Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/748

720 sensibilities. She laughed yet with her lips, and executed arch manœuvres with her speaking eyes, when unfeeling allusions were made in her hearing to the crooked stick that awaits the over-nice fagot-gatherer, and to the forlorn virgin, also a wanderer in woodlands, who answered the owl's "To-who?" all the freezing night with "Anybody!" But at heart she was growing restless, if not unhappy, when Dr. Baxter fell in her way. She was a littérateur as well as a beauty, and her reverend suitor was a man of note—a distinguished clergyman, a savant and senior professor in a highly respectable institution of learning. She overlooked the ill-fitting coat, the dragged cravat, the inevitable handkerchief—as she put it—set the subjective where it should ever be placed, above the grosser objective—in direct English, married the reverend doctor.

I have said he was a little man at his best. He was a pigmy on a certain evening in the November succeeding the summer of which I have written. To begin with the chiefest of the dwarfing processes to which he had been subjected. It was a reception night in the Presidential Mansion. Mrs. Baxter had given a party the week previous to this, and now sat in state, as was the Hamiltonian usage, to receive the calls demanded from those who had been the invitees on that occasion. The ceremony, in its mildest form, would have been purgatory to her spouse, but she had aggravated his torture by personally superintending his toilette. This accomplished, she begged him, if he had one atom of regard for her, to leave neck-tie and handkerchief alone for that night, walked him into the parlor and inducted him into an immense easy-chair, directly beneath a bracket-light; thrust an illuminated folio—one of her centre-table ornaments— between his fingers, and withdrew to her own chair, a little way off, to examine the effect.

"You are really picturesque, my love," she decided, in honeyed patronage. "If you can only remember to sit upright, instead of slipping down in the lap of your chair until your coat-collar shows above the back of your head, you will make a fine study for a sketch of 'Learned Leisure,' or something of that kind."

The poor man smiled resignedly, and began to turn the leaves of his book. It was a sacred album, the work of his wife's fair fingers, although he did not know it. "I flatter myself you will find some choice bits there," she said, modestly.

She was fond of talking about "bits," and "effects," and "tone," useful cant that forms the stock in trade of many an art-critic, whose decrees pass current with a larger circle than the clique which eulogized Mrs. Baxter's talents. She was, in feature and coloring, a pretty woman still, in defiance of her forty-five or forty-six years. Her brown eyes were lively; the red of her complexion, if a trifle hard, was hers honestly, as were the glossy curls that showed no frost-lines, and the pearly teeth she had trained her lips to reveal at every possible opportunity. Her hands were plump, white, and small, and would have been smaller had she exercised them less. Like the teeth, they were too obtrusive. She could not not say "Good day" to a passing acquaintance, without parting her lips in a wide smile over the milk-white treasures, tucking away their natural covering into an incredibly narrow fold above the ivory, and stretching it below into a straight line which lost itself in creases that had once been dimples. She had been renowned in her youth for her vivacity, and had cultivated it into what nobody was kind enough to tell her was frisky affectation. The extent to which the pliant fingers curved, and twined, and twinkled, and sprawled in the course of a conversation of moderate length, was a thing of wonder forever to the staid