National Avenue by Booth Tarkington (book recommendations website .txt) 📕

pretty quick-stepping New York of your own, Lena. Tea at Sherry’s means mighty little tea for you, my dear. A man told me the other day he’d never met a human being who could survive as many Benedictines in the afternoon as you can. Besides that, you get too much music.”

“You’re crazy!” Lena cried. “I live on music!”

“No, you don’t,” he said. “You keep yourself woozy with it. You go on music debauches, Lena. You don’t take it as an art; you take it as an excitement. You keep your emotions frothing with it, and that’s why you can’t get along without it. If you hadn’t been in the habit of getting yourself woozy with music, that Venable affair would never have happened.”

“George!” she said sharply, and her eyes, already angry, grew more brilliant with increased emotion. “Shame on you!”

“Oh, well⁠—” he said placatively.

“It’s a thing you have no right to make me remember.”

“Other people remember it,” he said, with a brother’s grimness. “You needn’t think because nobody outside the family ever speaks of it to you it isn’t thought of and referred to when you’re spoken of.”

She looked pathetic at this, and reproached him in a broken voice. “Unmanly! One would think my own⁠—my own brother⁠—”

“Your own brother is about the only person that could speak of it to you in a friendly way, Lena. You know how the rest of the family speak of it to you⁠—when they do.”

“It’s so unfair!” she moaned. “Nobody ever understood⁠—”

“We needn’t to go into that,” George said gently. “I think myself it was your musical emotions on top of a constitutional lack of discretion. Oh, I don’t blame you! I’ve spent too much time trying to cover my own indiscretions from the family. I’m really more the family black sheep than you are, only you had worse luck; that’s all. I only mention it to get you to think a little before you talk of throwing Dan Oliphant over rather than to go and live in the town he’s so proud of.”

She wiped her eyes, choked a little, and protested feebly: “But the two things haven’t any connection. What⁠—what’s Venable got to do with⁠—”

“Well, you make me say it,” George remarked as she paused. “I think you understand as well as I do; but if you want me to be definite, I will.”

“Not too definite, please, George!”

“How can I be anything else? There isn’t any tactful way to say some things, Lena. You may get proposals from some of these men you meet at parties and father don’t know about⁠—”

“Never mind, please, George. Do you have to be quite so⁠—”

“Yes,” he said decisively. “Quite. The family have made it clear what they’ll do, if you ever try again to marry one of the wrong sort, like Venable.”

“ ‘The wrong sort!’ ” she echoed pathetically, though with some bitterness toward her brother. “He was the most interesting man I ever knew, and a great artist. He was⁠—”

“Unfortunate in his domestic experiences,” George interrupted, concluding the sentence for her dryly. “And you were unfortunate in overlooking⁠—well, to put it tactlessly, in seeming to have no objection to what I’m afraid I must call his somewhat bigamous tendencies, Lena.”

“George!”

“My dear, I’m trying to say something helpful. Eligibles of our own walk in life enjoy dancing with you or buying Benedictines for you, but after Venable, none of ’em would be likely to⁠—”

“That’s enough, please, George!”

“No,” he said, “I’m explaining that Dan’s the best thing in sight. The family weren’t too pleased about him, I admit; but they couldn’t help seeing that. For my part, I think it might be the making of you.”

“I don’t care to be made, thanks.”

“I mean you might have a chance to improve, living somewhere else,” he explained calmly. “But more than that, Dan Oliphant looks up to you so worshipfully⁠—he pictures you as such spotless perfection⁠—it seems to me you’d just have to live up to his idea of you. If you want to know the truth, I took such a fancy to him I wasn’t too delighted on his account when I saw he was getting serious about you; but when he seemed to be so much so, I thought maybe it might turn out pretty well for both of you. It’s good sometimes for a man to have such ideals, and it’s always good for a woman to live up to ’em. Besides, you do care about him, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I wouldn’t have said I’d marry him if I didn’t. I really did fall a lot in love with him, but that’s not being in love with spending my life in some terrible place, is it? And besides I’m not going to live up to his ideals; nothing bores me more than pretending to be somebody I’m not. I get enough of that with the family, thanks!”

“You think you won’t try to be the girl he believes you are?” George asked gravely.

“Don’t be silly! Why on earth should I pretend to be anybody but myself?”

“In that case,” George said, “I hope you’ll write poor Dan that you refuse to be compelled and have decided to break your engagement. He’ll be pretty sick over it, I’m afraid, but I think you’d both live happier⁠—and longer!”

With this brotherly tribute, spoken in a rueful humour, he departed, leaving her at her small French desk, where the sheet of blue-tinted note paper before her remained blank, except for a few teardrops. In spite of his parting advice, George had relieved neither her indecision nor her conviction that she was being ill-treated by her lover. Nevertheless, except for one thing, she was inclined to accept that advice.

The one deterrent was the group of people defined by George and herself, in tones never enthusiastic, as “the family.” Aunts, uncles, and cousins were included, all of them persons of weight, and some of them of such prodigious substance in wealth as to figure as personages in the metropolis; though all McMillans were personages to themselves,