasure
in the place, and with the homesickness always lurking at his heart he
went about with her to the amusements which she frequented, as she
said, to help Ellen take her mind off herself. At the play and the opera
he sat thinking of the silent, lonely house at Tuakingum, dark among its
leafless maples, and the life that was no more in it than if they had all
died out of it; and he could not keep down a certain resentment,

senseless and cruel, as if the poor girl were somehow to blame for their
exile. When he betrayed this feeling to his wife, as he sometimes must,
she scolded him for it, and then offered, if he really thought anything
like that, to go back to Tuskingum at once; and it ended in his having to
own himself wrong, and humbly promise that he never would let the
child dream how he felt, unless he really wished to kill her. He was
obliged to carry his self- punishment so far as to take Lottie very
sharply to task when she broke out in hot rebellion, and declared that it
was all Ellen's fault; she was not afraid of killing her sister; and though
she did not say it to her, she said it of her, that anybody else could have
got rid of that fellow without turning the whole family out of house and
home.
Lottie, in fact, was not having a bit good time in New York, which she
did not find equal in any way to Tuskingum for fun. She hated the dull
propriety of the hotel, where nobody got acquainted, and every one was
as afraid as death of every one else; and in her desolation she was
thrown back upon the society of her brother Boyne. They became
friends in their common dislike of New York; and pending some
chance of bringing each other under condemnation they lamented their
banishment from Tuskingum together. But even Boyne contrived to
make the heavy time pass more lightly than she in the lessons he had
with a tutor, and the studies of the city which he carried on. When the
skating was not good in Central Park he spent most of his afternoons
and evenings at the vaudeville theatres. None of the dime museums
escaped his research, and he conversed with freaks and monsters of all
sorts upon terms of friendly confidence. He reported their different
theories of themselves to his family with the same simple-hearted
interest that he criticised the song and dance artists of the vaudeville
theatres. He became an innocent but by no means uncritical
connoisseur of their attractions, and he surprised with the constancy
and variety of his experience in them a gentleman who sat next him one
night. Boyne thought him a person of cultivation, and consulted him
upon the opinion he had formed that there was not so much harm in
such places as people said. The gentleman distinguished in saying that
he thought you would not find more harm in them, if you did not bring
it with you, than you would in the legitimate theatres; and in the hope
of further wisdom from him, Boyne followed him out of the theatre and

helped him on with his overcoat. The gentleman walked home to his
hotel with him, and professed a pleasure in his acquaintance which he
said he trusted they might sometime renew.
All at once the Kentons began to be acquainted in the hotel, as often
happens with people after they have long ridden up and down in the
elevator together in bonds of apparently perpetual strangeness. From
one friendly family their acquaintance spread to others until they were,
almost without knowing it, suddenly and simultaneously on smiling
and then on speaking terms with the people of every permanent table in
the dining-room. Lottie and Boyne burst the chains of the unnatural
kindness which bound them, and resumed their old relations of
reciprocal censure. He found a fellow of his own age in the apartment
below, who had the same country traditions and was engaged in a like
inspection of the city; and she discovered two girls on another floor,
who said they received on Saturdays and wanted her to receive with
them. They made a tea for her, and asked some real