Now singularity that is neither crazy, sporty, faddish, or a fashion, or low class with distinction, such a singularity, I say, we have not made enough of yet so that any other one can really know it, it is as yet an unknown product with us. It takes time to make queer people, and to have others who can know it, time and a certainty of place and means. Custom, passion, and a feel for mother earth are needed to breed vital singularity in any man, and alas, how poor we are in all these three.
Brother Singulars, we are misplaced in a generation that knows not Joseph. We flee before the disapproval of our cousins, the courageous condescension of our friends who gallantly sometimes agree to walk the streets with us, from all them who never any way can understand why such ways and not the others are so dear to us, we fly to the kindly comfort of an older world accustomed to take all manner of strange forms into its bosom and we leave our noble order to be known under such forms as Alfred Hersland, a poor thing, and even hardly then our own.
The Herslands were a Western family. David Hersland, the father, had gone out to a Western state to make his money. His wife had been born and brought up in the town of Bridgepoint. Later Mr. Hersland had sent his son Alfred back there to go to college and then to stay on and to study to become a lawyer. Now it was some years later and Alfred Hersland had come again to Bridgepoint, to settle down there to practice law there, and to make for himself his own money.
The Hersland family had not had their money any longer than the others of this community, but they had taken to culture and to ideas quicker.
Alfred Hersland was well put together to impress a courageous crude young woman, who had an ambition for both passion and position and who needed too to have a strain of romance with them.
Hersland was tall and well dressed and sufficiently good-looking, and he carried himself always with a certain easy dignity and grace. His blond hair, which he wore parted in the middle, a way of doing which at that time showed both courage and conviction, covered a well shaped head. His features were strongly marked, regular and attractive, his expression was pleasing, his talk was always interesting, and his manners were dignified and friendly. His eyes and voice meant knowledge, feeling, and a pleasant mystery.
Julia Dehning threw herself eagerly into this new acquaintance. She no longer wanted that men should bring with them the feel of out of doors, for out of doors with men now was soiled to her sense by the grossness of the Jamesons. Alfred Hersland brought with him the world of art and things, a world to her but vaguely known. He knew that some things made by men are things of beauty, and he spoke this knowledge with interest and conviction.
The time passed quickly by with all this joy of fresh experience and new faith.
Not many months from this first meeting, Julia gave her answer. "Yes, I do care for you," she said, "and you and I will live our lives together, always learning things and doing things, good things they will be for us whatever other people may think or say."
It had been a wonderful time for Julia Dehning these few months of knowing Hersland. She had had, always, stirring within her, a longing for the knowledge of made things, of works of art, of all the wonders that make, she knew, a world, for certain other people. (Twenty years ago, you know, it was still the dark ages in America and lectures on art did not grow on every tongue that had tasted the salt air of the mid-Atlantic. It was a feat then to know about hill towns in Italy, one might have heard of Titian and of Rembrandt but Giorgone and Botticelli were still sacred to the few, one did not then yet have to seek, to find for oneself new painters and new places.) It was a very real desire, this longing for the wisdom of all culture, this that had been always strong in Julia. Of course, mostly, such longing in Julia, took the form of moral idealism, the only form of culture the spare American imagination takes natural refuge in.
Julia Dehning, like all of her kind of people, needed everything, for anything could feed her. It was not strong meat that Hersland offered to her, but her palate was eager, this had the flavour of the dishes she longed to have eaten and to have inside her. To her young crude virgin desire the food he offered to her was plenty real enough to deeply content her.
Of the family about her, it was only Julia who found him worthy to be so important to her. The cousins and the uncles, the men who could make for her the sane and moral background that would give a wholesome middle class condition always to her, they did not like it much that Hersland was now so important for her. They said nothing to her, but they did not like to have him always about with her. He was not their kind and every minute they could know it, and they did not need him, either out in the world in business or at home where they were happy in the rich and solid family comfort they always had had with the Dehnings; and these men could not find Hersland's knowledge worth much for them, and they did not have it in them that it had a meaning for them that he Hersland had in him, knowledge and a certain kind of feeling that they never could have inside them. What could a pleasant mystery in a man mean to them except only that any man with any sense in him would not ever trust anything real to him.
But they said nothing, any of them, they knew nothing real against him, and, anyhow, it was not business for them to interfere with other people's matters, for after all it was to the Dehnings for them, and it did not in any way really concern any of the others of them. As men they could not feel it in them the right to interfere with a woman who did not as a child or a wife really belong to them.
The boy George and the little sister were too young to think very much about him. The young brother did not feel it in himself much to like him, for young George you may remember was young and heroic, out of doors was not yet in any way soiled for him and he needed that kind of a thing in a man to attract him, but anyhow, Julia liked him and it would be hard for George not to think Julia could judge better about him than any of the other members of the family could have it to know in them.
Mr. Dehning as yet had said nothing One day he was out walking and his daughter was with him. "Julia hadn't you better be a little careful how much you encourage that young Hersland."
Mr. Dehning, always, in his working, began very far away from a thing he meant later to be firmly attacking. And always in such a far away beginning, he would be looking sharply, out from him, in a sidelong, piercing, deprecating, challenging, fashion, the kind of a way he had always of looking when his wife, who, by her more than equal living, as it often is with a woman, had not in any kind of a way any fear in her of him, could be going to rebuke him. And this way he had of looking, always made him an old man to his children, and mostly there was a fear then in them, only now Julia was strong, other things were bright and glowing, and she could not now feel it in him, the old grown man's sharp outward looking that, closing him, went always so straight into them.
And so, now, filled full with her new warm imagining, Julia Dehning had not any kind of a fear from him, the kind of a fear a young grown woman has almost always from an old man's looking.
"Why papa!" she had eagerly quickly demanded of him.
"I say Julia I don't know anything against him. Yes, I say to you Julia I don't know of anything there is against him. I have looked up all the record there is yet of him and I haven't heard anything against him but Julia, I say, somehow I don't quite like him. His family are alright, I know a man who knows all Gossols, and I asked him, he says yes the family are all successful and well appearing, I say Julia I don't say anything against him only