XXIV
Society had to be taken into our confidence, and Mrs. Makely saw to itthat there were no reserves with society. Our engagement was not quitelike that of two young persons, but people found in our character andcircumstance an interest far transcending that felt in the engagement ofthe most romantic lovers. Some note of the fact came to us by accident,as one evening when we stood near a couple and heard them talking. "Itmust be very weird," the man said; "something like being engaged to amaterialization." "Yes," said the girl, "quite the Demon Lover business,I should think." She glanced round, as people do, in talking, and, atsight of us, she involuntarily put her hand over her mouth. I looked atEveleth; there was nothing expressed in her face but a generous anxietyfor me. But so far as the open attitude of society towards us wasconcerned, nothing could have been more flattering. We could hardly havebeen more asked to meet each other than before; but now there wereentertainments in special recognition of our betrothal, which Evelethsaid could not be altogether refused, though she found the ordeal asirksome as I did. In America, however, you get used to many things. Ido not know why it should have been done, but in the society columns ofseveral of the great newspapers our likenesses were printed, fromphotographs procured I cannot guess how, with descriptions of our personsas to those points of coloring and carriage and stature which thepictures could not give, and with biographies such as could beascertained in her case and imagined in mine. In some of the societypapers, paragraphs of a surprising scurrility appeared, attacking me asan impostor, and aspersing the motives of Eveleth in her former marriage,and treating her as a foolish crank or an audacious flirt. The goodnessof her life, her self-sacrifice and works of benevolence, counted for nomore against these wanton attacks than the absolute inoffensiveness of myown; the writers knew no harm of her, and they knew nothing at all of me;but they devoted us to the execration of their readers simply because weformed apt and ready themes for paragraphs. You may judge of how wildthey were in their aim when some of them denounced me as an Altrurianplutocrat!
We could not escape this storm of notoriety; we had simply to let itspend its fury. When it began, several reporters of both sexes came tointerview me, and questioned me, not only as to all the facts of my pastlife, and all my purposes in the future, but as to my opinion ofhypnotism, eternal punishment, the Ibsen drama, and the tariff reform. Idid my best to answer them seriously, and certainly I answered themcivilly; but it seemed from what they printed that the answers I gave didnot concern them, for they gave others for me. They appeared to me forthe most part kindly and well-meaning young people, though vastlyignorant of vital things. They had apparently visited me with minds madeup, or else their reports were revised by some controlling hand, and aquality injected more in the taste of the special journals theyrepresented than in keeping with the facts. When I realized this, Irefused to see any more reporters, or to answer them, and then theyprinted the questions they had prepared to ask me, in such form that mysilence was made of the same damaging effect as a full confession ofguilt upon the charges.
The experience was so strange and new to me that it affected me in adegree I was unwilling to let Eveleth imagine. But she divined mydistress, and, when she divined that it was chiefly for her, she setherself to console and reassure me. She told me that this was somethingevery one here expected, in coming willingly or unwillingly before thepublic; and that I must not think of it at all, for certainly no one elsewould think twice of it. This, I found, was really so, for when Iventured to refer tentatively to some of these publications, I found thatpeople, if they had read them, had altogether forgotten them; and thatthey were, with all the glare of print, of far less effect with ouracquaintance than something said under the breath in a corner. I foundthat some of our friends had not known the effigies for ours which theyhad seen in the papers; others made a joke of the whole affair, as theAmericans do with so many affairs, and said that they supposed thepictures were those of people who had been cured by some patent medicine,they looked so strong and handsome. This, I think, was a piece of Mr.Makely's humor in the beginning; but it had a general vogue long afterthe interviews and the illustrations were forgotten.