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Page 36
"You may rest easy upon that score, my dear Mrs. Noah," said the
prophetess. "What I have to say would commend itself, I am sure, even to
the ears of a British matron; and while it is as complete a demonstration
of man's perfidy as ever was, it is none the less as harmless a little
tale as the Dottie Dimple books or any other more recent study of New
England character."
"Thank you for the load your words have lifted from my mind," said Mrs.
Noah, settling back in her chair, a satisfied expression upon her gentle
countenance. "I hope you will understand why I spoke, and withal why
modern literature generally has been so distressful to me. When you
reflect that the world is satisfied that most of man's criminal instincts
are the result of heredity, and that Mr. Noah and I are unable to shift
the responsibility for posterity to other shoulders than our own, you will
understand my position. We were about the most domestic old couple that
ever lived, and when we see the long and varied assortment of crimes that
are cropping out everywhere in our descendants it is painful to us to
realize what a pair of unconsciously wicked old fogies we must have been."
"We all understand that," said Cleopatra, kindly; "and we are all prepared
to acquit you of any responsibility for the advanced condition of
wickedness to-day. Man has progressed since your time, my dear grandma,
and the modern improvements in the science of crime are no more
attributable to you than the invention of the telephone or the oyster
cocktail is attributable to your lord and master."
"Thank you kindly," murmured the old lady, and she resumed her knitting
upon a phantom tam-o'-shanter, which she was making as a Christmas
surprise for her husband.
"When Captain Kidd began his story," said Cassandra, "he made one very bad
mistake, and yet one which was prompted by that courtesy which all men
instinctively adopt when addressing women. When he entered the room he
removed his hat, and therein lay his fatal error, if he wished to convince
me of the truth of his story, for with his hat removed I could see the
workings of his mind. While you ladies were watching his lips or his eyes,
some of you taking in the gorgeous details of his dress, all of you
hanging upon his every word, I kept my eye fixed firmly upon his
imagination, and I saw, what you did not, _that he was drawing wholly upon
that_!"
"How extraordinary!" cried Elizabeth.
"Yes--and fortunate," said Cassandra. "Had I not done so, a week hence we
should, every one of us, have been lost in the surging wickedness of the
city of Paris."
"But, Cassandra," said Trilby, who was anxious to return once more to the
beautiful city by the Seine, "he told us we were going to Paris."
[Illustration: "'HE TOLD US WE WERE GOING TO PARIS'"]
"Of course he did," said Madame R�camier, "and in so many words. Certainly
he was not drawing upon his imagination there."
"And one might be lost in a very much worse place," put in Marguerite de
Valois, "if, indeed, it were possible to lose us in Paris at all. I fancy
that I know enough about Paris to find my way about."
"Humph!" ejaculated Cassandra. "What a foolish little thing you are! You
don't imagine that the Paris of to-day is the Paris of your time, or even
the Paris of that sweet child Trilby's time, do you? If you do you are
very much mistaken. I almost wish I had not warned you of your danger and
had let you go, just to see those eyes of yours open with amazement at the
change. You'd find your Louvre a very different sort of a place from what
it used to be, my dear lady. Those pleasing little windows through which
your relations were wont in olden times to indulge in target practice at
people who didn't go to their church are now kept closed; the galleries
which used to swarm with people, many of whom ought to have been hanged,
now swarm with pictures, many of which ought not to have been hung; the
romance which clung about its walls is as much a part of the dead past as
yourselves, and were you to materialize suddenly therein you would find
yourselves jostled and hustled and trodden upon by the curious from other
lands, with Argus eyes taking in five hundred pictures a minute, and
traversing those halls at a rate of speed at which Mercury himself would
stand aghast."
"But my beloved Tuileries?" cried Marie Antoinette.
"Has been swallowed up by a play-ground for the people, my dear," said
Cassandra, gently. "Paris is no place for us, and it is the intention of
these men, in whose hands we are, to take us there and then desert us. Can
you imagine anything worse than ourselves, the phantoms of a glorious
romantic past, basely deserted in the streets of a wholly strange,
superficial, material city of to-day? What do you think, Elizabeth, would
be your fate if, faint and famished, you begged for sustenance at an
English door to-day, and when asked your name and profession were to
reply, 'Elizabeth, Queen of England'?"
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