square upon which our friends looked out of their
dining-room windows the trees whitened in the gusts, and darkened in
the driving floods of the rainfall, and in some paroxysms of the tempest
bent themselves in desperate submission, and then with a great shudder
rent away whole branches and flung them far off upon the ground. Hail
mingled with the rain, and now the few umbrellas that had braved the
storm vanished, and the hurtling ice crackled upon the pavement, where
the lightning played like flames burning from the earth, while the
thunder roared overhead without ceasing. There was something splendidly
theatrical about it all; and when a street-car, laden to the last inch
of its capacity, came by, with horses that pranced and leaped under
the stinging blows of the hailstones, our friends felt as if it were
an effective and very naturalistic bit of pantomime contrived for their
admiration. Yet as to themselves they were very sensible of a potent
reality in the affair, and at intervals during the storm they debated
about going at all that day, and decided to go and not to go, according
to the changing complexion of the elements. Basil had said that as this
was their first journey together in America, he wished to give it at the
beginning as pungent a national character as possible, and that as he
could imagine nothing more peculiarly American than a voyage to New York
by a Fall River boat, they ought to take that route thither. So much
upholstery, so much music, such variety cf company, he understood, could
not be got in any other way, and it might be that they would even catch
a glimpse of the inventor of the combination, who represented the
very excess and extremity of a certain kind of Americanism. Isabel had
eagerly consented; but these aesthetic motives were paralyzed for her by
the thought of passing Point Judith in a storm, and she descended from
her high intents first to the Inside Boats, without the magnificence and
the orchestra, and then to the idea of going by land in a sleeping-car.
Having comfortably accomplished this feat, she treated Basil's consent
as a matter of course, not because she did not regard him, but because
as a woman she could not conceive of the steps to her conclusion as
unknown to him, and always treated her own decisions as the product
of their common reasoning. But her husband held out for the boat, and
insisted that if the storm fell before seven o'clock, they could reach
it at Newport