John performed the ceremony with the air of one who lights a powder-train, and against all canons of prudence stands waiting to see the explosion. But, behold! his mother was most gracious.
"Your family have been very hospitable to my son," she said. "I am an invalid, and do not entertain, but if you will come to supper some evening, my daughter and I will be glad to see you. Could you come to-night?"
"Oh yes; _do_ come," urged the smiling and unwary John.
She came. She was certainly a beautiful and amiable creature, but nevertheless John found himself fighting valiantly against the sudden temptation to judge her by a brand-new standard. His mother's soft Southern voice made Hattie's Western burr sound curiously common, and the manners he had thought delightfully vivacious seemed boisterous on a sudden. As he listened through his mother's ears, it dawned upon him for the first time that the girl laughed too loudly and too constantly. He set his acute discomfort down to his humiliating lack of discernment in the past, and too easy conquest by mere good looks. He did not realize that Hattie's gaucheries were intensified by her nervous awe of Mrs. Gano. She had never known any one in the least like her hostess, and so far from failing in respect, she was so deeply impressed that in her wonder and veneration she was driven to adopt the juvenile device for the working off of oppressive emotion--pretending to be extravagantly at her ease.
One or two things in that evening of disillusionment stood out with painful distinctness in John Gano's memory for years. Naturally, Hattie answered "Yes" and "No" to John's mother, not as Southern youths said to their elders: "Yes, ma'am," and "No, ma'am," or "Sir." But she also sat down to the piano without being invited, and sang a song which it was plain Mrs. Gano thought unrefined. Even John realized now that it wasn't quite the song he had imagined.
At supper, when Mrs. Gano's covert but unsparing inspection of the girl announced to her children, plain as words, that their visitor was overloaded with jewelry, John thought to mitigate the enormity of the huge frying-pan locket Hattie wore on her innocent breast by observing:
"Haven't I heard your sister say you have a daguerrotype of your father in the locket you're wearing?"