The Other Girls Part 1

The Other Girls.

by Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney.

PREFACE.

"Wait until you are helped, my dear! Don't touch the pie until it is cut!"

The old Mother, Life, keeps saying that to us all.

As individuals, it is well for us to remember it; that we may not have things until we are helped; at any rate, until the full and proper time comes, for courageously and with right a.s.surance helping ourselves.

Yet it is good for _people_, as people, to get a morsel--a flavor--in advance. It is well that they should be impatient for the King's supper, to which we shall all sit down, if we will, one day.

So I have not waited for everything to happen and become a usage, that I have told you of in this little story. I confess that there are good things in it which have not yet, literally, come to pa.s.s. I have picked something out of the pie beforehand.

I meant, therefore, to have laid all dates aside; especially as I found myself a little cramped by them, in re-introducing among these "Other Girls" the girls whom we have before, and rather lately, known. Lest, possibly, in anything which they have here grown to, or experienced, or accomplished, the sharply exact reader should seem to detect the requirement of a longer interval than the almanacs could actually give, I meant to have asked that it should be remembered, that we story-tellers write chiefly in the Potential Mood, and that tenses do not very essentially signify. It will all have had opportunity to be true in eighteen-seventy-five, if it have not had in eighteen-seventy-three. Well enough, indeed, if the prophecies be justified as speedily as the prochronisms will.

The Great Fire, you see, came in and dated it. I could not help that; neither could I leave the great fact out.

Not any more could I possibly tell what sort of April days we should have, when I found myself fixed to the very coming April and Easter, for the closing chapters of my tale. If persistent snow-storms fling a falsehood in my face, it will be what I have not heretofore believed possible,--a _white_ one; and we can all think of balmy Aprils that have been, and that are yet to be.

With these appeals for trifling allowance,--leaving the larger need to the obvious accounting for in a largeness of subject which no slight fiction can adequately handle,--I give you leave to turn the page.

A. D. T. W.

BOSTON, _March_, 1873.

THE OTHER GIRLS

CHAPTER I.

SPILLED OUT.

Sylvie Argenter was driving about in her mother's little basket-phaeton.

There was a story about this little basket-phaeton, a story, and a bit of domestic diplomacy.

The story would branch away, back and forward; which I cannot, right here in this first page, let it do. It would tell--taking the little carriage for a text and key--ever so much about aims and ways and principles, and the drift of a household life, which was one of the busy little currents in the world that help to make up its great universal character and atmosphere, at this present age of things, as the drifts and sweeps of ocean make up the climates and atmospheres that wrap and influence the planet.

But the diplomacy had been this:--

"There is one thing, Argie, I should really like Sylvie to have. It is getting to be almost a necessity, living out of town as we do."

Mr. Argenter's other names were "Increase Muchmore;" but his wife pa.s.sed over all that, and called him in the grace of conjugal intimacy, "Argie."

Increase Muchmore Argenter.

A curious combination; but you need not say it could not have happened. I have read half a dozen as funny combinations in a single advertising page of a newspaper, or in a single transit of the city in a horse-car.

It did not happen altogether without a purpose, either. Mr.

Argenter's father had been fond of money; had made and saved a considerable sum himself; and always meant that his son should make and save a good deal more. So he signified this in his cradle and gave him what he called a lucky name, to begin with. The wife of the elder Mr. Argenter had been a Muchmore; her only brother had been named Increase, either out of oddity, such as influenced a certain Mr. Crabtree whom I have heard of, to call his son Agreen, or because the old Puritan name had been in the family, or with a like original inspiration of luck and thrift to that which influenced the later christening, if you can call it such; and now, therefore, resulted Increase Muchmore Argenter. The father hung, as it were, a charm around his son's neck, as Catholics do, giving saints' names to their children. But young Increase found it, in his earlier years, rather of the nature of a millstone. It was a good while, for instance, before Miss Maria Thorndike could make up her mind to take upon herself such a t.i.tle. She did not much mind it now. "I.M.

Argenter" was such a good signature at the bottom of a check; and the surname was quite musical and elegant. "Mrs. Argenter" was all she had put upon her cards. There was no other Mrs. Argenter to be confounded with. The name stood by itself in the Directory. All the rest of the Argenters were away down in Maine in Poggowantimoc.

"Living out of town as we do." Mrs. Argenter always put that in. It was the nut that fastened all her screws of argument.

"Away out here as we are, we _must_ keep an expert cook, you know; we can't send out for bread and cake, and salads and soups, on an emergency, as we did in town." "We _must_ have a seamstress in the house the year round; it is such a bother driving about a ten-mile circuit after one in a hurry;" and now,--"Sylvie _ought_ to have a little vehicle of her own, she is so far away from all her friends; no running in and out and making little daily plans, as girls do in a neighborhood. All the girls of her cla.s.s have their own pony-chaises now; it is a part of the plan of living."

"It isn't any part of _my_ plan," said Mr. Argenter, who had his little spasms of returning to old-fas.h.i.+oned ideas he was brought up in, but had long ago practically deserted; and these spasms mostly took him, it must be said, in response to new propositions of Mrs.

Argenter's. His own plans evolved gradually; he came to them by imperceptible steps of mental process, or outward constraint; Mrs.

Argenter's "jumped" at him, took him at unawares, and by sudden impinging upon solid s.h.i.+eld of permanent judgment struck out sparks of opposition. She could not very well help that. He never had time to share her little experiences, and interests, and perplexities, and so sympathize with her as she went along, and up to the agreeing and consenting point.

"I won't set her up with any such absurdities," said Mr. Argenter.

"It's confounded ruinous shoddy nonsense. Makes little fools of them all. Sylvie's got airs enough now. It won't do for her to think she can have everything the Highfords do."

"It isn't that," said Mrs. Argenter, sweetly. Her position, and the soft "g" in her name, giving her a sense of something elegant and gentle-bred to be always sustained and acted up to, had really helped and strengthened Mrs. Argenter in very much of her established amiability. We don't know, always, where our ties and braces really are. We are graciously allowed many a little temporary stay whose hold cannot be quite directly raced to the everlasting foundations.

"It isn't _that_; I don't care for the Highfords, particularly.

Though I do like to have Sylvie enjoy things as she sees them enjoyed all around her, in her own circle. But it's the convenience; and then, it's a real means of showing kindness. She can so often ask other girls, you know, to drive with her; girls who haven't pony-chaises."

"_Showing_ kindness, yes; you've just hit it there. But it isn't always _fun to the frogs_, Mrs. A.!"

Now if Mrs. Argenter disliked one thing more than another, that her husband ever did, it was his calling her "Mrs. A.;" and I am very much afraid, I was going to say, that he knew it; but of course he did when she had mildly told him so, over and over,--I am afraid he _recollected_ it, at this very moment, and others similar.

"I don't know what you mean, Mr. Argenter," she said, with some quiet coldness.

"I mean, I know how she takes _other_ girls to ride; she _sets them down at the small gray house,--the house without any piazza or bay window, Michael_!" and Mr. Argenter laughed. That was the order he had heard Sylvie give one day when he had come up with his own carriage at the post-office in the village, whither he had walked over for exercise and the evening papers. Sylvie had Aggie Townsend with her, and she put her head out at the window on one side just as her father pa.s.sed on the other, and directed Michael, with a very elegant nonchalance, to "set this little girl down" as aforesaid.

Mr. Argenter had been half amused and half angry. The anger pa.s.sed off, but he had kept up the joke.

"O, do let that old story alone," exclaimed Mrs. Argenter. "Sylvie will soon outgrow all that. If you want to make her a real lady, there is nothing like letting her get thoroughly used to having things."

"I don't intend her to get used to having a pony-chaise," Mr.

Argenter said very quietly and shortly. "If she wants to 'show a kindness,' and take 'other' girls to ride, there's the slide-top buggy and old Scrub. She may have that as often as she pleases."

And Mrs. Argenter knew that this ended--or had better end--the conversation.

For that time. Sylvie Argenter did get used to having a pony-chaise, after all. Her mother waited six months, until the pleasant summer weather, when her friends began to come out from the city to spend days with her, or to take early teas, and Michael had to be sent continually to meet and leave them at the trains. Then she began again, and asked for a pony-chaise for herself. To "save the cost of it in Michael's time, and the wear and tear of the heavy carriages.

Those little sunset drives would be such a pleasure to her, just when Michael had to be milking and putting up for the night." Mr.

Argenter had forgotten all about the other talk, Sylvie's name now being not once mentioned; and the end of it was that a pretty little low phaeton was added to the Argenter equipages, and that Sylvie's mother was always lending it to her.

So Sylvie was driving about in it this afternoon. She had been over to West Dorbury to see the Highfords, and was coming round by Ingraham's Corner, to stop there and buy one of his fresh big loaves of real brown bread for her father's tea. It was a little unspoken, politic understanding between Sylvie and her mother, that some small, acceptable errand like this was to be accomplished whenever the former had the basket-phaeton of an afternoon. By quiet, unspoken demonstration, Mr. Argenter was made to feel in his own little comforts what a handy thing it was to have a daughter flitting about so easily with a pony-carriage.

But there was something else to be accomplished this time that Sylvie had not thought of, and that when it happened, she felt with some dismay might not be quite offset and compensated for by the Ingraham brown bread.