第83章

It makes one homesick in this world to think that there are so many rare people he can never know; and so many excellent people that scarcely any one will know, in fact.One discovers a friend by chance, and cannot but feel regret that twenty or thirty years of life maybe have been spent without the least knowledge of him.When he is once known, through him opening is made into another little world, into a circle of culture and loving hearts and enthusiasm in a dozen congenial pursuits, and prejudices perhaps.How instantly and easily the bachelor doubles his world when he marries, and enters into the unknown fellowship of the to him continually increasing company which is known in popular language as "all his wife's relations."Near at hand daily, no doubt, are those worth knowing intimately, if one had the time and the opportunity.And when one travels he sees what a vast material there is for society and friendship, of which he can never avail himself.Car-load after car-load of summer travel goes by one at any railway-station, out of which he is sure he could choose a score of life-long friends, if the conductor would introduce him.There are faces of refinement, of quick wit, of sympathetic kindness,--interesting people, traveled people, entertaining people, --as you would say in Boston, "nice people you would admire to know,"whom you constantly meet and pass without a sign of recognition, many of whom are no doubt your long-lost brothers and sisters.You can see that they also have their worlds and their interests, and they probably know a great many "nice" people.The matter of personal liking and attachment is a good deal due to the mere fortune of association.More fast friendships and pleasant acquaintanceships are formed on the Atlantic steamships between those who would have been only indifferent acquaintances elsewhere, than one would think possible on a voyage which naturally makes one as selfish as he is indifferent to his personal appearance.The Atlantic is the only power on earth I know that can make a woman indifferent to her personal appearance.

Mandeville remembers, and I think without detriment to himself, the glimpses he had in the White Mountains once of a young lady of whom his utmost efforts could give him no further information than her name.Chance sight of her on a passing stage or amid a group on some mountain lookout was all he ever had, and he did not even know certainly whether she was the perfect beauty and the lovely character he thought her.He said he would have known her, however, at a great distance; there was to her form that command of which we hear so much and which turns out to be nearly all command after the "ceremony;" or perhaps it was something in the glance of her eye or the turn of her head, or very likely it was a sweet inherited reserve or hauteur that captivated him, that filled his days with the expectation of seeing her, and made him hasten to the hotel-registers in the hope that her name was there recorded.Whatever it was, she interested him as one of the people he would like to know; and it piqued him that there was a life, rich in friendships, no doubt, in tastes, in many noblenesses, one of thousands of such, that must be absolutely nothing to him,--nothing but a window into heaven momentarily opened and then closed.I have myself no idea that she was a countess incognito, or that she had descended from any greater heights than those where Mandeville saw her, but I have always regretted that she went her way so mysteriously and left no glow, and that we shall wear out the remainder of our days without her society.I have looked for her name, but always in vain, among the attendants at the rights-conventions, in the list of those good Americans presented at court, among those skeleton names that appear as the remains of beauty in the morning journals after a ball to the wandering prince, in the reports of railway collisions and steamboat explosions.No news comes of her.And so imperfect are our means of communication in this world that, for anything we know, she may have left it long ago by some private way.