Poor Hughson felt that his evening had been a failure, and rashly ventured on some chances of rebuff from her as the two walked home,--chances of which Miss Mercedes was cruel enough to avail herself to the full. The honest fellow was puzzled by it, for even he knew that Mercedes' only desire in going to the ball was to be admired, and admiration she had had. John was too simple to make fine discriminations in male deference, but he judged more rightly the feminine opinion of her looks and manners than did Miss Mercedes herself. They had thought her too fine for them--as she had wished.
After all her democratic education, social consideration was the one ambition that had formed in pretty Mercedes' mind. Her desire for this was as real in the form it took with men as in the form it took with other women; as clear the outcome of the books and reading given her as of the training given any upper servant in a London suburb, patterned on a lady mistress. Mercedes had no affections; she was as careless of religion as a Yankee boy; this desire alone she had of self-esteem above her fellow-creatures, especially those of her own sex and age. Her education had not gone to the point of giving her higher enjoyment,--poetry, art, happiness of thought. Even her piano-playing was but an adornment. She never played for her own pleasure; and what was the use of practicing now?
This New World life has got reduced to about three motives, like the three primary colors; one is rather surprised that so few can blend in so many shades of people. Money-getting, love of self, love,--is not that quite all? Yet poor Jamie and Mercedes, who was nearest to him, did not happen in the same division. Hughson, perhaps, made even the third. Yet a woman who holds herself too fine for her world will get recognition, commonly, from it. To honest Hughson, lying unwontedly awake and thinking of the evening's chances and mischances, now in a hot fit, now in a cold fit, of something like to love, such a creature as Mercedes, as she lightly hung upon his arm that evening, had never yet appeared. She was an angel, a being apart, a fairy,--any crude simile that occurs to honest plodding men of such young girls. John took the _distrait_ look for dreamy thought; her irresponsiveness for ethereal purity; her moodiness for superiority of soul. She imposed herself on him now, as she had done before on Jamie, as deserving a higher life than he could give her. This is what a man terms being in love, and then would wish, _quand même_, to drag his own life into hers!