Brooklyn where such an animal was much appreciated, and there the signs
were quite different They had been discouraging--except on Georgina's
pail--from the first of his calling in Twelfth Street Mr. and Mrs.
Gressie used to look at each other in silence when he came in, and
indulge in strange, perpendicular salutations, without any shaking of
hands. People did that at Portsmouth, N.H., when they were glad to
see you; but in New York there was more luxuriance, and gesture had a
different value. He had never, in Twelfth Street, been asked to "take
anything," though the house had a delightful suggestion, a positive
aroma, of sideboards,--as if there were mahogany "cellarettes" under
every table. The old people, moreover, had repeatedly expressed surprise
at the quantity of leisure that officers in the navy seemed to enjoy.
The only way in which they had not made themselves offensive was
by always remaining in the other room; though at times even this
detachment, to which he owed some delightful moments, presented itself
to Benyon as a form of disapprobation. Of course, after Mrs. Gressie's
message, his visits were practically at an end; he would n't give the
girl up, but he would n't be beholden to her father for the opportunity
to converse with her. Nothing was left for the tender couple--there
was a curious mutual mistrust in their tenderness--but to meet in the
squares, or in the topmost streets, or in the sidemost avenues, on
the afternoons of spring. It was especially during this phase of their
relations that Georgina struck Benyon as imperial Her whole person
seemed to exhale a tranquil, happy consciousness of having broken a law.
She never told him how she arranged the matter at home, how she found it
possible always to keep the appointments (to meet him out of the house)
that she so boldly made, in what degree she dissimulated to her parents,
and how much, in regard to their continued acquaintance, the old people
suspected and accepted. If Mr. and Mrs. Gressie had forbidden him the
house, it was not, apparently, because they wished her to walk with him
in the Tenth Avenue or to sit at his side under the blossoming lilacs
in Stuyvesant Square. He didn't believe that she told lies in Twelfth
Street; he thought she was too imperial to lie; and he wondered what she
said to her mother when, at the end of nearly a whole afternoon of vague
peregrination with her lover, this bridling, bristling matron asked her
where she h