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Annie Kilburn : a Novel

by William Dean Howells · English · Gutenberg #7502 · 460,155 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Annie Kilburn : a Novel

Author: William Dean Howells


        
Release date: February 1, 2005 [eBook #7502]
                Most recently updated: February 25, 2018

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANNIE KILBURN : A NOVEL ***




Produced by Eric Eldred, William Flis, Charles Franks, and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team







ANNIE KILBURN

A Novel

By W. D. Howells


Author of

   “Indian Summer”
    “The Rise of Silas Lapham”
    “April Hopes” etc.




I.


After the death of Judge Kilburn his daughter came back to America. They
had been eleven winters in Rome, always meaning to return, but staying on
from year to year, as people do who have nothing definite to call them
home. Toward the last Miss Kilburn tacitly gave up the expectation of
getting her father away, though they both continued to say that they were
going to take passage as soon as the weather was settled in the spring.
At the date they had talked of for sailing he was lying in the Protestant
cemetery, and she was trying to gather herself together, and adjust her
life to his loss. This would have been easier with a younger person, for
she had been her father's pet so long, and then had taken care of his
helplessness with a devotion which was finally so motherly, that it was
like losing at once a parent and a child when he died, and she remained
with the habit of giving herself when there was no longer any one to
receive the sacrifice. He had married late, and in her thirty-first year he
was seventy-eight; but the disparity of their ages, increasing toward the
end through his infirmities, had not loosened for her the ties of custom
and affection that bound them; she had seen him grow more and more fitfully
cognisant of what they had been to each other since her mother's death,
while she grew the more tender and fond with him. People who came to
condole with her seemed not to understand this, or else they thought it
would help her to bear up if they treated her bereavement as a relief from
hopeless anxiety. They were all surprised when she told them she still
meant to go home.

“Why, my dear,” said one old lady, who had been away from America twenty
years, “_this_ is home! You've lived in this apartment longer now
than the oldest inhabitant has lived in most American towns. What are you
talking about? Do you mean that you are going back to Washington?”

“Oh no. We were merely staying on in Washington from force of habit, after
father gave up practice. I think we shall go back to the old homestead,
where we used to spend our summers, ever since I can remember.”

“And where is that?” the old lady asked, with the sharpness which people
believe must somehow be good for a broken spirit.

“It's in the interior of Massachusetts--you wouldn't know it: a place
called Hatboro'.”

“No, I certainly shouldn't,” said the old lady, with superiority. “Why
Hatboro', of all the ridiculous reasons?”

“It was one of the first places where they began to make straw hats; it was
a nickname at first, and then they adopted it. The old name was Dorchester
Farms. Father fought the change, but it was of no use; the people wouldn't
have it Farms after the place began to grow; and by that time they had got
used to Hatboro'. Besides, I don't see how it's any worse than Hatfield, in
England.”

“It's very American.”

“Oh, it's American. We have Boxboro' too, you know, in Massachusetts.”

“And you are going from Rome to Hatboro', Mass.,” said the old lady, trying
to present the idea in the strongest light by abbreviating the name of the
State.

“Yes,” said Miss Kilburn. “It will be a change, but not so much of a change
as you would think. It was father's wish to go back.”

“Ah, my _dear_!” cried the old lady. “You're letting that weigh with
you, I see. Don't do it! If it wasn't wise, don't you suppose that the last
thing he could wish you to do would be to sacrifice yourself to a sick whim
of his?”

The kindness expressed in the words touched Annie Kilburn. She had a
certain beauty of feature; she was near-sighted; but her eyes were brown
and soft, her lips red and full; her dark hair grew low, and played in
little wisps and rings on her temples, where her complexion was clearest;
the bold contour of her face, with its decided chin and the rather large
salient nose, was like her father's; it was this, probably, that gave an
impression of strength, with a wistful qualification. She was at that time
rather thin, and it could have been seen that she would be handsomer when
her frame had rounded out in fulfilment of its generous design. She opened
her lips to speak, but shut them again in an effort at self-control before
she said--

“But I really wish to do it. At this moment I would rather be in Hatboro'
than in Rome.”

“Oh, very well,” said the old lady, gathering herself up as one does from
throwing away one's sympathy upon an unworthy object; “if you really
_wish_ it--”

“I know that it must seem preposterous and--and almost ungrateful that I
should think of going back, when I might just as well stay. Why, I've a
great many more friends here than I have there; I suppose I shall be almost
a stranger when I get there, and there's no comparison in congeniality; and
yet I feel that I must go back. I can't tell you why. But I have a longing;
I feel that I must try to be of some use in the world--try to do some
good--and in Hatboro' I think I shall know how.” She put on her glasses,
and looked at the old lady as if she might attempt an explanation, but, as
if a clearer vision of the veteran worldling discouraged her, she did not
make the effort.

“_Oh_!” said the old lady. “If you want to be of use, and do good--”
 She stopped, as if then there were no more to be said by a sensible person.
“And shall you be going soon?” she asked. The idea seemed to suggest her
own departure, and she rose after speaking.

“Just as soon as possible,” answered Miss Kilburn. Words take on a colour
of something more than their explicit meaning from the mood in which they
are spoken: Miss Kilburn had a sense of hurrying her visitor away, and the
old lady had a sense of being turned out-of-doors, that the preparations
for the homeward voyage might begin instantly.




II.


Many times after the preparations began, and many times after they were
ended, Miss Kilburn faltered in doubt of her decision; and if there had
been any will stronger than her own to oppose it, she might have reversed
it, and stayed in Rome. All the way home there was a strain of misgiving
in her satisfaction at doing what she believed to be for the best, and the
first sight of her native land gave her a shock of emotion which was not
unmixed joy. She felt forlorn among people who were coming home with all
sorts of high expectations, while she only had high intentions.

These dated back a good many years; in fact, they dated back to the time
when the first flush of her unthinking girlhood was over, and she began
to question herself as to the life she was living. It was a very pleasant
life, ostensibly. Her father had been elected from the bench to Congress,
and had kept his title and his repute as a lawyer through several terms
in the House before he settled down to the practice of his profession
in the courts at Washington, where he made a good deal of money. They
passed from boarding to house-keeping, in the easy Washington way, after
their impermanent Congressional years, and divided their time between
a comfortable little place in Nevada Circle and the old homestead in
Hatboro'. He was fond of Washington, and robustly content with the world
as he found it there and elsewhere. If his daughter's compunctions came to
her through him, it must have been from some remoter ancestry; he was not
apparently characterised by their transmission, and probably she derived
them from her mother, who died when she was a little girl, and of whom she
had no recollection. Till he began to break, after they went abroad, he
had his own way in everything; but as men grow old or infirm they fall
into subjection to their womenkind; their rude wills yield in the suppler
insistence of the feminine purpose; they take the colour of the feminine
moods and emotions; the cycle of life completes itself where it began, in
helpless dependence upon the sex; and Rufus Kilburn did not escape the
common lot. He was often complaining and unlovely, as aged and ailing men
must be; perhaps he was usually so; but he had moments when he recognised
the beauty of his daughter's aspiration with a spiritual sympathy, which
showed that he must always have had an intellectual perception of it.
He expressed with rhetorical largeness and looseness the longing which
was not very definite in her own heart, and mingled with it a strain of
homesickness poignantly simple and direct for the places, the scenes, the
persons, the things, of his early days. As he failed more and more, his
homesickness was for natural aspects which had wholly ceased to exist
through modern changes and improvements, and for people long since dead,
whom he could find only in an illusion of that environment in some other
world. In the pathos of this situation it was easy for his daughter to keep
him ignorant of the passionate rebellion against her own ideals in which
she sometimes surprised herself. When he died, all counter-currents were
lost in the tidal revulsion of feeling which swept her to the fulfilment
of what she hoped was deepest and strongest in her nature, with shame for
what she hoped was shallowest, till that moment of repulsion in which she
saw the thickly roofed and many towered hills of Boston grow up out of the
western waves.

She had always regarded her soul as the battlefield of two opposite
principles, the good and the bad, the high and the low. God made her, she
thought, and He alone; He made everything that she was; but she would not
have said that He made the evil in her. Yet her belief did not admit the
existence of Creative Evil; and so she said to herself that she herself
was that evil, and she must struggle against herself; she must question
whatever she strongly wished because she strongly wished it. It was not
logical; she did not push her postulates to their obvious conclusions; and
there was apt to be the same kind of break between her conclusions and her
actions as between her reasons and her conclusions. She acted impulsively,
and from a force which she could not analyse. She indulged reveries so
vivid that they seemed to weaken and exhaust her for the grapple with
realities; the recollection of them abashed her in the presence of facts.

With all this, it must not be supposed that she was morbidly introspective.
Her life had been apparently a life of cheerful acquiescence in worldly
conditions; it had been, in some measure, a life of fashion, or at least
of society. It had not been without the interests of other girls' lives,
by any means; she had sometimes had fancies, flirtations, but she did not
think she had been really in love, and she had refused some offers of
marriage for that reason.




III.


The industry of making straw hats began at Hatboro', as many other
industries have begun in New England, with no great local advantages, but
simply because its founder happened to live there, and to believe that it
would pay. There was a railroad, and labour of the sort he wanted was cheap
and abundant in the village and the outlying farms. In time the work came
to be done more and more by machinery, and to be gathered into large shops.
The buildings increased in size and number; the single line of the railroad
was multiplied into four, and in the region of the tracks several large,
ugly, windowy wooden bulks grew up for shoe shops; a stocking factory
followed; yet this business activity did not warp the old village from its
picturesqueness or quiet. The railroad tracks crossed its main street; but
the shops were all on one side of them, with the work-people's cottages
and boarding-houses, and on the other were the simple, square, roomy old
mansions, with their white paint and their green blinds, varied by the
modern colour and carpentry of French-roofed villas. The old houses stood
quite close to the street, with a strip of narrow door-yard before them;
the new ones affected a certain depth of lawn, over which their owners
personally pushed a clucking hand-mower in the summer evenings after tea.
The fences had been taken away from the new houses, in the taste of some
of the Boston suburbs; they generally remained before the old ones, whose
inmates resented the ragged effect that their absence gave the street. The
irregularity had hitherto been of an orderly and harmonious kind, such as
naturally follows the growth of a country road into a village thoroughfare.
The dwellings were placed nearer or further from the sidewalk as their
builders fancied, and the elms that met in a low arch above the street had
an illusive symmetry in the perspective; they were really set at uneven
intervals, and in a line that wavered capriciously in and out. The street
itself lounged and curved along, widening and contracting like a river,
and then suddenly lost itself over the brow of an upland which formed a
natural boundary of the village. Beyond this was South Hatboro', a group of
cottages built by city people who had lately come in--idlers and invalids,
the former for the cool summer, and the latter for the dry winter. At
chance intervals in the old village new side streets branched from the
thoroughfare to the right and the left, and here and there a Queen Anne
cottage showed its chimneys and gables on them. The roadway under the
elms that kept it dark and cool with their hovering shade, and swept the
wagon-tops with their pendulous boughs at places, was unpaved; but the
sidewalks were asphalted to the last dwelling in every direction, and they
were promptly broken out in winter by the public snow-plough.

Miss Kilburn saw them in the spring, when their usefulness was least
apparent, and she did not know whether to praise the spirit of progress
which showed itself in them as well as in other things at Hatboro'. She
had come prepared to have misgivings, but she had promised herself to be
just; she thought she could bear the old ugliness, if not the new. Some
of the new things, however, were not so ugly; the young station-master
was handsome in his railroad uniform, and pleasanter to the eye than the
veteran baggage-master, incongruous in his stiff silk cap and his shirt
sleeves and spectacles. The station itself, one of Richardson's, massive
and low, with red-tiled, spreading veranda roofs, impressed her with
its fitness, and strengthened her for her encounter with the business
architecture of Hatboro', which was of the florid, ambitious New York type,
prevalent with every American town in the early stages of its prosperity.
The buildings were of pink brick, faced with granite, and supported in the
first story by columns of painted iron; flat-roofed blocks looked down over
the low-wooden structures of earlier Hatboro', and a large hotel had pushed
back the old-time tavern, and planted itself flush upon the sidewalk. But
the stores seemed very good, as she glanced at them from her carriage,
and their show-windows were tastefully arranged; the apothecary's had an
interior of glittering neatness unsurpassed by an Italian apothecary's; and
the provision-man's, besides its symmetrical array of pendent sides and
quarters indoors, had banks of fruit and vegetables without, and a large
aquarium with a spraying fountain in its window.

Bolton, the farmer who had always taken care of the Kilburn place, came
to meet her at the station and drive her home. Miss Kilburn had bidden
him drive slowly, so that she could see all the changes, and she noticed
the new town-hall, with which she could find no fault; the Baptist and
Methodist churches were the same as of old; the Unitarian church seemed to
have shrunk as if the architecture had sympathised with its dwindling body
of worshippers; just beyond it was the village green, with the soldiers'
monument, and the tall white-painted flag-pole, and the four small brass
cannon threatening the points of the compass at its base.

“Stop a moment, Mr. Bolton,” said Miss Kilburn; and she put her head quite
out of the carriage, and stared at the figure on the monument.

It was strange that the first misgiving she could really make sure of
concerning Hatboro' should relate to this figure, which she herself was
mainly responsible for placing there. When the money was subscribed and
voted for the statue, the committee wrote out to her at Rome as one who
would naturally feel an interest in getting something fit and economical
for them. She accepted the trust with zeal and pleasure; but she overruled
their simple notion of an American volunteer at rest, with his hands folded
on the muzzle of his gun, as intolerably hackneyed and commonplace. Her
conscience, she said, would not let her add another recruit to the regiment
of stone soldiers standing about in that posture on the tops of pedestals
all over the country; and so, instead of going to an Italian statuary with
her fellow-townsmen's letter, and getting him to make the figure they
wanted, she doubled the money and gave the commission to a young girl
from Kansas, who had come out to develop at Rome the genius recognised
at Topeka. They decided together that it would be best to have something
ideal, and the sculptor promptly imagined and rapidly executed a design
for a winged Victory, poising on the summit of a white marble shaft, and
clasping its hands under its chin, in expression of the grief that mingled
with the popular exultation. Miss Kilburn had her doubts while the work
went on, but she silenced them with the theory that when the figure was in
position it would be all right.

Now that she saw it in position she wished to ask Mr. Bolton what was
thought of it, but she could not nerve herself to the question. He remained
silent, and she felt that he was sorry for her. “Oh, may I be very humble;
may I be helped to be very humble!” she prayed under her breath. It
seemed as if she could not take her eyes from the figure; it was such a
modern, such an American shape, so youthfully inadequate, so simple, so
sophisticated, so like a young lady in society indecorously exposed for
a _tableau vivant_. She wondered if the people in Hatboro' felt all
this about it; if they realised how its involuntary frivolity insulted the
solemn memory of the slain.

“Drive on, please,” she said gently.

Bolton pulled the reins, and as the horses started he pointed with his whip
to a church at the other side of the green. “That's the new Orthodox
church,” he explained.

“Oh, is it?” asked Miss Kilburn. “It's very handsome, I'm sure.” She was
not sensible of admiring the large Romanesque pile very much, though it
was certainly not bad, but she remembered that Bolton was a member of the
Orthodox church, and she was grateful to him for not saying anything about
the soldiers' monument.

“We sold the old buildin' to the Catholics, and they moved it down ont' the
side street.”

Miss Kilburn caught the glimmer of a cross where he beckoned, through the
flutter of the foliage.

“They had to razee the steeple some to git their cross on,” he added;
and then he showed her the high-school building as they passed, and the
Episcopal chapel, of blameless church-warden's Gothic, half hidden by its
Japanese ivy, under a branching elm, on another side street.

“Yes,” she said, “that was built before we went abroad.”

“I disremember,” he said absently. He let the horses walk on the soft,
darkly shaded road, where the wheels made a pleasant grinding sound, and
set himself sidewise on his front seat, so as to talk to Miss Kilburn more
at his ease.

“I d'know,” he began, after clearing his throat, with a conscious air, “as
you know we'd got a new minister to our church.”

“No, I hadn't heard of it,” said Miss Kilburn, with her mind full of the
monument still. “But I might have heard and forgotten it,” she added. “I
was very much taken up toward the last before I left Rome.”

“Well, come to think,” said Bolton; “I don't know's you'd had time to
heard. He hain't been here a great while.”

“Is he--satisfactory?” asked Miss Kilburn, feeling how far from
satisfactory the Victory was, and formulating an explanatory apology to the
committee in her mind.

“Oh yes, he's satisfactory enough, as far forth as that goes. He's
talented, and he's right up with the times. Yes, he's progressive. I guess
they got pretty tired of Mr. Rogers, even before he died; and they kept the
supply a-goin' till--all was blue, before they could settle on anybody. In
fact they couldn't seem to agree on anybody till Mr. Peck come.”

Miss Kilburn had got as far, in her tacit interview with the committee, as
to have offered to replace at her own expense the Victory with a Volunteer,
and she seemed to be listening to Bolton with rapt attention.

“Well, it's like this,” continued the farmer. “He's progressive in his
idees, 'n' at the same time he's spiritual-minded; and so I guess he suits
pretty well all round. Of course you can't suit everybody. There's always
got to be a dog in the manger, it don't matter where you go. But if anybody
was to ask me, I should say Mr. Peck suited. Yes, I don't know but what I
should.”

Miss Kilburn instantaneously closed her transaction with the committee,
removed the Victory, and had the Volunteer unveiled with appropriate
ceremonies, opened with prayer by the Rev. Mr. Peck.

“Peck?” she said. “Did you tell me his name was Peck?”

“Yes, ma'am; Rev. Julius W. Peck. He's from down Penobscotport way, in
Maine. I guess he's all right.”

Miss Kilburn did not reply. Her mind had been taken off the monument for
the moment by her dislike for the name of the new minister, and the Victory
had seized the opportunity to get back.

Bolton sighed deeply, and continued in a strain whose diffusiveness at last
became perceptible to Miss Kilburn through her own humiliation. “There's
some in every community that's bound to complain, I don't care what you do
to accommodate 'em; and what I done, I done as much to stop their clack as
anything, and give him the right sort of a start off, an' I guess I did.
But Mis' Bolton she didn't know but what you'd look at it in the light of a
libbutty, and I didn't know but what you _would_ think I no business
to done it.”

He seemed to be addressing a question to her, but she only replied with a
dazed frown, and Bolton was obliged to go on.

“I didn't let him room in your part of the house; that is to say, not sleep
there; but I thought, as you was comin' home, and I better be airin' it up
some, anyway, I might as well let him set in the old Judge's room. If you
think it was more than I had a right to do, I'm willin' to pay for it. Git
up!” Bolton turned fully round toward his horses, to hide the workings of
emotion in his face, and shook the reins like a desperate man.

“What _are_ you talking about, Mr. Bolton?” cried Miss Kilburn.
“_Whom_ are you talking about?”

Bolton answered, with a kind of violence, “Mr. Peck; I took him to board,
first off.”

“You took him to board?”

“Yes. I know it wa'n't just accordin' to the letter o' the law, and the old
Judge was always pootty p'tic'lah. But I've took care of the place goin'
on twenty years now, and I hain't never had a chick nor a child in it
before. The child,” he continued, partly turning his face round again, and
beginning to look Miss Kilburn in the eye, “wa'n't one to touch anything,
anyway, and we kep' her in our part all the while; Mis' Bolton she couldn't
seem to let her out of her sight, she got so fond of her, and she used to
follow me round among the hosses like a kitten. I declare, I _miss_
her.”

Bolton's face, the colour of one of the lean ploughed fields of Hatboro',
and deeply furrowed, lighted up with real feeling, which he tried to make
go as far in the work of reconciling Miss Kilburn as if it had been
factitious.

“But I don't understand,” she said. “What child are you talking about?”

“Mr. Peck's.”

“Was he married?” she asked, with displeasure, she did not know why.

“Well, yes, he _had_ been,” answered Bolton. “But she'd be'n in the
asylum ever since the child was born.”

“Oh,” said Miss Kilburn, with relief; and she fell back upon the seat from
which she had started forward.

Bolton might easily have taken her tone for that of disgust. He faced round
upon her once more. “It was kind of queer, his havin' the child with him,
an' takin' most the care of her himself; and so, as I _say_, Mis'
Bolton and me we took him in, as much to stop folks' mouths as anything,
till they got kinder used to it. But we didn't take him into your part, as
I _say_; and as _I_ say, I'm willin' to pay you whatever you say
for the use of the old Judge's study. I presume that part of it _was_
a libbutty.”

“It was all perfectly right, Mr. Bolton,” said Miss Kilburn.

“His wife died anyway, more than a year ago,” said Bolton, as if the fact
completed his atonement to Miss Kilburn, “_Git_ ep! I told him from
the start that it had got to be a temporary thing, an' 't I only took him
till he could git settled somehow. I guess he means to go to house-keepin',
if he can git the right kind of a house-keeper; he wants an old one. If it
was a young one, I guess he wouldn't have any great trouble, if he went
about it the right way.” Bolton's sarcasm was merely a race sarcasm. He was
a very mild man, and his thick-growing eyelashes softened and shadowed his
grey eyes, and gave his lean face pathos.

“You could have let him stay till he had found a suitable place,” said Miss
Kilburn.

“Oh, I wa'n't goin' to do _that_,” said Bolton. “But I'm 'bliged to
you just the same.”

They came up in sight of the old square house, standing back a good
distance from the road, with a broad sweep of grass sloping down before it
into a little valley, and rising again to the wall fencing the grounds from
the street. The wall was overhung there by a company of magnificent elms,
which turned and formed one side of the avenue leading to the house. Their
tops met and mixed somewhat incongruously with those of the stiff dark
maples which more densely shaded the other side of the lane.

Bolton drove into their gloom, and then out into the wide sunny space at
the side of the house where Miss Kilburn had alighted so often with her
father. Bolton's dog, grown now so very old as to be weak-minded, barked
crazily at his master, and then, recognising him, broke into an imbecile
whimper, and went back and coiled his rheumatism up in the sun on a warm
stone before the door. Mrs. Bolton had to step over him as she came out,
formally supporting her right elbow with her left hand as she offered the
other in greeting to Miss Kilburn, with a look of question at her husband.

Miss Kilburn intercepted the look, and began to laugh.

All was unchanged, and all so strange; it seemed as if her father must both
get down with her from the carriage and come to meet her from the house.
Her glance involuntarily took in the familiar masses and details; the
patches of short tough grass mixed with decaying chips and small weeds
underfoot, and the spacious June sky overhead; the fine network and
blisters of the cracking and warping white paint on the clapboarding, and
the hills beyond the bulks of the village houses and trees; the woodshed
stretching with its low board arches to the barn, and the milk-pans tilted
to sun against the underpinning of the L, and Mrs. Bolton's pot plants in
the kitchen window.

“Did you think I could be hard about such a thing as that? It was perfectly
right. O Mrs. Bolton!” She stopped laughing and began to cry; she put away
Mrs. Bolton's carefully offered hand, she threw herself upon the bony
structure of her bosom, and buried her face sobbing in the leathery folds
of her neck.

Mrs. Bolton suffered her embrace above the old dog, who fled with a cry of
rheumatic apprehension from the sweep of Miss Kilburn's skirts, and then
came back and snuffed at them in a vain effort to recall her.

“Well, go in and lay down by the stove,” said Mrs. Bolton, with a divided
interest, while she beat Miss Kilburn's back with her bony palm in sign of
sympathy. But the dog went off up the lane, and stood there by the pasture
bars, barking abstractedly at intervals.




IV.


Miss Kilburn found that the house had been well aired for her coming, but
an old earthy and mouldy smell, which it took days and nights of open doors
and windows to drive out, stole back again with the first turn of rainy
weather. She had fires built on the hearths and in the stoves, and after
opening her trunks and scattering her dresses on beds and chairs, she spent
most of the first week outside of the house, wandering about the fields and
orchards to adjust herself anew to the estranged features of the place.
The house she found lower-ceiled and smaller than she remembered it. The
Boltons had kept it up very well, and in spite of the earthy and mouldy
smell, it was conscientiously clean. There was not a speck of dust
anywhere; the old yellowish-white paint was spotless; the windows shone.
But there was a sort of frigidity in the perfect order and repair which
repelled her, and she left her things tossed about, as if to break the ice
of this propriety. In several places, within and without, she found marks
of the faithful hand of Bolton in economical patches of the woodwork; but
she was not sure that they had not been there eleven years before; and
there were darnings in the carpets and curtains, which affected her with
the same mixture of novelty and familiarity. Certain stale smells about the
place (minor smells as compared with the prevalent odour) confused her; she
could not decide whether she remembered them of old, or was reminded of the
odours she used to catch in passing the pantry on the steamer.

Her father had never been sure that he would not return any next year or
month, and the house had always been ready to receive them. In his study
everything was as he left it. His daughter looked for signs of Mr. Peck's
occupation, but there were none; Mrs. Bolton explained that she had put
him in a table from her own sitting-room to write at. The Judge's desk was
untouched, and his heavy wooden arm-chair stood pulled up to it as if he
were in it. The ranks of law-books, in their yellow sheepskin, with their
red titles above and their black titles below, were in the order he had
taught Mrs. Bolton to replace them in after dusting; the stuffed owl on a
shelf above the mantel looked down with a clear solemnity in its gum-copal
eyes, and Mrs. Bolton took it from its perch to show Miss Kilburn that
there was not a moth on it, nor the sign of a moth.

Miss Kilburn experienced here that refusal of the old associations to take
the form of welcome which she had already felt in the earth and sky and air
outside; in everything there was a sense of impassable separation. Her dead
father was no nearer in his wonted place than the trees of the orchard, or
the outline of the well-known hills, or the pink of the familiar sunsets.
In her rummaging about the house she pulled open a chest of drawers which
used to stand in the room where she slept when a child. It was full of her
own childish clothing, a little girl's linen and muslin; and she thought
with a throe of despair that she could as well hope to get back into these
outgrown garments, which the helpless piety of Mrs. Bolton had kept from
the rag-bag, as to think of re-entering the relations of the life so long
left off.

It surprised her to find how cold the Boltons were; she had remembered them
as always very kind and willing; but she was so used now to the ways of
the Italians and their showy affection, it was hard for her to realise
that people could be both kind and cold. The Boltons seemed ashamed of
their feelings, and hid them; it was the same in some degree with all the
villagers when she began to meet them, and the fact slowly worked back into
her consciousness, wounding its way in. People did not come to see her at
once. They waited, as they told her, till she got settled, before they
called, and then they did not appear very glad to have her back.

But this was not altogether the effect of their temperament. The Kilburns
had made a long summer always in Hatboro', and they had always talked of it
as home; but they had never passed a whole year there since Judge Kilburn
first went to Congress, and they were not regarded as full neighbours
or permanent citizens. Miss Kilburn, however, kept up her childhood
friendships, and she and some of the ladies called one another by their
Christian names, but they believed that she met people in Washington whom
she liked better; the winters she spent there certainly weakened the ties
between them, and when it came to those eleven years in Rome, the letters
they exchanged grew rarer and rarer, till they stopped altogether. Some of
the girls went away; some died; others became dead and absent to her in
their marriages and household cares.

After waiting for one another, three of them came together to see her one
day. They all kissed her, after a questioning glance at her face and dress,
as if they wanted to see whether she had grown proud or too fashionable.
But they were themselves apparently much better dressed, and certainly more
richly dressed. In a place like Hatboro', where there is no dinner-giving,
and evening parties are few, the best dress is a street costume, which
may be worn for calls and shopping, and for church and all public
entertainments. The well-to-do ladies make an effect of outdoor fashion, in
which the poorest shop hand has her part; and in their turn they share her
indoor simplicity. These old friends of Annie's wore bonnets and frocks of
the latest style and costly material.

They let her make the advances, receiving them with blank passivity,
or repelling them with irony, according to the several needs of their
self-respect, and talking to one another across her. One of them asked her
when her hair had begun to turn, and they each told her how thin she was,
but promised her that Hatboro' air would bring her up. At the same time
they feigned humility in regard to everything about Hatboro' but the air;
they laughed when she said she intended now to make it her home the whole
year round, and said they guessed she would be tired of it long before
fall; there were plenty of summer folks that passed the winter as long as
the June weather lasted. As they grew more secure of themselves, or less
afraid of one another in her presence, their voices rose; they laughed
loudly at nothing, and they yelled in a nervous chorus at times, each
trying to make herself heard above the others.

She asked them about the social life in the village, and they told her that
a good many new people had really settled there, but they did not know
whether she would like them; they were not the old Hatboro' style. Annie
showed them some of the things she had brought home, especially Roman
views, and they said now she ought to give an evening in the church parlour
with them.

“You'll have to come to our church, Annie,” said Mrs. Putney. “The
Unitarian doesn't have preaching once in a month, and Mr. Peck is very
liberal.”

“He's 'most _too_ liberal for some,” said Emmeline Gerrish. Of the
three she had grown the stoutest, and from being a slight, light-minded
girl, she had become a heavy matron, habitually censorious in her speech.
She did not mean any more by it, however, than she did by her girlish
frivolity, and if she was not supported in her severity, she was apt to
break down and disown it with a giggle, as she now did.

“Well, I don't know about his being _too_ liberal,” said Mrs.
Wilmington, a large red-haired blonde, with a lazy laugh. “He makes you
feel that you're a pretty miserable sinner.” She made a grimace of humorous
disgust.

“Mr. Gerrish says that's just the trouble,” Mrs. Gerrish broke in. “Mr.
Peck don't put stress enough on the promises. That's what Mr. Gerrish says.
You must have been surprised, Annie,” she added, “to find that he'd been
staying in your house.”

“I was glad Mrs. Bolton invited him,” answered Annie sincerely, but not
instantly.

The ladies waited, with an exchange of glances, for her reply, as if they
had talked the matter over beforehand, and had agreed to find out just how
Annie Kilburn felt about it.

“Oh, I guess he paid his board,” said Mrs. Wilmington, jocosely rejecting
the implication that he had been the guest of the Boltons.

“I don't see what he expects to do with that little girl of his, without
any mother, that way,” said Mrs. Gerrish. “He ought to get married.”

“Perhaps he will, when he's waited a proper time,” suggested Mrs. Putney
demurely.

“Well, his wife's been the same as dead ever since the child was born. I
don't know what you call a proper time, Ellen,” argued Mrs. Gerrish.

“I presume a minister feels differently about such things,” Mrs. Wilmington
remarked indolently.

“I don't see why a minister should feel any different from anybody else,”
 said Mrs. Gerrish. “It's his duty to do it on his child's account. I don't
see why he don't have the remains brought to Hatboro', anyway.”

They debated this point at some length, and they seemed to forget Annie.
She listened with more interest than her concern in the last resting-place
of the minister's dead wife really inspired. These old friends of hers
seemed to have lost the sensitiveness of their girlhood without having
gained tenderness in its place. They treated the affair with a nakedness
that shocked her. In the country and in small towns people come face
to face with life, especially women. It means marrying, child-bearing,
household cares and burdens, neighbourhood gossip, sickness, death, burial,
and whether the corpse appeared natural. But ever so much kindness goes
with their disillusion; they are blunted, but not embittered.

They ended by recalling Annie to mind, and Mrs. Putney said: “I suppose you
haven't been to the cemetery yet? They've got it all fixed up since you
went away--drives laid out, and paths cut through, and everything. A good
many have put up family tombs, and they've taken away the old iron fences
round the lots, and put granite curbing. They mow the grass all the time.
It's a perfect garden.” Mrs. Putney was a small woman, already beginning
to wrinkle. She had married a man whom Annie remembered as a mischievous
little boy, with a sharp tongue and a nervous temperament; her father had
always liked him when he came about the house, but Annie had lost sight of
him in the years that make small boys and girls large ones, and he was at
college when she went abroad. She had an impression of something unhappy in
her friend's marriage.

“I think it's _too_ much fixed up myself,” said Mrs. Gerrish. She
turned suddenly to Annie: “You going to have your father fetched home?”

The other ladies started a little at the question and looked at Annie; it
was not that they were shocked, but they wanted to see whether she would
not be so.

“No,” she said briefly. She added, helplessly, “It wasn't his wish.”

“I should have thought he would have liked to be buried alongside of your
mother,” said Mrs. Gerrish. “But the Judge always _was_ a little
peculiar. I presume you can have the name and the date put on the monument
just the same.”

Annie flushed at this intimate comment and suggestion from a woman whom as
a girl she had never admitted to familiarity with her, but had tolerated
her because she was such a harmless simpleton, and hung upon other girls
whom she liked better. The word monument cowed her, however. She was afraid
they might begin to talk about the soldiers' monument. She answered
hastily, and began to ask them about their families.

Mrs. Wilmington, who had no children, and Mrs. Putney, who had one, spoke
of Mrs. Gerrish's large family. She had four children, and she refused the
praises of her friends for them, though she celebrated them herself. “You
ought to have seen the two little girls that Ellen lost, Annie,” she said.
“Ellen Putney, I don't see how you ever got over that. Those two lovely,
healthy children gone, and poor little Winthrop left! I always did say it
was too hard.”

She had married a clerk in the principal dry-goods store, who had prospered
rapidly, and was now one of the first business men of the place, and had an
ambition to be a leading citizen. She believed in his fitness to deal with
the questions of religion and education which he took part in, and was
always quoting Mr. Gerrish. She called him Mr. Gerrish so much that other
people began to call him so too. But Mrs. Putney's husband held out against
it, and had the habit of returning the little man's ceremonious salutations
with an easy, “Hello, Billy,” “Good morning, Billy.” It was his theory that
this was good for Gerrish, who might otherwise have forgotten when
everybody called him Billy. He was one of the old Putneys; and he was a
lawyer by profession.

Mrs. Wilmington's husband had come to Hatboro' since Annie's long absence
began; he had capital, and he had started a stocking-mill in Hatboro'.
He was much older than his wife, whom he had married after a protracted
widowerhood. She had one of the best houses and the most richly furnished
in Hatboro'. She and Mrs. Putney saw Mrs. Gerrish at rare intervals, and in
observance of some notable fact of their girlish friendship like the
present.

In pursuance of the subject of children, Mrs. Gerrish said that she
sometimes had a notion to offer to take Mr. Peck's little girl herself till
he could get fixed somehow, but Mr. Gerrish would not let her. Mr. Gerrish
said Mr. Peck had better get married himself if he wanted a step-mother for
his little girl. Mr. Gerrish was peculiar about keeping a family to itself.

“Well, you'll think _we've_ come to board with you _too_,” said
Mrs. Putney, in reference to Mr. Peck.

The ladies all rose, and having got upon their feet, began to shout and
laugh again--like girls, they implied.

They stayed and talked a long time after rising, with the same note of
unsparing personality in their talk. Where there are few public interests
and few events, as in such places, there can be no small-talk, nothing of
the careless touch-and-go of larger societies. Every one knows all the
others, and knows the worst of them. People are not unkind; they are
mutually and freely helpful; but they have only themselves to occupy their
minds. Annie's friends had also to distinguish themselves to her from the
rest of the villagers, and it was easiest to do this by an attitude of
criticism mingled with large allowance. They ended a dissection of the
community by saying that they believed there was no place like Hatboro',
after all.

In the contagion of their perfunctory gaiety Annie began to scream and
laugh too, as she followed them to the door, and stood talking to them
while they got into Mrs. Wilmington's extension-top carry-all. She answered
with deafening promises, when they put their bonnets out of the carry-all
and called back to her to be sure to come soon to see them soon.




V.


Mrs. Bolton made no advances with Annie toward the discussion of her
friends; but when Annie asked about their families, she answered with the
incisive directness of a country-bred woman. She delivered her judgments as
she went about her work, the morning after the ladies' visit, while Annie
sat before the breakfast-table, which she had given her leave to clear. As
she passed in and out from the dining-room to the kitchen she kept talking;
she raised her voice in the further room, and lowered it when she drew near
again. She wore a dismal calico wrapper, which made no compromise with the
gauntness of her figure; her reddish-brown hair, which grew in a fringe
below her crown, was plaited into small tags or tails, pulled up and tied
across the top of her head, the bare surfaces of which were curiously
mottled with the dye which she sometimes put on her hair. Behind, this
was gathered up into a small knob pierced with a single hair-pin; the
arrangement left Mrs. Bolton's visage to the unrestricted expression of
character. She did not let it express toward Annie any expectation of the
confidential relations that are supposed to exist between people who have
been a long time master and servant. She had never recognised her relations
with the Kilburns in these terms. She was a mature Yankee single woman,
of confirmed self-respect, when she first came as house-keeper to Judge
Kilburn, twenty years ago, and she had not changed her nature in changing
her condition by her marriage with Oliver Bolton; she was childless, unless
his comparative youth conferred a sort of adoptive maternity upon her.

Annie went into her father's study, where she had lit the fire in the
Franklin-stove on her way to breakfast. It had come on to rain during the
night, after the fine yesterday which Mrs. Gerrish had denounced to its
face as a weather-breeder. At first it rained silently, stealthily; but
toward morning Annie heard the wind rising, and when she looked out of her
window after daylight she found a fierce north-easterly storm drenching
and chilling the landscape. Now across the flattened and tangled grass of
the lawn the elms were writhing in the gale, and swinging their long lean
boughs to and fro; from another window she saw the cuffed and hustled
maples ruffling their stiff masses of foliage, and shuddering in the
storm. She turned away, with a sigh of the luxurious melancholy which a
northeaster inspires in people safely sheltered from it, and sat down
before her fire. She recalled the three women who had visited her the day
before, in the better-remembered figures of their childhood and young
girlhood; and their present character did not seem a broken promise.
Nothing was really disappointed in it but the animal joy, the hopeful riot
of their young blood, which must fade and die with the happiest fate. She
perceived that what they had come to was not unjust to what they had been;
and as our own fate always appears to us unaccomplished, a thing for the
distant future to fulfil, she began to ask herself what was to be the
natural sequence of such a temperament, such mental and moral traits, as
hers. Had her life been so noble in anything but vague aspirations that she
could ever reasonably expect the destiny of grand usefulness which she had
always unreasonably expected? The question came home to her with such pain,
in the light of what her old playmates had become, that she suddenly ceased
to enjoy the misery of the storm out-of-doors, or the purring content of
the fire on the hearth of the stove at her feet; the book she had taken
down to read fell unopened into her lap, and she gave herself up to a
half-hour of such piercing self-question as only a high-minded woman can
endure when the flattering promises of youth have grown vague and few.

There is no condition of life that is wholly acceptable, but none that is
not tolerable when once it establishes itself; and while Annie Kilburn
had never consented to be an old maid, she had become one without great
suffering. At thirty-one she could not call herself anything else; she
often called herself an old maid, with the mental reservation that she was
not one. She was merely unmarried; she might marry any time. Now, when she
assured herself of this, as she had done many times before, she suddenly
wondered if she should ever marry; she wondered if she had seemed to her
friends yesterday like a person who would never marry. Did one carry such
a thing in one's looks? Perhaps they idealised her; they had not seen her
since she was twenty, and perhaps they still thought of her as a young
girl. It now seemed to her as if she had left her youth in Rome, as in Rome
it had seemed to her that she should find it again in Hatboro'. A pang of
aimless, unlocalised homesickness passed through her; she realised that she
was alone in the world. She rose to escape the pang, and went to the window
of the parlour which looked toward the street, where she saw the figure of
a young man draped in a long indiarubber gossamer coat fluttering in the
wind that pushed him along as he tacked on a southerly course; he bowed
and twisted his head to escape the lash of the rain. She watched him till
he turned into the lane leading to the house, and then, at a discreeter
distance, she watched him through the window at the other corner, making
his way up to the front door in the teeth of the gale. He seemed to have a
bundle under his arm, and as he stepped into the shelter of the portico,
and freed his arm to ring, she discovered that it was a bundle of books.
Whether Mrs. Bolton did not hear the bell, or whether she heard it and
decided that it would be absurd to leave her work for it, when Miss
Kilburn, who was so much nearer, could answer it, she did not come, even at
a second ring, and Annie was forced to go to the door herself, or leave the
poor man dripping in the cold wind outside.

She had made up her mind, at sight of the books, that he was a canvasser
for some subscription book, such as used to come in her father's time, but
when she opened to him he took off his hat with a great deal of manner, and
said “Miss Kilburn?” with so much insinuation of gentle disinterestedness,
that it flashed upon her that it might be Mr. Peck.

“Yes,” she said, with confusion, while the flash of conjecture faded away.

“Mr. Brandreth,” said her visitor, whom she now saw to be much younger than
Mr. Peck could be. He looked not much more than twenty-two or twenty-three;
his damp hair waved and curled upon his temples and forehead, and his blue
eyes lightened from a beardless and freshly shaven face. “I called this
morning because I felt sure of finding you at home.”

He smiled at his reference to the weather, and Annie smiled too as she
again answered, “Yes?” She did not want his books, but she liked something
that was cheerful and enthusiastic in him; she added, “Won't you step into
the study?”

“Thanks, yes,” said the young man, flinging off his gossamer, and hanging
it up to drip into the pan of the hat rack. He gathered up his books from
the chair where he had laid them, and held them at his waist with both
hands, while he bowed her precedence beside the study door.

“I don't know,” he began, “but I ought to apologise for coming on a day
like this, when you were not expecting to be interrupted.”

“Oh no; I'm not at all busy. But you must have had courage to brave a storm
like this.”

“No. The truth is, Miss Kilburn, I was very anxious to see you about a
matter I have at heart--that I desire your help with.”

“He wants me,” Annie thought, “to give him the use of my name as a
subscriber to his book”--there seemed really to be a half-dozen books in
his bundle--“and he's come to me first.”

“I had expected to come with Mrs. Munger--she's a great friend of mine;
you haven't met her yet, but you'll like her; she's the leading spirit
in South Hatboro'--and we were coming together this morning; but she was
unexpectedly called away yesterday, and so I ventured to call alone.”

“I'm very glad to see you, Mr. Brandreth,” Annie said. “Then Mrs. Munger
has subscribed already, and I'm only second fiddle, after all,” she
thought.

“The truth is,” said Mr. Brandreth, “I'm the factotum, or teetotum, of the
South Hatboro' ladies' book club, and I've been deputed to come and see if
you wouldn't like to join it.”

“Oh!” said Annie, and with a thrill of dismay she asked herself how much
she had let her manner betray that she had supposed he was a book agent. “I
shall be very glad indeed, Mr. Brandreth.”

“Mrs. Munger was sure you would,” said Mr. Brandreth joyously. “I've
brought some of the books with me--the last,” he said; and Annie had time
to get into a new social attitude toward him during their discussion of the
books. She chose one, and Mr. Brandreth took her subscription, and wrote
her name in the club book.

“One of the reasons,” he said, “why I would have preferred to come with
Mrs. Munger is that she is so heart and soul with me in my little scheme.
She could have put it before you in so much better light than I can. But
she was called away so suddenly.”

“I hope for no serious cause,” said Annie.

“Oh no! It's just to Cambridge. Her son is one of the Freshman Nine, and
he's been hit by a ball.”

“Oh!” said Annie.

“Yes; it's a great pity for Mrs. Munger. But I come to you for advice as
well as co-operation, Miss Kilburn. You must have met a great many English
people in Rome, and heard some of them talk about it. We're thinking, some
of the young people here, about getting up some outdoor theatricals, like
Lady Archibald Campbell's, don't you know. You know about them?” he added,
at the blankness in her face.

“I read accounts of them in the English papers. They must have been
very--original. But do you think that in a community like Hatboro'--Are
there enough who could--enter into the spirit?”

“Oh yes, indeed!” cried Mr. Brandreth ardently. “You've no idea what a
place Hatboro' has got to be. You've not been about much yet, Miss
Kilburn?”

“No,” said Annie; “I haven't really been off our own place since I came.
I've seen nobody but two or three old friends, and we naturally talked more
about old times than anything else. But I hear that there are great
changes.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Brandreth. “The social growth has been even greater than
the business growth. You've no idea! People have come in for the winter
as well as the summer. South Hatboro', where we live--you must see South
Hatboro', Miss Kilburn!--is quite a famous health resort. A great many
Boston doctors send their patients to us now, instead of Colorado or the
Adirondacks. In fact, that's what brought _us_ to Hatboro'. My mother
couldn't have lived, if she had tried to stay in Melrose. One lung all
gone, and the other seriously affected. And people have found out what
a charming place it is for the summer. It's cool; and it's so near, you
know; the gentlemen can run out every night--only an hour and a quarter
from town, and expresses both ways. All very agreeable people, too; and
cultivated. Mr. Fellows, the painter, makes a long summer; he bought an old
farm-house, and built a studio; Miss Jennings, the flower-painter, has a
little box there, too; Mr. Chapley, the publisher, of New York, has built;
the Misses Clevinger, and Mrs. Valence, are all near us. There's one family
from Chicago--quite nice--New England by birth, you know; and Mrs. Munger,
of course; so that there's a very pleasant variety.”

“I certainly had no idea of it,” said Annie.

“I knew you couldn't have,” said Mr. Brandreth, “or you wouldn't have felt
any doubt about our having the material for the theatricals. You see,
I want to interest all the nice people in it, and make it a whole-town
affair. I think it's a great pity for some of the old village families and
the summer folks, as they call us, not to mingle more than they do, and
Mrs. Munger thinks so too; and we've been talking you over, Miss Kilburn,
and we've decided that you could do more than anybody else to help on a
scheme that's meant to bring them together.”

“Because I'm neither summer folks nor old village families?” asked Annie.

“Because you're both,” retorted Mr. Brandreth.

“I don't see that,” said Annie; “but we'll suppose the case, for the sake
of argument. What do you expect me to do in theatricals, in-doors or out?
I never took part in anything of the kind; I can't see an inch beyond the
end of my nose without glasses; I never could learn the simplest thing by
heart; I'm clumsy and awkward; I get confused.”

“Oh, my dear Miss Kilburn, spare yourself! We don't expect you to take part
in the play. I don't admit that you're what you say at all; but we only
want you to lend us your countenance.”

“Oh, is that all? And what do you expect to do with my countenance?” Annie
said, with a laugh of misgiving.

“Everything. We know how much influence your name has--one of the old
Hatboro' names--in the community, and all that; and we do want to interest
the whole community in our scheme. We want to establish a Social Union for
the work-people, don't you know, and we think it would be much nicer if it
seemed to originate with the old village people.”

Annie could not resist an impression in favour of the scheme. It gave
definition to the vague intentions with which she had returned to Hatboro';
it might afford her a chance to make reparation for the figure on the
soldiers' monument.

“I'm not sure,” she began. “If I knew just what a Social Union is--”

“Well, at first,” Mr. Brandreth interposed, “it will only be a
reading-room, supplied with the magazines and papers, and well lighted and
heated, where the work-people--those who have no families especially--could
spend their evenings. Afterward we should hope to have a kitchen, and
supply tea and coffee--and oysters, perhaps--at a nominal cost; and
ice-cream in the summer.”

“But what have your outdoor theatricals to do--But of course. You intend
to give the proceeds--”

“Exactly. And we want the proceeds to be as large as possible. We propose
to give our time and money to getting the thing up in the best shape, and
then we want all the villagers to give their half-dollars and make it a
success every way.”

“I see,” said Annie.

“We want it to be successful, and we want it to be distinguished; we
want to make it unique. Mrs. Munger is going to give her grounds and the
decorations, and there will be a supper afterward, and a little dance.”

“Such things are a great deal of trouble,” said Annie, with a smile, from
the vantage-ground of her larger experience. “What do you propose to
do--what play?”

“Well, we've about decided upon some scenes from _Romeo and Juliet_.
They would be very easy to set, outdoors, don't you know, and everybody
knows them, and they wouldn't be hard to do. The ballroom in the house of
the Capulets could be made to open on a kind of garden terrace--Mrs. Munger
has a lovely terrace in her grounds for lawn-tennis--and then we could have
a minuet on the grass. You know Miss Mather introduces a minuet in that
scene, and makes a great deal of it. Or, I forgot. She's come up since you
went away.”

“Yes; I hadn't heard of her. Isn't a minuet at Verona in the time of the
Scaligeri rather--”

“Well, yes, it is, rather. But you've no idea how pretty it is. And then,
you know, we could have the whole of the balcony scene, and other bits
that we choose to work in--perhaps parts of other acts that would suit the
scene.”

“Yes, it would be charming; I can see how very charming it could be made.”

“Then we may count upon you?” he asked.

“Yes, yes,” she said; “but I don't really know what I'm to do.”

Mr. Brandreth had risen; but he sat down again, as if glad to afford her
any light he could throw upon the subject.

“How am I to 'influence people,' as you say?” she continued. “I'm quite a
stranger in Hatboro'; I hardly know anybody.”

“But a great many people know _you_, Miss Kilburn. Your name is
associated with the history of the place, and you could do everything for
us. You _won't_ refuse!” cried Mr. Brandreth winningly. “For instance,
you know Mrs. Wilmington.”

“Oh yes; she's an old girl-friend of mine.”

“Then you know how enormously clever she is. She can do anything. We want
her to take an active part--the part of the Nurse. She's delightfully
funny. But you know her peculiar temperament--how she hates initiative of
all kinds; and we want somebody to bring Mr. Wilmington round. If we could
get them committed to the scheme, and a man like Mr. Putney--he'd make
a capital Mercutio--it would go like wildfire. We want to interest the
churches, too. The object is so worthy, and the theatricals will be so
entirely unobjectionable in every respect. We have the Unitarians and
Universalists, of course. The Baptists and Methodists will be hard to
manage; but the Orthodox are of so many different shades; and I understand
the new minister, Mr. Peck, is very liberal. He was here in your house, I
believe.”

“Yes; but I never saw him,” said Annie. “He boarded with the farmer. I'm a
Unitarian myself.”

“Of course. It would be a great point gained if we could interest him.
Every care will be taken to have the affair unobjectionable. You see, the
design is to let everybody come to the theatricals, and only those remain
to the supper and dance whom we invite. That will keep out the socially
objectionable element--the shoe-shop hands and the straw-shop girls.”

“Oh,” said Annie. “But isn't the--the Social Union for just that class?”

“Yes, it's _expressly_ for them, and we intend to organise a system of
entertainments--lectures, concerts, readings--for the winter, and keep them
interested the whole year round in it. The object is to show them that the
best people in the community have their interests at heart, and wish to get
on common ground with them.”

“Yes,” said Annie, “the object is certainly very good.”

Mr. Brandreth rose again, and put out his hand. “Then you will help us?”

“Oh, I don't know about that yet.”

“At least you won't hinder us?”

“Certainly not.”

“Then I consider you in a very hopeful condition, Miss Kilburn, and I feel
that I can safely leave you to Mrs. Munger. She is coming to see you as
soon as she gets back.”

Annie found herself sadder when he was gone, and she threw herself upon the
old feather-cushioned lounge to enjoy a reverie in keeping with the dreary
storm outside. Was it for this that she had left Rome? She had felt, as
every American of conscience feels abroad, the drawings of a duty, obscure
and indefinable, toward her country, the duty to come home and do something
for it, be something in it. This is the impulse of no common patriotism; it
is perhaps a sense of the opportunity which America supremely affords for
the race to help itself, and for each member of it to help all the rest.

But from the moment Annie arrived in Hatboro' the difficulty of being
helpful to anything or any one had increased upon her with every new fact
that she had learned about it and the people in it. To her they seemed
terribly self-sufficing. They seemed occupied and prosperous, from her
front parlour window; she did not see anybody going by who appeared to be
in need of her; and she shrank from a more thorough exploration of the
place. She found she had fancied necessity coming to her and taking away
her good works, as it were, in a basket; but till Mr. Brandreth appeared
with his scheme, nothing had applied for her help. She had always hated
theatricals; they bored her; and yet the Social Union was a good object,
and if this scheme would bring her acquainted in Hatboro' it might be
the stepping-stone to something better, something really or more ideally
useful. She wondered what South Hatboro' was like; she would get Mrs.
Bolton's opinion, which, if severe, would be just. She would ask Mrs.
Bolton about Mrs. Munger, too. She would tell Mrs. Bolton to tell Mr. Peck
to call to dine. Would it be thought patronising to Mr. Peck?

The fire from the Franklin-stove diffused a drowsy comfort through the
room, the rain lashed the window-panes, and the wind shrilled in the gable.
Annie fell off to sleep. When she woke up she heard Mrs. Bolton laying the
table for her one o'clock dinner, and she knew it was half-past twelve,
because Mrs. Bolton always laid the table just half an hour beforehand. She
went out to speak to Mrs. Bolton.

There was no want of distinctness in Mrs. Bolton's opinion, but Annie felt
that there was a want of perspective and proportion in it, arising from the
narrowness of Mrs. Bolton's experience and her ignorance of the world; she
was farm-bred, and she had always lived upon the outskirts of Hatboro',
even when it was a much smaller place than now. But Mrs. Bolton had her
criterions, and she believed in them firmly; in a time when agnosticism
extends among cultivated people to every region of conjecture, the social
convictions of Mrs. Bolton were untainted by misgiving. In the first place,
she despised laziness, and as South Hatboro' was the summer home of open
and avowed disoccupation, of an idleness so entire that it had to seek
refuge from itself in all manner of pastimes, she held its population in
a contempt to which her meagre phrase did imperfect justice. From time to
time she had to stop altogether, and vent it in “Wells!” of varying accents
and inflections, but all expressive of aversion, and in snorts and sniffs
still more intense in purport.

Then she held that people who had nothing else to do ought at least to be
exemplary in their lives, and she was merciless to the goings-on in South
Hatboro', which had penetrated on the breath of scandal to the elder
village. When Annie came to find out what these were, she did not think
them dreadful; they were small flirtations and harmless intimacies between
the members of the summer community, which in the imagination of the
village blackened into guilty intrigue. On the tongues of some, South
Hatboro' was another Gomorrah; Mrs. Bolton believed the worst, especially
of the women.

“I hear,” said Mrs. Bolton, “that them women come up here for _rest_.
I don't know what they want to rest _from_; but if it's from doin'
nothin' all winter long, I guess they go back to the city poot' near's
tired's they come.”

Perhaps Annie felt that it was useless to try to enlighten her in regard
to the fatigues from which the summer sojourner in the country escapes
so eagerly; the cares of giving and going to lunches and dinners; the
labour of afternoon teas; the late hours and the heavy suppers of evening
receptions; the drain of charity-doing and play-going; the slavery of
amateur art study, and parlour readings, and musicales; the writing of
invitations and acceptances and refusals; the trying on of dresses; the
calls made and received. She let her talk on, and tried to figure, as well
as she could from her talk, the form and magnitude of the task laid upon
her by Mr. Brandreth, of reconciling Old Hatboro' to South Hatboro', and
uniting them in a common enterprise.

“Mrs. Bolton,” she said, abruptly leaving the subject at last, “I've been
thinking whether I oughtn't to do something about Mr. Peck. I don't want
him to feel that he was unwelcome to me in my house; I should like him to
feel that I approved of his having been here.”

As this was not a question, Mrs. Bolton, after the fashion of country
people, held her peace, and Annie went on--

“Does he never come to see you?”

“Well, he was here last night,” said Mrs. Bolton.

“Last _night_!” cried Annie. “Why in the world didn't you let me
know?”

“I didn't know as you wanted to know,” began Mrs. Bolton, with a sullen
defiance mixed with pleasure in Annie's reproach. “He was out there in my
settin'-room with his little girl.”

“But don't you see that if you didn't let me know he was here it would look
to him as if I didn't wish to meet him--as if I had told you that you were
not to introduce him?”

Probably Mrs. Bolton believed too that a man's mind was agile enough for
these conjectures; but she said she did not suppose he would take it in
that way; she added that he stayed longer than she expected, because the
little girl seemed to like it so much; she always cried when she had to go
away.

“Do you mean that she's attached to the place?” demanded Annie.

“Well, yes, she is,” Mrs. Bolton admitted. “And the cat.”

Annie had a great desire to tell Mrs. Bolton that she had behaved very
stupidly. But she knew Mrs. Bolton would not stand that, and she had to
content herself with saying, severely, “The next time he comes, let me know
without fail, please. What is the child like?” she asked.

“Well, I guess it must favour the mother, if anything. It don't seem to
take after him any.”

“Why don't you have it here often, then,” asked Annie, “if it's so much
attached to the place?”

“Well I didn't know as you wanted to have it round,” replied Mrs. Bolton
bluntly.

Annie made a “Tchk!” of impatience with her obtuseness, and asked, “Where
is Mr. Peck staying?”

“Well, he's staying at Mis' Warner's till he can get settled.”

“Is it far from here?”

“It's down in the north part of the village--Over the Track.”

“Is Mr. Bolton at home?”

“Yes, he is,” said Mrs. Bolton, with the effect of not intending to deny
it.

“Then I want him to hitch up--now--at once--right away--and go and get the
child and bring her here to dinner with me.” Annie got so far with her
severity, feeling that it was needed to mask a proceeding so romantic,
perhaps so silly. She added timidly, “Can he do it?”

“I d'know but what he can,” said Mrs. Bolton, dryly, and whatever her
feeling really was in regard to the matter, her manner gave no hint of it.
Annie did not know whether Bolton was going on her errand or not, from Mrs.
Bolton, but in ten or twelve minutes she saw him emerge from the avenue
into the street, in the carry-all, tightly curtained against the storm.
Half an hour later he returned, and his wife set down in the library a
shabbily dressed little girl, with her cheeks bright and her hair curling
from the weather, and staring at Annie, and rather disposed to cry. She
said hastily, “Bring in the cat, Mrs. Bolton; we're going to have the cat
to dinner with us.”

This inspiration seemed to decide the little girl against crying. The cat
was equipped with a doily, and actually provided with dinner at a small
table apart; the child did not look at it as Annie had expected she would,
but remained with her eyes fastened on Annie herself: She did not stir from
the spot where Mrs. Bolton had put her down, but she let Annie take her
up and arrange her in a chair, with large books graduated to the desired
height under her, and made no sign of satisfaction or disapproval. Once she
looked round, when Mrs. Bolton finally went out after bringing in the last
dish for dinner, and then fastened her eyes on Annie again, twisting her
head shyly round to follow her in every gesture and expression as Annie
fitted on a napkin under her chin, cut up her meat, poured her milk, and
buttered her bread. She answered nothing to the chatter which Annie tried
to make lively and entertaining, and made no sound but that of a broken and
suppressed breathing. Annie had forgotten to ask her name of Mrs. Bolton,
and she asked it in vain of the child herself, with a great variety of
circumlocution; she was so unused to children that she was ashamed to
invent any pet name for her; she called her, in what she felt to be a stiff
and school-mistressly fashion, “Little Girl,” and talked on at her, growing
more and more nervous herself without perceiving that the child's condition
was approaching a climax. She had taken off her glasses, from the notion
that they embarrassed her guest, and she did not see the pretty lips
beginning to curl, nor the searching eyes clouding with tears; the storm of
sobs that suddenly burst upon her astounded her.

“Mrs. Bolton! Mrs. Bolton!” she screamed, in hysterical helplessness. Mrs.
Bolton rushed in, and with an instant perception of the situation, caught
the child to her bony breast, and fled with it to her own room, where Annie
heard its wails die gradually away amid murmurs of comfort and reassurance
from Mrs. Bolton.

She felt like a great criminal and a great fool; at the same time she was
vexed with the stupid child which she had meant so well by, and indignant
with Mrs. Bolton, whose flight with it had somehow implied a reproach of
her behaviour. When she could govern herself, she went out to Mrs. Bolton's
room, where she found the little one quiet enough, and Mrs. Bolton tying on
the long apron in which she cleared up the dinner and washed the dishes.

“I guess she'll get along now,” she said, without the critical tone which
Annie was prepared to resent. “She was scared some, and she felt kind of
strange, I presume.”

“Yes, and I behaved like a simpleton, dressing up the cat, I suppose,”
 answered Annie. “But I thought it would amuse her.”

“You can't tell how children will take a thing. I don't believe they like
anything that's out of the common--well, not a great deal.”

There was a leniency in Mrs. Bolton's manner which encouraged Annie to go
on and accuse herself more and more, and then an unresponsive blankness
that silenced her. She went back to her own rooms; and to get away from her
shame, she began to write a letter.

It was to a friend in Rome, and from the sense we all have that a letter
which is to go such a great distance ought to be a long letter, and from
finding that she had really a good deal to say, she let it grow so that
she began apologising for its length half a dozen pages before the end.
It took her nearly the whole afternoon, and she regained a little of her
self-respect by ridiculing the people she had met.




VI.


Toward five o'clock Annie was interrupted by a knock at her door, which
ought to have prepared her for something unusual, for it was Mrs. Bolton's
habit to come and go without knocking. But she called “Come in!” without
rising from her letter, and Mrs. Bolton entered with a stranger. The little
girl clung to his forefinger, pressing her head against his leg, and
glancing shyly up at Annie. She sprang up, and, “This is Mr. Peck, Miss
Kilburn,” said Mrs. Bolton.

“How do you do?” said Mr. Peck, taking the hand she gave him.

He was gaunt, without being tall, and his clothes hung loosely about him,
as if he had fallen away in them since they were made. His face was almost
the face of the caricature American: deep, slightly curved vertical lines
enclosed his mouth in their parenthesis; a thin, dust-coloured beard fell
from his cheeks and chin; his upper lip was shaven. But instead of the
slight frown of challenge and self-assertion which marks this face in the
type, his large blue eyes, set near together, gazed sadly from under a
smooth forehead, extending itself well up toward the crown, where his dry
hair dropped over it.

“I am very glad to see you, Mr. Peck,” said Annie; “I've wanted to tell you
how pleased I am that you found shelter in my old home when you first came
to Hatboro'.”

Mr. Peck's trousers were short and badly kneed, and his long coat hung
formlessly from his shoulders; she involuntarily took a patronising tone
toward him which was not habitual with her.

“Thank you,” he said, with the dry, serious voice which seemed the fit
vocal expression of his presence; “I have been afraid that it seemed like
an intrusion to you.”

“Oh, not the least,” retorted Annie. “You were very welcome. I hope you're
comfortably placed where you are now?”

“Quite so,” said the minister.

“I'd heard so much of your little girl from Mrs. Bolton, and her attachment
to the house, that I ventured to send for her to-day. But I believe I gave
her rather a bad quarter of an hour, and that she liked the place better
under Mrs. Bolton's _régime_.”

She expected some deprecatory expression of gratitude from him, which would
relieve her of the lingering shame she felt for having managed so badly,
but he made none.

“It was my fault. I'm not used to children, and I hadn't taken the
precaution to ask her name--”

“Her name is Idella,” said the minister.

Annie thought it very ugly, but, with the intention of saying something
kind, she said, “What a quaint name!”

“It was her mother's choice,” returned the minister. “Her own name was
Ella, and my mother's name was Ida; she combined the two.”

“Oh!” said Annie. She abhorred those made-up names in which the New England
country people sometimes indulge their fancy, and Idella struck her as a
particularly repulsive invention; but she felt that she must not visit the
fault upon the little creature. “Don't you think you could give me another
trial some time, Idella?” She stooped down and took the child's unoccupied
hand, which she let her keep, only twisting her face away to hide it in her
father's pantaloon leg. “Come now, won't you give me a forgiving little
kiss?” Idella looked round, and Annie made bold to gather her up.

Idella broke into a laugh, and took Annie's cheeks between her hands.

“Well, I declare!” said Mrs. Bolton. “You never can tell what that child
will do next.”

“I never can tell what I will do next myself,” said Annie. She liked the
feeling of the little, warm, soft body in her arms, against her breast,
and it was flattering to have triumphed where she had seemed to fail so
desperately. They had all been standing, and she now said, “Won't you sit
down, Mr. Peck?” She added, by an impulse which she instantly thought
ill-advised, “There is something I would like to speak to you about.”

“Thank you,” said Mr. Peck, seating himself beyond the stove. “We must be
getting home before a great while. It is nearly tea-time.”

“I won't detain you unduly,” said Annie.

Mrs. Bolton left them at her hint of something special to say to the
minister. Annie could not have had the face to speak of Mr. Brandreth's
theatricals in that grim presence; and as it was, she resolved to put
forward their serious object. She began abruptly: “Mr. Peck, I've been
asked to interest myself for a Social Union which the ladies of South
Hatboro' are trying to establish for the operatives. I suppose you haven't
heard anything of the scheme?”

“No, I hadn't,” said Mr. Peck.

He was one of those people who sit very high, and he now seemed taller and
more impressive than when he stood.

“It is certainly a very good object,” Annie resumed; and she went on to
explain it at second-hand from Mr. Brandreth as well as she could. The
little girl was standing in her lap, and got between her and Mr. Peck, so
that she had to look first around one side of her and then another to see
how he was taking it.

He nodded his head, and said gravely, “Yes,” and “Yes,” and “Yes,” at each
significant point of her statement. At the end he asked: “And are the means
forthcoming? Have they raised the money for renting and furnishing the
rooms?”

“Well, no, they haven't yet, or not quite, as I understand.”

“Have they tried to interest the working people themselves in it? If they
are to value its benefits, it ought to cost them something--self-denial,
privation even.”

“Yes, I know,” Annie began.

“I'm not satisfied,” the minister pursued, “that it is wise to provide
people with even harmless amusements that take them much away from
their homes. These things are invented by well-to-do people who have no
occupation, and think that others want pastimes as much as themselves.
But what working people want is rest, and what they need are decent homes
where they can take it. Besides, unless they help to support this union out
of their own means, the better sort among them will feel wounded by its
existence, as a sort of superfluous charity.”

“Yes, I see,” said Annie. She saw this side of the affair with surprise.
The minister seemed to have thought more about such matters than she had,
and she insensibly receded from her first hasty generalisation of him,
and paused to reapproach him on another level. The little girl began to
play with her glasses, and accidentally knocked them from her nose. The
minister's face and figure became a blur, and in the purblindness to which
she was reduced she had a moment of clouded volition in which she was
tempted to renounce, and even oppose, the scheme for a Social Union, in
spite of her promise to Mr. Brandreth. But she remembered that she was
a consistent and faithful person, and she said: “The ladies have a plan
for raising the money, and they've applied to me to second it--to use my
influence somehow among the villagers to get them interested; and the
working people can help too if they choose. But I'm quite a stranger
amongst those I'm expected to influence, and I don't at all know how they
will take it.” The minister listened, neither prompting nor interrupting.
“The ladies' plan is to have an entertainment at one of the cottages, and
charge an admission, and devote the proceeds to the union.” She paused.
Mr. Peck still remained silent, but she knew he was attentive. She pushed
on. “They intend to have a--a representation, in the open air, of one of
Shakespeare's plays, or scenes from one--”

“Do you wish me,” interrupted the minister, “to promote the establishment
of this union? Is that why you speak to me of it?”

“Why, I don't know _why_ I speak to you of it,” she replied with a
laugh of embarrassment, to which he was cold, apparently. “I certainly
couldn't ask you to take part in an affair that you didn't approve.”

“I don't know that I disapprove of it. Properly managed, it might be a good
thing.”

“Yes, of course. But I understand why you might not sympathise with that
part of it, and that is why I told you of it,” said Annie.

“What part?”

“The--the--theatricals.”

“Why not?” asked the minister.

“I know--Mrs. Bolton told me you were very liberal,” Annie faltered on;
“but I didn't expect you as a--But of course--”

“I read Shakespeare a great deal,” said Mr. Peck. “I have never been in the
theatre; but I should like to see one of his plays represented where it
could cause no one to offend.”

“Yes,” said Annie, “and this would be by amateurs, and there could be no
_possible_ 'offence in it.' I wished to know how the general idea
would strike you. Of course the ladies would be only too glad of your
advice and co-operation. Their plan is to sell tickets to every one for the
theatricals, and to a certain number of invited persons for a supper, and a
little dance afterward on the lawn.”

“I don't know if I understand exactly,” said the minister.

Annie repeated her statement more definitely, and explained, from Mr.
Brandreth, as before, that the invitations were to be given so as to
eliminate the shop-hand element from the supper and dance.

Mr. Peck listened quietly. “That would prevent my taking part in the
affair,” he said, as quietly as he had listened.

“Of course--dancing,” Annie began.

“It is not that. Many people who hold strictly to the old opinions now
allow their children to learn dancing. But I could not join at all with
those who were willing to lay the foundations of a Social Union in a social
disunion--in the exclusion of its beneficiaries from the society of their
benefactors.”

He was not sarcastic, but the grotesqueness of the situation as he had
sketched it was apparent. She remembered now that she had felt something
incongruous in it when Mr. Brandreth exposed it, but not deeply.

The minister continued gently: “The ladies who are trying to get up this
Social Union proceed upon the assumption that working people can neither
see nor feel a slight; but it is a great mistake to do so.”

Annie had the obtuseness about those she fancied below her which is one of
the consequences of being brought up in a superior station. She believed
that there was something to say on the other side, and she attempted to say
it.

“I don't know that you could call it a slight exactly. People can ask those
they prefer to a social entertainment.”

“Yes--if it is for their own pleasure.”

“But even in a public affair like this the work-people would feel
uncomfortable and out of place, wouldn't they, if they stayed to the supper
and the dance? They might be exposed to greater suffering among those whose
manners and breeding were different, and it might be very embarrassing all
round. Isn't there that side to be regarded?”

“You beg the question,” said the minister, as unsparingly as if she were
a man. “The point is whether a Social Union beginning in social exclusion
could ever do any good. What part do these ladies expect to take in
maintaining it? Do they intend to spend their evenings there, to associate
on equal terms with the shoe-shop and straw-shop hands?”

“I don't suppose they do, but I don't know,” said Annie dryly; and she
replied by helplessly quoting Mr. Brandreth: “They intend to organise a
system of lectures, concerts, and readings. They wish to get on common
ground with them.”

“They can never get on common ground with them in that way,” said the
minister. “No doubt they think they want to do them good; but good is from
the heart, and there is no heart in what they propose. The working people
would know that at once.”

“Then you mean to say,” Annie asked, half alarmed and half amused, “that
there can be no friendly intercourse with the poor and the well-to-do
unless it is based upon social equality?”

“I will answer your question by asking another. Suppose you were one of the
poor, and the well-to-do offered to be friendly with you on such terms as
you have mentioned, how should you feel toward them?”

“If you make it a personal question--”

“It makes itself a personal question,” said the minister dispassionately.

“Well, then, I trust I should have the good sense to see that social
equality between people who were better dressed, better taught, and better
bred than myself was impossible, and that for me to force myself into their
company was not only bad taste, but it was foolish, I have often heard my
father say that the great superiority of the American practice of democracy
over the French ideal was that it didn't involve any assumption of social
equality. He said that equality before the law and in politics was sacred,
but that the principle could never govern society, and that Americans all
instinctively recognised it. And I believe that to try to mix the different
classes would be un-American.”

Mr. Peck smiled, and this was the first break in his seriousness. “We don't
know what is or will be American yet. But we will suppose you are quite
right. The question is, how would you feel toward the people whose company
you wouldn't force yourself into?”

“Why, of course,” Annie was surprised into saying, “I suppose I shouldn't
feel very kindly toward them.”

“Even if you knew that they felt kindly toward you?”

“I'm afraid that would only make the matter worse,” she said, with an
uneasy laugh.

The minister was silent on his side of the stove.

“But do I understand you to say,” she demanded, “that there can be no love
at all, no kindness, between the rich and the poor? God tells us all to
love one another.”

“Surely,” said the minister. “Would you suffer such a slight as your
friends propose, to be offered to any one you loved?”

She did not answer, and he continued, thoughtfully: “I suppose that if
a poor person could do a rich person a kindness which cost him some
sacrifice, he might love him. In that case there could be love between
the rich and the poor.”

“And there could be no love if a rich man did the same?”

“Oh yes,” the minister said--“upon the same ground. Only, the rich man
would have to make a sacrifice first that he would really feel.”

“Then you mean to say that people can't do any good at all with their
money?” Annie asked.

“Money is a palliative, but it can't cure. It can sometimes create a bond
of gratitude perhaps, but it can't create sympathy between rich and poor.”

“But _why_ can't it?”

“Because sympathy--common feeling--the sense of fraternity--can spring only
from like experiences, like hopes, like fears. And money cannot buy these.”

He rose, and looked a moment about him, as if trying to recall something.
Then, with a stiff obeisance, he said, “Good evening,” and went out,
while she remained daunted and bewildered, with the child in her arms, as
unconscious of having kept it as he of having left it with her.

Mrs. Bolton must have reminded him of his oversight, for after being gone
so long as it would have taken him to walk to her parlour and back, he
returned, and said simply, “I forgot Idella.”

He put out his hands to take her, but she turned perversely from him, and
hid her face in Annie's neck, pushing his hands away with a backward reach
of her little arm.

“Come, Idella!” he said. Idella only snuggled the closer.

Mrs. Bolton came in with the little girl's wraps; they were very common
and poor, and the thought of getting her something prettier went through
Annie's mind.

At sight of Mrs. Bolton the child turned from Annie to her older friend.

“I'm afraid you have a woman-child for your daughter, Mr. Peck,” said
Annie, remotely hurt at the little one's fickleness.

Neither Mr. Peck nor Mrs. Bolton smiled, and with some vague intention
of showing him that she could meet the poor on common ground by sharing
their labours, she knelt down and helped Mrs. Bolton tie on and button on
Idella's things.




VII.


Next morning the day broke clear after the long storm, and Annie woke in
revolt against the sort of subjection in which she had parted from Mr.
Peck. She felt the need of showing Mrs. Bolton that, although she had been
civil to him, she had no sympathy with his ideas; but she could not think
of any way to formulate her opposition, and all she could say in offence
was, “Does Mr. Peck usually forget his child when he starts home?”

“I don't know as he does,” answered Mrs. Bolton simply. “He's rather of an
absent-minded man, and I suppose he's like other men when he gets talking.”

“The child's clothes were disgracefully shabby!” said Annie, vexed that her
attack could come to no more than this.

“I presume,” said Mrs. Bolton, “that if he kept more of his money for
himself, he could dress her better.”

“Oh, that's the way with these philanthropists,” said Annie, thinking of
Hollingsworth, in _The Blithedale Romance_, the only philanthropist
whom she had really ever known, “They are always ready to sacrifice the
happiness and comfort of any one to the general good.”

Mrs. Bolton stood a moment, and then went out without replying; but she
looked as offended as Annie could have wished. About ten o'clock the bell
rang, and she came gloomily into the study, and announced that Mrs. Munger
was in the parlour.

Annie had already heard an authoritative rustling of skirts, and she was
instinctively prepared for the large, vigorous woman who turned upon her
from the picture she had been looking at on the wall, and came toward her
with the confident air of one sure they must be friends. Mrs. Munger was
dressed in a dark, firm woollen stuff, which communicated its colour,
if not its material, to the matter-of-fact bonnet which she wore on her
plainly dressed hair. In one of her hands, which were cased in driving
gloves of somewhat insistent evidence, she carried a robust black silk
sun-umbrella, and the effect of her dress otherwise might be summarised in
the statement that where other women would have worn lace, she seemed to
wear leather. She had not only leather gloves, and a broad leather belt at
her waist, but a leather collar; her watch was secured by a leather cord,
passing round her neck, and the stubby tassel of her umbrella stick was
leather: she might be said to be in harness. She had a large, handsome
face, no longer fresh, but with an effect of exemplary cleanness, and a
pair of large grey eyes that suggested the notion of being newly washed,
and that now looked at Annie with the assumption of fully understanding
her.

“Ah, Miss Kilburn!” she said, without any of the wonted preliminaries of
introduction and greeting. “I should have come long ago to see you, but
I've been dispersed over the four quarters of the globe ever since you
came, my dear. I got home last night on the nine o'clock train, in the last
agonies of that howling tempest. Did you ever know anything like it? I see
your trees have escaped. I wonder they weren't torn to shreds.”

Annie took her on her own ground of ignoring their past non-acquaintance.
“Yes, it was awful. And your son--how did you leave him? Mr. Brandreth--”

“Oh yes, poor little man! I found him waiting for me at home last night,
and he told me he had been here. He was blowing about in the storm all day.
Such a spirit! There was nothing serious the matter; the bridge of the nose
was all right; merely the cartilage pushed aside by the ball.”

She had passed so lightly from Mr. Brandreth's heroic spirit to her son's
nose that Annie, woman as she was, and born to these bold bounds over
sequence, was not sure where they had arrived, till Mrs. Munger added:
“Jim's used to these things. I'm thankful it wasn't a finger, or an eye.
What is _that_?” She jumped from her chair, and swooped upon the
Spanish-Roman water-colour Annie had stood against some books on the table,
pending its final disposition.

“It's only a Guerra,” said Annie. “My things are all scattered about still;
I have scarcely tried to get into shape yet.”

Mrs. Munger would not let her interpose any idea of there being a past
between them. She merely said: “You knew the Herricks at Rome, of course.
I'm in hopes I shall get them here when they come back. I want you to help
me colonise Hatboro' with the right sort of people: it's so easy to get the
wrong sort! But, so far, I think we've succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.
It's easy enough to get nice people together at the seaside; but inland!
No; it's only a very few nice people who will come into the country for the
summer; and we propose to make Hatboro' a winter colony too; that gives us
agreeable invalids, you know; it gave us the Brandreths. He told you of our
projected theatricals, I suppose?”

“Yes,” said Annie non-committally, “he did.”

“I know just how you feel about it, my dear,” said Mrs. Munger. “'Been
there myself,' as Jim says. But it grows upon you. I'm glad you didn't
refuse outright;” and Mrs. Munger looked at her with eyes of large
expectance.

“No, I didn't,” said Annie, obliged by this expectance to say something.
“But to tell you the truth, Mrs. Munger, I don't see how I'm to be of any
use to you or to Mr. Brandreth.”

“Oh, take a cab and go about, like Boots and Brewer, you know, for the
Veneerings.” She said this as if she knew about the humour rather than felt
it. “We are placing all our hopes of bringing round the Old Hatborians in
you.”

“I'm afraid you're mistaken about my influence,” said Annie. “Mr. Brandreth
spoke of it, and I had an opportunity of trying it last night, and seeing
just what it amounted to.”

“Yes?” Mrs. Munger prompted, with an increase of expectance in her large
clear eyes, and of impartiality in her whole face.

“Mr. Peck was here,” said Annie reluctantly, “and I tried it on him.”

“Yes?” repeated Mrs. Munger, as immutably as if she were sitting for her
photograph and keeping the expression.

Annie broke from her reluctance with a sort of violence which carried
her further than she would have gone otherwise. She ridiculed Mr. Peck's
appearance and manner, and laughed at his ideas to Mrs. Munger. She had not
a good conscience in it, but the perverse impulse persisted in her. There
seemed no other way in which she could assert herself against him.

Mrs. Munger listened judicially, but she seemed to take in only what Mr.
Peck had thought of the dance and supper; at the end she said, rather
vacantly, “What nonsense!”

“Yes; but I'm afraid he thinks it's wisdom, and for all practical purposes
it amounts to that. You see what my 'influence' has done at the outset,
Mrs. Munger. He'll never give way on such a point.”

“Oh, very well, then,” said Mrs. Munger, with the utmost lightness and
indifference, “we'll drop the idea of the invited supper and dance.”

“Do you think that would be well?” asked Annie.

“Yes; why not? It's only an idea. I don't think you've made at all a bad
beginning. It was very well to try the idea on some one who would be frank
about it, and wouldn't go away and talk against it,” said Mrs. Munger,
rising. “I want you to come with me, my dear.”

“To see Mr. Peck? Excuse me. I don't think I could,” said Annie.

“No; to see some of his parishioners,” said Mrs. Munger. “His deacons, to
begin with, or his deacons' wives.”

This seemed so much less than calling on Mr. Peck that Annie looked out at
Mrs. Munger's basket-phaeton at her gate, and knew that she would go with
very little more urgence.

“After all, you know, you're not one of his congregation; he may yield to
them,” said Mrs. Munger. “We must _have_ him--if only because he's
hard to get. It'll give us an idea of what we've got to contend with.”

It had a very practical sound; it was really like meeting the difficulties
on their own ground, and it overcame the question of taste which was
rising in Annie's mind. She demurred a little more upon the theory of her
uselessness; but Mrs. Munger insisted, and carried her off down the village
street.

The air sparkled full of sun, and a breeze from the south-west frolicked
with the twinkling leaves of the overarching elms, and made their shadows
dance on the crisp roadway, packed hard by the rain, and faced with clean
sand, which crackled pleasantly under Mrs. Munger's phaeton wheels. She
talked incessantly. “I think we'll go first to Mrs. Gerrish's, and then to
Mrs. Wilmington's. You know them?”

“Oh yes; they were old girl friends.”

“Then you know why I go to Mrs. Gerrish's first. She'll care a great deal,
and Mrs. Wilmington won't care at all. She's a delicious creature, Mrs.
Wilmington--don't you think? That large, indolent nature; Mr. Brandreth
says she makes him think of 'the land in which it seemed always
afternoon.'”

Annie remembered Lyra Goodman as a long, lazy, red-haired girl who laughed
easily; and she could not readily realise her in the character of a
Titian-esque beauty with a gift for humorous dramatics, which she had
filled out into during the years of her absence from Hatboro'; but she said
“Oh yes,” in the necessity of polite acquiescence, and Mrs. Munger went on
talking--

“She's the only one of the Old Hatboro' people, so far as I know them, who
has any breadth of view. Whoa!” She pulled up suddenly beside a stout,
short lady in a fashionable walking dress, who was pushing an elegant
perambulator with one hand, and shielding her complexion with a crimson
sun-umbrella in the other.

“Mrs. Gerrish!” Mrs. Munger called; and Mrs. Gerrish, who had already
looked around at the approaching phaeton, and then looked away, so as not
to have seemed to look, stopped abruptly, and after some exploration of the
vicinity, discovered where the voice came from.

“Oh, Mrs. Munger!” she called back, bridling with pleasure at being greeted
in that way by the chief lady of South Hatboro', and struggling to keep up
a dignified indifference at the same time. “Why, Annie!” she added.

“Good morning, Emmeline,” said Annie; she annexed some irrelevancies about
the weather, which Mrs. Munger swept away with business-like robustness.

“We were driving down to your house to find you. I want to see the
principal ladies of your church, and talk with them about our Social Union.
You've heard about it?”

“Well, nothing very particular,” said Mrs. Gerrish; she had probably heard
nothing at all. After a moment she asked, “Have you seen Mrs. Wilmington
yet?”

“No, I haven't,” cried Mrs. Munger. “The fact is, I wanted to talk it over
with you and Mr. Gerrish first.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Gerrish, brightening. “Well, I was just going right there.
I guess he's in.”

“Well, we shall meet there, then. Sorry I can't offer you a _seat_.
But there's nothing but the rumble, and that wouldn't hold you _all_.”

Mrs. Munger called this back after starting her pony. Mrs. Gerrish did not
understand, and screamed, “_What_?”

Mrs. Munger repeated her joke at the top of her voice.

“Oh, I can walk!” Mrs. Gerrish yelled at the top of hers. Both the ladies
laughed at their repartee.

“She's as jealous of Mrs. Wilmington as a cat,” Mrs. Munger confided to
Annie as they drove away; “and she's just as pleased as Punch that I've
spoken to her first. Mrs. Wilmington won't mind. She's so delightfully
indifferent, it really renders her almost superior; you might forget that
she was a village person. But this has been an immense stroke. I don't
know,” she mused, “whether I'd better let her get there first and prepare
her husband, or do it myself. No; I'll let _her_. I'll stop here at
Gates's.”

She stopped at the pavement in front of a provision store, and a pale,
stout man, in the long over-shirt of his business, came out to receive her
orders. He stood, passing his hand through the top of a barrel of beans,
and listened to Mrs. Munger with a humorous, patient smile.

“Mr. Gates, I want you to send me up a leg of lamb for dinner--a large
one.”

“Last year's, then,” suggested Gates.

“No; _this_ year's,” insisted Mrs. Munger; and Gates gave way with the
air of pacifying a wilful child, which would get, after all, only what he
chose to allow it.

“All right, ma'am; a large leg of this year's lamb--grown to order. Any
peas, spinnage, cucumbers, sparrowgrass?”

“Southern, I suppose?” said Mrs. Munger.

“Well, not if you want to call 'em native,” said Gates.

“Yes, I'll take two bunches of asparagus, and some peas.”

“Any strawberries?--natives?” suggested Gates.

“Nonsense!”

“Same thing; natives of Norfolk.”

“You had better be honest with _me_, Mr. Gates,” said Mrs. Munger.
“Yes, I'll take a couple of boxes.”

“All right! Want 'em nice, and the biggest ones at the bottom of the box?”

“Yes, I do.”

“That's what I thought. Some customers wants the big ones on top; but I
tell 'em it's all foolishness; just vanity.” Gates laughed a dry, hacking
little laugh at his drollery, and kept his eyes on Annie. She smiled at
last, with permissive recognition, and Gates came forward. “Used to know
your father pretty well; but I can't keep up with the young folks any
more.” He was really not many years older than Annie; he rubbed his right
hand on the inside of his long shirt, and gave it her to shake. “Well, you
haven't been about much for the last nine or ten years, that's a fact.”

“Eleven,” said Annie, trying to be gay with the hand-shaking, and wondering
if this were meeting the lower classes on common ground, and what Mr. Peck
would think of it.

“That so?” queried Gates. “Well, I declare! No wonder you've grown!” He
hacked out another laugh, and stood on the curb-stone looking at Annie a
moment. Then he asked, “Anything else, Mrs. Munger?”

“No; that's all. Tell me, Mr. Gates, how _do_ Mr. Peck and Mr. Gerrish
get on?” asked Mrs. Munger in a lower tone.

“Well,” said Gates, “he's workin' round--the deacon's workin' round
gradually, I guess. I guess if Mr. Peck was to put in a little more
brimstone, the deacon'd be all right. He's a great hand for brimstone,
you know, the deacon is.”

Mrs. Munger laughed again, and then she said, with a proselyting sigh,
“It's a pity you couldn't all find your way into the Church.”

“Well, may be it _would_ be a good thing,” said Gates, as Mrs. Munger
gathered up her reins and chirped to her pony.

“He isn't a member of Mr. Peck's church,” she explained to Annie; “but
he's one of the society, and his wife's very devout Orthodox. He's a great
character, we think, and he'll treat you very well, if you keep on the
right side of him. They say he cheats awfully in the weight, though.”




VIII.


Mrs. Munger drove across the street, and drew up before a large, handsomely
ugly brick dry-goods store, whose showy windows had caught Annie's eye the
day she arrived in Hatboro'.

“I see Mrs. Gerrish has got here first,” Mrs. Munger said, indicating the
perambulator at the door, and she dismounted and fastened her pony with a
weight, which she took from the front of the phaeton. On either door jamb
of the store was a curved plate of polished metal, with the name GERRISH
cut into it in black letters; the sills of the wide windows were of metal,
and bore the same legend. At the threshold a very prim, ceremonious little
man, spare and straight, met Mrs. Munger with a ceremonious bow, and a
solemn “How do you do, ma'am? how do you do? I hope I see you well,” and
he put a small dry hand into the ample clasp of Mrs. Munger's gauntlet.

“Very well indeed, Mr. Gerrish. Isn't it a lovely morning? You know Miss
Kilburn, Mr. Gerrish.”

He took Annie's hand into his right and covered it with his left, lifting
his eyes to look her in the face with an old-merchant-like cordiality.

“Why, yes, indeed! Delighted to see her. Her father was one of my best
friends. I may say that I owe everything that I am to Squire Kilburn; he
advised me to stick to commerce when I once thought of studying law. Glad
to welcome you back to Hatboro', Miss Kilburn. You see changes on the
surface, no doubt, but you'll find the genuine old feeling here. Walk right
back, ladies,” he continued, releasing Annie's hand to waft them before
him toward the rear of the store. “You'll find Mrs. Gerrish in my room
there--my Growlery, as I call it.” He seemed to think he had invented the
name. “And Mrs. Gerrish tells me that you've really come back,” he said,
leaning decorously toward Annie as they walked, “with the intention of
taking up your residence permanently among us. You will find very few
places like Hatboro'.”

As he spoke, walking with his hands clasped behind him, he glanced to
right and left at the shop-girls on foot behind the counter, who dropped
their eyes under their different bangs as they caught his glance, and
bridled nervously. He denied them the use of chewing-gum; he permitted no
conversation, as he called it, among them; and he addressed no jokes or
idle speeches to them himself. A system of grooves overhead brought to his
counting-room the cash from the clerks in wooden balls, and he returned the
change, and kept the accounts, with a pitiless eye for errors. The women
were afraid of him, and hated him with bitterness, which exploded at crises
in excesses of hysterical impudence.

His store was an example of variety, punctuality, and quality. Upon the
theory, for which he deserved the credit, of giving to a country place
the advantages of one of the great city establishments, he was gradually
gathering, in their fashion, the small commerce into his hands. He had
already opened his bazaar through into the adjoining store, which he had
bought out, and he kept every sort of thing desired or needed in a country
town, with a tempting stock of articles before unknown to the shopkeepers
of Hatboro'. Everything was of the very quality represented; the prices
were low, but inflexible, and cash payments, except in the case of some
rich customers of unimpeachable credit, were invariably exacted; at the
same time every reasonable facility for the exchange or return of goods was
afforded. Nothing could exceed the justice and fidelity of his dealing with
the public. He had even some effects of generosity in his dealing with his
dependants; he furnished them free seats in the churches of their different
persuasions, and he closed every night at six o'clock, except Saturday,
when the shop hands were paid off, and made their purchases for the coming
week.

He stepped lightly before Annie and Mrs. Munger, and pushed open the
ground-glass door of his office for them. It was like a bank parlour,
except for Mrs. Gerrish sitting in her husband's leather-cushioned swivel
chair, with her last-born in her lap; she greeted the others noisily,
without trying to rise.

“You see we are quite at home here,” said Mr. Gerrish.

“Yes, and very snug you are, too,” said Mrs. Munger, taking one half of the
leather lounge, and leaving the other half to Annie. “I don't wonder Mrs.
Gerrish likes to visit you here.”

Mr. Gerrish laughed, and said to his wife, who moved provisionally in her
chair, seeing he had none, “Sit still, my dear; I prefer my usual perch.”
 He took a high stool beside a desk, and gathered a ruler in his hand.

“Well, I may as well begin at the beginning,” said Mrs. Munger, “and I'll
try to be short, for I know that these are business hours.”

“Take all the time you want, Mrs. Munger,” said Mr. Gerrish affably. “It's
my idea that a good business man's business can go on without him, when
necessary.”

“Of course!” Mrs. Munger sighed. “If everybody had your _system_, Mr.
Gerrish!” She went on and succinctly expounded the scheme of the Social
Union. “I suppose I can't deny that the idea occurred to _me_,” she
concluded, “but we can't hope to develop it without the co-operation of the
ladies of Old Hatboro', and I've come, first of all, to Mrs. Gerrish.”

Mr. Gerrish bowed his acknowledgments of the honour done his wife, with a
gravity which she misinterpreted.

“I think,” she began, with her censorious manner and accent, “that these
people have too much done for them _now_. They're perfectly spoiled.
Don't you, Annie?”

Mr. Gerrish did not give Annie time to answer. “I differ with you, my
dear,” he cut in. “It is my opinion--Or I don't know but you wish to
confine this matter entirely to the ladies?” he suggested to Mrs. Munger.

“Oh, I'm only too proud and glad that you feel interested in the matter!”
 cried Mrs. Munger. “Without the gentlemen's practical views, we ladies are
such feeble folk--mere conies in the rocks.”

“I am as much opposed as Mrs. Gerrish--or any one--to acceding to unjust
demands on the part of my clerks or other employees,” Mr. Gerrish began.

“Yes, that's what I mean,” said his wife, and broke down with a giggle.

He went on, without regarding her: “I have always made it a rule, as far as
business went, to keep my own affairs entirely in my own hands. I fix the
hours, and I fix the wages, and I fix all the other conditions, and I say
plainly, 'If you don't like them, 'don't come,' or 'don't stay,' and I
never have any difficulty.”

“I'm sure,” said Mrs. Munger, “that if all the employers in the country
would take such a stand, there would soon be an end of labour troubles. I
think we're too concessive.”

“And I do too, Mrs. Munger!” cried Mrs. Gerrish, glad of the occasion to be
censorious and of the finer lady's opinion at the same time. “That's what I
meant. Don't you, Annie?”

“I'm afraid I don't understand exactly,” Annie replied.

Mr. Gerrish kept his eye on Mrs. Munger's face, now arranged for indefinite
photography, as he went on. “That is exactly what I say to them. That is
what I said to Mr. Marvin one year ago, when he had that trouble in his
shoe shop. I said, 'You're too concessive.' I said, 'Mr. Marvin, if you
give those fellows an inch, they'll take an ell. Mr. Marvin,' said I,
'you've got to begin by being your own master, if you want to be master of
anybody else. You've got to put your foot down, as Mr. Lincoln said; and as
_I_ say, you've got to _keep_ it down.'”

Mrs. Gerrish looked at the other ladies for admiration, and Mrs. Munger
said, rapidly, without disarranging her face--

“Oh yes. And how much _misery_ could be saved in such cases by a
little firmness at the outset!”

“Mr. Marvin differed with me,” said Mr. Gerrish sorrowfully. “He agreed
with me on the main point, but he said that too many of his hands had
been in his regiment, and he couldn't lock them out. He submitted to
arbitration. And what is arbitration?” asked Mr. Gerrish, levelling his
ruler at Mrs. Munger. “It is postponing the evil day.”

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Munger, without winking.

“Mr. Marvin,” Mr. Gerrish proceeded, “may be running very smoothly now,
and sailing before the wind all--all--nicely; but I tell _you_ his
house is built upon the _sand_,” He put his ruler by on the desk very
softly, and resumed with impressive quiet: “I never had any trouble but
once. I had a porter in this store who wanted his pay raised. I simply
said that I made it a rule to propose all advances of salary myself, and I
should submit to no dictation from any one. He told me to go to--a place
that I will not repeat, and I told him to walk out of my store. He was
under the influence of liquor at the time, I suppose. I understand that he
is drinking very hard. He does nothing to support his family whatever, and
from all that I can gather, he bids fair to fill a drunkard's grave inside
of six months.”

Mrs. Munger seized her opportunity. “Yes; and it is just such cases as this
that the Social Union is designed to meet. If this man had some such place
to spend his evenings--and bring his family if he chose--where he could get
a cup of good coffee for the same price as a glass of rum--Don't you see?”

She looked round at the different faces, and Mr. Gerrish slightly frowned,
as if the vision of the Social Union interposing between his late porter
and a drunkard's grave, with a cup of good coffee, were not to his taste
altogether; but he said: “Precisely so! And I was about to make the remark
that while I am very strict--and obliged to be--with those under me in
business, _no_ one is more disposed to promote such objects as this of
yours.”

“I was _sure_ you would approve of it,” said Mrs. Munger. “That is
why I came to you--to you and Mrs. Gerrish--first,” said Mrs. Munger. “I
was sure you would see it in the right light.” She looked round at Annie
for corroboration, and Annie was in the social necessity of making a
confirmatory murmur.

Mr. Gerrish ignored them both in the more interesting work of celebrating
himself. “I may say that there is not an institution in this town which I
have not contributed my humble efforts to--to--establish, from the drinking
fountain in front of this store, to the soldiers' monument on the village
green.”

Annie turned red; Mrs. Munger said shamelessly, “That beautiful monument!”
 and looked at Annie with eyes full of gratitude to Mr. Gerrish.

“The schools, the sidewalks, the water-works, the free library, the
introduction of electricity, the projected system of drainage, and
_all_ the various religious enterprises at various times, I am
proud--I am humbly proud--that I have been allowed to be the means of
doing--sustaining--”

He lost himself in the labyrinths of his sentence, and Mrs. Munger came to
his rescue: “I fancy Hatboro' wouldn't be Hatboro' without _you_, Mr.
Gerrish! And you _don't_ think that Mr. Peck's objection will be
seriously felt by other leading citizens?”

“_What_ is Mr. Peck's objection?” demanded Mr. Gerrish, perceptibly
bristling up at the name of his pastor.

“Why, he talked it over with Miss Kilburn last night, and he objected
to an entertainment which wouldn't be open to all--to the shop hands and
everybody.” Mrs. Munger explained the point fully. She repeated some things
that Annie had said in ridicule of Mr. Peck's position regarding it. “If
you _do_ think that part would be bad or impolitic,” Mrs. Munger
concluded, “we could drop the invited supper and the dance, and simply have
the theatricals.”

She bent upon Mr. Gerrish a face of candid deference that filled him with
self-importance almost to bursting.

“No!” he said, shaking his head, and “No!” closing his lips abruptly, and
opening them again to emit a final “No!” with an explosive force which
alone seemed to save him. “Not at all, Mrs. Munger; not on any account! I
am surprised at Mr. Peck, or rather I am _not_ surprised. He is not a
practical man--not a man of the world; and I should have much preferred to
hear that he objected to the dancing and the play; I could have understood
that; I could have gone with him in that to a certain extent, though I can
see no harm in such things when properly conducted. I have a great respect
for Mr. Peck; I was largely instrumental in getting him here; but he is
altogether wrong in this matter. We are not obliged to go out into the
highways and the hedges until the bidden guests have--er--declined.”

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Munger. “I never thought of that.”

Mrs. Gerrish shifted her baby to another knee, and followed her husband
with her eyes, as he dismounted from his stool and began to pace the room.

“I came into this town a poor boy, without a penny in my pocket, and I
have made my own way, every inch of it, unaided and alone. I am a thorough
believer in giving every one an equal chance to rise and to--get along; I
would not throw an obstacle in anybody's way; but I do not believe--I do
_not_ believe--in pampering those who have not risen, or have made no
effort to rise.”

“It's their wastefulness, in nine cases out of ten, that keeps them down,”
 said Mrs. Gerrish.

“I don't care _what_ it is, I don't _ask_ what it is, that keeps
them down. I don't expect to invite my clerks or Mrs. Gerrish's servants
into my parlour. I will meet them at the polls, or the communion table,
or on any proper occasion; but a man's home is _sacred_. I will not
allow my wife or my children to associate with those whose--whose--whose
idleness, or vice, or whatever, has kept them down in a country
where--where everybody stands on an equality; and what I will not do
myself, I will not ask others to do. I make it a rule to do unto others as
I would have them do unto me. It is all nonsense to attempt to introduce
those one-ideaed notions into--put them in practice.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Munger, with deep conviction, “that is my own feeling, Mr.
Gerrish, and I'm glad to have it corroborated by your experience. Then you
_wouldn't_ drop the little invited dance and supper?”

“I will tell you how I feel about it, Mrs. Munger,” said Mr. Gerrish,
pausing in his walk, and putting on a fine, patronising,
gentleman-of-the-old-school smile. “You may put me down for any number of
tickets--five, ten, fifteen--and you may command me in anything I can do to
further the objects of your enterprise, if you will _keep_ the invited
supper and dance. But I should not be prepared to do anything if they are
dropped.”

“What a comfort it is to meet a person who knows his own mind!” exclaimed
Mrs. Munger.

“Got company, Billy?” asked a voice at the door; and it added, “Glad to see
_you_ here, Mrs. Gerrish.”

“Ah, Mr. Putney! Come in. Hope I see you well, sir!” cried Mr. Gerrish.
“Come in!” he repeated, with jovial frankness. “Nobody but friends here.”

“I don't know about that,” said Mr. Putney, with whimsical perversity,
holding the door ajar. “I see that arch-conspirator from South Hatboro',”
 he said, looking at Mrs. Munger.

He showed himself, as he stood holding the door ajar, a lank little figure,
dressed with reckless slovenliness in a suit of old-fashioned black; a
loose neck-cloth fell stringing down his shirt front, which his unbuttoned
waistcoat exposed, with its stains from the tobacco upon which his thin
little jaws worked mechanically, as he stared into the room with flamy blue
eyes; his silk hat was pushed back from a high, clear forehead; he had
yesterday's stubble on his beardless cheeks; a heavy moustache and imperial
gave dash to a cast of countenance that might otherwise have seemed slight
and effeminate.

“Yes; but I'm in charge of Miss Kilburn, and you needn't be afraid of me.
Come in. We wish to consult you,” cried Mrs. Munger. Mrs. Gerrish cackled
some applausive incoherencies.

Putney advanced into the room, and dropped his burlesque air as he
approached Annie.

“Miss Kilburn, I must apologise for not having called with Mrs. Putney to
pay my respects. I have been away; when I got back I found she had stolen
a march on me. But I'm going to make Ellen bring me at once. I don't think
I've been in your house since the old Judge's time. Well, he was an able
man, and a good man; I was awfully fond of the old Judge, in a boy's way.”

“Thank you,” said Annie, touched by something gentle and honest in his
words.

“He was a Christian gentleman,” said Mr. Gerrish with authority.

Putney said, without noticing Mr. Gerrish, “Well, I'm glad you've come back
to the old place, Miss Kilburn--I almost said Annie.”

“I shouldn't have minded, Ralph,” she retorted.

“Shouldn't you? Well, that's right.” Putney continued, ignoring the
laugh of the others at Annie's sally: “You'll find Hatboro' pretty
exciting, after Rome, for a while, I suppose. But you'll get used to
it. It's got more of the modern improvements, I'm told, and it's more
public-spirited--more snap to it. I'm told that there's more enterprise in
Hatboro', more real _crowd_ in South Hatboro' alone, than there is in
the Quirinal and the Vatican put together.”

“You had better come and live at South Hatboro', Mr. Putney; that would be
just the atmosphere for you,” said Mrs. Munger, with aimless hospitality.
She said this to every one.

“Is it about coming to South Hatboro' you want to consult me?” asked
Putney.

“Well, it is, and it isn't,” she began.

“Better be honest, Mrs. Munger,” said Putney. “You can't do anything for
a client who won't be honest with his attorney. That's what I have to
continually impress upon the reprobates who come to me. I say, 'It don't
matter what you've done; if you expect me to get you off, you've got to
make a clean breast of it.' They generally do; they see the sense of it.”

They all laughed, and Mr. Gerrish said, “Mr. Putney is one of Hatboro's
privileged characters, Miss Kilburn.”

“Thank you, Billy,” returned the lawyer, with mock-tenderness. “Now, Mrs.
Munger, out with it!”

“You'll have to tell him sooner or later, Mrs. Munger!” said Mrs. Gerrish,
with overweening pleasure in her acquaintance with both of these superior
people. “He'll get it out of you anyway.” Her husband looked at her, and
she fell silent.

Mrs. Munger swept her with a tolerant smile as she looked up at Putney.
“Why, it's really Miss Kilburn's affair,” she began; and she laid the case
before the lawyer with a fulness that made Annie wince.

Putney took a piece of tobacco from his pocket, and tore off a morsel with
his teeth. “Excuse me, Annie! It's a beastly habit. But it's saved me from
something worse. _You_ don't know what I've been; but anybody in
Hatboro' can tell you. I made my shame so public that it's no use trying
to blink the past. You don't have to be a hypocrite in a place where
everybody's seen you in the gutter; that's the only advantage I've got over
my fellow-citizens, and of course I abuse it; that's nature, you know. When
I began to pull up I found that tobacco helped me; I smoked and chewed
both; now I only chew. Well,” he said, dropping the pathetic simplicity
with which he had spoken, and turning with a fierce jocularity from the
shocked and pitying look in Annie's face to Mrs. Munger, “what do you
propose to do? Brother Peck's head seems to be pretty level, in the
abstract.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Munger, willing to put the case impartially; “and I should
be perfectly willing to drop the invited dance and supper, if it was
thought best, though I must say I don't at all agree with Mr. Peck in
principle. I don't see what would become of society.”

“You ought to be in politics, Mrs. Munger,” said Putney. “Your readiness to
sacrifice principle to expediency shows what a reform will be wrought when
you ladies get the suffrage. What does Brother Gerrish think?”

“No, no,” said Mrs. Munger. “We want an impartial opinion.”

“I always think as Brother Gerrish thinks,” said Putney. “I guess you
better give up the fandango; hey, Billy?”

“No, sir; no, Mr. Putney,” answered the merchant nervously. “I can't agree
with you. And I will tell you why, sir.”

He gave his reasons, with some abatement of pomp and detail, and with the
tremulous eagerness of a solemn man who expects a sarcastic rejoinder. “It
would be a bad precedent. This town is full now of a class of persons who
are using every opportunity to--to abuse their privileges. And this would
be simply adding fuel to the flame.”

“Do you really think so, Billy?” asked the lawyer, with cool derision.
“Well, we all abuse our privileges at every opportunity, of course; I was
just saying that I abused mine; and I suppose those fellows would abuse
theirs if you happened to hurt their wives' and daughters' feelings. And
how are you going to manage? Aren't you afraid that they will hang around,
after the show, indefinitely, unless you ask all those who have not
received invitations to the dance and supper to clear the grounds, as they
do in the circus when the minstrels are going to give a performance not
included in the price of admission? Mind, I don't care anything about your
Social Union.”

“Oh, but _surely_!” cried Mrs. Munger, “you _must_ allow that
it's a good object.”

“Well, perhaps it is, if it will keep the men away from the rum-holes. Yes,
I guess it is. You won't sell liquor?”

“We expect to furnish coffee at cost price,” said Mrs. Munger, smiling at
Putney's joke.

“And good navy-plug too, I hope. But you see it would be rather awkward,
don't you? You see, Annie?”

“Yes, I see,” said Annie. “I hadn't thought of that part before.”

“And you didn't agree with Brother Peck on general principles? There we
see the effect of residence abroad,” said Putney. “The uncorrupted--or
I will say the uninterrupted--Hatborian has none of those aristocratic
predilections of yours, Annie. He grows up in a community where there is
neither poverty nor richness, and where political economy can show by the
figures that the profligate shop hands get nine-tenths of the profits, and
starve on 'em, while the good little company rolls in luxury on the other
tenth. But you've got used to something different over there, and of course
Brother Peck's ideas startled you. Well, I suppose I should have been just
so myself.”

“Mr. Putney has never felt just right about the working-men since he lost
the boycotters' case,” said Mr. Gerrish, with a snicker.

“Oh, come now, Billy, why did you give me away?” said Putney, with mock
suffering. “Well, I suppose I might as well own up, Mrs. Munger; it's no
use trying to keep it from _you_; you know it already. Yes, Annie, I
defended some poor devils here for combining to injure a non-union man--for
doing once just what the big manufacturing Trusts do every day of the year
with impunity; and I lost the case. I expected to. I told 'em they were
wrong, but I did my best for 'em. 'Why, you fools,' said I--that's the way
I talk to 'em, Annie; I call 'em pet names; they like it; they're used to
'em; they get 'em every day in the newspapers--'you fools,' said I, 'what
do you want to boycott for, when you can _vote_? What do you want to
break the laws for, when you can _make_ 'em? You idiots, you,' said I,
'what do you putter round for, persecuting non-union men, that have as good
a right to earn their bread as you, when you might make the whole United
States of America a Labour Union?' Of course I didn't say that in court.”

“Oh, how delicious you are, Mr. Putney!” said Mrs. Munger.

“Glad you like me, Mrs. Munger,” Putney replied.

“Yes, you're delightful,” said the lady, recovering from the effects of
the drollery which they had all pretended to enjoy, Mr. Gerrish, and Mrs.
Gerrish by his leave, even more than the others. “But you're not candid.
All this doesn't help us to a conclusion. Would you give up the invited
dance and supper, or wouldn't you? That's the question.”

“And no shirking, hey?” asked Putney.

“No shirking.”

Putney glanced through a little transparent space in the ground-glass
windows framing the room, which Mr. Gerrish used for keeping an eye on his
sales-ladies to see that they did not sit down.

“Hello!” he exclaimed. “There's Dr. Morrell. Let's put the case to him.” He
opened the door and called down the store, “Come in here, Doc!”

“What?” called back an amused voice; and after a moment steps approached,
and Dr. Morrell hesitated at the open door. He was a tall man, with a
slight stoop; well dressed; full bearded; with kind, boyish blue eyes that
twinkled in fascinating friendliness upon the group. “Nobody sick here, I
hope?”

“Walk right in, sir! come in, Dr. Morrell,” said Mr. Gerrish. “Mrs. Munger
and Mrs. Gerrish you know. Present you to Miss Kilburn, who has come to
make her home among us after a prolonged residence abroad. Dr. Morrell,
Miss Kilburn.”

“No, there's nobody sick here, in one sense,” said Putney, when the doctor
had greeted the ladies. “But we want your advice all the same. Mrs. Munger
is in a pretty bad way morally, Doc.”

“Don't you mind Mr. Putney, doctor!” screamed Mrs. Gerrish.

Putney said, with respectful recognition of the poor woman's attempt to be
arch, “I'll try to keep within the bounds of truth in stating the case,
Mrs. Gerrish.”

He went on to state it, with so much gravity and scrupulosity, and with
so many appeals to Mrs. Munger to correct him if he were wrong, that the
doctor was shaking with laughter when Putney came to an end with unbroken
seriousness. At each repetition of the facts, Annie's relation to them grew
more intolerable; and she suspected Putney of an intention to punish her.
“Well, what do you say?” he demanded of the doctor.

“Ha, ha, ha! ah, ha, ha.” laughed the doctor, shutting his eyes and
throwing back his head.

“Seems to consider it a _laughing_ matter,” said Putney to Mrs.
Munger.

“Yes; and that is all your fault,” said Mrs. Munger, trying, with the
ineffectiveness of a large woman, to pout.

“No, no, I'm not laughing.” began the doctor.

“Smiling, perhaps,” suggested Putney.

The doctor went off again. Then, “I beg--I _beg_ your pardon, Mrs.
Munger,” he resumed. “But it isn't a professional question, you know; and
I--I really couldn't judge--have any opinion on such a matter.”

“No shirking,” said Putney. “That's what Mrs. Munger said to me.”

“Of course not,” gurgled the doctor. “You ladies will know what to do. I'm
sure _I_ shouldn't,” he added.

“Well, I must be going,” said Putney. “Sorry to leave you in this fix,
Doc.” He flashed out of the door, and suddenly came back to offer Annie his
hand. “I beg your pardon, Annie. I'm going to make Ellen bring me round.
Good morning.” He bowed cursorily to the rest.

“Wait--I'll go with you, Putney,” said the doctor.

Mrs. Munger rose, and Annie with her. “We must go too,” she said. “We've
taken up Mr. Gerrish's time most unconscionably,” and now Mr. Gerrish did
not urge her to remain.

“Well, good-bye,” said Mrs. Gerrish, with a genteel prolongation of the
last syllable.

Mr. Gerrish followed his guests down the store, and even out upon the
sidewalk, where he presided with unheeded hospitality over the superfluous
politeness of Putney and Dr. Morrell in putting Mrs. Munger and Annie into
the phaeton. Mrs. Munger attempted to drive away without having taken up
her hitching weight.

“I suppose that there isn't a post in this town that my wife hasn't tried
to pull up in that way,” said Putney gravely.

The doctor doubled himself down with another fit of laughing.

Annie wanted to laugh too, but she did not like his laughing. She
questioned if it were not undignified. She felt that it might be
disrespectful. Then she asked herself why he should respect her.




IX.


“That was a great success,” said Mrs. Munger, as they drove away. Annie
said nothing, and she added, “Don't you think so?”

“Well, I confess,” said Annie, “I don't see how, exactly. Do you mean with
regard to Mr. Gerrish?”

“Oh no; I don't care anything about him,” said Mrs. Munger, touching her
pony with the tip of her whip-lash. “He's an odious little creature, and I
knew that he would go for the dance and supper because Mr. Peck was opposed
to them. He's one of the anti-Peck party in his church, and that is the
reason I spoke to him. But I meant the other gentlemen. You saw how they
took it.”

“I saw that they both made fun of it,” said Annie.

“Yes; that's just the point. It's so fortunate they were frank about it. It
throws a new light on it; and if that's the way nice people are going to
look at it, why, we must give up the idea. I'm quite prepared to do so. But
I want to see Mrs. Wilmington first.”

“Mrs. Munger,” said Annie uneasily, “I would rather not see Mrs. Wilmington
with you on this subject; I should be of no use.”

“My dear, you would be of the _greatest_ use,” persisted Munger, and
she laid her arm across Annie's lap, as if to prevent her jumping out of
the phaeton. “As Mrs. Wilmington's old friend, you will have the greatest
influence with her.”

“But I don't know that I wish to influence her in favour of the supper and
dance; I don't know that I believe in them,” said Annie, cowed and troubled
by the affair.

“That doesn't make the slightest difference,” said Mrs. Munger impartially.
“All you will have to do is to keep still. I will put the case to her.”

She checked the pony before the bar which the flagman at the railroad
crossing had let down, while a long freight train clattered deafeningly
by, and then drove bumping and jouncing across the tracks. “I suppose you
remember what 'Over the Track' means in Hatboro'?”

“Oh yes,” said Annie, with a smile. “Social perdition at the least. You
don't mean that Mrs. Wilmington lives 'Over the Track'?”

“Yes. It isn't so bad as it used to be, socially. Mr. Wilmington has built
a very fine house on this side, and there are several pretty Queen Anne
cottages going up.”

They drove along under the elms which here stood somewhat at random about
the wide, grassless street, between the high, windowy bulks of the shoe
shops and hat shops. The dust gradually freed itself from the cinders
about the tracks, and it hardened into a handsome, newly made road beyond
the houses of the shop hands. They passed some open lots, and then, on a
pleasant rise of ground, they came to a stately residence, lifted still
higher on its underpinning of granite blocks. It was built in a Boston
suburban taste of twenty years ago, with a lofty mansard-roof, and it was
painted the stone-grey colour which was once esteemed for being so quiet.
The lawn before it sloped down to the road, where it ended smoothly at the
brink of a neat stone wall. A black asphalt path curved from the steps by
which you mounted from the street to the steps by which you mounted to the
heavy portico before the massive black walnut doors.

The ladies were shown into the music-room, from which the notes of a piano
were sounding when they rang, and Mrs. Wilmington rose from the instrument
to meet them. A young man who had been standing beside her turned away.
Mrs. Wilmington was dressed in a light morning dress with a Watteau fall,
whose delicate russets and faded reds and yellows heightened the richness
of her complexion and hair.

“Why, Annie,” she said, “how glad I am to see you! And you too, Mrs.
Munger. How _vurry_ nice!” Her words took value from the thick
mellow tones of her voice, and passed for much more than they were worth
intrinsically. She moved lazily about and got them into chairs, and was not
resentful when Mrs. Munger broke out with “How hot you have it!” “Have we?
We had the furnace lighted yesterday, and we've been in all the morning,
and so we hadn't noticed. Jack, won't you shut the register?” she drawled
over her shoulder. “This is my nephew, Mr. Jack Wilmington, Miss Kilburn.
Mr. Wilmington and Mrs. Munger are old friends.”

The young fellow bowed silently, and Annie instantly took a dislike to him,
his heavy jaw, long eyes, and low forehead almost hidden under a thick
bang. He sat down cornerwise on a chair, and listened, with a scornful
thrust of his thick lips, to their talk.

Mrs. Munger was not abashed by him. She opened her budget with all her
robust authority, and once more put Annie to shame. When she came to the
question of the invited supper and dance, and having previously committed
Mrs. Wilmington in favour of the general scheme, asked her what she thought
of that part, Mr. Jack Wilmington answered for her--

“I should think you had a right to do what you please about it. It's none
of the hands' business if you don't choose to ask them.”

“Yes, that's what any one would think--in the abstract,” said Mrs. Munger.

“Now, little boy,” said Mrs. Wilmington, with indolent amusement, putting
out a silencing hand in the direction of the young man, “don't you be so
fast. You let your aunty speak for herself. I don't know about not letting
the hands stay to the dance and supper, Mrs. Munger. You know I might feel
'put upon.' I used to be one of the hands myself. Yes, Annie, there was a
time after you went away, and after father died, when I actually fell so
low as to work for an honest living.”

“I think I heard, Lyra,” said Annie; “but I had forgotten.” The fact, in
connection with what had been said, made her still more uncomfortable.

“Well, I didn't work very hard, and I didn't have to work long. But I was
a hand, and there's no use trying to deny it. As Mr. Putney says, he and I
have our record, and we don't have to make any pretences. And the question
is, whether I ought to go back on my fellow-hands.”

“Oh, but Mrs. _Wilmington_!” said Mrs. Munger, with intense
deprecation, “that's such a very different thing. You were not brought up
to it; it was just temporary; and besides--”

“And besides, there was Mr. Wilmington, I know. He was very opportune. I
might have been a hand at this moment if Mr. Wilmington had not come along
and invited me to be a head--the head of his house. But I don't know,
Annie, whether I oughtn't to remember my low beginnings.”

“I suppose we all like to be consistent,” answered Annie aimlessly,
uneasily.

“Yes,” Mrs. Munger broke in; “but they were not your beginnings, Mrs.
Wilmington; they were your incidents--your accidents.”

“It's very pretty of you to say so, Mrs. Munger,” drawled Mrs. Wilmington.
“But I guess I must oppose the little invited dance and supper, on
principle. We all like to be consistent, as Annie says--even if we're
inconsistent in the attempt,” she added, with a laugh.

“Very well, then,” exclaimed Mrs. Munger, “we'll _drop_ them. As I
said to Miss Kilburn on our way here, 'if Mrs. Wilmington is opposed to
them, we'll drop them.'”

“Oh, am I such an influential person?” said Mrs. Wilmington, with a shrug.
“It's rather awful--isn't it, Annie?”

“Not at all!” Mrs. Munger answered for Annie. “We've just been talking the
matter over with Mr. Putney and Dr. Morrell, and they're both opposed.
You're merely the straw that breaks the camel's back, Mrs. Wilmington.”

“Oh, _thank_ you! That's a great relief.”

“Well--and now the question is, will you take the part of the Nurse or not
in the dramatics?” asked Mrs. Munger, returning to business.

“Well, I must think about that, and I must ask Mr. Wilmington. Jack,” she
called over her shoulder to the young man at the window, “do you think your
uncle would approve of me as Juliet's Nurse?”

“You'd better ask him,” growled the young fellow.

“Well,” said Mrs. Wilmington, with another laugh, “I'll think it over, Mrs.
Munger.”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Munger. “And now we must really be going,” she
added, pulling out her watch by its leathern guard.

“Not till you've had lunch,” said Mrs. Wilmington, rising with the ladies.
“You must stay. Annie, I shall not excuse you.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Munger, complying without regard to Annie, “all this
diplomacy is certainly very exhausting.”

“Lunch will be on the table in one moment,” returned Mrs. Wilmington, as
the ladies sat down again provisionally. “Will you join us, Jack?”

“No; I'm going to the office,” said the nephew, bowing himself out of the
room.

“Jack's learning to be superintendent,” said Mrs. Wilmington, lifting her
teasing voice to make him hear her in the hall, “and he's been spending the
whole morning here.”

In the richly appointed dining-room--a glitter of china and glass and a
mass of carven oak--the table was laid for two.

“Put another plate, Norah,” said Mrs. Wilmington carelessly.

There was bouillon in teacups, chicken cutlets in white sauce, and luscious
strawberries.

“_What_ a cook!” cried Mrs. Munger, over the cutlets.

“Yes, she's a treasure; I don't deny it,” said Mrs. Wilmington.




X.


By the end of May most of the summer folk had come to their cottages in
South Hatboro'. One after another the ladies called upon Annie. They all
talked to her of the Social Union, and it seemed to be agreed that it was
fully in train, though what was really in train was the entertainment to
be given at Mrs. Munger's for the benefit of the Union; the Union always
dropped out of the talk as soon as the theatricals were mentioned.

When Annie went to return these visits she scarcely recognised even
the shape of the country, once so familiar to her, of which the summer
settlement had possessed itself. She found herself in a strange world--a
world of colonial and Queen Anne architecture, where conscious lines and
insistent colours contributed to an effect of posing which she had never
seen off the stage. But it was not a very large world, and after the young
trees and hedges should have grown up and helped to hide it, she felt sure
that it would be a better world. In detail it was not so bad now, but
the whole was a violent effect of porches, gables, chimneys, galleries,
loggias, balconies, and jalousies, which nature had not yet had time to
palliate.

Mrs. Munger was at home, and wanted her to spend the day, to drive out with
her, to stay to lunch. When Annie would not do any of these things, she
invited herself to go with her to call at the Brandreths'. But first she
ordered her to go out with her to see the place where they intended to have
the theatricals: a pretty bit of natural boscage--white birches, pines, and
oaks--faced by a stretch of smooth turf, where a young man in a flannel
blazer was painting a tennis-court in the grass. Mrs. Munger introduced him
as her Jim, and the young fellow paused from his work long enough to bow to
her: his nose now seemed in perfect repair.

Mr. Brandreth met them at the door of his mother's cottage. It was a very
small cottage on the outside, with a good deal of stained glass _en
évidence_ in leaded sashes; where the sashes were not leaded and the
glass not stained, the panes were cut up into very large ones, with little
ones round them. Everything was very old-fashioned inside. The door opened
directly into a wainscoted square hall, which had a large fireplace with
gleaming brass andirons, and a carved mantel carried to the ceiling. It was
both baronial and colonial in its decoration; there was part of a suit of
imitation armour under a pair of moose antlers on one wall, and at one side
of the fireplace there was a spinning-wheel, with a tuft of flax ready to
be spun. There were Japanese swords on the lowest mantel-shelf, together
with fans and vases; a long old flint-lock musket stretched across the
panel above. Mr. Brandreth began to show things to Annie, and to tell how
little they cost, as soon as the ladies entered. His mother's voice called
from above, “Now, Percy, you stop till _I_ get there!” and in a moment
or two she appeared from behind a _portière_ in one corner. Before she
shook hands with the ladies, or allowed any kind of greeting, she pulled
the _portière_ aside, and made Annie admire the snug concealment of
the staircase. Then she made her go upstairs and see the chambers, and the
second-hand colonial bedsteads, and the andirons everywhere, and the old
chests of drawers and their brasses; and she told her some story about
each, and how Percy picked it up and had it repaired. When they came down,
the son took Annie in hand again and walked her over the ground-floor,
ending with the kitchen, which was in the taste of an old New England
kitchen, with hard-seated high-backed chairs, and a kitchen table with
curiously turned legs, which he had picked up in the hen-house of a
neighbouring farmer for a song. There was an authentic crane in the
dining-room fireplace, which he had found in a heap of scrap-iron at a
blacksmith's shop, and had got for next to nothing. The sideboard he had
got at an old second-hand shop in the North End; and he believed it was
an heirloom from the house of one of the old ministers of the North End
Church. Everything, nearly, in the Brandreth cottage was an heirloom,
though Annie could not remember afterward any object that had been an
heirloom in the Brandreth family.

When she went back with Mr. Brandreth to the hall, which seemed to be also
the drawing-room, she found that Mrs. Brandreth had lighted the fire on
the hearth, though it was rather a warm day without, for the sake of the
effect. She was sitting in the chimney-seat, and shielding her face from
the blaze with an old-fashioned feather hand-screen.

“Now don't you think we have a lovely little home?” she demanded.

Mrs. Munger began to break out in its praise, but she shook the screen
silencingly at her.

“No, no! I want Miss Kilburn's unbiassed opinion. Don't you speak, Mrs.
Munger! Now haven't we?”

Mrs. Brandreth made Annie assent to the superiority of her cottage in
detail. She recapitulated the different facts of the architecture and
furnishing, from each of which she seemed to acquire personal merit, and
she insisted that Percy should show some of them again. “We think it's a
little picture,” she concluded, and once more Annie felt obliged to murmur
her acquiescence.

At last Mrs. Munger said that she must go to lunch, and was going to take
Annie with her; Annie said she must lunch at home; and then Mrs. Brandreth
pressed them both to stay to lunch with her. “You shall have a cup of tea
out of a piece of real Satsuma,” she said; but they resisted. “I don't
believe,” she added, apparently relieved by their persistence, and losing a
little anxiety of manner, “that Percy's had any chance to consult you on a
very important point about your theatricals, Miss Kilburn.”

“Oh, that will do some other time, mother,” said Mr. Brandreth.

“No, no! Now! And you can have Mrs. Munger's opinion too. You know Miss Sue
Northwick is going to be Juliet?”

“No!” shouted Mrs. Munger. “I thought she had refused positively. When did
she change her mind?”

“She's just sent Percy a note. We were talking it over when you came, and
Percy was going over to tell you.”

“Then it is _sure_ to be a success,” said Mrs. Munger, with a
solemnity of triumph.

“Yes, but Percy feels that it complicates one point more than ever--”

“It's a question that always comes up in amateur dramatics,” said Mr.
Brandreth, with reluctance, “and it always will; and of course it's
particularly embarrassing in _Romeo and Juliet_. If they don't show
any affection--it's very awkward and stiff; and if--”

“I never approved of those liberties on the stage,” said Mrs. Brandreth.
“I tell Percy that it's my principal objection to it. I can't make it
seem nice. But he says that it's essential to the effect. Now _I_
say that they might just incline their heads toward each other without
_actually_, you know. But Percy is afraid that it won't do, especially
in the parting scene on the balcony--so passionate, you know--it won't do
simply to--They must _act_ like lovers. And it's such a great point to
get Miss Sue Northwick to take the part, that he mustn't risk losing her by
anything that might seem--”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Munger, with deep concern.

Mr. Brandreth looked very unhappy. “It's an embarrassing point. We can't
change the play, and so the difficulty must be met and disposed of at
once.”

He did not look at either of the ladies, but Mrs. Munger referred the
matter to Annie with a glance of impartiality. His mother also turned her
eyes upon Annie. “Percy thought that you must have seen so much of amateur
dramatics in Europe that you could tell him just how to do.”

“Perhaps you could consult Miss Northwick herself,” said Annie dryly, after
a moment of indignation, and another of amusement.

“I thought of that,” said Mrs. Brandreth; “but as Percy's to be Romeo--You
see he wishes the play to be a success artistically; but if it's to succeed
socially, he must have Miss Northwick, and she might resign at the first
suggestion of--”

“Bessie Chapley would certainly have been better. She's so outspoken you
could have put the case right to her,” said Mrs. Munger.

“Yes,” said Mr. Brandreth gloomily.

“But we shall find out a way. Why, you can settle it at rehearsal!”

“Perhaps at rehearsal,” said Mr. Brandreth, with a pensive absence of mind.

Mrs. Munger crushed his hand and his mother's in her leathern grasp, and
took Annie away with her. “It isn't lunch-time yet,” she explained, when
they were out of earshot, “but I saw she was simply killing you, and so I
made the excuse. She has no mercy. There's time enough for you to make your
calls before lunch, and then you can come home with me.”

Annie suggested that this would not do after refusing Mrs. Brandreth.

“Why, it would never have done to _accept_!” Mrs. Munger cried. “They
didn't dream of it!” At the next place she said: “This is the Clevingers'.
_They're_ some of our all-the-year-round people too.” She opened the
door without ringing, and let herself noisily in. “This is the way we run
in, without ceremony, everywhere. It's quite one family. That's the charm
of the place. We expect to take each other as we find them.”

Her freedom did not find the ladies off their guard anywhere. At all the
houses there was a skurrying of feet and a flashing of skirts out of the
room or up the stairs, and there was an interval for a thorough study of
the features of the room before the hostess came in, with the effect of
coming in just as she was. She had naturally always made some change in
her dress, and Annie felt that she had not really liked being run in upon.
Everywhere they talked to her about the theatricals; and they talked across
her to Mrs. Munger, about one another, pretty freely.

“Well, that's all there is of us at present,” said Mrs. Munger, coming down
the main road with her from the last place, “and you see just what we are.
It's a neighbourhood where everybody's just adapted to everybody else.
It's not a mere mush of concession, as Emerson says; people are perfectly
outspoken; but there's the greatest good feeling, and no vulgar display, or
lavish expenditure, or--anything.”

Annie walked slowly homeward. She was tired, and she was now aware of
having been extremely bored by the South Hatboro' people. She was very
censorious of them, as we are of other people when we have reason to be
discontented with ourselves. They were making a pretence of simplicity
and unconventionality; but they had brought each her full complement of
servants with her, and each was apparently giving herself in the summer
to the unrealities that occupied her during the winter. Everywhere Annie
had found the affectation of intellectual interests, and the assumption
that these were the highest interests of life: there could be no doubt
that culture was the ideal of South Hatboro', and several of the ladies
complained that in the summer they got behind with their reading, or their
art, or their music. They said it was even more trouble to keep house in
the country than it was in town; sometimes your servants would not come
with you; or, if they did, they were always discontented, and you did not
know what moment they would leave you.

Annie asked herself how her own life was in any wise different from that of
these people. It had received a little more light into it, but as yet it
had not conformed itself to any ideal of duty. She too was idle and vapid,
like the society of which her whole past had made her a part, and she owned
to herself, groaning in spirit, that it was no easier to escape from her
tradition at Hatboro' than it was at Rome.

When she reached her own house again, Mrs. Bolton called to her from the
kitchen threshold as she was passing the corner on her way to the front
door: “Mis' Putney's b'en here. I guess you'll find a note from her on the
parlour table.”

Annie fired in resentment of the uncouthness. It was Mrs. Bolton's business
to come into the parlour and give her the note, with a respectful statement
of the facts. But she did not tell her so; it would have been useless.

Mrs. Putney's note was an invitation to a family tea for the next evening.




XI.


Putney met Annie at the door, and led her into the parlour beside the hall.
He had a little crippled boy on his right arm, and he gave her his left
hand. In the parlour he set his burden down in a chair, and the child drew
up under his thin arms a pair of crutches that stood beside it. His white
face had the eager purity and the waxen translucence which we see in
sufferers from hip-disease.

“This is our Winthrop,” said his father, beginning to talk at once. “We
receive the company and do the honours while mother's looking after the
tea. We only keep one undersized girl,” he explained more directly to
Annie, “and Ellen has to be chief cook and bottlewasher herself. She'll
be in directly. Just lay off your bonnet anywhere.”

She was taking in the humility of the house and its belongings while she
received the impression of an unimagined simplicity in its life from his
easy explanations. The furniture was in green terry, the carpet a harsh,
brilliant tapestry; on the marble-topped centre table was a big clasp Bible
and a basket with a stereoscope and views; the marbleised iron shelf above
the stove-pipe hole supported two glass vases and a French clock under a
glass bell; through the open door, across the oil-cloth of the hallway, she
saw the white-painted pine balusters of the steep, cramped stairs. It was
clear that neither Putney nor his wife had been touched by the aesthetic
craze; the parlour was in the tastelessness of fifteen years before; but
after the decoration of South Hatboro', she found a delicious repose in
it. Her eyes dwelt with relief on the wall-paper of French grey, sprigged
with small gilt flowers, and broken by a few cold engravings and framed
photographs.

Putney himself was as little decorated as the parlour. He had put on a
clean shirt, but the bulging bosom had broken away from its single button,
and showed two serrated edges of ragged linen; his collar lost itself from
time to time under the rise of his plastron scarf band, which kept escaping
from the stud that ought to have held it down behind. His hair was brushed
smoothly across a forehead which looked as innocent and gentle as the
little boy's.

“We don't often give these festivities,” he went on, “but you don't come
home once in twelve years every day, Annie. I can't tell you how glad I am
to see you in our house; and Ellen's just as excited as the rest of us; she
was sorry to miss you when she called.”

“You're very kind, Ralph. I can't tell _you_ what a pleasure it was to
come, and I'm not going to let the trouble I'm giving spoil my pleasure.”

“Well, that's right,” said Putney. “_We_ sha'n't either.” He took out
a cigar and put it into his mouth. “It's only a dry smoke. Ellen makes
me let up on my chewing when we have company, and I must have something
in my mouth, so I get a cigar. It's a sort of compromise. I'm a terribly
nervous man, Annie; you can't imagine. If it wasn't for the grace of God,
I think I should fly to pieces sometimes. But I guess that's what holds me
together--that and Winthy here. I dropped him on the stairs out there, when
I was drunk, one night. I saw you looking at them; I suppose you've been
told; it's all right. I presume the Almighty knows what He's about; but
sometimes He appears to save at the spigot and waste at the bung-hole, like
the rest of us. He let me cripple my boy to reform me.”

“Don't, Ralph!” said Annie, with a voice of low entreaty. She turned and
spoke to the child, and asked him if he would not come to see her.

“What?” he asked, breaking with a sort of absent-minded start from his
intentness upon his father's words.

She repeated her invitation.

“Thanks!” he said, in the prompt, clear little pipe which startles by
its distinctness and decision on the lips of crippled children. “I guess
father'll bring me some day. Don't you want I should go out and tell mother
she's here?” he asked his father.

“Well, if you want to, Winthrop,” said his father.

The boy swung himself lightly out of the room on his crutches, and his
father turned to her. “Well, how does Hatboro' strike you, anyway, Annie?
You needn't mind being honest with me, you know.”

He did not give her a chance to say, and she was willing to let him talk
on, and tell her what he thought of Hatboro' himself. “Well, it's like
every other place in the world, at every moment of history--it's in a
transition state. The theory is, you know, that most places are at a
standstill the greatest part of the time; they haven't begun to move, or
they've stopped moving; but I guess that's a mistake; they're moving all
the while. I suppose Rome itself was in a transition state when you left?”

“Oh, very decidedly. It had ceased to be old and was becoming new.”

“Well, that's just the way with Hatboro'. There is no old Hatboro' any
more; and there never was, as your father and mine could tell us if they
were here. They lived in a painfully transitional period, poor old fellows!
But, for all that, there is a difference. They lived in what was really a
New England village, and we live now in a sprawling American town; and by
American of course I mean a town where at least one-third of the people
are raw foreigners or rawly extracted natives. The old New England ideal
characterises them all, up to a certain point, socially; it puts a decent
outside on most of 'em; it makes 'em keep Sunday, and drink on the sly.
We got in the Irish long ago, and now they're part of the conservative
element. We got in the French Canadians, and some of them are our best
mechanics and citizens. We're getting in the Italians, and as soon as they
want something better than bread and vinegar to eat, they'll begin going to
Congress and boycotting and striking and forming pools and trusts just like
any other class of law-abiding Americans. There used to be some talk of the
Chinese, but I guess they've pretty much blown over. We've got Ah Lee and
Sam Lung here, just as they have everywhere, but their laundries don't seem
to increase. The Irish are spreading out into the country and scooping in
the farms that are not picturesque enough for the summer folks. You can buy
a farm anywhere round Hatboro' for less than the buildings on it cost. I'd
rather the Irish would have the land than the summer folks. They make an
honest living off it, and the other fellows that come out to roost here
from June till October simply keep somebody else from making a living
off it, and corrupt all the poor people in sight by their idleness and
luxury. That's what I tell 'em at South Hatboro'. They don't like it, but
I guess they believe it; anyhow they have to hear it. They'll tell you in
self-defence that J. Milton Northwick is a practical farmer, and sells his
butter for a dollar a pound. He's done more than anybody else to improve
the breeds of cattle and horses; and he spends fifteen thousand a year on
his place. It can't return him five; and that's the reason he's a curse and
a fraud.”

“Who _is_ Mr. Northwick, Ralph?” Annie interposed. “Everybody at South
Hatboro' asked me if I'd met the Northwicks.”

“He's a very great and good man,” said Putney. “He's worth a million, and
he runs a big manufacturing company at Ponkwasset Falls, and he owns a
fancy farm just beyond South Hatboro'. He lives in Boston, but he comes out
here early enough to dodge his tax there, and let poorer people pay it.
He's got miles of cut stone wall round his place, and conservatories and
gardens and villas and drives inside of it, and he keeps up the town roads
outside at his own expense. Yes, we feel it such an honour and advantage to
have J. Milton in Hatboro' that our assessors practically allow him to fix
the amount of tax here himself. People who can pay only a little at the
highest valuation are assessed to the last dollar of their property and
income; but the assessors know that this wouldn't do with Mr. Northwick.
They make a guess at his income, and he always pays their bills without
asking for abatement; they think themselves wise and public-spirited men
for doing it, and most of their fellow-citizens think so too. You see it's
not only difficult for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven, Annie,
but he makes it hard for other people.

“Well, as I was saying, socially, the old New England element is at the top
of the heap here. That's so everywhere. The people that are on the ground
first, it don't matter much who they are, have to manage pretty badly not
to leave their descendants in social ascendency over all newer comers for
ever. Why, I can see it in my own case. I can see that I was a sort of
fetich to the bedevilled fancy of the people here when I was seen drunk in
the streets every day, just because I was one of the old Hatboro' Putneys;
and when I began to hold up, there wasn't a man in the community that
wasn't proud and flattered to help me. Curious, isn't it? It made me sick
of myself and ashamed of them, and I just made up my mind, as soon as I got
straight again, I'd give all my help to the men that hadn't a tradition.
That's what I've done, Annie. There isn't any low, friendless rapscallion
in this town that hasn't got me for his friend--and Ellen. We've been in
all the strikes with the men, and all their fool boycottings and kicking
over the traces generally. Anybody else would have been turned out of
respectable society for one-half that I've done, but it tolerates me
because I'm one of the old Hatboro' Putneys. You're one of the old Hatboro'
Kilburns, and if you want to have a mind of your own and a heart of your
own, all you've got to do is to have it. They'll like it; they'll think
it's original. That's the reason South Hatboro' got after you with that
Social Union scheme. They were right in thinking you would have a great
deal of influence. I was sorry you had to throw it against Brother Peck.”

Annie felt herself jump at this climax, as if she had been touched on
an exposed nerve. She grew red, and tried to be angry, but she was only
ashamed and tempted to lie out of the part she had taken. “Mrs. Munger,”
 she said, “gave that a very unfair turn. I didn't mean to ridicule Mr.
Peck. I think he was perfectly sincere. The scheme of the invited dance and
supper has been entirely given up. And I don't care for the project of the
Social Union at all.”

“Well, I'm glad to hear it,” said Putney, indifferently, and he resumed his
analysis of Hatboro'--

“We've got all the modern improvements here, Annie. I suppose you'd
find the modern improvements, most of 'em, in Sheol: electric light,
Bell telephone, asphalt sidewalks, and city water--though I don't know
about the water; and I presume they haven't got a public library or an
opera-house--perhaps they _have_ got an opera-house in Sheol: you see
I use the Revised Version, it don't sound so much like swearing. But, as
I was saying--”

Mrs. Putney came in, and he stopped with the laugh of a man who knows that
his wife will find it necessary to account for him and apologise for him.

The ladies kissed each other. Mrs. Putney was dressed in the black silk of
a woman who has one silk; she was red from the kitchen, but all was neat
and orderly in the hasty toilet which she must have made since leaving the
cook-stove. A faint, mixed perfume of violet sachet and fricasseed chicken
attended her.

“Well, as you were saying, Ralph?” she suggested.

“Oh, I was just tracing a little parallel between Hatboro' and Sheol,”
 replied her husband.

Mrs. Putney made a _tchk_ of humorous patience, and laughed toward
Annie for sympathy. “Well, then, I guess you needn't go on. Tea's ready.
Shall we wait for the doctor?”

“No; doctors are too uncertain. We'll wait for him while we're eating.
That's what fetches him the soonest. I'm hungry. Ain't you, Win?”

“Not so very,” said the boy, with his queer promptness. He stood resting
himself on his crutches at the door, and he now wheeled about, and led the
way out to the living-room, swinging himself actively forward. It seemed
that his haste was to get to the dumb-waiter in the little china closet
opening off the dining-room, which was like the papered inside of a square
box. He called to the girl below, and helped pull it up, as Annie could
tell by the creaking of the rope, and the light jar of the finally arriving
crockery. A half-grown girl then appeared, and put the dishes on at the
places indicated with nods and looks by Mrs. Putney, who had taken her
place at the table. There was a platter of stewed fowl, and a plate of
high-piled waffles, sweltering in successive courses of butter and sugar.
In cut-glass dishes, one at each end of the table, there were canned
cherries and pine-apple. There was a square of old-fashioned soda biscuit,
not broken apart, which sent up a pleasant smell; in the centre of the
table was a shallow vase of strawberries.

It was all very good and appetising; but to Annie it was pathetically
old-fashioned, and helped her to realise how wholly out of the world was
the life which her friends led.

“Winthrop,” said Putney, and the father and mother bowed their heads.

The boy dropped his over his folded hands, and piped up clearly: “Our
Father, which art in heaven, help us to remember those who have nothing to
eat. Amen!”

“That's a grace that Win got up himself,” his father explained, beginning
to heap a plate with chicken and mashed potato, which he then handed to
Annie, passing her the biscuit and the butter. “We think it suits the
Almighty about as well as anything.”

“I suppose you know Ralph of old, Annie?” said Mrs. Putney. “The only way
he keeps within bounds at all is by letting himself perfectly loose.”

Putney laughed out his acquiescence, and they began to talk together about
old times. Mrs. Putney and Annie recalled the childish plays and adventures
they had together, and one dreadful quarrel. Putney told of the first time
he saw Annie, when his father took him one day for a call on the old judge,
and how the old judge put him through his paces in American history, and
would not admit the theory that the battle of Bunker's Hill could have been
fought on Breed's Hill. Putney said that it was years before it occurred to
him that the judge must have been joking: he had always thought he was
simply ignorant.

“I used to set a good deal by the battle of Bunker's Hill,” he continued.
“I thought the whole Revolution and subsequent history revolved round it,
and that it gave us all liberty, equality, and fraternity at a clip. But
the Lord always finds some odd jobs to look after next day, and I guess He
didn't clear 'em all up at Bunker's Hill.”

Putney's irony and piety were very much of a piece apparently, and Annie
was not quite sure which this conclusion was. She glanced at his wife, who
seemed satisfied with it in either case. She was waiting patiently for
him to wake up to the fact that he had not yet given her anything to eat;
after helping Annie and the boy, he helped himself, and pending his wife's
pre-occupation with the tea, he forgot her.

“Why didn't you throw something at me,” he roared, in grief and
self-reproach. “There wouldn't have been a loose piece of crockery on this
side of the table if I hadn't got my tea in time.”

“Oh, I was listening to Annie's share in the conversation,” said Mrs.
Putney; and her husband was about to say something in retort of her thrust
when a tap on the front door was heard.

“Come in, come in, Doc!” he shouted. “Mrs. Putney's just been helped, and
the tea is going to begin.”

Dr. Morrell's chuckle made answer for him, and after time enough to put
down his hat, he came in, rubbing his hands and smiling, and making short
nods round the table. “How d'ye do, Mrs. Putney? How d'ye do, Miss Kilburn?
Winthrop?” He passed his hand over the boy's smooth hair and slipped into
the chair beside him.

“You see, the reason why we always wait for the doctor in this formal way,”
 said Putney, “is that he isn't in here more than seven nights of the week,
and he rather stands on his dignity. Hand round the doctor's plate, my
son,” he added to the boy, and he took it from Annie, to whom the boy gave
it, and began to heap it from the various dishes. “Think you can lift that
much back to the doctor, Win?”

“I guess so,” said the boy coolly.

“What is flooring Win at present,” said his father, “and getting him down
and rolling him over, is that problem of the robin that eats half a pint of
grasshoppers and then doesn't weigh a bit more than he did before.”

“When he gets a little older,” said the doctor, shaking over his plateful,
“he'll be interested to trace the processes of his father's thought from a
guest and half a peck of stewed chicken, to a robin and half a pint of--”

“Don't, doctor!” pleaded Mrs. Putney. “He won't have the least trouble if
he'll keep to the surface.”

Putney laughed impartially, and said: “Well, we'll take the doctor out and
weigh him when he gets done. We expected Brother Peck here this evening,”
 he explained to Dr. Morrell. “You're our sober second thought--Well,”
 he broke off, looking across the table at his wife with mock anxiety.
“Anything wrong about that, Ellen?”

“Not as far as I'm concerned, Mrs. Putney,” interposed the doctor. “I'm
glad to be here on any terms. Go on, Putney.”

“Oh, there isn't anything more. You know how Miss Kilburn here has been
round throwing ridicule on Brother Peck, because he wants the shop-hands
treated with common decency, and my idea was to get the two together and
see how she would feel.”

Dr. Morrell laughed at this with what Annie thought was unnecessary malice;
but he stopped suddenly, after a glance at her, and Putney went on--

“Brother Peck pleaded another engagement. Said he had to go off into
the country to see a sick woman that wasn't expected to live. You don't
remember the Merrifields, do you, Annie? Well, it doesn't matter. One of
'em married West, and her husband left her, and she came home here and
got a divorce; I got it for her. She's the one. As a consumptive, she had
superior attractions for Brother Peck. It isn't a case that admits of
jealousy exactly, but it wouldn't matter to Brother Peck anyway. If he saw
a chance to do a good action, he'd wade through blood.”

“Now look here, Ralph,” said Mrs. Putney, “there's such a thing as letting
yourself _too_ loose.”

“Well, _gore_, then,” said Putney, buttering himself a biscuit.

The boy, who had kept quiet till now, seemed reached by this last touch,
and broke into a high, crowing laugh, in which they all joined except his
father.

“Gore suits Winthy, anyway,” he said, beginning to eat his biscuit. “I met
one of the deacons from Brother Peck's last parish, in Boston, yesterday.
He asked me if we considered Brother Peck anyways peculiar in Hatboro', and
when I said we thought he was a little too luxurious, the deacon came out
with a lot of things. The way Brother Peck behaved toward the needy in that
last parish of his made it simply uninhabitable to the standard Christian.
They had to get rid of him somehow--send him away or kill him. Of course
the deacon said they didn't want to _kill_ him.”

“Where was his last parish?” asked the doctor.

“Down on the Maine coast somewhere. Penobscotport, I believe.”

“And was he indigenous there?”

“No, I believe not; he's from Massachusetts. Farm-boy and then mill-hand,
I understand. Self-helped to an education; divinity student with summer
intervals of waiting at table in the mountain hotels probably. Drifted down
Maine way on his first call and stuck; but I guess he won't stick here
very long. Annie's friend Mr. Gerrish is going to look after Brother Peck
before a great while.” He laughed, to see her blush, and went on. “You see,
Brother Gerrish has got a high ideal of what a Christian minister ought to
be; he hasn't said much about it, but I can see that Brother Peck doesn't
come up to it. Well, Brother Gerrish has got a good many ideals. He likes
to get anybody he can by the throat, and squeeze the difference of opinion
out of 'em.”

“There, now, Ralph,” his wife interposed, “you let Mr. Gerrish alone.
_You_ don't like people to differ with you, either. Is your cup out,
doctor?”

“Thank you,” said the doctor, handing it up to her. “And you mean Mr.
Gerrish doesn't like Mr. Peck's doctrine?” he asked of Putney.

“Oh, I don't know that he objects to his doctrine; he can't very well; it's
'between the leds of the Bible,' as the Hard-shell Baptist said. But he
objects to Brother Peck's walk and conversation. He thinks he walks too
much with the poor, and converses too much with the lowly. He says he
thinks that the pew-owners in Mr. Peck's church and the people who pay his
salary have some rights to his company that he's bound to respect.”

The doctor relished the irony, but he asked, “Isn't there something to say
on that side?”

“Oh yes, a good deal. There's always something to say on both sides, even
when one's a wrong side. That's what makes it all so tiresome--makes you
wish you were dead.” He looked up, and caught his boy's eye fixed with
melancholy intensity upon him. “I hope you'll never look at both sides when
you grow up, Win. It's mighty uncomfortable. You take the right side, and
stick to that. Brother Gerrish,” he resumed, to the doctor, “goes round
taking the credit of Brother Peck's call here; but the fact is he opposed
it. He didn't like his being so indifferent about the salary. Brother
Gerrish held that the labourer was worthy of his hire, and if he didn't
inquire what his wages were going to be, it was a pretty good sign that he
wasn't going to earn them.”

“Well, there was some logic in that,” said the doctor, smiling as before.

“Plenty. And now it worries Brother Gerrish to see Brother Peck going round
in the same old suit of clothes he came here in, and dressing his child
like a shabby little Irish girl. He says that he who provideth not for
those of his own household is worse than a heathen. That's perfectly true.
And he would like to know what Brother Peck does with his money, anyway. He
would like to insinuate that he loses it at poker, I guess; at any rate, he
can't find out whom he gives it to, and he certainly doesn't spend it on
himself.”

“From your account of Mr. Peck.” said the doctor, “I should think Brother
Gerrish might safely object to him as a certain kind of sentimentalist.”

“Well, yes, he might, looking at him from the outside. But when you come
to talk with Brother Peck, you find yourself sort of frozen out with a
most unexpected, hard-headed cold-bloodedness. Brother Peck is plain
common-sense itself. He seems to be a man without an illusion, without an
emotion.”

“Oh, not so bad as that!” laughed the doctor.

“Ask Miss Kilburn. She's talked with him, and she hates him.”

“No, I don't, Ralph,” Annie began.

“Oh, well, then, perhaps he only made you hate yourself,” said Putney.
There was something charming in his mockery, like the teasing of a brother
with a sister; and Annie did not find the atonement to which he brought her
altogether painful. It seemed to her really that she was getting off pretty
easily, and she laughed with hearty consent at last.

Winthrop asked solemnly, “How did he do that?”

“Oh, I can't tell exactly, Winthrop,” she said, touched by the boy's simple
interest in this abstruse point. “He made me feel that I had been rather
mean and cruel when I thought I had only been practical. I can't explain;
but it wasn't a comfortable feeling, my dear.”

“I guess that's the trouble with Brother Peck,” said Putney. “He doesn't
make you feel comfortable. He doesn't flatter you up worth a cent.
There was Annie expecting him to take the most fervent interest in her
theatricals, and her Social Union, and coo round, and tell her what a noble
woman she was, and beg her to consider her health, and not overwork herself
in doing good; but instead of that he simply showed her that she was a
moral Cave-Dweller, and that she was living in a Stone Age of social
brutalities; and of course she hated him.”

“Yes, that was the way, Winthrop,” said Annie; and they all laughed with
her.

“Now you take them into the parlour, Ralph,” said his wife, rising, “and
tell them how he made _you_ hate him.”

“I shouldn't like anything better,” replied Putney. He lifted the large
ugly kerosene lamp that had been set on the table when it grew dark during
tea, and carried it into the parlour with him. His wife remained to speak
with her little helper, but she sent Annie with the gentlemen.

“Why, there isn't a great deal of it--more spirit than letter, so to
speak,” said Putney, when he put down the lamp in the parlour. “You know
how I like to go on about other people's sins, and the world's wickedness
generally; but one day Brother Peck, in that cool, impersonal way of his,
suggested that it was not a wholly meritorious thing to hate evil. He went
so far as to say that perhaps we could not love them that despitefully used
us if we hated their evil so furiously. He said it was a good deal more
desirable to understand evil than to hate it, for then we could begin to
cure it. Yes, Brother Peck let in a good deal of light on me. He rather
insinuated that I must be possessed by the very evils I hated, and that was
the reason I was so violent about them. I had always supposed that I hated
other people's cruelty because I was merciful, and their meanness because
I was magnanimous, and their intolerance because I was generous, and
their conceit because I was modest, and their selfishness because I was
disinterested; but after listening to Brother Peck a while I came to the
conclusion that I hated these things in others because I was cruel myself,
and mean, and bigoted, and conceited, and piggish; and that's why I've
hated Brother Peck ever since--just like you, Annie. But he didn't reform
me, I'm thankful to say, any more than he did you. I've gone on just
the same, and I suppose I hate more infernal scoundrels and loathe more
infernal idiots to-day than ever; but I perceive that I'm no part of the
power that makes for righteousness as long as I work that racket; and now
I sin with light and knowledge, anyway. No, Annie,” he went on, “I can
understand why Brother Peck is not the success with women, and feminine
temperaments like me, that his virtues entitle him to be. What we feminine
temperaments want is a prophet, and Brother Peck doesn't prophesy worth
a cent. He doesn't pretend to be authorised in any sort of way; he has a
sneaking style of being no better than you are, and of being rather stumped
by some of the truths he finds out. No, women like a good prophet about
as well as they do a good doctor. Now if you, if you could unite the two
functions, Doc--”

“Sort of medicine-man?” suggested Morrell.

“Exactly! The aborigines understood the thing. Why, I suppose that a real
live medicine-man could go through a community like this and not leave a
sinful soul nor a sore body in it among the ladies--perfect faith cure.”

“But what did you say to Mr. Peck, Ralph?” asked Annie. “Didn't you attempt
any defence?”

“No,” said Putney. “He had the advantage of me. You can't talk back at a
man in the pulpit.”

“Oh, it was a sermon?”

“I suppose the other people thought so. But I knew it was a private
conversation that he was publicly holding with me.”

Putney and the doctor began to talk of the nature and origin of evil, and
Annie and the boy listened. Putney took high ground, and attributed it to
Adam. “You know, Annie,” he explained, “I don't believe this; but I like to
get a scientific man that won't quite deny Scripture or the good old Bible
premises, and see him suffer. Hello! you up yet, Winthrop? I guess I'll go
through the form of carrying you to bed, my son.”

When Mrs. Putney rejoined them, Annie said she must go, and Mrs. Putney
went upstairs with her, apparently to help her put on her things, but
really to have that talk before parting which guest and hostess value above
the whole evening's pleasure. She showed Annie the pictures of the little
girls that had died, and talked a great deal about their sickness and their
loveliness in death. Then they spoke of others, and Mrs. Putney asked Annie
if she had seen Lyra Wilmington lately. Annie told of her call with Mrs.
Munger, and Mrs. Putney said: “I _like_ Lyra, and I always did. I
presume she isn't very happily married; he's too old; there couldn't have
been any love on her part. But she would be a better woman than she is if
she had children. Ralph says,” added Mrs. Putney, smiling, “that he knows
she would be a good mother, she's such a good aunt.”

Annie put her two hands impressively on the hands of her friend folded at
her waist. “Ellen, what _does_ it mean?”

“Nothing more than what you saw, Annie. She must have--or she _will_
have--some one to amuse her; to be at her beck and call; and it's best to
have it all in the family, Ralph says.”

“But isn't it--doesn't he think it's--odd?”

“It makes talk.”

They moved a little toward the door, holding each other's hands. “Ellen,
I've had a _lovely_ time!”

“And so have I, Annie. I thought you'd like to meet Dr. Morrell.”

“Oh yes, indeed!”

“And I can't tell you what a night this has been for Ralph. He likes you so
much, and it isn't often that he has a chance to talk to two such people as
you and Dr. Morrell.”

“How brilliant he is!” Annie sighed.

“Yes, he's a very able man. It's very fortunate for Hatboro' to have such
a doctor. He and Ralph are great cronies. I never feel uneasy now when
Ralph's out late--I know he's been up at the doctor's office, talking. I--”

Annie broke in with a laugh. “I've no doubt Dr. Morrell is all you say,
Ellen, but I meant Ralph when I spoke of brilliancy. He has a great future,
I'm sure.”

Mrs. Putney was silent for a moment. “I'm satisfied with the present, so
long as Ralph--” The tears suddenly gushed out of her eyes, and ran down
over the fine wrinkles of her plump little cheeks.

“Not quite so much loud talking, please,” piped a thin, high voice from a
room across the stairs landing.

“Why, dear little soul!” cried Annie. “I forgot he'd gone to bed.”

“Would you like to see him?” asked his mother.

She led the way into the room where the boy lay in a low bed near a larger
one. His crutches lay beside it. “Win sleeps in our room yet. He can take
care of himself quite well. But when he wakes in the night he likes to
reach out and touch his father's hand.”

The child looked mortified.

“I wish I could reach out and touch _my_ father's hand when I wake in
the night,” said Annie.

The cloud left the boy's face. “I can't remember whether I said my prayers,
mother, I've been thinking so.”

“Well, say them over again, to me.”

The men's voices sounded in the hall below, and the ladies found them
there. Dr. Morrell had his hat in his hand.

“Look here, Annie,” said Putney, “_I_ expected to walk home with you,
but Doc Morrell says he's going to cut me out. It looks like a put-up job.
I don't know whether you're in it or not, but there's no doubt about
Morrell.”

Mrs. Putney gave a sort of gasp, and then they all shouted with laughter,
and Annie and the doctor went out into the night. In the imperfect light
which the electrics of the main street flung afar into the little avenue
where Putney lived, and the moon sent through the sidewalk trees, they
struck against each other as they walked, and the doctor said, “Hadn't you
better take my arm, Miss Kilburn, till we get used to the dark?”

“Yes, I think I had, decidedly,” she answered; and she hurried to add: “Dr.
Morrell, there is something I want to ask you. You're their physician,
aren't you?”

“The Putneys? Yes.”

“Well, then, you can tell me--”

“Oh no, I can't, if you ask me as their physician,” he interrupted.

“Well, then, as their friend. Mrs. Putney said something to me that makes
me very unhappy. I thought Mr. Putney was out of all danger of
his--trouble. Hasn't he perfectly reformed? Does he ever--”

She stopped, and Dr. Morrell did not answer at once. Then he said
seriously: “It's a continual fight with a man of Putney's temperament, and
sometimes he gets beaten. Yes, I guess you'd better know it.”

“Poor Ellen!”

“They don't allow themselves to be discouraged. As soon as he's on his feet
they begin the fight again. But of course it prevents his success in his
profession, and he'll always be a second-rate country lawyer.”

“Poor Ralph! And so brilliant as he is! He could be anything.”

“We must be glad if he can be something, as it is.”

“Yes, and how happy they seem together, all three of them! That child
worships his father; and how tender Ralph is of him! How good he is to his
wife; and how proud she is of him! And that awful shadow over them all the
time! I don't see how they live!”

The doctor was silent for a moment, and finally said: “They have the peace
that seems to come to people from the presence of a common peril, and they
have the comfort of people who never blink the facts.”

“I think Ralph is terrible. I wish he'd let other people blink the facts a
little.”

“Of course,” said the doctor, “it's become a habit with him now, or a
mania. He seems to speak of his trouble as if mentioning it were a sort of
conjuration to prevent it. I wouldn't venture to check him in his way of
talking. He may find strength in it.”

“It's all terrible!”

“But it isn't by any means hopeless.”

“I'm so glad to hear you say so. You see a great deal of them, I believe?”

“Yes,” said the doctor, getting back from their seriousness, with apparent
relief. “Pretty nearly every day. Putney and I consider the ways of God to
man a good deal together. You can imagine that in a place like Hatboro' one
would make the most of such a friend. In fact, anywhere.”

“Yes, of course,” Annie assented. “Dr. Morrell,” she added, in that effect
of continuing the subject with which one breaks away from it, “do you know
much about South Hatboro'?”

“I have some patients there.”

“I was there this morning--”

“I heard of you. They all take a great interest in your theatricals.”

“In _my_ theatricals? Really this is too much! Who has made them my
theatricals, I should like to know? Everybody at South Hatboro' talked as
if I had got them up.”

“And haven't you?”

“No. I've had nothing to do with them. Mr. Brandreth spoke to me about
them a week ago, and I was foolish enough to go round with Mrs. Munger
to collect public opinion about her invited dance and supper; and now it
appears that I have invented the whole affair.”

“I certainly got that impression,” said the doctor, with a laugh lurking
under his gravity.

“Well, it's simply atrocious,” said Annie. “I've nothing at all to do with
either. I don't even know that I approve of their object.”

“Their object?”

“Yes. The Social Union.”

“Oh! Oh yes. I had forgot about the object,” and now the doctor laughed
outright.

“It seems to have dropped into the background with everybody,” said Annie,
laughing too.

“You like the unconventionality of South Hatboro'?” suggested the doctor,
after a little silence.

“Oh, very much,” said Annie. “I was used to the same thing abroad. It might
be an American colony anywhere on the Continent.”

“I suppose,” said the doctor musingly, “that the same conditions of sojourn
and disoccupation _would_ produce the same social effects anywhere.
Then you must feel quite at home in South Hatboro'!”

“Quite! It's what I came back to avoid. I was sick of the life over there,
and I wanted to be of some use here, instead of wasting all my days.”

She stopped, resolved not to go on if he took this lightly, but the doctor
answered her with sufficient gravity: “Well?”

“It seemed to me that if I could be of any use in the world anywhere, I
could in the place where I was born, and where my whole childhood was
spent. I've been at home a month now, the most useless person in Hatboro'.
I did catch at the first thing that offered--at Mr. Brandreth and his
ridiculous Social Union and theatricals, and brought all this trouble on
myself. I talked to Mr. Peck about them. You know what his views are?”

“Only from Putney's talk,” said the doctor.

“He didn't merely disapprove of the dance and supper, but he had some very
peculiar notions about the relations of the different classes in general,”
 said Annie; and this was the point she had meant circuitously to lead up
to when she began to speak of South Hatboro', though she theoretically
despised all sorts of feminine indirectness.

“Yes?” said the doctor. “What notions?”

“Well, he thinks that if you have money, you _can't_ do good with it.”

“That's rather odd,” said Dr. Morrell.

“I don't state it quite fairly. He meant that you can't make any kindness
with it between yourself and the--the poor.”

“That's odd too.”

“Yes,” said Annie anxiously. “You can impose an obligation, he says, but
you can't create sympathy. Of course Ralph exaggerates what I said about
him in connection with the invited dance and supper, though I don't justify
what I did say; and if I'd known then, as I do now, what his history had
been, I should have been more careful in my talk with him. I should be very
sorry to have hurt his feelings, and I suppose people who've come up in
that way are sensitive?”

She suggested this, and it was not the reassurance she was seeking to have
Dr. Morrell say, “Naturally.”

She continued with an effort: “I'm afraid I didn't respect his sincerity,
and I ought to have done that, though I don't at all agree with him on the
other points. It seems to me that what he said was shocking, and
perfectly--impossible.”

“Why, what was it?” asked the doctor.

“He said there could be no real kindness between the rich and poor, because
all their experiences of life were different. It amounted to saying that
there ought not to _be_ any wealth. Don't you think so?”

“Really, I've never thought about it,” returned Dr. Morrell. After a moment
he asked, “Isn't it rather an abstraction?”

“Don't say that!” said Annie nervously. “It's the _most_ concrete
thing in the world!”

The doctor laughed with enjoyment of her convulsive emphasis; but she went
on: “I don't think life's worth living if you're to be shut up all your
days to the intelligence merely of your own class.”

“Who said you were?”

“Mr. Peck.”

“And what was your inference from the fact? That there oughtn't to be any
classes?”

“Of course it won't do to say that. There _must_ be social
differences. Don't you think so?”

“I don't know,” said Dr. Morrell. “I never thought of it in that light
before. It's a very curious question.” He asked, brightening gaily after a
moment of sober pause, “Is that the whole trouble?”

“Isn't it enough?”

“No; I don't think it is. Why didn't you tell him that you didn't want any
gratitude?”.

“Not _want_ any?” she demanded.

“Oh!” said Dr. Morrell, “I didn't know but you thought it was enough to
_give.”_

Annie believed that he was making fun of her, and she tried to make her
resentful silence dignified; but she only answered sadly: “No; it isn't
enough for me. Besides, he made me see that you can't give sympathy where
you can't receive it.”

“Well, that _is_ bad,” said the doctor, and he laughed again. “Excuse
me,” he added. “I see the point. But why don't you forget it?”

“Forget it!”

“Yes. If you can't help it, why need you worry about it?”

She gave a kind of gasp of astonishment. “Do you really think that would be
right?” She edged a little away from Dr. Morrell, as if with distrust.

“Well, no; I can't say that I do,” he returned thoughtfully, without
seeming to have noticed her withdrawal. “I don't suppose I was looking at
the moral side. It's rather out of my way to do that. If a physician let
himself get into the habit of doing that, he might regard nine-tenths of
the diseases he has to treat as just penalties, and decline to interfere.”

She fancied that he was amused again, rather than deeply concerned, and she
determined to make him own his personal complicity in the matter if she
could. “Then you _do_ feel sympathy with your patients? You find it
necessary to do so?”

The doctor thought a moment. “I take an interest in their diseases.”

“But you want them to get well?”

“Oh, certainly. I'm bound to do all I can for them as a physician.”

“Nothing more?”

“Yes; I'm sorry for them--for their families, if it seems to be going badly
with them.”

“And--and as--as--Don't you care at all for your work as a part of what
every one ought to do for others--as humanity, philan--” She stopped the
offensive word.

“Well, I can't say that I've looked at it in that light exactly,” he
answered. “I suspect I'm not very good at generalising my own relations to
others, though I like well enough to speculate in the abstract. But don't
you think Mr. Peck has overlooked one important fact in his theory? What
about the people who have grown rich from being poor, as most Americans
have? They have the same experiences, and why can't they sympathise with
those who have remained poor?”

“I never thought of that. Why didn't I ask him that?” She lamented so
sincerely that the doctor laughed again. “I think that Mr. Peck--”

“Oh no! oh no!” said the doctor, in an entreating, coaxing tone, expressive
of a satiety with the subject that he might very well have felt; and he
ended with another laugh, in which, after a moment of indignant
self-question, she joined him.

“Isn't that delicious?” he exclaimed; and she involuntarily slowed her pace
with his.

The spicy scent of sweet-currant blossoms hung in the dewy air that wrapped
one of the darkened village houses. From a syringa bush before another, as
they moved on, a denser perfume stole out with the wild song of a cat-bird
hidden in it; the music and the odour seemed braided together. The shadows
of the trees cast by the electrics on the walks were so thick and black
that they looked palpable; it seemed as if she could stoop down and lift
them from the ground. A broad bath of moonlight washed one of the house
fronts, and the white-painted clapboards looked wet with it.

They talked of these things, of themselves, and of their own traits and
peculiarities; and at her door they ended far from Mr. Peck and all the
perplexities he had suggested.

She had told Dr. Morrell of some things she had brought home with her,
and had said she hoped he would find time to come and see them. It would
have been stiff not to do it, and she believed she had done it in a very
off-hand, business-like way. But she continued to question whether she had.




XII.


Miss Northwick called upon Annie during the week, with excuses for her
delay and for coming alone. She seemed to have intentions of being polite;
but she constantly betrayed her want of interest in Annie, and disappointed
an expectation of refinement which her physical delicacy awakened. She
asked her how she ever came to take up the Social Union, and answered for
her that of course it had the attraction of the theatricals, and went on
to talk of her sister's part in them. The relation of the Northwick family
to the coming entertainment, and an impression of frail mottled wrists and
high thin cheeks, and an absence of modelling under affluent drapery, was
the main effect of Miss Northwick's visit.

When Annie returned it, she met the younger sister, whom she found a great
beauty. She seemed very cold, and of a _hauteur_ which she subdued
with difficulty; but she was more consecutively polite than her sister,
and Annie watched with fascination her turns of the head, her movements of
leopard swiftness and elasticity, the changing lights of her complexion,
the curves of her fine lips, the fluttering of her thin nostrils.

A very new basket phaeton stood glittering at Annie's door when she got
home, and Mrs. Wilmington put her head out of the open parlour window.

“How d'ye do, Annie?” she drawled, in her tender voice. “Won't you come in?
You see I'm in possession. I've just got my new phaeton, and I drove up at
once to crush you with it. Isn't it a beauty?”

“You're too late, Lyra,” said Annie. “I've just come from the Northwicks,
and another crushing beauty has got in ahead of your phaeton.”

“Oh, _poor_ Annie!” Lyra began to laugh with agreeable intelligence.
“_Do_ come in and tell me about it!”

“Why is that girl going to take part in the theatricals? She doesn't care
to please any one, does she?”

“I didn't know that people took part in theatricals for that, Annie. I
thought they wanted to please themselves and mortify others. _I_ do.
But then I may be different. Perhaps Miss Northwick wants to please Mr.
Brandreth.”

“Do you mean it, Lyra?” demanded Annie, arrested on her threshold by the
charm of this improbability.

“Well, I don't know; they're opposites. But, upon second thoughts, you
needn't come in, Annie. I want you to take a drive with me, and try my new
phaeton,” said Lyra, coming out.

Annie now looked at it with that irresolution of hers, and Lyra commanded:
“Get right in. We'll go down to the Works. You've never met my husband yet;
have you, Annie?”

“No, I haven't, Lyra. I've always just missed him somehow. He seems to have
been perpetually just gone to town, or not got back.”

“Well, he's really at home now. And I don't mean at the house, which isn't
home to him, but the Works. You've never seen the Works either, have you?”

“No, I haven't.”

“Well, then, we'll just go round there, and kill two birds with one stone.
I ought to show off my new phaeton to Mr. Wilmington first of all; he gave
it to me. It would be kind of conjugal, or filial, or something. You know
Mr. Wilmington and I are not exactly contemporaries, Annie?”

“I heard he was somewhat your senior,” said Annie reluctantly.

Lyra laughed. “Well, I always say we were born in the same century,
_any_way.”

They came round into the region of the shops, and Lyra checked her pony in
front of her husband's factory. It was not imposingly large, but, as Mrs.
Wilmington caused Annie to observe, it was as big as the hat shops and as
ugly as the shoe shops.

The structure trembled with the operation of its industry, and as they
mounted the wooden steps to the open outside door, an inner door swung ajar
for a moment, and let out a roar mingled of the hum and whirl and clash of
machinery and fragments of voice, borne to them on a whiff of warm, greasy
air. “Of course it doesn't smell very nice,” said Lyra.

She pushed open the door of the office, and finding its first apartment
empty, led the way with Annie to the inner room, where her husband sat
writing at a table.

“George, I want to introduce you to Miss Kilburn.”

“Oh yes, yes, yes,” said her husband, scrambling to his feet, and coming
round to greet Annie. He was a small man, very bald, with a serious and
wrinkled forehead, and rather austere brows; but his mouth had a furtive
curl at one corner, which, with the habit he had of touching it there with
the tip of his tongue, made Annie think of a cat that had been at the
cream. “I've been hoping to call with Mrs. Wilmington to pay my respects;
but I've been away a great deal this season, and--and--We're all very happy
to have you home again, Miss Kilburn. I've often heard my wife speak of
your old days together at Hatboro'.”

They fenced with some polite feints of interest in each other, the old man
standing beside his writing-table, and staying himself with a shaking hand
upon it.

Lyra interrupted them. “Well, I think now that Annie is here, we'd better
not let her get away without showing her the Works.”

“Oh--oh--decidedly! I'll go with you, with great pleasure. Ah!” He bustled
about, putting the things together on his table, and then reaching for
the Panama hat on a hook behind it. There was something pathetic in his
eagerness to do what Lyra bade him, and Annie fancied in him the uneasy
consciousness which an elderly husband might feel in the presence of those
who met him for the first time with his young wife. At the outer office
door they encountered Jack Wilmington.

“I'll show them through,” he said to his uncle; and the ol

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