The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather (best reads .TXT) 📕

much, do you think, Dr. Archie?” Thea leaned toward him. “Isn’t it only because we’ve known them since I was little?”

The doctor glanced at her deferentially. Fred had noticed that he seemed a little afraid to look at her squarely⁠—perhaps a trifle embarrassed by a mode of dress to which he was unaccustomed. “Well, you are practically an outsider yourself, Thea, now,” he observed smiling. “Oh, I know,” he went on quickly in response to her gesture of protest⁠—“I know you don’t change toward your old friends, but you can see us all from a distance now. It’s all to your advantage that you can still take your old interest, isn’t it, Mr. Ottenburg?”

“That’s exactly one of her advantages, Dr. Archie. Nobody can ever take that away from her, and none of us who came later can ever hope to rival Moonstone in the impression we make. Her scale of values will always be the Moonstone scale. And, with an artist, that is an advantage.” Fred nodded.

Dr. Archie looked at him seriously. “You mean it keeps them from getting affected?”

“Yes; keeps them from getting off the track generally.”

While the waiter filled the glasses, Fred pointed out to Thea a big black French barytone who was eating anchovies by their tails at one of the tables below, and the doctor looked about and studied his fellow diners.

“Do you know, Mr. Ottenburg,” he said deeply, “these people all look happier to me than our Western people do. Is it simply good manners on their part, or do they get more out of life?”

Fred laughed to Thea above the glass he had just lifted. “Some of them are getting a good deal out of it now, doctor. This is the hour when bench-joy brightens.”

Thea chuckled and darted him a quick glance. “Bench-joy! Where did you get that slang?”

“That happens to be very old slang, my dear. Older than Moonstone or the sovereign State of Colorado. Our old friend Mr. Nathanmeyer could tell us why it happens to hit you.” He leaned forward and touched Thea’s wrist, “See that fur coat just coming in, Thea. It’s D’Albert. He’s just back from his Western tour. Fine head, hasn’t he?”

“To go back,” said Dr. Archie; “I insist that people do look happier here. I’ve noticed it even on the street, and especially in the hotels.”

Fred turned to him cheerfully. “New York people live a good deal in the fourth dimension, Dr. Archie. It’s that you notice in their faces.”

The doctor was interested. “The fourth dimension,” he repeated slowly; “and is that slang, too?”

“No,”⁠—Fred shook his head⁠—“that’s merely a figure. I mean that life is not quite so personal here as it is in your part of the world. People are more taken up by hobbies, interests that are less subject to reverses than their personal affairs. If you’re interested in Thea’s voice, for instance, or in voices in general, that interest is just the same, even if your mining stocks go down.”

The doctor looked at him narrowly. “You think that’s about the principal difference between country people and city people, don’t you?”

Fred was a little disconcerted at being followed up so resolutely, and he attempted to dismiss it with a pleasantry. “I’ve never thought much about it, doctor. But I should say, on the spur of the moment, that that is one of the principal differences between people anywhere. It’s the consolation of fellows like me who don’t accomplish much. The fourth dimension is not good for business, but we think we have a better time.”

Dr. Archie leaned back in his chair. His heavy shoulders were contemplative. “And she,” he said slowly; “should you say that she is one of the kind you refer to?” He inclined his head toward the shimmer of the pale-green dress beside him. Thea was leaning, just then, over the balcony rail, her head in the light from the chandeliers below.

“Never, never!” Fred protested. “She’s as hardheaded as the worst of you⁠—with a difference.”

The doctor sighed. “Yes, with a difference; something that makes a good many revolutions to the second. When she was little I used to feel her head to try to locate it.”

Fred laughed. “Did you, though? So you were on the track of it? Oh, it’s there! We can’t get round it, miss,” as Thea looked back inquiringly. “Dr. Archie, there’s a fellow townsman of yours I feel a real kinship for.” He pressed a cigar upon Dr. Archie and struck a match for him. “Tell me about Spanish Johnny.”

The doctor smiled benignantly through the first waves of smoke. “Well, Johnny’s an old patient of mine, and he’s an old admirer of Thea’s. She was born a cosmopolitan, and I expect she learned a good deal from Johnny when she used to run away and go to Mexican Town. We thought it a queer freak then.”

The doctor launched into a long story, in which he was often eagerly interrupted or joyously confirmed by Thea, who was drinking her coffee and forcing open the petals of the roses with an ardent and rather rude hand. Fred settled down into enjoying his comprehension of his guests. Thea, watching Dr. Archie and interested in his presentation, was unconsciously impersonating her suave, gold-tinted friend. It was delightful to see her so radiant and responsive again. She had kept her promise about looking her best; when one could so easily get together the colors of an apple branch in early spring, that was not hard to do. Even Dr. Archie felt, each time he looked at her, a fresh consciousness. He recognized the fine texture of her mother’s skin, with the difference that, when she reached across the table to give him a bunch of grapes, her arm was not only white, but somehow a little dazzling. She seemed to him taller, and freer in all her movements. She had now a way of taking a deep breath when she was interested, that made her seem very strong, somehow, and brought her at one quite overpoweringly. If he seemed shy, it was not that he was