Rhodora Pennington came to Trega with her invalid mother as the guest of her uncle, the Commandant at the Fort – for Trega was a garrison town. She was a beautiful girl. I do not mean a pretty girl: there were pretty girls in Trega – several of them. She was beautiful as the Queen of Sheba was beautiful – grand, perfect, radiantly tawny of complexion, without a flaw or a failing in her pulchritude – almost too fine a being for family use, except that she had plenty of hot woman’s blood in her veins, and was an accomplished, delightful, impartial flirt.
All the men turned to her with such prompt unanimity that all the girls of Trega’s best society joined hands in one grand battle for their prospective altars and hearths. From the June day when Rhodora came, to the Ash Wednesday of the next year when her engagement was announced, there was one grand battle, a dozen girls with wealth and social position and knowledge of the ground to help them, all pitted against one garrison girl, with not so much as a mother to back her – Mrs. Pennington being hopelessly and permanently on the sick-list.
Trega girls who had never thought of doing more than wait at their leisure for the local young men to marry them at their leisure now went in for accomplishments of every sort. They rode, they drove, they danced new dances, they read Browning and Herbert Spencer, they sang, they worked hard at archery and lawn-tennis, they rowed and sailed and fished, and some of the more desperate even went shooting in the Fall, and in the Winter played billiards and – penny ante. Thus did they, in the language of a somewhat cynical male observer, back Accomplishments against Beauty.
The Shakspere Club and the Lake Picnic, which had hitherto divided the year between them, were submerged in the flood of social entertainments. Balls and parties followed one another. Trega’s square stone houses were lit up night after night, and the broad moss-grown gardens about them were made trim and presentable, and Chinese lanterns turned them into a fairy-land for young lovers.
It was a great year for Trega! The city had been dead, commercially, ever since the New York Central Railroad had opened up the great West; but the unprecedented flow of champagne and Apollinaris actually started a little business boom, based on the inferable wealth of Trega, and two or three of Trega’s remaining firms went into bankruptcy because of the boom. And Rhodora Pennington did it all.
Have you ever seen the end of a sham-fight? You have been shouting and applauding, and wasting enough enthusiasm for a foot-ball match. And now it is all finished, and nothing has been done, and you go home somewhat ashamed of yourself, and glad only that the blue-coated participants must feel more ashamed of themselves; and the smell of the villainous saltpetre, that waked the Berserker in your heart an hour ago, is now noisome and disgusting, and makes you cough and sneeze.
Even so did the girls of Trega’s best society look each in the face of the other, when Ash Wednesday ended that nine months of riot, and ask of each other, “What has it all been about?”
True, there were nine girls engaged to be married, and engagement meant marriage in Trega. Alma Lyle was engaged to Dexter Townsend, Mary Waite to John Lang, Winifred Peters to McCullom McIntosh, Ellen Humphreys to George Lister, Laura Visscher to William Jans, (Oranje boven! – Dutch blood stays Dutch,) Millicent Smith to Milo Smith, her cousin, Olive Cregier to Aleck Sloan, Aloha Jones, (niece of a Sandwich Islands missionary,) to Parker Hall, and Rhodora Pennington to Charley Boyd.
But all of these matches, save the last, would have been made in the ordinary course of things. The predestination of propinquity would have settled that. And even if Ellen Humphreys had married John Lang instead of George Lister, and George Lister had wedded Mary Waite – why, there would have been no great difference to admire or to deplore. The only union of the nine which came as a surprise to the community was the engagement of Rhodora to Charley Boyd. The beauty of the season had picked up the one crooked stick in the town – a dissolute, ne’er-do-well hanger-on of Trega’s best society, who would never have seen a dinner-card if he had not been a genius at amateur theatricals, an artist on the banjo, and a half-bred Adonis.
There the agony ended for the other girls, and there it began for Rhodora Boyd. In less than a year, Boyd had deserted her. The Commandant was transferred to the Pacific Coast. Rhodora moved, with her mother, bed-ridden now, into a little house in the unfashionable outskirts of Trega. There she nursed the mother until the poor bed-ridden old lady died. Rhodora supported them both by teaching music and French at the Trega Seminary, down by the Falls. Morning and evening she went out and back on that weary, jingling horse-car line. She received the annual visits that her friends paid her, inspired by something between courtesy and charity, with her old stately simplicity and imperturbable calm; and no one of them could feel sure that she was conscious of their triumph or of her degradation. And she kept the best part of her stately beauty to the very last. In any other town she would have been taught what divorce-courts were made for; but Trega society was Episcopalian, and that communion is healthily and conservatively monogamous.
And so Rhodora Boyd, that once was Rhodora Pennington, died in her little house, and her pet old maid closed her eyes. And there was an end of Rhodora. Not quite an end, though.
Scene. — The Public Library of Trega. Mrs. George Lister and Mrs. John Lang are seated in the Rotunda. Mr. Libriver, the Librarian, advances to them with books in his hands.
Mrs. Lister. – Ah, here comes Mr. Libriver, with my “Intellectual Life.” Thank you, Mr. Libriver – you are always so kind!
Mrs. Lang. – And Mr. Libriver has brought me my “Status of Woman.” Oh, thank you, Mr. Libriver.
Mr. Libriver, a thin young man in a linen duster, retires, blushing.
Mrs. Lister. – Mr. Libriver does so appreciate women who are free from the bondage of the novel. Did you hear about poor Rhodora’s funeral?
Mrs. Lang (with a sweeping grasp at the intellectual side of the conversation). – Oh, I despise love-stories. In the church? Oh, yes, I heard. (Sweetly). Dr. Homly told me. Doesn’t it seem just a little – ostentatious?
Mrs. Lister. – Ostentatious – but, do you know, my dear, there are to be eight pall-bearers!
Mrs. Lang (turning defeat into victory). – No, I did not know. I don’t suppose that ridiculous old maid, that Miss Wimple, who seems to be conducting the affair, dared to tell that to Dr. Homly. And who are they?
Mrs. Lister (with exceeding sweetness). – Oh, I don’t know, dear. Only I met Mr. Townsend, and he told me that Dr. Homly had just told him that he was one of the eight.
Mrs. Lister. – Dexter Townsend! Why, it’s scandalous. Everybody knows that he proposed to her three times and that she threw him over. It’s an insult to – to —
Mrs. Lang. – To poor dear Alma Townsend. I quite agree with you. I should like to know how she feels – if she understands what it means.
Mrs. Lister. – Well, if I were in her place —
Enter Mrs. Dexter Townsend.
Mrs. Townsend. – Why, Ellen! Why, Mary! Oh, I’m so glad to meet you both. I want you to lunch with me to-morrow at one o’clock. I do so hate to be left alone. And poor Rhodora Pennington – Mrs. Boyd, I mean – her funeral is at noon, and our three male protectors will have to go to the cemetery, and Mr. Townsend is just going to take a cold bite before he goes, and so I’m left to lunch —
Mrs. Lang (coldly). – I don’t think Mr. Lang will go to the cemetery —
Mrs. Lister. – There is no reason why Mr. Lister —
Mrs. Townsend. – But, don’t you know? – They’re all to be pall-bearers! They can’t refuse, of course.
Mrs.