But Frothingham, grown extraordinarily sensitive, shied at the amazing high heels on which she tottered like a cripple, at the skin-like fit of her clothes, at the suspicious brilliance of her cheeks and blackness of her brows and lashes. Whenever she spoke to him suddenly in her shrill dialect he felt as if a file had been drawn across his pneumogastric nerve. And she constantly used a slang expression which seemed to him--in her--the essence of vulgarity. She could not speak ten sentences without saying that she or somebody or everybody had nearly or quite “thrown a fit.”
It struck him as a biting irony of fate that the woman whom of all he knew well in America he least approved should be the one who was frankly throwing herself at his head in his hour of desperation. When he learned that her father was an Englishman born and bred in the “lower middle class,” he felt that he had solved the problem of the family’s over-eagerness to get him. “That’s why the old beggar almost cringes as he talks to me,” he said to himself.
“D----n their impudence!” And the next time he met Hooper he treated him not as an American and an equal, but as an Englishman and an inferior. And Amzi at once fell into his “place,” just as a car horse, though elevated to be a coach horse, will halt at one ring of a bell. “It’s in the blood,” thought Frothingham. “It can’t be hid or got out.” But--he didn’t venture the experiment with the daughter.
The climax came one morning when he met her by chance in the Lake Park Drive. She was perched high on a red and black dog-cart in which she was driving a bay and a gray tandem. Her hat was the biggest he had seen her wear, and she was swathed in a silver-grey dust-coat with a red embroidered collar. She stopped and invited him to join her.
“I needed you to complete my turnout,” she said, when they were under way. Her dazzling smile took part of the edge off her unconscious insolence--or was it conscious? He found her a puzzle, with her flashes of good taste and flashes of good sense, with her wit that seemed accidental and her folly that seemed her real self.
He set his teeth and tried to think only of how much “I need her to complete _my_ turnout,” and of how pretty she was--for there was no denying her beauty, or her style for that matter, in spite of its efflorescence. He saw that everyone was looking at them, but he did not appreciate that his own striking costume and his eyeglass were as magnetic as were her hat, her bright skin, and her dust-coat with its gaudy collar. She was supremely happy. The most conspicuous girl in Chicago, driving with the most conspicuous man, in the most conspicuous trap and on the most conspicuous highway--what more could a young woman ask?
