The Street Called Straight | Page 3

college class-days. Something of
this latter fact persisted, notwithstanding her English articulation and
style of doing her hair. Her marriage had been the accident of a winter
spent with her mother in Bermuda, at a time when the Sussex Rangers
were stationed there. Her engagement to Captain Gerald Fane--son of
the Very Reverend the Dean of Silchester--was the result of a series of
dances given chiefly in the Hamilton hotels. Marriage brought the girl
born and bred in a New England college town into a kind of life for
which she had had no preparation; but she adapted herself as readily as
she would have done had she married a Russian prince or a Spanish
grandee. In the effort she made there was a mingling of the
matter-of-fact and the tour de force. Regimental life is not unlike that
of a large family; it has the same sort of claims, intimacies, and
quarrels, the same sort of jealousies within, combined with solidarity
against the outsider. Perceiving this quickly, Drusilla proceeded to
disarm criticism by being impeccable in dress and negatively amiable
in conduct. "With my temperament," she said to herself, "I can afford
to wait." Following her husband to Barbados, the Cape, and India, she
had just succeeded in passing all the tests of the troop-ship and the
married quarters when he died. For a while her parents hoped she
would make her widowed home in Boston; but her heart had been
given irrevocably to the British army--to its distinguished correctness,
to its sober glories, its world-wide roving, and its picturesque personal
associations. Though she had seen little of England, except for
occasional visits on leave, she had become English in tastes and at

heart. For a year after Gerald's death she lived with his family at
Silchester, in preference to going to her own. After that she settled in
the small house at Southsea, where from time to time she had her
girlhood's companion, Olivia Guion, as a guest.
"Perhaps that'll do us good," Miss Guion ventured, in reply to Drusilla's
observations at her expense. "To see ourselves as others see us must be
much like looking at one's face in a spoon."
"That doesn't do us any good," Rodney Temple corrected, "because we
always blame the spoon."
"Don't you mind them, dear," Mrs. Temple cooed. She was a little,
apple-faced woman, with a figure suggestive of a tea-cozy, and a voice
with a gurgle in it, like a dove's. A nervous, convulsive moment of her
pursed-up little mouth made that organ an uncertain element in her
physiognomy, shifting as it did from one side of her face to the other
with the rapidity of an aurora borealis. "Don't mind them, dear. A
woman can never do more than reflect 'broken lights' of her husband,
when she has a good one. Don't you love that expression?--'broken
lights'? 'We are but broken lights of Thee!' Dear Tennyson! And no
word yet from Madame de Melcourt."
"I don't expect any now," Olivia explained. "If Aunt Vic had meant to
write she would have done it long ago. I'm afraid I've offended her past
forgiveness."
She held her head slightly to one side, smiling with an air of mock
penitence.
"Dear, dear!" Mrs. Temple murmured, sympathetically. "Just because
you wouldn't marry a Frenchman!"
"And a little because I'm going to marry an Englishman. To Aunt Vic
all Englishmen are grocers."
"Horrid old thing!" Drusilla said, indignantly.

"It's because she doesn't know them, of course," Olivia went on. "It's
one of the things I never can understand--how people can generalize
about a whole nation because they happen to dislike one or two
individuals. As a matter of fact, Aunt Vic has become so absorbed in
her little circle of old French royalist noblesse that she can't see
anything to admire outside the rue de l'Université and château life in
Normandy. She does admit that there's an element of homespun virtue
in the old families of Boston and Waverton; but that's only because she
belongs to them herself."
"The capacity of the American woman for being domesticated in an
alien environment," observed Rodney Temple, "is only equaled by the
dog's."
"We're nomadic, father," Drusilla asserted, "and migratory. We've
always been so. It's because we're Saxons and Angles and Celts and
Normans, and--"
"Saxon and Norman and Dane are we," Mrs. Temple quoted, gently.
"They've always been fidgeting about the world, from one country to
another," Drusilla continued, "and we've inherited the taste. If we
hadn't, our ancestors would never have crossed the Atlantic, in the first
place. And now that we've got here, and can't go any farther in this
direction, we're on the jump to get back again. That's all there is to it.
It's just in the blood. Isn't it, Peter? Isn't it, Cousin