You would have said that American civilization expressed itself to his sense in a tissue of capital jokes. The jokes were certainly excellent, and the young man's merriment was joyous and genial. He possessed what is called the pictorial sense; and this first glimpse of democratic manners stirred the same sort of attention that he would have given to the movements of a lively young person with a bright complexion.
Such attention would have been demonstrative and complimentary; and in the present case Felix might have passed for an undispirited young exile revisiting the haunts of his childhood. He kept looking at the violent blue of the sky, at the scintillating air, at the scattered and multiplied patches of color.
"Comme c'est bariole, eh?" he said to his sister in that foreign tongue which they both appeared to feel a mysterious prompting occasionally to use.
"Yes, it is bariole indeed," the Baroness answered.
"I don't like the coloring; it hurts my eyes."
"It shows how extremes meet," the young man rejoined.
"Instead of coming to the West we seem to have gone to the East.
The way the sky touches the house-tops is just like Cairo; and the red and blue sign-boards patched over the face of everything remind one of Mahometan decorations."
"The young women are not Mahometan," said his companion.
"They can't be said to hide their faces. I never saw anything so bold."
"Thank Heaven they don't hide their faces!" cried Felix.
"Their faces are uncommonly pretty."
"Yes, their faces are often very pretty," said the Baroness, who was a very clever woman. She was too clever a woman not to be capable of a great deal of just and fine observation.
She clung more closely than usual to her brother's arm; she was not exhilarated, as he was; she said very little, but she noted a great many things and made her reflections.
She was a little excited; she felt that she had indeed come to a strange country, to make her fortune. Superficially, she was conscious of a good deal of irritation and displeasure; the Baroness was a very delicate and fastidious person.
Of old, more than once, she had gone, for entertainment's sake and in brilliant company, to a fair in a provincial town.
It seemed to her now that she was at an enormous fair--that the entertainment and the desagrements were very much the same.
She found herself alternately smiling and shrinking; the show was very curious, but it was probable, from moment to moment, that one would be jostled. The Baroness had never seen so many people walking about before; she had never been so mixed up with people she did not know. But little by little she felt that this fair was a more serious undertaking.
She went with her brother into a large public garden, which seemed very pretty, but where she was surprised at seeing no carriages.
The afternoon was drawing to a close; the coarse, vivid grass and the slender tree-boles were gilded by the level sunbeams--gilded as with gold that was fresh from the mine. It was the hour at which ladies should come out for an airing and roll past a hedge of pedestrians, holding their parasols askance.
Here, however, Eugenia observed no indications of this custom, the absence of which was more anomalous as there was a charming avenue of remarkably graceful, arching elms in the most convenient contiguity to a large, cheerful street, in which, evidently, among the more prosperous members of the bourgeoisie, a great deal of pedestrianism went forward. Our friends passed out into this well lighted promenade, and Felix noticed a great many more pretty girls and called his sister's attention to them.
This latter measure, however, was superfluous; for the Baroness had inspected, narrowly, these charming young ladies.
"I feel an intimate conviction that our cousins are like that," said Felix.
The Baroness hoped so, but this is not what she said.
"They are very pretty," she said, "but they are mere little girls.
Where are the women--the women of thirty?"
"Of thirty-three, do you mean?" her brother was going to ask; for he understood often both what she said and what she did not say.