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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ragged Lady, Part 1, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Ragged Lady, Part 1
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: October 24, 2004 [EBook #3405]
+[Last updated: August 10, 2014]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RAGGED LADY, PART 1 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+RAGGED LADY.
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+Part 1.
+
+
+I.
+
+It was their first summer at Middlemount and the Landers did not know the
+roads. When they came to a place where they had a choice of two, she said
+that now he must get out of the carry-all and ask at the house standing a
+little back in the edge of the pine woods, which road they ought to take
+for South Middlemount. She alleged many cases in which they had met
+trouble through his perverse reluctance to find out where they were
+before he pushed rashly forward in their drives. Whilst she urged the
+facts she reached forward from the back seat where she sat, and held her
+hand upon the reins to prevent his starting the horse, which was
+impartially cropping first the sweet fern on one side and then the
+blueberry bushes on the other side of the narrow wheel-track. She
+declared at last that if he would not get out and ask she would do it
+herself, and at this the dry little man jerked the reins in spite of her,
+and the horse suddenly pulled the carry-all to the right, and seemed
+about to overset it.
+
+"Oh, what are you doing, Albe't?" Mrs. Lander lamented, falling helpless
+against the back of her seat. "Haven't I always told you to speak to the
+hoss fust?"
+
+"He wouldn't have minded my speakin'," said her husband. "I'm goin' to
+take you up to the dooa so that you can ask for youaself without gettin'
+out."
+
+This was so well, in view of Mrs. Lander's age and bulk, and the hardship
+she must have undergone, if she had tried to carry out her threat, that
+she was obliged to take it in some sort as a favor; and while the vehicle
+rose and sank over the surface left rough, after building, in front of
+the house, like a vessel on a chopping sea, she was silent for several
+seconds.
+
+The house was still in a raw state of unfinish, though it seemed to have
+been lived in for a year at least. The earth had been banked up at the
+foundations for warmth in winter, and the sheathing of the walls had been
+splotched with irregular spaces of weather boarding; there was a good
+roof over all, but the window-casings had been merely set in their places
+and the trim left for a future impulse of the builder. A block of wood
+suggested the intention of steps at the front door, which stood
+hospitably open, but remained unresponsive for some time after the
+Landers made their appeal to the house at large by anxious noises in
+their throats, and by talking loud with each other, and then talking low.
+They wondered whether there were anybody in the house; and decided that
+there must be, for there was smoke coming out of the stove pipe piercing
+the roof of the wing at the rear.
+
+Mr. Lander brought himself under censure by venturing, without his wife's
+authority, to lean forward and tap on the door-frame with the butt of his
+whip. At the sound, a shrill voice called instantly from the region of
+the stove pipe, "Clem! Clementina? Go to the front dooa! The'e's somebody
+knockin'." The sound of feet, soft and quick, made itself heard within,
+and in a few moments a slim maid, too large for a little girl, too
+childlike for a young girl, stood in the open doorway, looking down on
+the elderly people in the buggy, with a face as glad as a flower's. She
+had blue eyes, and a smiling mouth, a straight nose, and a pretty chin
+whose firm jut accented a certain wistfulness of her lips. She had hair
+of a dull, dark yellow, which sent out from its thick mass light prongs,
+or tendrils, curving inward again till they delicately touched it. Her
+tanned face was not very different in color from her hair, and neither
+were her bare feet, which showed well above her ankles in the calico
+skirt she wore. At sight of the elders in the buggy she involuntarily
+stooped a little to lengthen her skirt in effect, and at the same time
+she pulled it together sidewise, to close a tear in it, but she lost in
+her anxiety no ray of the joy which the mere presence of the strangers
+seemed to give her, and she kept smiling sunnily upon them while she
+waited for them to speak.
+
+"Oh!" Mrs. Lander began with involuntary apology in her tone, "we just
+wished to know which of these roads went to South Middlemount. We've come
+from the hotel, and we wa'n't quite ce'tain."
+
+The girl laughed as she said, "Both roads go to South Middlemount'm; they
+join together again just a little piece farther on."
+
+The girl and the woman in their parlance replaced the letter 'r' by vowel
+sounds almost too obscure to be represented, except where it came last in
+a word before a word beginning with a vowel; there it was annexed to the
+vowel by a strong liaison, according to the custom universal in rural New
+England.
+
+"Oh, do they?" said Mrs. Lander.
+
+"Yes'm," answered the girl. "It's a kind of tu'nout in the wintatime; or
+I guess that's what made it in the beginning; sometimes folks take one
+hand side and sometimes the other, and that keeps them separate; but
+they're really the same road, 'm."
+
+"Thank you," said Mrs. Lander, and she pushed her husband to make him say
+something, too, but he remained silently intent upon the child's
+prettiness, which her blue eyes seemed to illumine with a light of their
+own. She had got hold of the door, now, and was using it as if it was a
+piece of drapery, to hide not only the tear in her gown, but somehow both
+her bare feet. She leaned out beyond the edge of it; and then, at moments
+she vanished altogether behind it.
+
+Since Mr. Lander would not speak, and made no sign of starting up his
+horse, Mrs. Lander added, "I presume you must be used to havin' people
+ask about the road, if it's so puzzlin'."
+
+"O, yes'm," returned the girl, gladly. "Almost every day, in the
+summatime."
+
+"You have got a pretty place for a home, he'e," said Mrs. Lander.
+
+"Well, it will be when it's finished up." Without leaning forward
+inconveniently Mrs. Lander could see that the partitions of the house
+within were lathed, but not plastered, and the girl looked round as if to
+realize its condition and added, "It isn't quite finished inside."
+
+"We wouldn't, have troubled you," said Mrs. Lander, "if we had seen
+anybody to inquire of."
+
+"Yes'm," said the girl. "It a'n't any trouble."
+
+"There are not many otha houses about, very nea', but I don't suppose you
+get lonesome; young folks are plenty of company for themselves, and if
+you've got any brothas and sistas--"
+
+"Oh," said the girl, with a tender laugh, "I've got eva so many of them!"
+
+There was a stir in the bushes about the carriage, and Mrs. Lander was
+aware for an instant of children's faces looking through the leaves at
+her and then flashing out of sight, with gay cries at being seen. A boy,
+older than the rest, came round in front of the horse and passed out of
+sight at the corner of the house.
+
+Lander now leaned back and looked over his shoulder at his wife as if he
+might hopefully suppose she had come to the end of her questions, but she
+gave no sign of encouraging him to start on their way again.
+
+"That your brotha, too?" she asked the girl.
+
+"Yes'm. He's the oldest of the boys; he's next to me."
+
+"I don't know," said Mrs. Lander thoughtfully, "as I noticed how many
+boys there were, or how many girls."
+
+"I've got two sistas, and three brothas, 'm," said the girl, always
+smiling sweetly. She now emerged from the shelter of the door, and Mrs.
+Lander perceived that the slight movements of such parts of her person as
+had been evident beyond its edge were the effects of some endeavor at
+greater presentableness. She had contrived to get about her an overskirt
+which covered the rent in her frock, and she had got a pair of shoes on
+her feet. Stockings were still wanting, but by a mutual concession of her
+shoe-tops and the border of her skirt, they were almost eliminated from
+the problem. This happened altogether when the girl sat down on the
+threshold, and got herself into such foreshortening that the eye of Mrs.
+Lander in looking down upon her could not detect their absence. Her
+little head then showed in the dark of the doorway like a painted head
+against its background.
+
+"You haven't been livin' here a great while, by the looks," said Mrs.
+Lander. "It don't seem to be clea'ed off very much."
+
+"We've got quite a ga'den-patch back of the house," replied the girl,
+"and we should have had moa, but fatha wasn't very well, this spring;
+he's eva so much better than when we fust came he'e."
+
+"It has the name of being a very healthy locality," said Mrs. Lander,
+somewhat discontentedly, "though I can't see as it's done me so very much
+good, yit. Both your payrints livin'?"
+
+"Yes'm. Oh, yes, indeed!"
+
+"And your mother, is she real rugged? She need to be, with such a flock
+of little ones!"
+
+"Yes, motha's always well. Fatha was just run down, the doctas said, and
+ought to keep more in the open air. That's what he's done since he came
+he'e. He helped a great deal on the house and he planned it all out
+himself."
+
+"Is he a ca'penta?" asked Mrs. Lander.
+
+"No'm; but he's--I don't know how to express it--he likes to do every
+kind of thing."
+
+"But he's got some business, ha'n't he?" A shadow of severity crept over
+Mrs. Lander's tone, in provisional reprehension of possible
+shiftlessness.
+
+"Yes'm. He was a machinist at the Mills; that's what the doctas thought
+didn't agree with him. He bought a piece of land he'e, so as to be in the
+pine woods, and then we built this house."
+
+"When did you say you came?"
+
+"Two yea's ago, this summa."
+
+"Well! What did you do befoa you built this house?"
+
+"We camped the first summa."
+
+"You camped? In a tent?"
+
+"Well, it was pahtly a tent, and pahtly bank."
+
+"I should have thought you would have died."
+
+The girl laughed. "Oh, no, we all kept fast-rate. We slept in the
+tents--we had two--and we cooked in the shanty." She smiled at the notion in
+adding, "At fast the neighbas thought we we'e Gipsies; and the summa
+folks thought we were Indians, and wanted to get baskets of us."
+
+Mrs. Lander did not know what to think, and she asked, "But didn't it
+almost perish you, stayin' through the winter in an unfinished house?"
+
+"Well, it was pretty cold. But it was so dry, the air was, and the woods
+kept the wind off nicely."
+
+The same shrill voice in the region of the stovepipe which had sent the
+girl to the Landers now called her from them. "Clem! Come here a minute!"
+
+The girl said to Mrs. Lander, politely, "You'll have to excuse me, now'm.
+I've got to go to motha."
+
+"So do!" said Mrs. Lander, and she was so taken by the girl's art and
+grace in getting to her feet and fading into the background of the
+hallway without visibly casting any detail of her raiment, that she was
+not aware of her husband's starting up the horse in time to stop him.
+They were fairly under way again, when she lamented, "What you doin',
+Albe't? Whe'e you goin'?"
+
+"I'm goin' to South Middlemount. Didn't you want to?"
+
+"Well, of all the men! Drivin' right off without waitin' to say thankye
+to the child, or take leave, or anything!"
+
+"Seemed to me as if SHE took leave."
+
+"But she was comin' back! And I wanted to ask--"
+
+"I guess you asked enough for one while. Ask the rest to-morra."
+
+Mrs. Lander was a woman who could often be thrown aside from an immediate
+purpose, by the suggestion of some remoter end, which had already,
+perhaps, intimated itself to her. She said, "That's true," but by the
+time her husband had driven down one of the roads beyond the woods into
+open country, she was a quiver of intolerable curiosity. "Well, all I've
+got to say is that I sha'n't rest till I know all about 'em."
+
+"Find out when we get back to the hotel, I guess," said her husband.
+
+"No, I can't wait till I get back to the hotel. I want to know now. I
+want you should stop at the very fust house we come to. Dea'! The'e don't
+seem to be any houses, any moa." She peered out around the side of the
+carry-all and scrutinized the landscape. "Hold on! No, yes it is, too!
+Whoa! Whoa! The'e's a man in that hay-field, now!"
+
+She laid hold of the reins and pulled the horse to a stand. Mr. Lander
+looked round over his shoulder at her. "Hadn't you betta wait till you
+get within half a mile of the man?"
+
+"Well, I want you should stop when you do git to him. Will you? I want to
+speak to him, and ask him all about those folks."
+
+"I didn't suppose you'd let me have much of a chance," said her husband.
+When he came within easy hail of the man in the hay-field, he pulled up
+beside the meadow-wall, where the horse began to nibble the blackberry
+vines that overran it.
+
+Mrs. Lander beckoned and called to the man, who had stopped pitching hay
+and now stood leaning on the handle of his fork. At the signs and sounds
+she made, he came actively forward to the road, bringing his fork with
+him. When he arrived within easy conversational distance, he planted the
+tines in the ground and braced himself at an opposite incline from the
+long smooth handle, and waited for Mrs. Lander to begin.
+
+"Will you please tell us who those folks ah', livin' back there in the
+edge of the woods, in that new unfinished house?"
+
+The man released his fork with one hand to stoop for a head of timothy
+that had escaped the scythe, and he put the stem of it between his teeth,
+where it moved up and down, and whipped fantastically about as he talked,
+before he answered, "You mean the Claxons?"
+
+"I don't know what thei' name is." Mrs. Lander repeated exactly what she
+had said.
+
+The farmer said, "Long, red-headed man, kind of sickly-lookin'?"
+
+"We didn't see the man--"
+
+"Little woman, skinny-lookin; pootty tonguey?"
+
+"We didn't see her, eitha; but I guess we hea'd her at the back of the
+house."
+
+"Lot o' children, about as big as pa'tridges, runnin' round in the
+bushes?"
+
+"Yes! And a very pretty-appearing girl; about thi'teen or fou'teen, I
+should think."
+
+The farmer pulled his fork out of the ground, and planted it with his
+person at new slopes in the figure of a letter A, rather more upright
+than before. "Yes; it's them," he said. "Ha'n't been in the neighbahood a
+great while, eitha. Up from down Po'tland way, some'res, I guess. Built
+that house last summer, as far as it's got, but I don't believe it's
+goin' to git much fa'tha."
+
+"Why, what's the matta?" demanded Mrs. Lander in an anguish of interest.
+
+The man in the hay-field seemed to think it more dignified to include
+Lander in this inquiry, and he said with a glimmer of the eye for him,
+"Hea'd of do-nothin' folks?"
+
+"Seen 'em, too," answered Lander, comprehensively.
+
+"Well, that a'n't Claxon's complaint exactly. He a'n't a do-nothin'; he's
+a do-everything. I guess it's about as bad." Lander glimmered back at the
+man, but did not speak.
+
+"Kind of a machinist down at the Mills, where he come from," the farmer
+began again, and Mrs. Lander, eager not to be left out of the affair for
+a moment, interrupted:
+
+"Yes, Yes! That's what the gul said."
+
+"But he don't seem to think't the i'on agreed with him, and now he's
+goin' in for wood. Well, he did have a kind of a foot-powa tu'nin' lathe,
+and tuned all sots o' things; cups, and bowls, and u'ns for fence-posts,
+and vases, and sleeve-buttons and little knick-knacks; but the place bunt
+down, here, a while back, and he's been huntin' round for wood, the whole
+winta long, to make canes out of for the summa-folks. Seems to think that
+the smell o' the wood, whether it's green or it's dry, is goin' to cure
+him, and he can't git too much of it."
+
+"Well, I believe it's so, Albe't!" cried Mrs. Lander, as if her husband
+had disputed the theory with his taciturn back. He made no other sign of
+controversy, and the man in the hay-field went on.
+
+"I hea' he's goin' to put up a wind mill, back in an open place he's got,
+and use the powa for tu'nin', if he eva gits it up. But he don't seem to
+be in any great of a hurry, and they scrape along somehow. Wife takes in
+sewin' and the girl wo'ked at the Middlemount House last season. Whole
+fam'ly's got to tu'n in and help s'po't a man that can do everything."
+
+The farmer appealed with another humorous cast of his eye to Lander; but
+the old man tacitly refused to take any further part in the talk, which
+began to flourish apace, in question and answer, between his wife and the
+man in the hay-field. It seemed that the children had all inherited the
+father's smartness. The oldest boy could beat the nation at figures, and
+one of the young ones could draw anything you had a mind to. They were
+all clear up in their classes at school, and yet you might say they
+almost ran wild, between times. The oldest girl was a pretty-behaved
+little thing, but the man in the hay-field guessed there was not very
+much to her, compared with some of the boys. Any rate, she had not the
+name of being so smart at school. Good little thing, too, and kind of
+mothered the young ones.
+
+Mrs. Lander, when she had wrung the last drop of information out of him,
+let him crawl back to his work, mentally flaccid, and let her husband
+drive on, but under a fire of conjecture and asseveration that was
+scarcely intermitted till they reached their hotel. That night she talked
+a long time about their afternoon's adventure before she allowed him to go
+to sleep. She said she must certainly see the child again; that they must
+drive down there in the morning, and ask her all about herself.
+
+"Albe't," she concluded; "I wish we had her to live with us. Yes, I do! I
+wonder if we could get her to. You know I always did want to adopt a
+baby."
+
+"You neva said so," Mr. Lander opened his mouth almost for the first
+time, since the talk began.
+
+"I didn't suppose you'd like it," said his wife.
+
+"Well, she a'n't a baby. I guess you'd find you had your hands full,
+takon' a half-grown gul like that to bring up."
+
+"I shouldn't be afraid any," the wife declared. "She has just twined
+herself round my heat. I can't get her pretty looks out of my eyes. I
+know she's good."
+
+"We'll see how you feel about it in the morning."
+
+The old man began to wind his watch, and his wife seemed to take this for
+a sign that the incident was closed, for the present at least. He seldom
+talked, but there came times when he would not even listen. One of these
+was the time after he had wound his watch. A minute later he had
+undressed, with an agility incredible of his years, and was in bed, as
+effectively blind and deaf to his wife's appeals as if he were already
+asleep.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+When Albert Gallatin Lander (he was named for an early Secretary of the
+Treasury as a tribute to the statesman's financial policy) went out of
+business, his wife began to go out of health; and it became the most
+serious affair of his declining years to provide for her invalid fancies.
+He would have liked to buy a place in the Boston suburbs (he preferred
+one of the Newtons) where they could both have had something to do, she
+inside of the house, and he outside; but she declared that what they both
+needed was a good long rest, with freedom from care and trouble of every
+kind. She broke up their establishment in Boston, and stored their
+furniture, and she would have made him sell the simple old house in which
+they had always lived, on an unfashionable up-and-down-hill street of the
+West End, if he had not taken one of his stubborn stands, and let it for
+a term of years without consulting her. But she had her way about their
+own movements, and they began that life of hotels, which they had now
+lived so long that she believed any other impossible. Its luxury and
+idleness had told upon each of them with diverse effect.
+
+They had both entered upon it in much the same corporal figure, but she
+had constantly grown in flesh, while he had dwindled away until he was
+not much more than half the weight of his prime. Their digestion was
+alike impaired by their joint life, but as they took the same medicines
+Mrs. Lander was baffled to account for the varying result. She was sure
+that all the anxiety came upon her, and that logically she was the one
+who ought to have wasted away. But she had before her the spectacle of a
+husband who, while he gave his entire attention to her health, did not
+audibly or visibly worry about it, and yet had lost weight in such
+measure that upon trying on a pair of his old trousers taken out of
+storage with some clothes of her own, he found it impossible to use the
+side pockets which the change in his figure carried so far to the rear
+when the garment was reduced at the waist. At the same time her own
+dresses of ten years earlier would not half meet round her; and one of
+the most corroding cares of a woman who had done everything a woman could
+to get rid of care, was what to do with those things which they could
+neither of them ever wear again. She talked the matter over with herself
+before her husband, till he took the desperate measure of sending them
+back to storage; and they had been left there in the spring when the
+Landers came away for the summer.
+
+They always spent the later spring months at a hotel in the suburbs of
+Boston, where they arrived in May from a fortnight in a hotel at New
+York, on their way up from hotels in Washington, Ashville, Aiken and St.
+Augustine. They passed the summer months in the mountains, and early in
+the autumn they went back to the hotel in the Boston suburbs, where Mrs.
+Lander considered it essential to make some sojourn before going to a
+Boston hotel for November and December, and getting ready to go down to
+Florida in January. She would not on any account have gone directly to
+the city from the mountains, for people who did that were sure to lose
+the good of their summer, and to feel the loss all the winter, if they
+did not actually come down with a fever.
+
+She was by no means aware that she was a selfish or foolish person. She
+made Mr. Lander subscribe statedly to worthy objects in Boston, which she
+still regarded as home, because they had not dwelt any where else since
+they ceased to live there; and she took lavishly of tickets for all the
+charitable entertainments in the hotels where they stayed. Few if any
+guests at hotels enjoyed so much honor from porters, bell-boys, waiters,
+chambermaids and bootblacks as the Landers, for they gave richly in fees
+for every conceivable service which could be rendered them; they went out
+of their way to invent debts of gratitude to menials who had done nothing
+for them. He would make the boy who sold papers at the dining-room door
+keep the change, when he had been charged a profit of a hundred per cent.
+already; and she would let no driver who had plundered them according to
+the carriage tariff escape without something for himself.
+
+A sense of their munificence penetrated the clerks and proprietors with a
+just esteem for guests who always wanted the best of everything, and
+questioned no bill for extras. Mrs. Lander, in fact, who ruled these
+expenditures, had no knowledge of the value of things, and made her
+husband pay whatever was asked. Yet when they lived under their own roof
+they had lived simply, and Lander had got his money in an old-fashioned
+business way, and not in some delirious speculation such as leaves a man
+reckless of money afterwards. He had been first of all a tailor, and then
+he had gone into boys' and youths' clothing in a small way, and finally
+he had mastered this business and come out at the top, with his hands
+full. He invested his money so prosperously that the income for two
+elderly people, who had no children, and only a few outlying relations on
+his side, was far beyond their wants, or even their whims.
+
+She as a woman, who in spite of her bulk and the jellylike majesty with
+which she shook in her smoothly casing brown silks, as she entered hotel
+dining-rooms, and the severity with which she frowned over her fan down
+the length of the hotel drawing-rooms, betrayed more than her husband the
+commonness of their origin. She could not help talking, and her accent
+and her diction gave her away for a middle-class New England person of
+village birth and unfashionable sojourn in Boston. He, on the contrary,
+lurked about the hotels where they passed their days in a silence so
+dignified that when his verbs and nominatives seemed not to agree, you
+accused your own hearing. He was correctly dressed, as an elderly man
+should be, in the yesterday of the fashions, and he wore with
+impressiveness a silk hat whenever such a hat could be worn. A pair of
+drab cloth gaiters did much to identify him with an old school of
+gentlemen, not very definite in time or place. He had a full gray beard
+cut close, and he was in the habit of pursing his mouth a great deal. But
+he meant nothing by it, and his wife meant nothing by her frowning. They
+had no wish to subdue or overawe any one, or to pass for persons of
+social distinction. They really did not know what society was, and they
+were rather afraid of it than otherwise as they caught sight of it in
+their journeys and sojourns. They led a life of public seclusion, and
+dwelling forever amidst crowds, they were all in all to each other, and
+nothing to the rest of the world, just as they had been when they resided
+(as they would have said) on Pinckney street. In their own house they had
+never entertained, though they sometimes had company, in the style of the
+country town where Mrs. Lander grew up. As soon as she was released to
+the grandeur of hotel life, she expanded to the full measure of its
+responsibilities and privileges, but still without seeking to make it the
+basis of approach to society. Among the people who surrounded her, she
+had not so much acquaintance as her husband even, who talked so little
+that he needed none. She sometimes envied his ease in getting on with
+people when he chose; and his boldness in speaking to fellow guests and
+fellow travellers, if he really wanted anything. She wanted something of
+them all the time, she wanted their conversation and their companionship;
+but in her ignorance of the social arts she was thrown mainly upon the
+compassion of the chambermaids. She kept these talking as long as she
+could detain them in her rooms; and often fed them candy (which she ate
+herself with childish greed) to bribe them to further delays. If she was
+staying some days in a hotel, she sent for the house-keeper, and made all
+she could of her as a listener, and as soon as she settled herself for a
+week, she asked who was the best doctor in the place. With doctors she
+had no reserves, and she poured out upon them the history of her diseases
+and symptoms in an inexhaustible flow of statement, conjecture and
+misgiving, which was by no means affected by her profound and
+inexpugnable ignorance of the principles of health. From time to time she
+forgot which side her liver was on, but she had been doctored (as she
+called it) for all her organs, and she was willing to be doctored for any
+one of them that happened to be in the place where she fancied a present
+discomfort. She was not insensible to the claims which her husband's
+disorders had upon science, and she liked to end the tale of her own
+sufferings with some such appeal as: "I wish you could do something for
+Mr. Landa, too, docta." She made him take a little of each medicine that
+was left for her; but in her presence he always denied that there was
+anything the matter with him, though he was apt to follow the doctor out
+of the room, and get a prescription from him for some ailment which he
+professed not to believe in himself, but wanted to quiet Mrs. Lander's
+mind about.
+
+He rose early, both from long habit, and from the scant sleep of an
+elderly man; he could not lie in bed; but his wife always had her
+breakfast there and remained so long that the chambermaid had done up
+most of the other rooms and had leisure for talk with her. As soon as he
+was awake, he stole softly out and was the first in the dining-room for
+breakfast. He owned to casual acquaintance in moments of expansion that
+breakfast was his best meal, but he did what he could to make it his
+worst by beginning with oranges and oatmeal, going forward to beefsteak
+and fried potatoes, and closing with griddle cakes and syrup, washed down
+with a cup of cocoa, which his wife decided to be wholesomer than coffee.
+By the time he had finished such a repast, he crept out of the
+dining-room in a state of tension little short of anguish, which he
+confided to the sympathy of the bootblack in the washroom.
+
+He always went from having his shoes polished to get a toothpick at the
+clerk's desk; and at the Middlemount House, the morning after he had been
+that drive with Mrs. Lander, he lingered a moment with his elbows beside
+the register. "How about a buckboa'd?" he asked.
+
+"Something you can drive yourself"--the clerk professionally dropped his
+eye to the register--"Mr. Lander?"
+
+"Well, no, I guess not, this time," the little man returned, after a
+moment's reflection. "Know anything of a family named Claxon, down the
+road, here, a piece?" He twisted his head in the direction he meant.
+
+"This is my first season at Middlemount; but I guess Mr. Atwell will
+know." The clerk called to the landlord, who was smoking in his private
+room behind the office, and the landlord came out. The clerk repeated Mr.
+Lander's questions.
+
+"Pootty good kind of folks, I guess," said the landlord provisionally,
+through his cigar-smoke. "Man's a kind of univussal genius, but he's got
+a nice family of children; smaht as traps, all of 'em."
+
+"How about that oldest gul?" asked Mr. Lander.
+
+"Well, the'a," said the landlord, taking the cigar out of his mouth. "I
+think she's about the nicest little thing goin'. We've had her up he'e,
+to help out in a busy time, last summer, and she's got moo sense than
+guls twice as old. Takes hold like--lightnin'."
+
+"About how old did you say she was?"
+
+"Well, you've got me the'a, Mr. Landa; I guess I'll ask Mis' Atwell."
+
+"The'e's no hurry," said Lander. "That buckboa'd be round pretty soon?"
+he asked of the clerk.
+
+"Be right along now, Mr. Lander," said the clerk, soothingly. He stepped
+out to the platform that the teams drove up to from the stable, and came
+back to say that it was coming. "I believe you said you wanted something
+you could drive yourself?"
+
+"No, I didn't, young man," answered the elder sharply. But the next
+moment he added, "Come to think of it, I guess it's just as well. You
+needn't get me no driver. I guess I know the way well enough. You put me
+in a hitchin' strap."
+
+"All right, Mr. Lander," said the clerk, meekly.
+
+The landlord had caught the peremptory note in Lander's voice, and he
+came out of his room again to see that there was nothing going wrong.
+
+"It's all right," said Lander, and went out and got into his buckboard.
+
+"Same horse you had yesterday," said the young clerk. "You don't need to
+spare the whip."
+
+"I guess I can look out for myself," said Lander, and he shook the reins
+and gave the horse a smart cut, as a hint of what he might expect.
+
+The landlord joined the clerk in looking after the brisk start the horse
+made. "Not the way he set off with the old lady, yesterday," suggested
+the clerk.
+
+The landlord rolled his cigar round in his tubed lips. "I guess he's used
+to ridin' after a good hoss." He added gravely to the clerk, "You don't
+want to make very free with that man, Mr. Pane. He won't stan' it, and
+he's a class of custom that you want to cata to when it comes in your
+way. I suspicioned what he was when they came here and took the highest
+cost rooms without tu'nin' a haia. They're a class of custom that you
+won't get outside the big hotels in the big reso'ts. Yes, sir," said the
+landlord taking a fresh start, "they're them kind of folks that live the
+whole yea' round in hotels; no'th in summa, south in winta, and city
+hotels between times. They want the best their money can buy, and they
+got plenty of it. She"--he meant Mrs. Lander--"has been tellin' my wife
+how they do; she likes to talk a little betta than he doos; and I guess
+when it comes to society, they're away up, and they won't stun' any
+nonsense."
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+Lander came into his wife's room between ten and eleven o'clock, and
+found her still in bed, but with her half-finished breakfast on a tray
+before her. As soon as he opened the door she said, "I do wish you would
+take some of that heat-tonic of mine, Albe't, that the docta left for me
+in Boston. You'll find it in the upper right bureau box, the'a; and I
+know it'll be the very thing for you. It'll relieve you of that
+suffocatin' feeling that I always have, comin' up stars. Dea'! I don't
+see why they don't have an elevata; they make you pay enough; and I wish
+you'd get me a little more silva, so's't I can give to the chambamaid and
+the bell-boy; I do hate to be out of it. I guess you been up and out long
+ago. They did make that polonaise of mine too tight after all I said, and
+I've been thinkin' how I could get it alt'ed; but I presume there ain't a
+seamstress to be had around he'e for love or money. Well, now, that's
+right, Albe't; I'm glad to see you doin' it."
+
+Lander had opened the lid of the bureau box, and uncorked a bottle from
+it, and tilted this to his lips.
+
+"Don't take too much," she cautioned him, "or you'll lose the effects.
+When I take too much of a medicine, it's wo'se than nothing, as fah's I
+can make out. When I had that spell in Thomasville spring before last, I
+believe I should have been over it twice as quick if I had taken just
+half the medicine I did. You don't really feel anyways bad about the
+heat, do you, Albe't?"
+
+"I'm all right," said Lander. He put back the bottle in its place and sat
+down.
+
+Mrs. Lander lifted herself on her elbow and looked over at him. "Show me
+on the bottle how much you took."
+
+He got the bottle out again and showed her with his thumb nail a point
+which he chose at random.
+
+"Well, that was just about the dose for you," she said; and she sank down
+in bed again with the air of having used a final precaution. "You don't
+want to slow your heat up too quick."
+
+Lander did not put the bottle back this time. He kept it in his hand,
+with his thumb on the cork, and rocked it back and forth on his knees as
+he spoke. "Why don't you get that woman to alter it for you?"
+
+"What woman alta what?"
+
+"Your polonaise. The one whe'e we stopped yestaday."
+
+"Oh! Well, I've been thinkin' about that child, Albe't; I did before I
+went to sleep; and I don't believe I want to risk anything with her. It
+would be a ca'e," said Mrs. Lander with a sigh, "and I guess I don't want
+to take any moa ca'e than what I've got now. What makes you think she
+could alta my polonaise?"
+
+"Said she done dress-makin'," said Lander, doggedly.
+
+"You ha'n't been the'a?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"You didn't say anything to her about her daughta?"
+
+"Yes, I did," said Lander.
+
+"Well, you ce'tainly do equal anything," said his wife. She lay still
+awhile, and then she roused herself with indignant energy. "Well, then, I
+can tell you what, Albe't Landa: you can go right straight and take back
+everything you said. I don't want the child, and I won't have her. I've
+got care enough to worry me now, I should think; and we should have her
+whole family on our hands, with that shiftless father of hers, and the
+whole pack of her brothas and sistas. What made you think I wanted you to
+do such a thing?"
+
+"You wanted me to do it last night. Wouldn't ha'dly let me go to bed."
+
+"Yes! And how many times have I told you nova to go off and do a thing
+that I wanted you to, unless you asked me if I did? Must I die befo'e you
+can find out that there is such a thing as talkin', and such anotha thing
+as doin'? You wouldn't get yourself into half as many scrapes if you
+talked more and done less, in this wo'ld." Lander rose.
+
+"Wait! Hold on! What are you going to say to the pooa thing? She'll be so
+disappointed!"
+
+"I don't know as I shall need to say anything myself," answered the
+little man, at his dryest. "Leave that to you."
+
+"Well, I can tell you," returned his wife, "I'm not goin' nea' them
+again; and if you think--What did you ask the woman, anyway?"
+
+"I asked her," he said, "if she wanted to let the gul come and see you
+about some sewing you had to have done, and she said she did."
+
+"And you didn't speak about havin' her come to live with us?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, why in the land didn't you say so before, Albe't?"
+
+"You didn't ask me. What do you want I should say to her now?"
+
+"Say to who?"
+
+"The gul. She's down in the pahlor, waitin'."
+
+"Well, of all the men!" cried Mrs. Lander. But she seemed to find
+herself, upon reflection, less able to cope with Lander personally than
+with the situation generally. "Will you send her up, Albe't?" she asked,
+very patiently, as if he might be driven to further excesses, if not
+delicately handled. As soon as he had gone out of the room she wished
+that she had told him to give her time to dress and have her room put in
+order, before he sent the child up; but she could only make the best of
+herself in bed with a cap and a breakfast jacket, arranged with the help
+of a handglass. She had to get out of bed to put her other clothes away
+in the closet and she seized the chance to push the breakfast tray out of
+the door, and smooth up the bed, while she composed her features and her
+ideas to receive her visitor. Both, from long habit rather than from any
+cause or reason, were of a querulous cast, and her ordinary tone was a
+snuffle expressive of deep-seated affliction. She was at once plaintive
+and voluable, and in moments of excitement her need of freeing her mind
+was so great that she took herself into her own confidence, and found a
+more sympathetic listener than when she talked to her husband. As she now
+whisked about her room in her bed-gown with an activity not predicable of
+her age and shape, and finally plunged under the covering and drew it up
+to her chin with one hand while she pressed it out decorously over her
+person with the other, she kept up a rapid flow of lamentation and
+conjecture. "I do suppose he'll be right back with her before I'm half
+ready; and what the man was thinkin' of to do such a thing anyway, I
+don't know. I don't know as she'll notice much, comin' out of such a
+lookin' place as that, and I don't know as I need to care if she did. But
+if the'e's care anywhe's around, I presume I'm the one to have it. I
+presume I did take a fancy to her, and I guess I shall be glad to see how
+I like her now; and if he's only told her I want some sewin' done, I can
+scrape up something to let her carry home with her. It's well I keep my
+things where I can put my hand on 'em at a time like this, and I don't
+believe I shall sca'e the child, as it is. I do hope Albe't won't hang
+round half the day before he brings her; I like to have a thing ova."
+
+Lander wandered about looking for the girl through the parlors and the
+piazzas, and then went to the office to ask what had become of her.
+
+The landlord came out of his room at his question to the clerk. "Oh, I
+guess she's round in my wife's room, Mr. Landa. She always likes to see
+Clementina, and I guess they all do. She's a so't o' pet amongst 'em."
+
+"No hurry," said Lander, "I guess my wife ain't quite ready for her yet."
+
+"Well, she'll be right out, in a minute or so," said the landlord.
+
+The old man tilted his hat forward over his eyes, and went to sit on the
+veranda and look at the landscape while he waited. It was one of the
+loveliest landscapes in the mountains; the river flowed at the foot of an
+abrupt slope from the road before the hotel, stealing into and out of the
+valley, and the mountains, gray in the farther distance, were draped with
+folds of cloud hanging upon their flanks and tops. But Lander was tired
+of nearly all kinds of views and prospects, though he put' up with them,
+in his perpetual movement from place to place, in the same resignation
+that he suffered the limitations of comfort in parlor cars and sleepers,
+and the unwholesomeness of hotel tables. He was chained to the restless
+pursuit of an ideal not his own, but doomed to suffer for its
+impossibility as if he contrived each of his wife's disappointments from
+it. He did not philosophize his situation, but accepted it as in an order
+of Providence which it would be useless for him to oppose; though there
+were moments when he permitted himself to feel a modest doubt of its
+justice. He was aware that when he had a house of his own he was master
+in it, after a fashion, and that as long as he was in business he was in
+some sort of authority. He perceived that now he was a slave to the
+wishes of a mistress who did not know what she wanted, and that he was
+never farther from pleasing her than when he tried to do what she asked.
+He could not have told how all initiative had been taken from him, and he
+had fallen into the mere follower of a woman guided only by her whims,
+who had no object in life except to deprive it of all object. He felt no
+rancor toward her for this; he knew that she had a tender regard for him,
+and that she believed she was considering him first in her most selfish
+arrangements. He always hoped that sometime she would get tired of her
+restlessness, and be willing to settle down again in some stated place;
+and wherever it was, he meant to get into some kind of business again.
+Till this should happen he waited with an apathetic patience of which his
+present abeyance was a detail. He would hardly have thought it anything
+unfit, and certainly nothing surprising, that the landlady should have
+taken the young girl away from where he had left her, and then in the
+pleasure of talking with her, and finding her a centre of interest for
+the whole domestic force of the hotel, should have forgotten to bring her
+back.
+
+The Middlemount House had just been organized on the scale of a first
+class hotel, with prices that had risen a little in anticipation of the
+other improvements. The landlord had hitherto united in himself the
+functions of clerk and head waiter, but he had now got a senior, who was
+working his way through college, to take charge of the dining-room, and
+had put in the office a youth of a year's experience as under clerk at a
+city hotel. But he meant to relinquish no more authority than his wife
+who frankly kept the name as well as duty of house-keeper. It was in
+making her morning inspection of the dusting that she found Clementina in
+the parlor where Lander had told her to sit down till he should come for
+her.
+
+"Why, Clem!" she said, "I didn't know you! You have grown so! Youa folks
+all well? I decla'e you ah' quite a woman now," she added, as the girl
+stood up in her slender, graceful height. "You look as pretty as a pink
+in that hat. Make that dress youaself? Well, you do beat the witch! I
+want you should come to my room with me."
+
+Mrs. Atwell showered other questions and exclamations on the girl, who
+explained how she happened to be there, and said that she supposed she
+must stay where she was for fear Mr. Lander should come back and find her
+gone; but Mrs. Atwell overruled her with the fact that Mrs. Lander's
+breakfast had just gone up to her; and she made her come out and see the
+new features of the enlarged house-keeping. In the dining-room there were
+some of the waitresses who had been there the summer before, and
+recognitions of more or less dignity passed between them and Clementina.
+The place was now shut against guests, and the head-waiter was having it
+put in order for the one o'clock dinner. As they came near him, Mrs.
+Atwell introduced him to Clementina, and he behaved deferentially, as if
+she were some young lady visitor whom Mrs. Atwell was showing the
+improvements, but he seemed harassed and impatient, as if he were anxious
+about his duties, and eager to get at them again. He was a handsome
+little fellow, with hair lighter than Clementina's and a sanguine
+complexion, and the color coming and going.
+
+"He's smaht," said Mrs. Atwell, when they had left him--he held the
+dining-room door open for them, and bowed them out. "I don't know but he
+worries almost too much. That'll wear off when he gets things runnin' to
+suit him. He's pretty p'tic'la'. Now I'll show you how they've made the
+office over, and built in a room for Mr. Atwell behind it."
+
+The landlord welcomed Clementina as if she had been some acceptable class
+of custom, and when the tall young clerk came in to ask him something,
+and Mrs. Atwell said, "I want to introduce you to Miss Claxon, Mr. Fane,"
+the clerk smiled down upon her from the height of his smooth, acquiline
+young face, which he held bent encouragingly upon one side.
+
+"Now, I want you should come in and see where I live, a minute," said
+Mrs. Atwell. She took the girl from the clerk, and led her to the
+official housekeeper's room which she said had been prepared for her so
+that folks need not keep running to her in her private room where she
+wanted to be alone with her children, when she was there. "Why, you a'n't
+much moa than a child youaself, Clem, and here I be talkin' to you as if
+you was a mother in Israel. How old ah' you, this summa? Time does go
+so!"
+
+"I'm sixteen now," said Clementina, smiling.
+
+"You be? Well, I don't see why I say that, eitha! You're full lahge
+enough for your age, but not seein' you in long dresses before, I didn't
+realize your age so much. My, but you do all of you know how to do
+things!"
+
+"I'm about the only one that don't, Mrs. Atwell," said the girl. "If it
+hadn't been for mother, I don't believe I could have eva finished this
+dress." She began to laugh at something passing in her mind, and Mrs.
+Atwell laughed too, in sympathy, though she did not know what at till
+Clementina said, "Why, Mrs. Atwell, nea'ly the whole family wo'ked on
+this dress. Jim drew the patte'n of it from the dress of one of the summa
+boa'das that he took a fancy to at the Centa, and fatha cut it out, and I
+helped motha make it. I guess every one of the children helped a little."
+
+"Well, it's just as I said, you can all of you do things," said Mrs.
+Atwell. "But I guess you ah' the one that keeps 'em straight. What did
+you say Mr. Landa said his wife wanted of you?"
+
+"He said some kind of sewing that motha could do."
+
+"Well, I'll tell you what! Now, if she ha'n't really got anything that
+your motha'll want you to help with, I wish you'd come here again and
+help me. I tuned my foot, here, two-three weeks back, and I feel it,
+times, and I should like some one to do about half my steppin' for me. I
+don't want to take you away from her, but IF. You sha'n't go int' the
+dinin'room, or be under anybody's oddas but mine. Now, will you?"
+
+"I'll see, Mrs. Atwell. I don't like to say anything till I know what
+Mrs. Landa wants."
+
+"Well, that's right. I decla'e, you've got moa judgment! That's what I
+used to say about you last summa to my husband: she's got judgment. Well,
+what's wanted?" Mrs. Atwell spoke to her husband, who had opened her door
+and looked in, and she stopped rocking, while she waited his answer.
+
+"I guess you don't want to keep Clementina from Mr. Landa much longa.
+He's settin' out there on the front piazza waitin' for her."
+
+"Well, the'a!" cried Mrs. Atwell. "Ain't that just like me? Why didn't
+you tell me sooner, Alonzo? Don't you forgit what I said, Clem!"
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+Mrs. Lander had taken twice of a specific for what she called her
+nerve-fag before her husband came with Clementina, and had rehearsed
+aloud many of the things she meant to say to the girl. In spite of her
+preparation, they were all driven out of her head when Clementina
+actually appeared, and gave her a bow like a young birch's obeisance in
+the wind.
+
+"Take a chaia," said Lander, pushing her one, and the girl tilted over
+toward him, before she sank into it. He went out of the room, and left
+Mrs. Lander to deal with the problem alone. She apologized for being in
+bed, but Clementina said so sweetly, "Mr. Landa told me you were not
+feeling very well, 'm," that she began to be proud of her ailments, and
+bragged of them at length, and of the different doctors who had treated
+her for them. While she talked she missed one thing or another, and
+Clementina seemed to divine what it was she wanted, and got it for her,
+with a gentle deference which made the elder feel her age cushioned by
+the girl's youth. When she grew a little heated from the interest she
+took in her personal annals, and cast off one of the folds of her bed
+clothing, Clementina got her a fan, and asked her if she should put up
+one of the windows a little.
+
+"How you do think of things!" said Mrs. Lander. "I guess I will let you.
+I presume you get used to thinkin' of othas in a lahge family like youas.
+I don't suppose they could get along without you very well," she
+suggested.
+
+"I've neva been away except last summa, for a little while."
+
+"And where was you then?"
+
+"I was helping Mrs. Atwell."
+
+"Did you like it?"
+
+"I don't know," said Clementina. "It's pleasant to be whe'e things ah'
+going on."
+
+"Yes--for young folks," said Mrs. Lander, whom the going on of things had
+long ceased to bring pleasure.
+
+"It's real nice at home, too," said Clementina. "We have very good
+times--evenings in the winta; in the summer it's very nice in the woods,
+around there. It's safe for the children, and they enjoy it, and fatha
+likes to have them. Motha don't ca'e so much about it. I guess she'd
+ratha have the house fixed up more, and the place. Fatha's going to do it
+pretty soon. He thinks the'e's time enough."
+
+"That's the way with men," said Mrs. Lander. "They always think the's
+time enough; but I like to have things over and done with. What chuhch do
+you 'tend?"
+
+"Well, there isn't any but the Episcopal," Clementina answered. "I go to
+that, and some of the children go to the Sunday School. I don't believe
+fatha ca'es very much for going to chuhch, but he likes Mr. Richling;
+he's the recta. They take walks in the woods; and they go up the
+mountains togetha."
+
+"They want," said Mrs. Lander, severely, "to be ca'eful how they drink of
+them cold brooks when they're heated. Mr. Richling a married man?"
+
+"Oh, yes'm! But they haven't got any family."
+
+"If I could see his wife, I sh'd caution her about lettin' him climb
+mountains too much. A'n't your father afraid he'll ovado?"
+
+"I don't know. He thinks he can't be too much in the open air on the
+mountains."
+
+"Well, he may not have the same complaint as Mr. Landa; but I know if I
+was to climb a mountain,' it would lay me up for a yea'."
+
+The girl did not urge anything against this conviction. She smiled
+politely and waited patiently for the next turn Mrs. Lander's talk should
+take, which was oddly enough toward the business Clementina had come
+upon.
+
+"I declare I most forgot about my polonaise. Mr. Landa said your motha
+thought she could do something to it for me."
+
+"Yes'm."
+
+"Well, I may as well let you see it. If you'll reach into that fuhthest
+closet, you'll find it on the last uppa hook on the right hand, and if
+you'll give it to me, I'll show you what I want done. Don't mind the
+looks of that closet; I've just tossed my things in, till I could get a
+little time and stren'th to put 'em in odda."
+
+Clementina brought the polonaise to Mrs. Lander, who sat up and spread it
+before her on the bed, and had a happy half hour in telling the girl
+where she had bought the material and where she had it made up, and how
+it came home just as she was going away, and she did not find out that it
+was all wrong till a week afterwards when she tried it on. By the end of
+this time the girl had commended herself so much by judicious and
+sympathetic assent, that Mrs. Lander learned with a shock of
+disappointment that her mother expected her to bring the garment home
+with her, where Mrs. Lander was to come and have it fitted over for the
+alterations she wanted made.
+
+"But I supposed, from what Mr. Landa said, that your motha would come
+here and fit me!" she lamented.
+
+"I guess he didn't undastand, 'm. Motha doesn't eva go out to do wo'k,"
+said Clementina gently but firmly.
+
+"Well, I might have known Mr. Landa would mix it up, if it could be
+mixed;" Mrs. Lander's sense of injury was aggravated by her suspicion
+that he had brought the girl in the hope of pleasing her, and confirming
+her in the wish to have her with them; she was not a woman who liked to
+have her way in spite of herself; she wished at every step to realize
+that she was taking it, and that no one else was taking it for her.
+
+"Well," she said dryly, "I shall have to see about it. I'm a good deal of
+an invalid, and I don't know as I could go back and fo'th to try on. I'm
+moa used to havin' the things brought to me."
+
+"Yes'm," said Clementina. She moved a little from the bed, on her way to
+the door, to be ready for Mrs. Lander in leave-taking.
+
+"I'm real sorry," said Mrs. Lander. "I presume it's a disappointment for
+you, too."
+
+"Oh, not at all," answered Clementina. "I'm sorry we can't do the wo'k
+he'a; but I know mocha wouldn't like to. Good-mo'ning,'m!"
+
+"No, no! Don't go yet a minute! Won't you just give me my hand bag off
+the bureau the'a?" Mrs. Lander entreated, and when the girl gave her the
+bag she felt about among the bank-notes which she seemed to have loose in
+it, and drew out a handful of them without regard to their value. "He'a!"
+she said, and she tried to put the notes into Clementina's hand, "I want
+you should get yourself something."
+
+The girl shrank back. "Oh, no'm," she said, with an effect of seeming to
+know that her refusal would hurt, and with the wish to soften it.
+"I--couldn't; indeed I couldn't."
+
+"Why couldn't you? Now you must! If I can't let you have the wo'k the way
+you want, I don't think it's fair, and you ought to have the money for it
+just the same."
+
+Clementina shook her head smiling. "I don't believe motha would like to
+have me take it."
+
+"Oh, now, pshaw!" said Mrs. Lander, inadequately. "I want you should take
+this for youaself; and if you don't want to buy anything to wea', you can
+get something to fix your room up with. Don't you be afraid of robbin'
+us. Land! We got moa money! Now you take this."
+
+Mrs. Lander reached the money as far toward Clementina as she could and
+shook it in the vehemence of her desire.
+
+"Thank you, I couldn't take it," Clementina persisted. "I'm afraid I must
+be going; I guess I must bid you good-mo'ning."
+
+"Why, I believe the child's sca'ed of me! But you needn't be. Don't you
+suppose I know how you feel? You set down in that chai'a there, and I'll
+tell you how you feel. I guess we've been pooa, too--I don't mean
+anything that a'n't exactly right--and I guess I've had the same
+feelin's. You think it's demeanin' to you to take it. A'n't that it?"
+Clementina sank provisionally upon the edge of the chair. "Well, it did
+use to be so consid'ed. But it's all changed, nowadays. We travel pretty
+nee' the whole while, Mr. Lander and me, and we see folks everywhere, and
+it a'n't the custom to refuse any moa. Now, a'n't there any little thing
+for your own room, there in your nice new house? Or something your
+motha's got her heat set on? Or one of your brothas? My, if you don't
+have it, some one else will! Do take it!"
+
+The girl kept slipping toward the door. "I shouldn't know what to tell
+them, when I got home. They would think I must be--out of my senses."
+
+"I guess you mean they'd think I was. Now, listen to me a minute!" Mrs.
+Lander persisted.
+
+"You just take this money, and when you get home, you tell your mother
+every word about it, and if she says, you bring it right straight back to
+me. Now, can't you do that?"
+
+"I don't know but I can," Clementina faltered. "Well, then take it!" Mrs.
+Lander put the bills into her hand but she did not release her at once.
+She pulled Clementina down and herself up till she could lay her other
+arm on her neck. "I want you should let me kiss you. Will you?"
+
+"Why, certainly," said Clementina, and she kissed the old woman.
+
+"You tell your mother I'm comin' to see her before I go; and I guess,"
+said Mrs. Lander in instant expression of the idea that came into her
+mind, "we shall be goin' pretty soon, now."
+
+"Yes'm," said Clementina.
+
+She went out, and shortly after Lander came in with a sort of hopeful
+apathy in his face.
+
+Mrs. Lander turned her head on her pillow, and so confronted him.
+"Albe't, what made you want me to see that child?"
+
+Lander must have perceived that his wife meant business, and he came to
+it at once. "I thought you might take a fancy to her, and get her to come
+and live with us."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"We're both of us gettin' pretty well on, and you'd ought to have
+somebody to look after you if--I'm not around. You want somebody that can
+do for you; and keep you company, and read to you, and talk to you--well,
+moa like a daughta than a suvvant--somebody that you'd get attached to,
+maybe--"
+
+"And don't you see," Mrs. Lander broke out severely upon him, "what a
+ca'e that would be? Why, it's got so already that I can't help thinkin'
+about her the whole while, and if I got attached to her I'd have her on
+my mind day and night, and the moa she done for me the more I should be
+tewin' around to do for her. I shouldn't have any peace of my life any
+moa. Can't you see that?"
+
+"I guess if you see it, I don't need to," said Lander.
+
+"Well, then, I want you shouldn't eva mention her to me again. I've had
+the greatest escape! But I've got her off home, and I've give her money
+enough! had a time with her about it--so that they won't feel as if we'd
+made 'em trouble for nothing, and now I neva want to hear of her again. I
+don't want we should stay here a great while longer; I shall be frettin'
+if I'm in reach of her, and I shan't get any good of the ai'a. Will you
+promise?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, then!" Mrs. Lander turned her face upon the pillow again in the
+dramatization of her exhaustion; but she was not so far gone that she was
+insensible to the possible interest that a light rap at the door
+suggested. She once more twisted her head in that direction and called,
+"Come in!"
+
+The door opened and Clementina came in. She advanced to the bedside
+smiling joyously, and put the money Mrs. Lander had given her down upon
+the counterpane.
+
+"Why, you haven't been home, child?"
+
+"No'm," said Clementina, breathlessly. "But I couldn't take it. I knew
+they wouldn't want me to, and I thought you'd like it better if I just
+brought it back myself. Good-mo'ning." She slipped out of the door. Mrs.
+Lander swept the bank-notes from the coverlet and pulled it over her
+head, and sent from beneath it a stifled wail. "Now we got to go! And
+it's all youa fault, Albe't."
+
+Lander took the money from the floor, and smoothed each bill out, and
+then laid them in a neat pile on the corner of the bureau. He sighed
+profoundly but left the room without an effort to justify himself.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+The Landers had been gone a week before Clementina's mother decided that
+she could spare her to Mrs. Atwell for a while. It was established that
+she was not to serve either in the dining-room or the carving room; she
+was not to wash dishes or to do any part of the chamber work, but to
+carry messages and orders for the landlady, and to save her steps, when
+she wished to see the head-waiter, or the head-cook; or to make an excuse
+or a promise to some of the lady-boarders; or to send word to Mr. Atwell
+about the buying, or to communicate with the clerk about rooms taken or
+left.
+
+She had a good deal of dignity of her own and such a gravity in the
+discharge of her duties that the chef, who was a middle-aged Yankee with
+grown girls of his own, liked to pretend that it was Mrs. Atwell herself
+who was talking with him, and to discover just as she left him that it
+was Clementina. He called her the Boss when he spoke of her to others in
+her hearing, and he addressed her as Boss when he feigned to find that it
+was not Mrs. Atwell. She did not mind that in him, and let the chef have
+his joke as if it were not one. But one day when the clerk called her
+Boss she merely looked at him without speaking, and made him feel that he
+had taken a liberty which he must not repeat. He was a young man who much
+preferred a state of self-satisfaction to humiliation of any sort, and
+after he had endured Clementina's gaze as long as he could, he said,
+"Perhaps you don't allow anybody but the chef to call you that?"
+
+She did not answer, but repeated the message Mrs. Atwell had given her
+for him, and went away.
+
+It seemed to him undue that a person who exchanged repartees with the
+young lady boarders across his desk, when they came many times a day to
+look at the register, or to ask for letters, should remain snubbed by a
+girl who still wore her hair in a braid; but he was an amiable youth, and
+he tried to appease her by little favors and services, instead of trying
+to bully her.
+
+He was great friends with the head-waiter, whom he respected as a college
+student, though for the time being he ranked the student socially. He had
+him in behind the frame of letter-boxes, which formed a sort of little
+private room for him, and talked with him at such hours of the forenoon
+and the late evening as the student was off duty. He found comfort in the
+student's fretful strength, which expressed itself in the pugnacious
+frown of his hot-looking young face, where a bright sorrel mustache was
+beginning to blaze on a short upper lip.
+
+Fane thought himself a good-looking fellow, and he regarded his figure
+with pleasure, as it was set off by the suit of fine gray check that he
+wore habitually; but he thought Gregory's educational advantages told in
+his face. His own education had ended at a commercial college, where he
+acquired a good knowledge of bookkeeping, and the fine business hand he
+wrote, but where it seemed to him sometimes that the earlier learning of
+the public school had been hermetically sealed within him by several
+coats of mathematical varnish. He believed that he had once known a
+number of things that he no longer knew, and that he had not always been
+so weak in his double letters as he presently found himself.
+
+One night while Gregory sat on a high stool and rested his elbow on the
+desk before it, with his chin in his hand, looking down upon Fane, who
+sprawled sadly in his chair, and listening to the last dance playing in
+the distant parlor, Fane said. "Now, what'll you bet that they won't
+every one of 'em come and look for a letter in her box before she goes to
+bed? I tell you, girls are queer, and there's no place like a hotel to
+study 'em."
+
+"I don't want to study them," said Gregory, harshly.
+
+"Think Greek's more worth your while, or know 'em well enough already?"
+Fane suggested.
+
+"No, I don't know them at all," said the student.
+
+"I don't believe," urged the clerk, as if it were relevant, "that there's
+a girl in the house that you couldn't marry, if you gave your mind to
+it."
+
+Gregory twitched irascibly. "I don't want to marry them."
+
+"Pretty cheap lot, you mean? Well, I don't know."
+
+"I don't mean that," retorted the student. "But I've got other things to
+think of."
+
+"Don't you believe," the clerk modestly urged, "that it is natural for a
+man--well, a young man--to think about girls?"
+
+"I suppose it is."
+
+"And you don't consider it wrong?"
+
+"How, wrong?"
+
+"Well, a waste of time. I don't know as I always think about wanting to
+marry 'em, or be in love, but I like to let my mind run on 'em. There's
+something about a girl that, well, you don't know what it is, exactly.
+Take almost any of 'em," said the clerk, with an air of inductive
+reasoning. "Take that Claxon girl, now for example, I don't know what it
+is about her. She's good-looking, I don't deny that; and she's got pretty
+manners, and she's as graceful as a bird. But it a'n't any one of 'em,
+and it don't seem to be all of 'em put together that makes you want to
+keep your eyes on her the whole while. Ever noticed what a nice little
+foot she's got? Or her hands?"
+
+"No," said the student.
+
+"I don't mean that she ever tries to show them off; though I know some
+girls that would. But she's not that kind. She ain't much more than a
+child, and yet you got to treat her just like a woman. Noticed the kind
+of way she's got?"
+
+"No," said the student, with impatience.
+
+The clerk mused with a plaintive air for a moment before he spoke. "Well,
+it's something as if she'd been trained to it, so that she knew just the
+right thing to do, every time, and yet I guess it's nature. You know how
+the chef always calls her the Boss? That explains it about as well as
+anything, and I presume that's what my mind was running on, the other
+day, when I called her Boss. But, my! I can't get anywhere near her
+since!"
+
+"It serves you right," said Gregory. "You had no business to tease her."
+
+"Now, do you think it was teasing? I did, at first, and then again it
+seemed to me that I came out with the word because it seemed the right
+one. I presume I couldn't explain that to her."
+
+"It wouldn't be easy."
+
+"I look upon her," said Fane, with an effect of argument in the sweetness
+of his smile, "just as I would upon any other young lady in the house. Do
+you spell apology with one p or two?"
+
+"One," said the student, and the clerk made a minute on a piece of paper.
+
+"I feel badly for the girl. I don't want her to think I was teasing her
+or taking any sort of liberty with her. Now, would you apologize to her,
+if you was in my place, and would you write a note, or just wait your
+chance and speak to her?"
+
+Gregory got down from his stool with a disdainful laugh, and went out of
+the place. "You make me sick, Fane," he said.
+
+The last dance was over, and the young ladies who had been waltzing with
+one another, came out of the parlor with gay cries and laughter, like
+summer girls who had been at a brilliant hop, and began to stray down the
+piazzas, and storm into the office. Several of them fluttered up to the
+desk, as the clerk had foretold, and looked for letters in the boxes
+bearing their initials. They called him out, and asked if he had not
+forgotten something for them. He denied it with a sad, wise smile, and
+then they tried to provoke him to a belated flirtation, in lack of other
+material, but he met their overtures discreetly, and they presently said,
+Well, they guessed they must go; and went. Fane turned to encounter
+Gregory, who had come in by a side door.
+
+"Fane, I want to beg your pardon. I was rude to you just now."
+
+"Oh, no! Oh, no!" the clerk protested. "That's all right. Sit down a
+while, can't you, and talk with a fellow. It's early, yet."
+
+"No, I can't. I just wanted to say I was sorry I spoke in that way.
+Good-night. Is there anything in particular?"
+
+"No; good-night. I was just wondering about--that girl."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Gregory had an habitual severity with his own behavior which did not stop
+there, but was always passing on to the behavior of others; and his days
+went by in alternate offence and reparation to those he had to do with.
+He had to do chiefly with the dining-room girls, whose susceptibilities
+were such that they kept about their work bathed in tears or suffused
+with anger much of the time. He was not only good-looking but he was a
+college student, and their feelings were ready to bud toward him in
+tender efflorescence, but he kept them cropped and blighted by his curt
+words and impatient manner. Some of them loved him for the hurts he did
+them, and some hated him, but all agreed fondly or furiously that he was
+too cross for anything. They were mostly young school-mistresses, and
+whether they were of a soft and amorous make, or of a forbidding temper,
+they knew enough in spite of their hurts to value a young fellow whose
+thoughts were not running upon girls all the time. Women, even in their
+spring-time, like men to treat them as if they had souls as well as
+hearts, and it was a saving grace in Gregory that he treated them all,
+the silliest of them, as if they had souls. Very likely they responded
+more with their hearts than with their souls, but they were aware that
+this was not his fault.
+
+The girls that waited at table saw that he did not distinguish in manner
+between them and the girls whom they served. The knot between his brows
+did not dissolve in the smiling gratitude of the young ladies whom he
+preceded to their places, and pulled out their chairs for, any more than
+in the blandishments of a waitress who thanked him for some correction.
+
+They owned when he had been harshest that no one could be kinder if he
+saw a girl really trying, or more patient with well meaning stupidity,
+but some things fretted him, and he was as apt to correct a girl in her
+grammar as in her table service. Out of work hours, if he met any of
+them, he recognized them with deferential politeness; but he shunned
+occasions of encounter with them as distinctly as he avoided the ladies
+among the hotel guests. Some of the table girls pitied his loneliness,
+and once they proposed that he should read to them on the back piazza in
+the leisure of their mid-afternoons. He said that he had to keep up with
+his studies in all the time he could get; he treated their request with
+grave civility, but they felt his refusal to be final.
+
+He was seen very little about the house outside of his own place and
+function, and he was scarcely known to consort with anyone but Fane, who
+celebrated his high sense of the honor to the lady-guests; but if any of
+these would have been willing to show Gregory that they considered his
+work to get an education as something that redeemed itself from discredit
+through the nobility of its object, he gave them no chance to do so.
+
+The afternoon following their talk about Clementina, Gregory looked in
+for Fane behind the letter boxes, but did not find him, and the girl
+herself came round from the front to say that he was out buying, but
+would be back now, very soon; it was occasionally the clerk's business to
+forage among the farmers for the lighter supplies, such as eggs, and
+butter, and poultry, and this was the buying that Clementina meant. "Very
+well, I'll wait here for him a little while," Gregory answered.
+
+"So do," said Clementina, in a formula which she thought polite; but she
+saw the frown with which Gregory took a Greek book from his pocket, and
+she hurried round in front of the boxes again, wondering how she could
+have displeased him. She put her face in sight a moment to explain, "I
+have got to be here and give out the lettas till Mr. Fane gets back," and
+then withdrew it. He tried to lose himself in his book, but her tender
+voice spoke from time to time beyond the boxes, and Gregory kept
+listening for Clementina to say, "No'm, there a'n't. Perhaps, the'e'll be
+something the next mail," and "Yes'm, he'e's one, and I guess this paper
+is for some of youa folks, too."
+
+Gregory shut his book with a sudden bang at last and jumped to his feet,
+to go away.
+
+The girl came running round the corner of the boxes. "Oh! I thought
+something had happened."
+
+"No, nothing has happened," said Gregory, with a sort of violence; which
+was heightened by a sense of the rings and tendrils of loose hair
+springing from the mass that defined her pretty head. "Don't you know
+that you oughtn't to say 'No'm' and 'Yes'm?"' he demanded, bitterly, and
+then he expected to see the water come into her eyes, or the fire into
+her cheeks.
+
+Clementina merely looked interested. "Did I say that? I meant to say Yes,
+ma'am and No, ma'am; but I keep forgetting."
+
+"You oughtn't to say anything!" Gregory answered savagely, "Just say Yes,
+and No, and let your voice do the rest."
+
+"Oh!" said the girl, with the gentlest abeyance, as if charmed with the
+novelty of the idea. "I should be afraid it wasn't polite."
+
+Gregory took an even brutal tone. It seemed to him as if he were forced
+to hurt her feelings. But his words, in spite of his tone, were not
+brutal; they might have even been thought flattering. "The politeness is
+in the manner, and you don't need anything but your manner."
+
+"Do you think so, truly?" asked the girl joyously. "I should like to try
+it once!"
+
+He frowned again. "I've no business to criticise your way of speaking."
+
+"Oh yes'm--yes, ma'am; sir, I mean; I mean, Oh, yes, indeed! The'a! It
+does sound just as well, don't it?" Clementina laughed in triumph at the
+outcome of her efforts, so that a reluctant visional smile came upon
+Gregory's face, too. "I'm very mach obliged to you, Mr. Gregory--I shall
+always want to do it, if it's the right way."
+
+"It's the right way," said Gregory coldly.
+
+"And don't they," she urged, "don't they really say Sir and Ma'am,
+whe'e--whe'e you came from?"
+
+He said gloomily, "Not ladies and gentlemen. Servants do. Waiters--like
+me." He inflicted this stab to his pride with savage fortitude and he
+bore with self-scorn the pursuit of her innocent curiosity.
+
+"But I thought--I thought you was a college student."
+
+"Were," Gregory corrected her, involuntarily, and she said, "Were, I
+mean."
+
+"I'm a student at college, and here I'm a servant! It's all right!" he
+said with a suppressed gritting of the teeth; and he added, "My Master
+was the servant of the meanest, and I must--I beg your pardon for
+meddling with your manner of speaking--"
+
+"Oh, I'm very much obliged to you; indeed I am. And I shall not care if
+you tell me of anything that's out of the way in my talking," said
+Clementina, generously.
+
+"Thank you; I think I won't wait any longer for Mr. Fane."
+
+"Why, I'm su'a he'll be back very soon, now. I'll try not to disturb you
+any moa."
+
+Gregory turned from taking some steps towards the door, and said, "I wish
+you would tell Mr. Fane something."
+
+"For you? Why, suttainly!"
+
+"No. For you. Tell him that it's all right about his calling you Boss."
+
+The indignant color came into Clementina's face. "He had no business to
+call me that."
+
+"No; and he doesn't think he had, now. He's truly sorry for it."
+
+"I'll see," said Clementina.
+
+She had not seen by the time Fane got back. She received his apologies
+for being gone so long coldly, and went away to Mrs. Atwell, whom she
+told what had passed between Gregory and herself.
+
+"Is he truly so proud?" she asked.
+
+"He's a very good young man," said Mrs. Atwell, "but I guess he's proud.
+He can't help it, but you can see he fights against it. If I was you,
+Clem, I wouldn't say anything to the guls about it."
+
+"Oh, no'm--I mean, no, indeed. I shouldn't think of it. But don't you
+think that was funny, his bringing in Christ, that way?"
+
+"Well, he's going to be a minister, you know."
+
+"Is he really?" Clementina was a while silent. At last she said, "Don't
+you think Mr. Gregory has a good many freckles?"
+
+"Well, them red-complected kind is liable to freckle," said Mrs. Atwell,
+judicially.
+
+After rather a long pause for both of them, Clementina asked, "Do you
+think it would be nice for me to ask Mr. Gregory about things, when I
+wasn't suttain?"
+
+"Like what?"
+
+"Oh-wo'ds, and pronunciation; and books to read."
+
+"Why, I presume he'd love to have you. He's always correctin' the guls; I
+see him take up a book one day, that one of 'em was readin', and when she
+as't him about it, he said it was rubbage. I guess you couldn't have a
+betta guide."
+
+"Well, that was what I was thinking. I guess I sha'n't do it, though. I
+sh'd neva have the courage." Clementina laughed and then fell rather
+seriously silent again.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+One day the shoeman stopped his wagon at the door of the helps' house,
+and called up at its windows, "Well, guls, any of you want to git a numba
+foua foot into a numba two shoe, to-day? Now's youa chance, but you got
+to be quick abort it. The'e ha'r't but just so many numba two shoes made,
+and the wohld's full o' numba foua feet."
+
+The windows filled with laughing faces at the first sound of the
+shoeman's ironical voice; and at sight of his neat wagon, with its
+drawers at the rear and sides, and its buggy-hood over the seat where the
+shoeman lounged lazily holding the reins, the girls flocked down the
+stairs, and out upon the piazza where the shoe man had handily ranged his
+vehicle.
+
+They began to ask him if he had not this thing and that, but he said with
+firmness, "Nothin' but shoes, guls. I did carry a gen'l line, one while,
+of what you may call ankle-wea', such as spats, and stockin's, and
+gaitas, but I nova did like to speak of such things befoa ladies, and now
+I stick ex-elusively to shoes. You know that well enough, guls; what's
+the use?"
+
+He kept a sober face amidst the giggling that his words aroused,--and let
+his voice sink into a final note of injury.
+
+"Well, if you don't want any shoes, to-day, I guess I must be goin'." He
+made a feint of jerking his horse's reins, but forebore at the entreaties
+that went up from the group of girls.
+
+"Yes, we do!" "Let's see them!" "Oh, don't go!" they chorused in an
+equally histrionic alarm, and the shoeman got down from his perch to show
+his wares.
+
+"Now, the'a, ladies," he said, pulling out one of the drawers, and
+dangling a pair of shoes from it by the string that joined their heels,
+"the'e's a shoe that looks as good as any Sat'd'y-night shoe you eva see.
+Looks as han'some as if it had a pasteboa'd sole and was split stock all
+through, like the kind you buy for a dollar at the store, and kick out in
+the fust walk you take with your fella--'r some other gul's fella, I
+don't ca'e which. And yet that's an honest shoe, made of the best of
+material all the way through, and in the best manna. Just look at that
+shoe, ladies; ex-amine it; sha'n't cost you a cent, and I'll pay for youa
+lost time myself, if any complaint is made." He began to toss pairs of
+the shoes into the crowd of girls, who caught them from each other before
+they fell, with hysterical laughter, and ran away with them in-doors to
+try them on. "This is a shoe that I'm intaducin'," the shoeman went on,
+"and every pair is warranted--warranted numba two; don't make any otha
+size, because we want to cata to a strictly numba two custom. If any lady
+doos feel 'em a little mite too snug, I'm sorry for her, but I can't do
+anything to help her in this shoe."
+
+"Too snug!" came a gay voice from in-doors. "Why my foot feels puffectly
+lost in this one."
+
+"All right," the shoeman shouted back. "Call it a numba one shoe and then
+see if you can't find that lost foot in it, some'eres. Or try a little
+flour, and see if it won't feel more at home. I've hea'd of a shoe that
+give that sensation of looseness by not goin' on at all."
+
+The girls exulted joyfully together at the defeat of their companion, but
+the shoeman kept a grave face, while he searched out other sorts of shoes
+and slippers, and offered them, or responded to some definite demand with
+something as near like as he could hope to make serve. The tumult of talk
+and laughter grew till the chef put his head out of the kitchen door, and
+then came sauntering across the grass to the helps' piazza. At the same
+time the clerk suffered himself to be lured from his post by the
+excitement. He came and stood beside the chef, who listened to the
+shoeman's flow of banter with a longing to take his chances with him.
+
+"That's a nice hawss," he said. "What'll you take for him?"
+
+"Why, hello!" said the shoeman, with an eye that dwelt upon the chef's
+official white cap and apron, "You talk English, don't you? Fust off, I
+didn't know but it was one of them foreign dukes come ova he'a to marry
+some oua poor millionai'es daughtas." The girls cried out for joy, and
+the chef bore their mirth stoically, but not without a personal relish of
+the shoeman's up-and-comingness. "Want a hawss?" asked the shoeman with
+an air of business. "What'll you give?"
+
+"I'll give you thutty-seven dollas and a half," said the chef.
+
+"Sorry I can't take it. That hawss is sellin' at present for just one
+hundred and fifty dollas."
+
+"Well," said the chef, "I'll raise you a dolla and a quahta. Say
+thutty-eight and seventy-five."
+
+"W-ell now, you're gittin' up among the figgas where you're liable to own
+a hawss. You just keep right on a raisin' me, while I sell these ladies
+some shoes, and maybe you'll hit it yit, 'fo'e night."
+
+The girls were trying on shoes on every side now, and they had dispensed
+with the formality of going in-doors for the purpose. More than one put
+out her foot to the clerk for his opinion of the fit, and the shoeman was
+mingling with the crowd, testing with his hand, advising from his
+professional knowledge, suggesting, urging, and in some cases artfully
+agreeing with the reluctance shown.
+
+"This man," said the chef, indicating Fane, "says you can tell moa lies
+to the square inch than any man out o' Boston."
+
+"Doos he?" asked the shoeman, turning with a pair of high-heeled bronze
+slippers in his hand from the wagon. "Well, now, if I stood as nea' to
+him as you do, I believe I sh'd hit him."
+
+"Why, man, I can't dispute him!" said the chef, and as if he had now at
+last scored a point, he threw back his head and laughed. When he brought
+down his head again, it was to perceive the approach of Clementina.
+"Hello," he said for her to hear, "he'e comes the Boss. Well, I guess I
+must be goin'," he added, in mock anxiety. "I'm a goin', Boss, I'm a
+goin'."
+
+Clementina ignored him. "Mr. Atwell wants to see you a moment, Mr. Fane,"
+she said to the clerk.
+
+"All right, Miss Claxon," Fane answered, with the sorrowful respect which
+he always showed Clementina, now, "I'll be right there." But he waited a
+moment, either in expression of his personal independence, or from
+curiosity to know what the shoeman was going to say of the bronze
+slippers.
+
+Clementina felt the fascination, too; she thought the slippers were
+beautiful, and her foot thrilled with a mysterious prescience of its
+fitness for them.
+
+"Now, the'e, ladies, or as I may say guls, if you'll excuse it in one
+that's moa like a fatha to you than anything else, in his feelings"--the
+girls tittered, and some one shouted derisively--"It's true!"--"now there
+is a shoe, or call it a slippa, that I've rutha hesitated about showin'
+to you, because I know that you're all rutha serious-minded, I don't ca'e
+how young ye be, or how good-lookin' ye be; and I don't presume the'e's
+one among you that's eve' head o' dancin'." In the mirthful hooting and
+mocking that followed, the shoeman hedged gravely from the extreme
+position he had taken. "What? Well, maybe you have among some the summa
+folks, but we all know what summa folks ah', and I don't expect you to
+patte'n by them. But what I will say is that if any young lady within the
+sound of my voice,"--he looked round for the applause which did not fail
+him in his parody of the pulpit style--"should get an invitation to a
+dance next winta, and should feel it a wo'k of a charity to the young man
+to go, she'll be sorry--on his account, rememba--that she ha'n't got this
+pair o' slippas.
+
+"The'a! They're a numba two, and they'll fit any lady here, I don't ca'e
+how small a foot she's got. Don't all speak at once, sistas! Ample time
+allowed for meals. That's a custom-made shoe, and if it hadn't b'en too
+small for the lady they was oddid foh, you couldn't-'a' got 'em for less
+than seven dollas; but now I'm throwin' on 'em away for three."
+
+A groan of dismay went up from the whole circle, and some who had pressed
+forward for a sight of the slippers, shrank back again.
+
+"Did I hea' just now," asked the shoeman, with a soft insinuation in his
+voice, and in the glance he suddenly turned upon Clementina, "a party
+addressed as Boss?" Clementina flushed, but she did not cower; the chef
+walked away with a laugh, and the shoeman pursued him with his voice.
+"Not that I am goin' to folla the wicked example of a man who tries to
+make spot of young ladies; but if the young lady addressed as Boss--"
+
+"Miss Claxon," said the clerk with ingratiating reverence.
+
+"Miss Claxon--I Stan' corrected," pursued the shoeman. "If Miss Claxon
+will do me the fava just to try on this slippa, I sh'd be able to tell at
+the next place I stopped just how it looked on a lady's foot. I see you
+a'n't any of you disposed to buy 'em this aftanoon, 'and I a'n't
+complainin'; you done pootty well by me, already, and I don't want to
+uhge you; but I do want to carry away the picture, in my mind's eye--what
+you may call a mental photograph--of this slipper on the kind of a foot
+it was made for, so't I can praise it truthfully to my next customer.
+What do you say, ma'am?" he addressed himself with profound respect to
+Clementina.
+
+"Oh, do let him, Clem!" said one of the girls, and another pleaded, "Just
+so he needn't tell a story to his next customa," and that made the rest
+laugh.
+
+Clementina's heart was throbbing, and joyous lights were dancing in her
+eyes. "I don't care if I do," she said, and she stooped to unlace her
+shoe, but one of the big girls threw herself on her knees at her feet to
+prevent her. Clementina remembered too late that there was a hole in her
+stocking and that her little toe came through it, but she now folded the
+toe artfully down, and the big girl discovered the hole in time to abet
+her attempt at concealment. She caught the slipper from the shoeman and
+harried it on; she tied the ribbons across the instep, and then put on
+the other. "Now put out youa foot, Clem! Fast dancin' position!" She
+leaned back upon her own heels, and Clementina daintily lifted the edge
+of her skirt a little, and peered over at her feet. The slippers might or
+might not have been of an imperfect taste, in their imitation of the
+prevalent fashion, but on Clementina's feet they had distinction.
+
+"Them feet was made for them slippas," said the shoeman devoutly.
+
+The clerk was silent; he put his hand helplessly to his mouth, and then
+dropped it at his side again.
+
+Gregory came round the corner of the building from the dining-room, and
+the big girl who was crouching before Clementina, and who boasted that
+she was not afraid of the student, called saucily to him, "Come here, a
+minute, Mr. Gregory," and as he approached, she tilted aside, to let him
+see Clementina's slippers.
+
+Clementina beamed up at him with all her happiness in her eyes, but after
+a faltering instant, his face reddened through its freckles, and he gave
+her a rebuking frown and passed on.
+
+"Well, I decla'e!" said the big girl. Fane turned uneasily, and said with
+a sigh, he guessed he must be going, now.
+
+A blight fell upon the gay spirits of the group, and the shoeman asked
+with an ironical glance after Gregory's retreating figure, "Owna of this
+propaty?"
+
+"No, just the ea'th," said the big girl, angrily.
+
+The voice of Clementina made itself heard with a cheerfulness which had
+apparently suffered no chill, but was really a rising rebellion. "How
+much ah' the slippas?"
+
+"Three dollas," said the shoeman in a surprise which he could not conceal
+at Clementina's courage.
+
+She laughed, and stooped to untie the slippers. "That's too much for me."
+
+"Let me untie 'em, Clem," said the big girl. "It's a shame for you eva to
+take 'em off."
+
+"That's right, lady," said the shoeman. "And you don't eva need to," he
+added, to Clementina, "unless you object to sleepin' in 'em. You pay me
+what you want to now, and the rest when I come around the latta paht of
+August."
+
+"Oh keep 'em, Clem!" the big girl urged, passionately, and the rest
+joined her with their entreaties.
+
+"I guess I betta not," said Clementina, and she completed the work of
+taking off the slippers in which the big girl could lend her no further
+aid, such was her affliction of spirit.
+
+"All right, lady," said the shoeman. "Them's youa slippas, and I'll just
+keep 'em for you till the latta paht of August."
+
+He drove away, and in the woods which he had to pass through on the road
+to another hotel he overtook the figure of a man pacing rapidly. He
+easily recognized Gregory, but he bore him no malice. "Like a lift?" he
+asked, slowing up beside him.
+
+"No, thank you," said Gregory. "I'm out for the walk." He looked round
+furtively, and then put his hand on the side of the wagon, mechanically,
+as if to detain it, while he walked on.
+
+"Did you sell the slippers to the young lady?"
+
+"Well, not as you may say sell, exactly," returned the shoeman,
+cautiously.
+
+"Have you--got them yet?" asked the student.
+
+"Guess so," said the man. "Like to see 'em?"
+
+He pulled up his horse.
+
+Gregory faltered a moment. Then he said, "I'd like to buy them. Quick!"
+
+He looked guiltily about, while the shoeman alertly obeyed, with some
+delay for a box to put them in. "How much are they?"
+
+"Well, that's a custom made slipper, and the price to the lady that
+oddid'em was seven dollas. But I'll let you have 'em for three--if you
+want 'em for a present."--The shoeman was far too discreet to permit
+himself anything so overt as a smile; he merely let a light of
+intelligence come into his face.
+
+Gregory paid the money. "Please consider this as confidential," he said,
+and he made swiftly away. Before the shoeman could lock the drawer that
+had held the slippers, and clamber to his perch under the buggy-hood,
+Gregory was running back to him again.
+
+"Stop!" he called, and as he came up panting in an excitement which the
+shoeman might well have mistaken for indignation attending the discovery
+of some blemish in his purchase. "Do you regard this as in any manner a
+deception?" he palpitated.
+
+"Why," the shoeman began cautiously, "it wa'n't what you may call a
+promise, exactly. More of a joke than anything else, I looked on it. I
+just said I'd keep 'em for her; but--"
+
+"You don't understand. If I seemed to disapprove--if I led any one to
+suppose, by my manner, or by--anything--that I thought it unwise or
+unbecoming to buy the shoes, and then bought them myself, do you think it
+is in the nature of an acted falsehood?"
+
+"Lo'd no!" said the shoeman, and he caught up the slack of his reins to
+drive on, as if he thought this amusing maniac might also be dangerous.
+
+Gregory stopped him with another question. "And shall--will you--think it
+necessary to speak of--of this transaction? I leave you free!"
+
+"Well," said the shoeman. "I don't know what you're after, exactly, but
+if you think I'm so shot on for subjects that I've got to tell the folks
+at the next stop that I sold a fellar a pair of slippas for his gul--Go
+'long!" he called to his horse, and left Gregory standing in the middle
+of the road.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+The people who came to the Middlemount in July were ordinarily the
+nicest, but that year the August folks were nicer than usual and there
+were some students among them, and several graduates just going into
+business, who chose to take their outing there instead of going to the
+sea-side or the North Woods. This was a chance that might not happen in
+years again, and it made the house very gay for the young ladies; they
+ceased to pay court to the clerk, and asked him for letters only at
+mail-time. Five or six couples were often on the floor together, at the
+hops, and the young people sat so thick upon the stairs that one could
+scarcely get up or down.
+
+So many young men made it gay not only for the young ladies, but also for
+a certain young married lady, when she managed to shirk her rather filial
+duties to her husband, who was much about the verandas, purblindly
+feeling his way with a stick, as he walked up and down, or sitting opaque
+behind the glasses that preserved what was left of his sight, while his
+wife read to him. She was soon acquainted with a good many more people
+than he knew, and was in constant request for such occasions as needed a
+chaperon not averse to mountain climbing, or drives to other hotels for
+dancing and supper and return by moonlight, or the more boisterous sorts
+of charades; no sheet and pillow case party was complete without her; for
+welsh-rarebits her presence was essential. The event of the conflict
+between these social claims and her duties to her husband was her appeal
+to Mrs. Atwell on a point which the landlady referred to Clementina.
+
+"She wants somebody to read to her husband, and I don't believe but what
+you could do it, Clem. You're a good reader, as good as I want to hear,
+and while you may say that you don't put in a great deal of elocution, I
+guess you can read full well enough. All he wants is just something to
+keep him occupied, and all she wants is a chance to occupy herself with
+otha folks. Well, she is moa their own age. I d'know as the's any hahm in
+her. And my foot's so much betta, now, that I don't need you the whole
+while, any moa."
+
+"Did you speak to her about me?" asked the girl.
+
+"Well, I told her I'd tell you. I couldn't say how you'd like."
+
+"Oh, I guess I should like," said Clementina, with her eyes shining.
+"But--I should have to ask motha."
+
+"I don't believe but what your motha'd be willin'," said Mrs. Atwell.
+"You just go down and see her about it."
+
+The next day Mrs. Milray was able to take leave of her husband, in
+setting off to matronize a coaching party, with an exuberance of good
+conscience that she shared with the spectators. She kissed him with
+lively affection, and charged him not to let the child read herself to
+death for him. She captioned Clementina that Mr. Milray never knew when
+he was tired, and she had better go by the clock in her reading, and not
+trust to any sign from him.
+
+Clementina promised, and when the public had followed Mrs. Milray away,
+to watch her ascent to the topmost seat of the towering coach, by means
+of the ladder held in place by two porters, and by help of the
+down-stretched hands of all the young men on the coach, Clementina opened
+the book at the mark she found in it, and began to read to Mr. Milray.
+
+The book was a metaphysical essay, which he professed to find a lighter
+sort of reading than fiction; he said most novelists were too seriously
+employed in preventing the marriage of the lovers, up to a certain point,
+to be amusing; but you could always trust a metaphysician for
+entertainment if he was very much in earnest, and most metaphysicians
+were. He let Clementina read on a good while in her tender voice, which
+had still so many notes of childhood in it, before he manifested any
+consciousness of being read to. He kept the smile on his delicate face
+which had come there when his wife said at parting, "I don't believe I
+should leave her with you if you could see how prettty she was," and he
+held his head almost motionlessly at the same poise he had given it in
+listening to her final charges. It was a fine head, still well covered
+with soft hair, which lay upon it in little sculpturesque masses, like
+chiseled silver, and the acquiline profile had a purity of line in the
+arch of the high nose and the jut of the thin lips and delicate chin,
+which had not been lost in the change from youth to age. One could never
+have taken it for the profile of a New York lawyer who had early found
+New York politics more profitable than law, and after a long time passed
+in city affairs, had emerged with a name shadowed by certain doubtful
+transactions. But this was Milray's history, which in the rapid progress
+of American events, was so far forgotten that you had first to remind
+people of what he had helped do before you could enjoy their surprise in
+realizing that this gentle person, with the cast of intellectual
+refinement which distinguished his face, was the notorious Milray, who
+was once in all the papers. When he made his game and retired from
+politics, his family would have sacrificed itself a good deal to reclaim
+him socially, though they were of a severer social than spiritual
+conscience, in the decay of some ancestral ideals. But he had rendered
+their willingness hopeless by marrying, rather late in life, a young girl
+from the farther West who had come East with a general purpose to get on.
+She got on very well with Milray, and it was perhaps not altogether her
+own fault that she did not get on so well with his family, when she began
+to substitute a society aim for the artistic ambition that had brought
+her to New York. They might have forgiven him for marrying her, but they
+could not forgive her for marrying him. They were of New England origin
+and they were perhaps a little more critical with her than if they had
+been New Yorkers of Dutch strain. They said that she was a little Western
+hoyden, but that the stage would have been a good place for her if she
+could have got over her Pike county accent; in the hush of family
+councils they confided to one another the belief that there were phases
+of the variety business in which her accent would have been no barrier to
+her success, since it could not have been heard in the dance, and might
+have been disguised in the song.
+
+"Will you kindly read that passage over again?" Milray asked as
+Clementina paused at the end of a certain paragraph. She read it, while
+he listened attentively. "Could you tell me just what you understand by
+that?" he pursued, as if he really expected Clementina to instruct him.
+
+She hesitated a moment before she answered, "I don't believe I undastand
+anything at all."
+
+"Do you know," said Milray, "that's exactly my own case? And I've an idea
+that the author is in the same box," and Clementina perceived she might
+laugh, and laughed discreetly.
+
+Milray seemed to feel the note of discreetness in her laugh, and he
+asked, smiling, "How old did you tell me you were?"
+
+"I'm sixteen," said Clementina.
+
+"It's a great age," said Milray. "I remember being sixteen myself; I have
+never been so old since. But I was very old for my age, then. Do you
+think you are?"
+
+"I don't believe I am," said Clementina, laughing again, but still very
+discreetly.
+
+"Then I should like to tell you that you have a very agreeable voice. Do
+you sing?"
+
+"No'm--no, sir--no," said Clementina, "I can't sing at all."
+
+"Ah, that's very interesting," said Milray, "but it's not surprising. I
+wish I could see your face distinctly; I've a great curiosity about
+matching voices and faces; I must get Mrs. Milray to tell me how you
+look. Where did you pick up your pretty knack at reading? In school,
+here?"
+
+"I don't know," answered Clementina. "Do I read-the way you want?"
+
+"Oh, perfectly. You let the meaning come through--when there is any."
+
+"Sometimes," said Clementina ingenuously, "I read too fast; the children
+ah' so impatient when I'm reading to them at home, and they hurry me. But
+I can read a great deal slower if you want me to."
+
+"No, I'm impatient, too," said Milray. "Are there many of them,--the
+children?"
+
+"There ah' six in all."
+
+"And are you the oldest?"
+
+"Yes," said Clementina. She still felt it very blunt not to say sir, too,
+but she tried to make her tone imply the sir, as Mr. Gregory had bidden
+her.
+
+"You've got a very pretty name."
+
+Clementina brightened. "Do you like it? Motha gave it to me; she took it
+out of a book that fatha was reading to her."
+
+"I like it very much," said Milray. "Are you tall for your age?"
+
+"I guess I am pretty tall."
+
+"You're fair, of course. I can tell that by your voice; you've got a
+light-haired voice. And what are your eyes?"
+
+"Blue!" Clementina laughed at his pursuit.
+
+"Ah, of course! It isn't a gray-eyed blonde voice. Do you think--has
+anybody ever told you-that you were graceful?"
+
+"I don't know as they have," said Clementina, after thinking.
+
+"And what is your own opinion?" Clementina began to feel her dignity
+infringed; she did not answer, and now Milray laughed. "I felt the little
+tilt in your step as you came up. It's all right. Shall we try for our
+friend's meaning, now?"
+
+Clementina began again, and again Milray stopped her. "You mustn't bear
+malice. I can hear the grudge in your voice; but I didn't mean to laugh
+at you. You don't like being made fun of, do you?"
+
+"I don't believe anybody does," said Clementina.
+
+"No, indeed," said Milray. "If I had tried such a thing I should be
+afraid you would make it uncomfortable for me. But I haven't, have I?"
+
+"I don't know," said Clementina, reluctantly.
+
+Milray laughed gleefully. "Well, you'll forgive me, because I'm an old
+fellow. If I were young, you wouldn't, would you?"
+
+Clementina thought of the clerk; she had certainly never forgiven him.
+"Shall I read on?" she asked.
+
+"Yes, yes. Read on," he said, respectfully. Once he interrupted her to
+say that she pronounced admirable, but he would like now and then to
+differ with her about a word if she did not mind. She answered, Oh no,
+indeed; she should like it ever so much, if he would tell her when she
+was wrong. After that he corrected her, and he amused himself by studying
+forms of respect so delicate that they should not alarm her pride;
+Clementina reassured him in terms as fine as his own. She did not accept
+his instructions implicitly; she meant to bring them to the bar of
+Gregory's knowledge. If he approved of them, then she would submit.
+
+Milray easily possessed himself of the history of her life and of all its
+circumstances, and he said he would like to meet her father and make the
+acquaintance of a man whose mind, as Clementina interpreted it to him, he
+found so original.
+
+He authorized his wife to arrange with Mrs. Atwell for a monopoly of
+Clementina's time while he stayed at Middlemount, and neither he nor Mrs.
+Milray seemed surprised at the good round sum, as the landlady thought
+it, which she asked in the girl's behalf.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+The Milrays stayed through August, and Mrs. Milray was the ruling spirit
+of the great holiday of the summer, at Middlemount. It was this year that
+the landlords of the central mountain region had decided to compete in a
+coaching parade, and to rival by their common glory the splendor of the
+East Side and the West Side parades. The boarding-houses were to take
+part, as well as the hotels; the farms where only three or four summer
+folks were received, were to send their mountain-wagons, and all were to
+be decorated with bunting. An arch draped with flags and covered with
+flowers spanned the entrance to the main street at Middlemount Centre,
+and every shop in the village was adorned for the event.
+
+Mrs. Milray made the landlord tell her all about coaching parades, and
+the champions of former years on the East Side and the West Side, and
+then she said that the Middlemount House must take the prize from them
+all this year, or she should never come near his house again. He
+answered, with a dignity and spirit he rarely showed with Mrs. Milray's
+class of custom, "I'm goin' to drive our hossis myself."
+
+She gave her whole time to imagining and organizing the personal display
+on the coach. She consulted with the other ladies as to the kind of
+dresses that were to be worn, but she decided everything herself; and
+when the time came she had all the young men ravaging the lanes and
+pastures for the goldenrod and asters which formed the keynote of her
+decoration for the coach.
+
+She made peace and kept it between factions that declared themselves
+early in the affair, and of all who could have criticized her for taking
+the lead perhaps none would have willingly relieved her of the trouble.
+She freely declared that it was killing her, and she sounded her accents
+of despair all over the place. When their dresses were finished she made
+the persons of her drama rehearse it on the coach top in the secret of
+the barn, where no one but the stable men were suffered to see the
+effects she aimed at. But on the eve of realizing these in public she was
+overwhelmed by disaster. The crowning glory of her composition was to be
+a young girl standing on the highest seat of the coach, in the character
+of the Spirit of Summer, wreathed and garlanded with flowers, and
+invisibly sustained by the twelve months of the year, equally divided as
+to sex, but with the more difficult and painful attitudes assigned to the
+gentlemen who were to figure as the fall and winter months. It had been
+all worked out and the actors drilled in their parts, when the Spirit of
+Summer, who had been chosen for the inoffensiveness of her extreme youth,
+was taken with mumps, and withdrawn by the doctor's orders. Mrs. Milray
+had now not only to improvise another Spirit of Summer, but had to choose
+her from a group of young ladies, with the chance of alienating and
+embittering those who were not chosen. In her calamity she asked her
+husband what she should do, with but the least hope that he could tell
+her. But he answered promptly, "Take Clementina; I'll let you have her
+for the day," and then waited for the storm of her renunciations and
+denunciations to spend itself.
+
+"To be sure," she said, when this had happened, "it isn't as if she were
+a servant in the house; and the position can be regarded as a kind of
+public function, anyhow. I can't say that I've hired her to take the
+part, but I can give her a present afterwards, and it will be the same
+thing."
+
+The question of clothes for Clementina Mrs. Milray declared was almost
+as sweeping in its implication as the question of the child's creation.
+"She has got to be dressed new from head to foot," she said, "every
+stitch, and how am I to manage it in twenty-four hours?"
+
+By a succession of miracles with cheese-cloth, and sashes and ribbons, it
+was managed; and ended in a triumph so great that Mrs. Milray took the
+girl in her arms and kissed her for looking the Spirit of Summer to a
+perfection that the victim of the mumps could not have approached. The
+victory was not lastingly marred by the failure of Clementina's shoes to
+look the Spirit of Summer as well as the rest of her costume. No shoes at
+all world have been the very thing, but shoes so shabby and worn down at
+one side of the heel as Clementina's were very far from the thing. Mrs.
+Milray decided that another fold of cheese-cloth would add to the
+statuesque charm of her figure, and give her more height; and she was
+richly satisfied with the effect when the Middlemount coach drove up to
+the great veranda the next morning, with all the figures of her picture
+in position on its roof, and Clementina supreme among them. She herself
+mounted in simple, undramatized authority to her official seat beside the
+landlord, who in coachman's dress, with a bouquet of autumnal flowers in
+his lapel, sat holding his garlanded reins over the backs of his six
+horses; and then the coach as she intended it to appear in the parade set
+out as soon as the turnouts of the other houses joined it. They were all
+to meet at the Middlemount, which was thickly draped and festooned in
+flags, with knots of evergreen and the first red boughs of the young
+swamp maples holding them in place over its irregular facade. The coach
+itself was amass of foliage and flowers, from which it defined itself as
+a wheeled vehicle in vague and partial outline; the other wagons and
+coaches, as they drove tremulously up, with an effect of having been
+mired in blossoms about their spokes and hubs, had the unwieldiness which
+seems inseparable from spectacularity. They represented motives in color
+and design sometimes tasteless enough, and sometimes so nearly very good
+that Mrs. Milray's heart was a great deal in her mouth, as they arrived,
+each with its hotel-cry roared and shrilled from a score of masculine and
+feminine throats, and finally spelled for distinctness sake, with an
+ultimate yell or growl. But she had not finished giving the
+lady-representative of a Sunday newspaper the points of her own tableau,
+before she regained the courage and the faith in which she remained
+serenely steadfast throughout the parade.
+
+It was when all the equipages of the neighborhood had arrived that she
+climbed to her place; the ladder was taken away; the landlord spoke to
+his horses, and the Middlemount coach led the parade, amid the renewed
+slogans, and the cries and fluttered handkerchiefs of the guests crowding
+the verandas.
+
+The line of march was by one road to Middlemount Centre, where the prize
+was to be awarded at the judges' stand, and then the coaches were to
+escort the triumphant vehicle homeward by another route, so as to pass as
+many houses on the way as possible. It was a curious expression of the
+carnival spirit in a region immemorially starved of beauty in the lives
+of its people; and whatever was the origin of the mountain coaching
+parade, or from whatever impulse of sentimentality or advertising it
+came, the effect was of undeniable splendor, and of phantasmagoric
+strangeness.
+
+Gregory watched its progress from a hill-side pasture as it trailed
+slowly along the rising and falling road. The songs of the young girls,
+interrupted by the explosion of hotel slogans and college cries from the
+young men, floated off to him on the thin breeze of the cloudless August
+morning, like the hymns and shouts of a saturnalian rout going in holiday
+processional to sacrifice to their gods. Words of fierce Hebrew poetry
+burned in his thought; the warnings and the accusals and the
+condemnations of the angry prophets; and he stood rapt from his own time
+and place in a dream of days when the Most High stooped to commune face
+to face with His ministers, while the young voices of those forgetful or
+ignorant of Him, called to his own youth, and the garlanded chariots,
+with their banners and their streamers passed on the road beneath him and
+out of sight in the shadow of the woods beyond.
+
+When the prize was given to the Middlemount coach at the Center the
+landlord took the flag, and gallantly transferred it to Mrs. Milray, and
+Mrs. Milray passed it up to Clementina, and bade her, "Wave it, wave it!"
+
+The village street was thronged with people that cheered, and swung their
+hats and handkerchiefs to the coach as it left the judges' stand and
+drove under the triumphal arch, with the other coaches behind it. Then
+Atwell turned his horses heads homewards, and at the brisker pace with
+which people always return from festivals or from funerals, he left the
+village and struck out upon the country road with his long escort before
+him. The crowd was quick to catch the courteous intention of the victors,
+and followed them with applause as far beyond the village borders as wind
+and limb would allow; but the last noisy boy had dropped off breathless
+before they reached a half-finished house in the edge of some woods. A
+line of little children was drawn up by the road-side before it, who
+watched the retinue with grave eagerness, till the Middlemount coach came
+in full sight. Then they sprang into the air, and beating their hands
+together, screamed, "Clem! Clem! Oh it's Clem!" and jumped up and down,
+and a shabby looking work worn woman came round the corner of the house
+and stared up at Clementina waving her banner wildly to the children, and
+shouting unintelligible words to them. The young people on the coach
+joined in response to the children, some simply, some ironically, and one
+of the men caught up a great wreath of flowers which lay at Clementina's
+feet, and flung it down to them; the shabby woman quickly vanished round
+the corner of the house again. Mrs. Milray leaned over to ask the
+landlord, "Who in the world are Clementina's friends?"
+
+"Why don't you know?" he retorted in abated voice. "Them's her brothas
+and sistas."
+
+"And that woman?"
+
+"The lady at the conna? That's her motha."
+
+When the event was over, and all the things had been said and said again,
+and there was nothing more to keep the spring and summer months from
+going up to their rooms to lie down, and the fall and winter months from
+trying to get something to eat, Mrs. Milray found herself alone with
+Clementina.
+
+The child seemed anxious about something, and Mrs. Milray, who wanted to
+go and lie down, too, asked a little impatiently, "What is it,
+Clementina?"
+
+"Oh, nothing. Only I was afraid maybe you didn't like my waving to the
+children, when you saw how queea they looked." Clementina's lips
+quivered.
+
+"Did any of the rest say anything?"
+
+"I know what they thought. But I don't care! I should do it right over
+again!"
+
+Mrs. Milray's happiness in the day's triumph was so great that she could
+indulge a generous emotion. She caught the girl in her arms. "I want to
+kiss you; I want to hug you, Clementina!"
+
+The notion of a dance for the following night to celebrate the success of
+the house in the coaching parade came to Mrs. Milray over a welsh-rarebit
+which she gave at the close of the evening. The party was in the charge
+of Gregory, who silently served them at their orgy with an austerity that
+might have conspired with the viand itself against their dreams, if they
+had not been so used to the gloom of his ministrations. He would not
+allow the waitresses to be disturbed in their evening leisure, or kept
+from their sleep by such belated pleasures; and when he had provided the
+materials for the rarebit, he stood aloof, and left their combination to
+Mrs. Milray and her chafing-dish.
+
+She had excluded Clementina on account of her youth, as she said to one
+of the fall and winter months, who came in late, and noticed Clementina's
+absence with a "Hello! Anything the matter with the Spirit of Summer?"
+Clementina had become both a pet and a joke with these months before the
+parade was over, and now they clamored together, and said they must have
+her at the dance anyway. They were more tepidly seconded by the spring
+and summer months, and Mrs. Milray said, "Well, then, you'll have to all
+subscribe and get her a pair of dancing slippers." They pressed her for
+her meaning, and she had to explain the fact of Clementina's destitution,
+which that additional fold of cheese-cloth had hidden so well in the
+coaching tableau that it had never been suspected. The young men
+entreated her to let them each buy a pair of slippers for the Spirit of
+Summer, which she should wear in turn for the dance that she must give
+each of them; and this made Mrs. Milray declare that, no, the child
+should not come to the dance at all, and that she was not going to have
+her spoiled. But, before the party broke up, she promised that she would
+see what could be done, and she put it very prettily to the child the
+next day, and waited for her to say, as she knew she must, that she could
+not go, and why. They agreed that the cheese-cloth draperies of the
+Spirit of Summer were surpassingly fit for the dance; but they had to
+agree that this still left the question of slippers untouched. It
+remained even more hopeless when Clementina tried on all of Mrs. Milray's
+festive shoes, and none of her razorpoints and high heels would avail.
+She went away disappointed, but not yet disheartened; youth does not so
+easily renounce a pleasure pressed to the lips; and Clementina had it in
+her head to ask some of the table girls to help her out. She meant to try
+first with that big girl who had helped her put on the shoeman's bronze
+slippers; and she hurried through the office, pushing purblindly past
+Fane without looking his way, when he called to her in the deference
+which he now always used with her, "Here's a package here for you,
+Clementina--Miss Claxon," and he gave her an oblong parcel, addressed in
+a hand strange to her. "Who is it from?" she asked, innocently, and Fane
+replied with the same ingenuousness: "I'm sure I don't know." Afterwards
+he thought of having retorted, "I haven't opened it," but still without
+being certain that he would have had the courage to say it.
+
+Clementina did not think of opening it herself, even when she was alone
+in her little room above Mrs. Atwell's, until she had carefully felt it
+over, and ascertained that it was a box of pasteboard, three or four
+inches deep and wide, and eight or ten inches long. She looked at the
+address again, "Miss Clementina Claxon," and at the narrow notched ribbon
+which tied it, and noted that the paper it was wrapped in was very white
+and clean. Then she sighed, and loosed the knot, and the paper slipped
+off the box, and at the same time the lid fell off, and the shoe man's
+bronze slippers fell out upon the floor.
+
+Either it must be a dream or it must be a joke; it could not be both real
+and earnest; somebody was trying to tease her; such flattery of fortune
+could not be honestly meant. But it went to her head, and she was so
+giddy with it as she caught the slippers from the floor, and ran down to
+Mrs. Atwell, that she knocked against the sides of the narrow staircase.
+
+"What is it? What does it mean? Who did it?" she panted, with the
+slippers in her hand. "Whe'e did they come from?" She poured out the
+history of her trying on these shoes, and of her present need of them and
+of their mysterious coming, to meet her longing after it had almost
+ceased to be a hope. Mrs. Atwell closed with her in an exultation hardly
+short of a clapping the hands. Her hair was gray, and the girl's hair
+still hung in braids down her back, but they were of the same age in
+their transport, which they referred to Mrs. Milray, and joined with her
+in glad but fruitless wonder who had sent Clementina the shoes. Mrs.
+Atwell held that the help who had seen the girl trying them on had
+clubbed together and got them for her at the time; and had now given them
+to her for the honor she had done the Middlemount House in the parade.
+Mrs. Milray argued that the spring and summer months had secretly
+dispatched some fall and winter month to ransack the stores at
+Middlemount Centre for them. Clementina believed that they came from the
+shoe man himself, who had always wanted to send them, in the hope that
+she would keep them, and had merely happened to send them just then in
+that moment of extremity when she was helpless against them. Each
+conjecture involved improbabilities so gross that it left the field free
+to any opposite theory.
+
+Rumor of the fact could not fail to go through the house, and long before
+his day's work was done it reached the chef, and amused him as a piece of
+the Boss's luck. He was smoking his evening pipe at the kitchen door
+after supper, when Clementina passed him on one of the many errands that
+took her between Mrs. Milray's room and her own, and he called to her:
+"Boss, what's this I hear about a pair o' glass slippas droppin' out the
+sky int' youa lap?"
+
+Clementina was so happy that she thought she might trust him for once,
+and she said, "Oh, yes, Mr. Mahtin! Who do you suppose sent them?" she
+entreated him so sweetly that it would have softened any heart but the
+heart of a tease.
+
+"I believe I could give a pootty good guess if I had the facts."
+
+Clementina innocently gave them to him, and he listened with a
+well-affected sympathy.
+
+"Say Fane fust told you about 'em?"
+
+"Yes. 'He'e's a package for you,' he said. Just that way; and he couldn't
+tell me who left it, or anything."
+
+"Anybody asked him about it since?"
+
+"Oh, yes! Mrs. Milray, and Mrs. Atwell, and Mr. Atwell, and everybody."
+
+"Everybody." The chef smiled with a peculiar droop of one eye. "And he
+didn't know when the slippas got into the landlo'd's box?"
+
+"No. The fust thing he knew, the' they we'e!" Clementina stood expectant,
+but the chef smoked on as if that were all there was to say, and seemed
+to have forgotten her. "Who do you think put them thea, Mr. Mahtin?"
+
+The chef looked up as if surprised to find her still there. "Oh! Oh, yes!
+Who d' I think? Why, I know, Boss. But I don't believe I'd betta tell
+you."
+
+"Oh, do, Mr. Mahtin! If you knew how I felt about it--"
+
+"No, no! I guess I betta not. 'Twouldn't do you any good. I guess I won't
+say anything moa. But if I was in youa place, and I really wanted to know
+whe'e them slippas come from--"
+
+"I do--I do indeed--"
+
+The chef paused before he added, "I should go at Fane. I guess what he
+don't know ain't wo'th knowin', and I guess nobody else knows anything.
+Thea! I don't know but I said mo'n I ought, now."
+
+What the chef said was of a piece with what had been more than once in
+Clementina's mind; but she had driven it out, not because it might not be
+true, but because she would not have it true. Her head drooped; she
+turned limp and springless away. Even the heart of the tease was touched;
+he had not known that it would worry her so much, though he knew that she
+disliked the clerk.
+
+"Mind," he called after her, too late, "I ain't got no proof 't he done
+it."
+
+She did not answer him, or look round. She went to her room, and sat down
+in the growing dusk to think, with a hot lump in her throat.
+
+Mrs. Atwell found her there an hour later, when she climbed to the
+chamber where she thought she ought to have heard Clementina moving about
+over her own room.
+
+"Didn't know but I could help you do youa dressin'," she began, and then
+at sight of the dim figure she broke off: "Why, Clem! What's the matte?
+Ah' you asleep? Ah' you sick? It's half an hour of the time and--"
+
+"I'm not going," Clementina answered, and she did not move.
+
+"Not goin'! Why the land o'--"
+
+"Oh, I can't go, Mrs. Atwell. Don't ask me! Tell Mrs. Milray, please!"
+
+"I will, when I got something to tell," said Mrs. Atwell. "Now, you just
+say what's happened, Clementina Claxon!" Clementina suffered the woful
+truth to be drawn from her. "But you don't know whether it's so or not,"
+the landlady protested.
+
+"Yes, yes, I do! It was the last thing I thought of, and the chef
+wouldn't have said it if he didn't believe it."
+
+"That's just what he would done," cried Mrs. Atwell. "And I'll give him
+such a goin' ova, for his teasin', as he ain't had in one while. He just
+said it to tease. What you goin' to say to Mrs. Milray?"
+
+"Oh, tell her I'm not a bit well, Mrs. Atwell! My head does ache, truly."
+
+"Why, listen," said Mrs. Atwell, recklessly. "If you believe he done
+it--and he no business to--why don't you just go to the dance, in 'em,
+and then give 'em back to him after it's ova? It would suv him right."
+
+Clementina listened for a moment of temptation, and then shook her head.
+"It wouldn't do, Mrs. Atwell; you know it wouldn't," she said, and Mrs.
+Atwell had too little faith in her suggestion to make it prevail. She
+went away to carry Clementina's message to Mrs. Milray, and her task was
+greatly eased by the increasing difficulty Mrs. Milray had begun to find,
+since the way was perfectly smoothed for her, in imagining the management
+of Clementina at the dance: neither child nor woman, neither servant nor
+lady, how was she to be carried successfully through it, without sorrow
+to herself or offence to others? In proportion to the relief she felt,
+Mrs. Milray protested her irreconcilable grief; but when the simpler Mrs.
+Atwell proposed her going and reasoning with Clementina, she said, No,
+no; better let her alone, if she felt as she did; and perhaps after all
+she was right.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+Clementina listened to the music of the dance, till the last note was
+played; and she heard the gay shouts and laughter of the dancers as they
+issued from the ball room and began to disperse about the halls and
+verandas, and presently to call good night to one another. Then she
+lighted her lamp, and put the slippers back into the box and wrapped it
+up in the nice paper it had come in, and tied it with the notched ribbon.
+She thought how she had meant to put the slippers away so, after the
+dance, when she had danced her fill in them, and how differently she was
+doing it all now. She wrote the clerk's name on the parcel, and then she
+took the box, and descended to the office with it. There seemed to be
+nobody there, but at the noise of her step Fane came round the case of
+letter-boxes, and advanced to meet her at the long desk.
+
+"What's wanted, Miss Claxon?" he asked, with his hopeless respectfulness.
+"Anything I can do for you?"
+
+She did not answer, but looked him solemnly in the eyes and laid the
+parcel down on the open register, and then went out.
+
+He looked at the address on the parcel, and when he untied it, the box
+fell open and the shoes fell out of it, as they had with Clementina. He
+ran with them behind the letter-box frame, and held them up before
+Gregory, who was seated there on the stool he usually occupied, gloomily
+nursing his knee.
+
+"What do you suppose this means, Frank?"
+
+Gregory looked at the shoes frowningly. "They're the slippers she got
+to-day. She thinks you sent them to her."
+
+"And she wouldn't have them because she thought I sent them! As sure as
+I'm standing here, I never did it," said the clerk, solemnly.
+
+"I know it," said Gregory. "I sent them."
+
+"You!"
+
+"What's so wonderful?" Gregory retorted. "I saw that she wanted them that
+day when the shoe peddler was here. I could see it, and you could."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I went across into the woods, and the man overtook me with his wagon. I
+was tempted, and I bought the slippers of him. I wanted to give them to
+her then, but I resisted, and I thought I should never give them. To-day,
+when I heard that she was going to that dance, I sent them to her
+anonymously. That's all there is about it."
+
+The clerk had a moment of bitterness. "If she'd known it was you, she
+wouldn't have given them back."
+
+"That's to be seen. I shall tell her, now. I never meant her to know, but
+she must, because she's doing you wrong in her ignorance."
+
+Gregory was silent, and Fane was trying to measure the extent of his own
+suffering, and to get the whole bearing of the incident in his mind. In
+the end his attempt was a failure. He asked Gregory, "And do you think
+you've done just right by me?"
+
+"I've done right by nobody," said Gregory, "not even by myself; and I can
+see that it was my own pleasure I had in mind. I must tell her the truth,
+and then I must leave this place."
+
+"I suppose you want I should keep it quiet," said Fane.
+
+"I don't ask anything of you."
+
+"And she wouldn't," said Fane, after reflection. "But I know she'd be
+glad of it, and I sha'n't say anything. Of course, she never can care for
+me; and--there's my hand with my word, if you want it." Gregory silently
+took the hand stretched toward him and Fane added: "All I'll ask is that
+you'll tell her I wouldn't have presumed to send her the shoes. She
+wouldn't be mad at you for it."
+
+Gregory took the box, and after some efforts to speak, he went away. It
+was an old trouble, an old error, an old folly; he had yielded to impulse
+at every step, and at every step he had sinned against another or against
+himself. What pain he had now given the simple soul of Fane; what pain he
+had given that poor child who had so mistaken and punished the simple
+soul! With Fane it was over now, but with Clementina the worst was
+perhaps to come yet. He could not hope to see the girl before morning,
+and then, what should he say to her? At sight of a lamp burning in Mrs.
+Atwell's room, which was on a level with the veranda where he was
+walking, it came to him that first of all he ought to go to her, and
+confess the whole affair; if her husband were with her, he ought to
+confess before him; they were there in the place of the child's father
+and mother, and it was due to them. As he pressed rapidly toward the
+light he framed in his thought the things he should say, and he did not
+notice, as he turned to enter the private hallway leading to Mrs.
+Atwell's apartment, a figure at the door. It shrank back from his
+contact, and he recognized Clementina. His purpose instantly changed, and
+he said, "Is that you, Miss Claxon? I want to speak with you. Will you
+come a moment where I can?"
+
+"I--I don't know as I'd betta," she faltered. But she saw the box under
+his arm, and she thought that he wished to speak to her about that, and
+she wanted to hear what he would say. She had been waiting at the door
+there, because she could not bear to go to her room without having
+something more happen.
+
+"You needn't be afraid. I shall not keep you. Come with me a moment.
+There is something I must tell you at once. You have made a mistake. And
+it is my fault. Come!"
+
+Clementina stepped out into the moonlight with him, and they walked
+across the grass that sloped between the hotel and the river. There were
+still people about, late smokers singly, and in groups along the piazzas,
+and young couples, like themselves, strolling in the dry air, under the
+pure sky.
+
+Gregory made several failures in trying to begin, before he said: "I have
+to tell you that you are mistaken about Mr. Fane. I was there behind the
+letter boxes when you came in, and I know that you left these shoes
+because you thought he sent them to you. He didn't send them." Clementina
+did not say anything, and Gregory was forced to ask: "Do you wish to know
+who sent them? I won't tell you unless you do wish it."
+
+"I think I ought to know," she said, and she asked, "Don't you?"
+
+"Yes; for you must blame some one else now, for what you thought Fane
+did. I sent them to you."
+
+Clementina's heart gave a leap in her breast, and she could not say
+anything. He went on.
+
+"I saw that you wanted them that day, and when the peddler happened to
+overtake me in the woods where I was walking, after I left you, I acted
+on a sudden impulse, and I bought them for you. I meant to send them to
+you anonymously, then. I had committed one error in acting upon
+impulse-my rashness is my besetting sin--and I wished to add a species of
+deceit to that. But I was kept from it until-to-day. I hoped you would
+like to wear them to the dance to-night, and I put them in the
+post-office for you myself. Mr. Fane didn't know anything about it. That
+is all. I am to blame, and no one else."
+
+He waited for her to speak, but Clementina could only say, "I don't know
+what to say."
+
+"You can't say anything that would be punishment enough for me. I have
+acted foolishly, cruelly."
+
+Clementina did not think so. She was not indignant, as she was when she
+thought Fane had taken this liberty with her, but if Mr. Gregory thought
+it was so very bad, it must be something much more serious than she had
+imagined. She said, "I don't see why you wanted to do it," hoping that he
+would be able to tell her something that would make his behavior seem
+less dreadful than he appeared to think it was.
+
+"There is only one thing that could justify it, and that is something
+that I cannot justify." It was very mysterious, but youth loves mystery,
+and Clementina was very young. "I did it," said Gregory solemnly, and he
+felt that now he was acting from no impulse, but from a wisely considered
+decision which he might not fail in without culpability, "because I love
+you."
+
+"Oh!" said Clementina, and she started away from him.
+
+"I knew that it would make me detestable!" he cried, bitterly. "I had to
+tell you, to explain what I did. I couldn't help doing it. But now if you
+can forget it, and never think of me again, I can go away, and try to
+atone for it somehow. I shall be guided."
+
+Clementina did not know why she ought to feel affronted or injured by
+what he had said to her; but if Mr. Gregory thought it was wrong for him
+to have spoken so, it must be wrong. She did not wish him to feel badly,
+even if he had done wrong, but she had to take his view of what he had
+done. "Why, suttainly, Mr. Gregory," she answered. "You mustn't mind it."
+
+"But I do mind it. I have been very, very selfish, very thoughtless. We
+are both too young. I can't ask you to wait for me till I could marry--"
+
+The word really frightened Clementina. She said, "I don't believe I betta
+promise."
+
+"Oh, I know it!" said Gregory. "I am going away from here. I am going
+to-morrow as soon as I can arrange--as soon as I can get away.
+Good-night--I"--Clementina in her agitation put her hands up to her face.
+"Oh, don't cry--I can't bear to have you cry."
+
+She took down her hands. "I'm not crying! But I wish I had neva seen
+those slippas."
+
+They had come to the bank of the river, whose current quivered at that
+point in a scaly ripple in the moonlight. At her words Gregory suddenly
+pulled the box from under his arm, and flung it into the stream as far as
+he could. It caught upon a shallow of the ripple, hung there a moment,
+then loosed itself, and swam swiftly down the stream.
+
+"Oh!" Clementina moaned.
+
+"Do you want them back?" he demanded. "I will go in for them!"
+
+"No, no! No. But it seemed such a--waste!"
+
+"Yes, that is a sin, too." They climbed silently to the hotel. At Mrs.
+Atwell's door, he spoke. "Try to forget what I said, and forgive me, if
+you can."
+
+"Yes--yes, I will, Mr. Gregory. You mustn't think of it any moa."
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+Clementina did not sleep till well toward morning, and she was still
+sleeping when Mrs. Atwell knocked and called in to her that her brother
+Jim wanted to see her. She hurried down, and in the confusion of mind
+left over from the night before she cooed sweetly at Jim as if he had
+been Mr. Gregory, "What is it, Jim? What do you want me for?"
+
+The boy answered with the disgust a sister's company manners always rouse
+in a brother. "Motha wants you. Says she's wo'ked down, and she wants you
+to come and help." Then he went his way.
+
+Mrs. Atwell was used to having help snatched from her by their families
+at a moment's notice. "I presume you've got to go, Clem," she said.
+
+"Oh, yes, I've got to go," Clementina assented, with a note of relief
+which mystified Mrs. Atwell.
+
+"You tied readin' to Mr. Milray?"
+
+"Oh, no'm--no, I mean. But I guess I betta go home. I guess I've been away
+long enough."
+
+"Well, you're a good gul, Clem. I presume your motha's got a right to
+have you home if she wants you." Clementina said nothing to this, but
+turned briskly, and started upstairs toward her room again. The landlady
+called after her, "Shall you speak to Mis' Milray, or do you want I
+should?"
+
+Clementina looked back at her over her shoulder to warble, "Why, if you
+would, Mrs. Atwell," and kept on to her room.
+
+Mrs. Milray was not wholly sorry to have her go; she was going herself
+very soon, and Clementina's earlier departure simplified the question of
+getting rid of her; but she overwhelmed her with reproaches which
+Clementina received with such sweet sincerity that another than Mrs.
+Milray might have blamed herself for having abused her ingenuousness.
+
+The Atwells could very well have let the girl walk home, but they sent
+her in a buckboard, with one of the stablemen to drive her. The landlord
+put her neat bundle under the seat of the buckboard with his own hand.
+There was something in the child's bearing, her dignity and her
+amiability, which made people offer her, half in fun, and half in
+earnest, the deference paid to age and state.
+
+She did not know whether Gregory would try to see her before she went.
+She thought he must have known she was going, but since he neither came
+to take leave of her, nor sent her any message, she decided that she had
+not expected him to do so. About the third week of September she heard
+that he had left Middlemount and gone back to college.
+
+She kept at her work in the house and helped her mother, and looked after
+the little ones; she followed her father in the woods, in his quest of
+stuff for walking sticks, and advised with both concerning the taste of
+summer folks in dress and in canes. The winter came, and she read many
+books in its long leisure, mostly novels, out of the rector's library. He
+had a whole set of Miss Edgeworth, and nearly all of Miss Austen and Miss
+Gurney, and he gave of them to Clementina, as the best thing for her mind
+as well as her morals; he believed nothing could be better for any one
+than these old English novels, which he had nearly forgotten in their
+details. She colored the faded English life of the stories afresh from
+her Yankee circumstance; and it seemed the consensus of their testimony
+that she had really been made love to, and not so very much too soon, at
+her age of sixteen, for most of their heroines were not much older. The
+terms of Gregory's declaration and of its withdrawal were mystifying, but
+not more mystifying than many such things, and from what happened in the
+novels she read, the affair might be trusted to come out all right of
+itself in time. She was rather thoughtfuller for it, and once her mother
+asked her what was the matter with her. "Oh, I guess I'm getting old,
+motha," she said, and turned the question off. She would not have minded
+telling her mother about Gregory, but it would not have been the custom;
+and her mother would have worried, and would have blamed him. Clementina
+could have more easily trusted her father with the case, but so far as
+she knew fathers never were trusted with anything of the kind. She would
+have been willing that accident should bring it to the knowledge of Mrs.
+Richling; but the moment never came when she could voluntarily confide in
+her, though she was a great deal with her that winter. She was Mrs.
+Richling's lieutenant in the social affairs of the parish, which the
+rector's wife took under her care. She helped her get up entertainments
+of the kind that could be given in the church parlor, and they managed
+together some dances which had to be exiled to the town hall. They
+contrived to make the young people of the village feel that they were
+having a gay time, and Clementina did not herself feel that it was a dull
+one. She taught them some of the new steps and figures which the help
+used to pick up from the summer folks at the Middlemount, and practise
+together; she liked doing that; her mother said the child would rather
+dance than eat, any time. She was never sad, but so much dignity got into
+her sweetness that the rector now and then complained of feeling put down
+by her.
+
+She did not know whether she expected Gregory to write to her or not; but
+when no letters came she decided that she had not expected them. She
+wondered if he would come back to the Middlemount the next summer; but
+when the summer came, she heard that they had another student in his
+place. She heard that they had a new clerk, and that the boarders were
+not so pleasant. Another year passed, and towards the end of the season
+Mrs. Atwell wished her to come and help her again, and Clementina went
+over to the hotel to soften her refusal. She explained that her mother
+had so much sewing now that she could not spare her; and Mrs. Atwell
+said: Well, that was right, and that she must be the greatest kind of
+dependence for her mother. "You ah' going on seventeen this year, ain't
+you?"
+
+"I was nineteen the last day of August," said Clementina, and Mrs. Atwell
+sighed, and said, How the time did fly.
+
+It was the second week of September, but Mrs. Atwell said they were going
+to keep the house open till the middle of October, if they could, for the
+autumnal foliage, which there was getting to be quite a class of custom
+for.
+
+"I presume you knew Mr. Landa was dead," she added, and at Clementina's
+look of astonishment, she said with a natural satisfaction, "Mm! died the
+thutteenth day of August. I presumed somehow you'd know it, though you
+didn't see a great deal of 'em, come to think of it. I guess he was a
+good man; too good for her, I guess," she concluded, in the New England
+necessity of blaming some one. "She sent us the papah."
+
+There was an early frost; and people said there was going to be a hard
+winter, but it was not this that made Clementina's father set to work
+finishing his house. His turning business was well started, now, and he
+had got together money enough to pay for the work. He had lately enlarged
+the scope of his industry by turning gate-posts and urns for the tops of
+them, which had become very popular, for the front yards of the farm and
+village houses in a wide stretch of country. They sold more steadily than
+the smaller wares, the cups, and tops, and little vases and platters
+which had once been the output of his lathe; after the first season the
+interest of the summer folks in these fell off; but the gate posts and
+the urns appealed to a lasting taste in the natives.
+
+Claxon wished to put the finishing touches on the house himself, and he
+was willing to suspend more profitable labors to do so. After some
+attempts at plastering he was forced to leave that to the plasterers, but
+he managed the clap-boarding, with Clementina to hand him boards and
+nails, and to keep him supplied with the hammer he was apt to drop at
+critical moments. They talked pretty constantly at their labors, and in
+their leisure, which they spent on the brown needles under the pines at
+the side of the house. Sometimes the hammering or the talking would be
+interrupted by a voice calling, from a passing vehicle in the hidden
+roadway, something about urns. Claxon would answer, without troubling
+himself to verify the inquirer; or moving from his place, that he would
+get round to them, and then would hammer on, or talk on with Clementina.
+
+One day in October a carriage drove up to the door, after the work on the
+house had been carried as far as Claxon's mood and money allowed, and he
+and Clementina were picking up the litter of his carpentering. He had
+replaced the block of wood which once served at the front door by some
+steps under an arbor of rustic work; but this was still so novel that the
+younger children had not outgrown their pride in it and were playing at
+house-keeping there. Clementina ran around to the back door and out
+through the front entry in time to save the visitor and the children from
+the misunderstanding they began to fall into, and met her with a smile of
+hospitable brilliancy, and a recognition full of compassionate welcome.
+
+Mrs. Lander gave way to her tears as she broke out, "Oh, it ain't the way
+it was the last time I was he'a! You hea'd that he--that Mr. Landa--"
+
+"Mrs. Atwell told me," said Clementina. "Won't you come in, and sit
+down?"
+
+"Why, yes." Mrs. Lander pushed in through the narrow door of what was to
+be the parlor. Her crapes swept about her and exhaled a strong scent of
+their dyes. Her veil softened her heavy face; but she had not grown
+thinner in her bereavement.
+
+"I just got to the Middlemount last night," she said, "and I wanted to
+see you and your payrents, both, Miss Claxon. It doos bring him back so!
+You won't neva know how much he thought of you, and you'll all think I'm
+crazy. I wouldn't come as long as he was with me, and now I have to come
+without him; I held out ag'inst him as long as I had him to hold out
+ag'inst. Not that he was eva one to push, and I don't know as he so much
+as spoke of it, afta we left the hotel two yea's ago; but I presume it
+wa'n't out of his mind a single minute. Time and time again I'd say to
+him, 'Now, Albe't, do you feel about it just the way you done?' and he'd
+say, 'I ha'r't had any call to charge my mind about it,' and then I'd
+begin tryin' to ahgue him out of it, and keep a hectorin', till he'd say,
+'Well, I'm not askin' you to do it,' and that's all I could get out of
+him. But I see all the while 't he wanted me to do it, whateva he asked,
+and now I've got to do it when it can't give him any pleasure." Mrs.
+Lander put up her black-bordered handkerchief and sobbed into it, and
+Clementina waited till her grief had spent itself; then she gave her a
+fan, and Mrs. Lander gratefully cooled her hot wet face. The children had
+found the noises of her affliction and the turbid tones of her monologue
+annoying, and had gone off to play in the woods; Claxon kept incuriously
+about the work that Clementina had left him to; his wife maintained the
+confidence which she always felt in Clementina's ability to treat with
+the world when it presented itself, and though she was curious enough,
+she did not offer to interrupt the girl's interview with Mrs. Lander;
+Clementina would know how to behave.
+
+Mrs. Lander, when she had refreshed herself with the fan, seemed to get a
+fresh grip of her theme, and she told Clementina all abort Mr. Lander's
+last sickness. It had been so short that it gave her no time to try the
+climate of Colorado upon him, which she now felt sure would have brought
+him right up; and she had remembered, when too late, to give him a
+liver-medicine of her own, though it did not appear that it was his liver
+which was affected; that was the strange part of it. But, brief as his
+sickness was, he had felt that it was to be his last, and had solemnly
+talked over her future with her, which he seemed to think would be
+lonely. He had not named Clementina, but Mrs. Lander had known well
+enough what he meant; and now she wished to ask her, and her father and
+mother, how they would all like Clementina to come and spend the winter
+with her at Boston first, and then further South, and wherever she should
+happen to go. She apologized for not having come sooner upon this errand;
+she had resolved upon it as soon as Mr. Lander was gone, but she had been
+sick herself, and had only just now got out of bed.
+
+Clementina was too young to feel the pathos of the case fully, or perhaps
+even to follow the tortuous course of Mrs. Lander's motives, but she was
+moved by her grief; and she could not help a thrill of pleasure in the
+vague splendor of the future outlined by Mrs. Lander's proposal. For a
+time she had thought that Mrs. Milray was going to ask her to visit her
+in New York; Mrs. Milray had thrown out a hint of something of the kind
+at parting, but that was the last of it; and now she at once made up her
+mind that she would like to go with Mrs. Lander, while discreetly saying
+that she would ask her father and mother to come and talk with her.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+Her parents objected to leaving their work; each suggested that the other
+had better go; but they both came at Clementina's urgence. Her father
+laughed and her mother frowned when she told them what Mrs. Lander
+wanted, from the same misgiving of her sanity. They partly abandoned this
+theory for a conviction of Mrs. Lander's mere folly when she began to
+talk, and this slowly yielded to the perception that she had some streaks
+of sense. It was sense in the first place to want to have Clementina with
+her, and though it might not be sense to suppose that they would be
+anxious to let her go, they did not find so much want of it as Mrs.
+Lander talked on. It was one of her necessities to talk away her emotions
+before arriving at her ideas, which were often found in a tangle, but
+were not without a certain propriety. She was now, after her interview
+with Clementina, in the immediate presence of these, and it was her ideas
+that she began to produce for the girl's father and mother. She said,
+frankly, that she had more money than she knew what to do with, and they
+must not think she supposed she was doing a favor, for she was really
+asking one.
+
+She was alone in the world, without near connections of her own, or
+relatives of her husband's, and it would be a mercy if they could let
+their daughter come and visit her; she would not call it more than a
+visit; that would be the best thing on both sides; she told of her great
+fancy for Clementina the first time she saw her, and of her husband's
+wish that she would come and visit with them then for the winter. As for
+that money she had tried to make the child take, she presumed that they
+knew about it, and she wished to say that she did it because she was
+afraid Mr. Lander had said so much about the sewing, that they would be
+disappointed. She gave way to her tears at the recollection, and
+confessed that she wanted the child to have the money anyway. She ended
+by asking Mrs. Claxon if she would please to let her have a drink of
+water; and she looked about the room, and said that they had got it
+finished up a great deal, now, had not they? She made other remarks upon
+it, so apt that Mrs. Claxon gave her a sort of permissive invitation to
+look about the whole lower floor, ending with the kitchen.
+
+Mrs. Lander sat down there while Mrs. Claxon drew from the pipes a glass
+of water, which she proudly explained was pumped all over the house by
+the wind mill that supplied the power for her husband's turning lathes.
+
+"Well, I wish mah husband could have tasted that wata," said Mrs. Lander,
+as if reminded of husbands by the word, and by the action of putting down
+the glass. "He was always such a great hand for good, cold wata. My! He'd
+'a liked youa kitchen, Mrs. Claxon. He always was such a home-body, and
+he did get so ti'ed of hotels. For all he had such an appearance, when
+you see him, of bein'--well!--stiff and proud, he was fah moa common in
+his tastes--I don't mean common, exactly, eitha--than what I was; and
+many a time when we'd be drivin' through the country, and we'd pass some
+o' them long-strung-out houses, don't you know, with the kitchen next to
+the wood shed, and then an ahchway befoa you get to the stable, Mr. Landa
+he'd get out, and make an urrand, just so's to look in at the kitchen
+dooa; he said it made him think of his own motha's kitchen. We was both
+brought up in the country, that's a fact, and I guess if the truth was
+known we both expected to settle down and die thea, some time; but now
+he's gone, and I don't know what'll become o' me, and sometimes I don't
+much care. I guess if Mr. Landa'd 'a seen youa kitchen, it wouldn't 'a'
+been so easy to git him out of it; and I do believe if he's livin'
+anywhe' now he takes as much comfo't in my settin' here as what I do. I
+presume I shall settle down somewhe's before a great while, and if you
+could make up youa mind to let your daughta come to me for a little visit
+till spring, you couldn't do a thing that 'd please Mr. Landa moa."
+
+Mrs. Claxon said that she would talk it over with the child's father; and
+then Mrs. Lander pressed her to let her take Clementina back to the
+Middlemount with her for supper, if they wouldn't let her stay the night.
+After Clementina had driven away, Mrs. Claxon accused herself to her
+husband of being the greatest fool in the State, but he said that the
+carriage was one of the Middlemount rigs, and he guessed it was all
+right. He could see that Clem was wild to go, and he didn't see why she
+shouldn't.
+
+"Well, I do, then," his wife retorted. "We don't know anything about the
+woman, or who she is."
+
+"I guess no harm'll come to Clem for one night," said Claxon, and Mrs.
+Claxon was forced back upon the larger question for the maintenance of
+her anxiety. She asked what he was going to do about letting Clem go the
+whole winter with a perfect stranger; and he answered that he had not got
+round to that yet, and that there were a good many things to be thought
+of first. He got round to see the rector before dark, and in the light of
+his larger horizon, was better able to orient Mrs. Lander and her motives
+than he had been before.
+
+When she came back with the girl the next morning, she had thought of
+something in the nature of credentials. It was the letter from her church
+in Boston, which she took whenever she left home, so that if she wished
+she might unite with the church in any place where she happened to be
+stopping. It did not make a great impression upon the Claxons, who were
+of no religion, though they allowed their children to go to the Episcopal
+church and Sunday-school, and always meant to go themselves. They said
+they would like to talk the matter over with the rector, if Mrs. Lander
+did not object; she offered to send her carriage for him, and the rector
+was brought at once.
+
+He was one of those men who have, in the breaking down of the old
+Puritanical faith, and the dying out of the later Unitarian rationalism,
+advanced and established the Anglican church so notably in the New
+England hill-country, by a wise conformity to the necessities and
+exactions of the native temperament. On the ecclesiastical side he was
+conscientiously uncompromising, but personally he was as simple-mannered
+as he was simple-hearted. He was a tall lean man in rusty black, with a
+clerical waistcoat that buttoned high, and scholarly glasses, but with a
+belated straw hat that had counted more than one summer, and a farmer's
+tan on his face and hands. He pronounced the church-letter, though quite
+outside of his own church, a document of the highest respectability, and
+he listened with patient deference to the autobiography which Mrs. Lander
+poured out upon him, and her identifications, through reference to this
+or that person in Boston whom he knew either at first or second hand. He
+had not to pronounce upon her syntax, or her social quality; it was
+enough for him, in behalf of the Claxons, to find her what she professed
+to be.
+
+"You must think," he said, laughing, "that we are over-particular; but
+the fact is that we value Clementina rather highly, and we wish to be
+sure that your hospitable offer will be for her real good."
+
+"Of cou'se," said Mrs. Lander. "I should be just so myself abort her."
+
+"I don't know," he continued, "that I've ever said how much we think of
+her, Mrs. Richling and I, but this seems a good opportunity, as she is
+not present.
+
+"She is not perfect, but she comes as near being a thoroughly good girl
+as she can without knowing it. She has a great deal of common-sense, and
+we all want her to have the best chance."
+
+"Well, that's just the way I feel about her, and that's just what I mean
+to give her," said Mrs. Lander.
+
+"I am not sure that I make myself quite clear," said the rector. "I mean,
+a chance to prove how useful and helpful she can be. Do you think you can
+make life hard for her occasionally? Can you be peevish and exacting, and
+unreasonable? Can you do something to make her value superfluity and
+luxury at their true worth?"
+
+Mrs. Lander looked a little alarmed and a little offended. "I don't know
+as I undastand what you mean, exactly," she said, frowning rather with
+perplexity than resentment. "But the child sha'n't have a care, and her
+own motha couldn't be betta to her than me. There a'n't anything money
+can buy that she sha'n't have, if she wants it, and all I'll ask of her
+is 't she'll enjoy herself as much as she knows how. I want her with me
+because I should love to have her round; and we did from the very fust
+minute she spoke, Mr. Lander and me, both. She shall have her own money,
+and spend it for anything she pleases, and she needn't do a stitch o'
+work from mohnin' till night. But if you're afraid I shall put upon her."
+
+"No, no," said the rector, and he threw back his head with a laugh.
+
+When it was all arranged, a few days later, after the verification of
+certain of Mrs. Lander's references by letters to Boston, he said to
+Clementina's father and mother, "There's only one danger, now, and that
+is that she will spoil Clementina; but there's a reasonable hope that she
+won't know how." He found the Claxons struggling with a fresh misgiving,
+which Claxon expressed. "The way I look at it is like this. I don't want
+that woman should eva think Clem was after her money. On the face of it
+there a'n't very much to her that would make anybody think but what we
+was after it; and I should want it pootty well undastood that we wa'n't
+that kind. But I don't seem to see any way of tellin' her."
+
+"No," said the rector, with a sympathetic twinkle, "that would be
+difficult."
+
+"It's plain to be seen," Mrs. Claxon interposed, "that she thinks a good
+deal of her money; and I d' know but what she'd think she was doin' Clem
+most too much of a favor anyway. If it can't be a puffectly even thing,
+all round, I d' know as I should want it to be at all."
+
+"You're quite right, Mrs. Claxon, quite right. But I believe Mrs. Lander
+may be safely left to look out for her own interests. After all, she has
+merely asked Clementina to pass the winter with her. It will be a good
+opportunity for her to see something of the world; and perhaps it may
+bring her the chance of placing herself in life. We have got to consider
+these things with reference to a young girl."
+
+Mrs. Claxon said, "Of cou'se," but Claxon did not assent so readily.
+
+"I don't feel as if I should want Clem to look at it in that light. If
+the chance don't come to her, I don't want she should go huntin' round
+for it."
+
+"I thoroughly agree with you," said the rector. "But I was thinking that
+there was not only no chance worthy of her in Middlemount, but there is
+no chance at all."
+
+"I guess that's so," Claxon owned with a laugh. "Well, I guess we can
+leave it to Clem to do what's right and proper everyway. As you say,
+she's got lots of sense."
+
+From that moment he emptied his mind of care concerning the matter; but
+husband and wife are never both quite free of care on the same point of
+common interest, and Mrs. Claxon assumed more and more of the anxieties
+which he had abandoned. She fretted under the load, and expressed an
+exasperated tenderness for Clementina when the girl seemed forgetful of
+any of the little steps to be taken before the great one in getting her
+clothes ready for leaving home. She said finally that she presumed they
+were doing a wild thing, and that it looked crazier and crazier the more
+she thought of it; but all was, if Clem didn't like, she could come home.
+By this time her husband was in something of that insensate eagerness to
+have the affair over that people feel in a house where there is a
+funeral.
+
+At the station, when Clementina started for Boston with Mrs. Lander, her
+father and mother, with the rector and his wife, came to see her off.
+Other friends mistakenly made themselves of the party, and kept her
+talking vacuities when her heart was full, till the train drew up. Her
+father went with her into the parlor car, where the porter of the
+Middlemount House set down Mrs. Lander's hand baggage and took the final
+fee she thrust upon him. When Claxon came out he was not so satisfactory
+about the car as he might have been to his wife, who had never been
+inside a parlor car, and who had remained proudly in the background,
+where she could not see into it from the outside. He said that he had
+felt so bad about Clem that he did not notice what the car was like. But
+he was able to report that she looked as well as any of the folks in it,
+and that, if there were any better dressed, he did not see them. He owned
+that she cried some, when he said good-bye to her.
+
+"I guess," said his wife, grimly, "we're a passel o' fools to let her go.
+Even if she don't like, the'a, with that crazy-head, she won't be the
+same Clem when she comes back."
+
+They were too heavy-hearted to dispute much, and were mostly silent as
+they drove home behind Claxon's self-broken colt: a creature that had
+taken voluntarily to harness almost from its birth, and was an example to
+its kind in sobriety and industry.
+
+The children ran out from the house to meet them, with a story of having
+seen Clem at a point in the woods where the train always slowed up before
+a crossing, and where they had all gone to wait for her. She had seen
+them through the car-window, and had come out on the car platform, and
+waved her handkerchief, as she passed, and called something to them, but
+they could not hear what it was, they were all cheering so.
+
+At this their mother broke down, and went crying into the house. Not to
+have had the last words of the child whom she should never see the same
+again if she ever saw her at all, was more, she said, than heart could
+bear.
+
+The rector's wife arrived home with her husband in a mood of mounting
+hopefulness, which soared to tops commanding a view of perhaps more of
+this world's kingdoms than a clergyman's wife ought ever to see, even for
+another. She decided that Clementina's chances of making a splendid
+match, somewhere, were about of the nature of certainties, and she
+contended that she would adorn any station, with experience, and with her
+native tact, especially if it were a very high station in Europe, where
+Mrs. Lander would now be sure to take her. If she did not take her to
+Europe, however, she would be sure to leave her all her money, and this
+would serve the same end, though more indirectly.
+
+Mr. Richling scoffed at this ideal of Clementina's future with a contempt
+which was as little becoming to his cloth. He made his wife reflect that,
+with all her inherent grace and charm, Clementina was an ignorant little
+country girl, who had neither the hardness of heart nor the greediness of
+soul, which gets people on in the world, and repair for them the
+disadvantages of birth and education. He represented that even if
+favorable chances for success in society showed themselves to the girl,
+the intense and inexpugnable vulgarity of Mrs. Lander would spoil them;
+and he was glad of this, he said, for he believed that the best thing
+which could happen to the child would be to come home as sweet and good
+as she had gone away; he added this was what they ought both to pray for.
+
+His wife admitted this, but she retorted by asking if he thought such a
+thing was possible, and he was obliged to own that it was not possible.
+He marred the effect of his concession by subjoining that it was no more
+possible than her making a brilliant and triumphant social figure in
+society, either at home or in Europe.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+So far from embarking at once for Europe, Mrs. Lander went to that hotel
+in a suburb of Boston, where she had the habit of passing the late autumn
+months, in order to fortify herself for the climate of the early winter
+months in the city. She was a little puzzled how to provide for
+Clementina, with respect to herself, but she decided that the best thing
+would be to have her sleep in a room opening out of her own, with a
+folding bed in it, so that it could be used as a sort of parlor for both
+of them during the day, and be within easy reach, for conversation, at
+all times.
+
+On her part, Clementina began by looking after Mrs. Lander's comforts,
+large and little, like a daughter, to her own conception and to that of
+Mrs. Lander, but to other eyes, like a servant. Mrs. Lander shyly shrank
+from acquaintance among the other ladies, and in the absence of this, she
+could not introduce Clementina, who went down to an early breakfast
+alone, and sat apart with her at lunch and dinner, ministering to her in
+public as she did in private. She ran back to their rooms to fetch her
+shawl, or her handkerchief, or whichever drops or powders she happened to
+be taking with her meals, and adjusted with closer care the hassock which
+the head waiter had officially placed at her feet. They seldom sat in the
+parlor where the ladies met, after dinner; they talked only to each
+other; and there, as elsewhere, the girl kept her filial care of the old
+woman. The question of her relation to Mrs. Lander became so pressing
+among several of the guests that, after Clementina had watched over the
+banisters, with throbbing heart and feet, a little dance one night which
+the other girls had got up among themselves, and had fled back to her
+room at the approach of one of the kindlier and bolder of them, the
+landlord felt forced to learn from Mrs. Lander how Miss Claxon was to be
+regarded. He managed delicately, by saying he would give the Sunday paper
+she had ordered to her nurse, "Or, I beg your pardon," he added, as if he
+had made a mistake. "Why, she a'n't my nuhse," Mrs. Lander explained,
+simply, neither annoyed nor amused; "she's just a young lady that's
+visiting me, as you may say," and this put an end to the misgiving among
+the ladies. But it suggested something to Mrs. Lander, and a few days
+afterwards, when they came out from Boston where they had been shopping,
+and she had been lavishing a bewildering waste of gloves, hats, shoes,
+capes and gowns upon Clementina, she said, "I'll tell you what. We've got
+to have a maid."
+
+"A maid?" cried the girl.
+
+"It isn't me, or my things I want her for," said Mrs. Lander. "It's you
+and these dresses of youas. I presume you could look afta them, come to
+give youa mind to it; but I don't want to have you tied up to a lot of
+clothes; and I presume we should find her a comfo't in moa ways than one,
+both of us. I don't know what we shall want her to do, exactly; but I
+guess she will, if she undastands her business, and I want you should go
+in with me, to-morror, and find one. I'll speak to some of the ladies,
+and find out whe's the best place to go, and we'll get the best there
+is."
+
+A lady whom Mrs. Lander spoke to entered into the affair with zeal born
+of a lurking sense of the wrong she had helped do Clementina in the
+common doubt whether she was not herself Mrs. Lander's maid. She offered
+to go into Boston with them to an intelligence office, where you could
+get nice girls of all kinds; but she ended by giving Mrs. Lander the
+address, and instructions as to what she was to require in a maid. She
+was chiefly to get an English maid, if at all possible, for the
+qualifications would more or less naturally follow from her nationality.
+There proved to be no English maid, but there was a Swedish one who had
+received a rigid training in an English family living on the Continent,
+and had come immediately from that service to seek her first place in
+America. The manager of the office pronounced her character, as set down
+in writing, faultless, and Mrs. Lander engaged her. "You want to look
+afta this young lady," she said, indicating Clementina. "I can look afta
+myself," but Ellida took charge of them both on the train out from Boston
+with prompt intelligence.
+
+"We got to get used to it, I guess," Mrs. Lander confided at the first
+chance of whispering to Clementina.
+
+Within a month after washing the faces and combing the hair of all her
+brothers and sisters who would suffer it at her hands, Clementina's own
+head was under the brush of a lady's maid, who was of as great a
+discreetness in her own way as Clementina herself. She supplied the
+defects of Mrs. Lander's elementary habits by simply asking if she should
+get this thing and that thing for the toilet, without criticising its
+absence,--and then asking whether she should get the same things for her
+young lady. She appeared to let Mrs. Lander decide between having her
+brushes in ivory or silver, but there was really no choice for her, and
+they came in silver. She knew not only her own place, but the places of
+her two ladies, and she presently had them in such training that they
+were as proficient in what they might and might not do for themselves and
+for each other, as if making these distinctions were the custom of their
+lives.
+
+Their hearts would both have gone out to Ellida, but Ellida kept them at
+a distance with the smooth respectfulness of the iron hand in the glove
+of velvet; and Clementina first learned from her to imagine the
+impassable gulf between mistress and maid.
+
+At the end of her month she gave them, out of a clear sky, a week's
+warning. She professed no grievance, and was not moved by Mrs. Lander's
+appeal to say what wages she wanted. She would only say that she was
+going to take a place an Commonwealth Avenue, where a friend of hers was
+living, and when the week was up, she went, and left her late mistresses
+feeling rather blank. "I presume we shall have to get anotha," said Mrs.
+Lander.
+
+"Oh, not right away!" Clementina pleaded.
+
+"Well, not right away," Mrs. Lander assented; and provisionally they each
+took the other into her keeping, and were much freer and happier
+together.
+
+Soon after Clementina was startled one morning, as she was going in to
+breakfast, by seeing Mr. Fane at the clerk's desk. He did not see her; he
+was looking down at the hotel register, to compute the bill of a
+departing guest; but when she passed out she found him watching for her,
+with some letters.
+
+"I didn't know you were with us," he said, with his pensive smile, "till
+I found your letters here, addressed to Mrs. Lander's care; and then I
+put two and two together. It only shows how small the world is, don't you
+think so? I've just got back from my vacation; I prefer to take it in the
+fall of the year, because it's so much pleasanter to travel, then. I
+suppose you didn't know I was here?"
+
+"No, I didn't," said Clementina. "I never dreamed of such a thing."
+
+"To be sure; why should you?" Fane reflected. "I've been here ever since
+last spring. But I'll say this, Miss Claxon, that if it's the least
+unpleasant to you, or the least disagreeable, or awakens any kind of
+associations--"
+
+"Oh, no!" Clementina protested, and Fane was spared the pain of saying
+what he would do if it were.
+
+He bowed, and she said sweetly, "It's pleasant to meet any one I've seen
+before. I suppose you don't know how much it's changed at Middlemount
+since you we' e thea." Fane answered blankly, while he felt in his breast
+pocket, Oh, he presumed so; and she added: "Ha'dly any of the same guests
+came back this summer, and they had more in July than they had in August,
+Mrs. Atwell said. Mr. Mahtin, the chef, is gone, and newly all the help
+is different."
+
+Fane kept feeling in one pocket and then slapped himself over the other
+pockets. "No," he said, "I haven't got it with me. I must have left it in
+my room. I just received a letter from Frank--Mr. Gregory, you know, I
+always call him Frank--and I thought I had it with me. He was asking
+about Middlemount; and I wanted to read you what he said. But I'll find
+it upstairs. He's out of college, now, and he's begun his studies in the
+divinity school. He's at Andover. I don't know what to make of Frank,
+oftentimes," the clerk continued, confidentially. "I tell him he's a kind
+of a survival, in religion; he's so aesthetic." It seemed to Fane that he
+had not meant aesthetic, exactly, but he could not ask Clementina what
+the word was. He went on to say, "He's a grand good fellow, Frank is, but
+he don't make enough allowance for human nature. He's more like one of
+those old fashioned orthodox. I go in for having a good time, so long as
+you don't do anybody else any hurt."
+
+He left her, and went to receive the commands of a lady who was leaning
+over the desk, and saying severely, "My mail, if you please," and
+Clementina could not wait for him to come back; she had to go to Mrs.
+Lander, and get her ready for breakfast; Ellida had taught Mrs. Lander a
+luxury of helplessness in which she persisted after the maid's help was
+withdrawn.
+
+Clementina went about the whole day with the wonder what Gregory had said
+about Middlemount filling her mind. It must have had something to do with
+her; he could not have forgotten the words he had asked her to forget.
+She remembered them now with a curiosity, which had no rancor in it, to
+know why he really took them back. She had never blamed him, and she had
+outlived the hurt she had felt at not hearing from him. But she had never
+lost the hope of hearing from him, or rather the expectation, and now she
+found that she was eager for his message; she decided that it must be
+something like a message, although it could not be anything direct. No
+one else had come to his place in her fancy, and she was willing to try
+what they would think of each other now, to measure her own obligation to
+the past by a knowledge of his. There was scarcely more than this in her
+heart when she allowed herself to drift near Fane's place that night,
+that he might speak to her, and tell her what Gregory had said. But he
+had apparently forgotten about his letter, and only wished to talk about
+himself. He wished to analyze himself, to tell her what sort of person he
+was. He dealt impartially with the subject; he did not spare some faults
+of his; and after a week, he proposed a correspondence with her, in a
+letter of carefully studied spelling, as a means of mutual improvement as
+well as further acquaintance.
+
+It cost Clementina a good deal of trouble to answer him as she wished and
+not hurt his feelings. She declined in terms she thought so cold that
+they must offend him beyond the point of speaking to her again; but he
+sought her out, as soon after as he could, and thanked her for her
+kindness, and begged her pardon. He said he knew that she was a very busy
+person, with all the lessons she was taking, and that she had no time for
+carrying on a correspondence. He regretted that he could not write
+French, because then the correspondence would have been good practice for
+her. Clementina had begun taking French lessons, of a teacher who came
+out from Boston. She lunched three times a week with her and Mrs. Lander,
+and spoke the language with Clementina, whose accent she praised for its
+purity; purity of accent was characteristic of all this lady's pupils;
+but what was really extraordinary in Mademoiselle Claxon was her sense of
+grammatical structure; she wrote the language even more perfectly than
+she spoke it; but beautifully, but wonderfully; her exercises were
+something marvellous.
+
+Mrs. Lander would have liked Clementina to take all the lessons that she
+heard any of the other young ladies in the hotel were taking. One of them
+went in town every day, and studied drawing at an art-school, and she
+wanted Clementina to do that, too. But Clementina would not do that; she
+had tried often enough at home, when her brother Jim was drawing, and her
+father was designing the patterns of his woodwork; she knew that she
+never could do it, and the time would be wasted. She decided against
+piano lessons and singing lessons, too; she did not care for either, and
+she pleaded that it would be a waste to study them; but she suggested
+dancing lessons, and her gift for dancing won greater praise, and perhaps
+sincerer, than her accent won from Mademoiselle Blanc, though Mrs. Lander
+said that she would not have believed any one could be more
+complimentary. She learned the new steps and figures in all the
+fashionable dances; she mastered some fancy dances, which society was
+then beginning to borrow from the stage; and she gave these before Mrs.
+Lander with a success which she felt herself.
+
+"I believe I could teach dancing," she said.
+
+"Well, you won't eve' haf to, child," returned Mrs. Lander, with an eye
+on the side of the case that seldom escaped her.
+
+In spite of his wish to respect these preoccupations, Fane could not keep
+from offering Clementina attentions, which took the form of persecution
+when they changed from flowers for Mrs. Lander's table to letters for
+herself. He apologized for his letters whenever he met her; but at last
+one of them came to her before breakfast with a special delivery stamp
+from Boston. He had withdrawn to the city to write it, and he said that
+if she could not make him a favorable answer, he should not come back to
+Woodlake.
+
+She had to show this letter to Mrs. Lander, who asked: "You want he
+should come back?"
+
+"No, indeed! I don't want eva to see him again."
+
+"Well, then, I guess you'll know how to tell him so."
+
+The girl went into her own room to write, and when she brought her answer
+to show it to Mrs. Lander she found her in frowning thought. "I don't
+know but you'll have to go back and write it all over again, Clementina,"
+she said, "if you've told him not to come. I've been thinkin', if you
+don't want to have anything to do with him, we betta go ouaselves."
+
+"Yes," answered Clementina, "that's what I've said."
+
+"You have? Well, the witch is in it! How came you to--"
+
+"I just wanted to talk with you about it. But I thought maybe you'd like
+to go. Or at least I should. I should like to go home, Mrs. Landa."
+
+"Home!" retorted Mrs. Lander. "The'e's plenty of places where you can be
+safe from the fella besides home, though I'll take you back the'a this
+minute if you say so. But you needn't to feel wo'ked up about it."
+
+"Oh, I'm not," said Clementina, but with a gulp which betrayed her
+nervousness.
+
+"I did think," Mrs. Lander went on, "that I should go into the Vonndome,
+for December and January, but just as likely as not he'd come pesterin'
+the'a, too, and I wouldn't go, now, if you was to give me the whole city
+of Boston. Why shouldn't we go to Florida?"
+
+When Mrs. Lander had once imagined the move, the nomadic impulse mounted
+irresistably in her. She spoke of hotels in the South, where they could
+renew the summer, and she mapped out a campaign which she put into
+instant action so far as to advance upon New York.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Ragged Lady, Part 1, by William Dean Howells
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+Title: Ragged Lady, v1
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+Author: William Dean Howells
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+
+
+RAGGED LADY.
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+Part 1.
+
+I.
+
+It was their first summer at Middlemount and the Landers did not know the
+roads.  When they came to a place where they had a choice of two, she
+said that now he must get out of the carry-all and ask at the house
+standing a little back in the edge of the pine woods, which road they
+ought to take for South Middlemount.  She alleged many cases in which
+they had met trouble through his perverse reluctance to find out where
+they were before he pushed rashly forward in their drives.  Whilst she
+urged the facts she reached forward from the back seat where she sat, and
+held her hand upon the reins to prevent his starting the horse, which was
+impartially cropping first the sweet fern on one side and then the
+blueberry bushes on the other side of the narrow wheel-track.  She
+declared at last that if he would not get out and ask she would do it
+herself, and at this the dry little man jerked the reins in spite of her,
+and the horse suddenly pulled the carry-all to the right, and seemed
+about to overset it.
+
+"Oh, what are you doing, Albe't?  "Mrs. Lander lamented, falling helpless
+against the back of her seat.  "Haven't I always told you to speak to the
+hoss fust?"
+
+"He wouldn't have minded my speakin'," said her husband.  "I'm goin' to
+take you up to the dooa so that you can ask for youaself without gettin'
+out."
+
+This was so well, in view of Mrs. Lander's age and bulk, and the hardship
+she must have undergone, if she had tried to carry out her threat, that
+she was obliged to take it in some sort as a favor; and while the vehicle
+rose and sank over the surface left rough, after building, in front of
+the house, like a vessel on a chopping sea, she was silent for several
+seconds.
+
+The house was still in a raw state of unfinish, though it seemed to have
+been lived in for a year at least.  The earth had been banked up at the
+foundations for warmth in winter, and the sheathing of the walls had been
+splotched with irregular spaces of weather boarding; there was a good
+roof over all, but the window-casings had been merely set in their places
+and the trim left for a future impulse of the builder.  A block of wood
+suggested the intention of steps at the front door, which stood
+hospitably open, but remained unresponsive for some time after the
+Landers made their appeal to the house at large by anxious noises in
+their throats, and by talking loud with each other, and then talking low.
+They wondered whether there were anybody in the house; and decided that
+there must be, for there was smoke coming out of the stove pipe piercing
+the roof of the wing at the rear.
+
+Mr. Lander brought himself under censure by venturing, without his wife's
+authority, to lean forward and tap on the door-frame with the butt of his
+whip.  At the sound, a shrill voice called instantly from the region of
+the stove pipe, "Clem!  Clementina?  Go to the front dooa!  The'e's
+somebody knockin'."  The sound of feet, soft and quick, made itself heard
+within, and in a few moments a slim maid, too large for a little girl,
+too childlike for a young girl, stood in the open doorway, looking down
+on the elderly people in the buggy, with a face as glad as a flower's.
+She had blue eyes, and a smiling mouth, a straight nose, and a pretty
+chin whose firm jut accented a certain wistfulness of her lips.  She had
+hair of a dull, dark yellow, which sent out from its thick mass light
+prongs, or tendrils, curving inward again till they delicately touched
+it.  Her tanned face was not very different in color from her hair, and
+neither were her bare feet, which showed well above her ankles in the
+calico skirt she wore.  At sight of the elders in the buggy she
+involuntarily stooped a little to lengthen her skirt in effect, and at
+the same time she pulled it together sidewise, to close a tear in it, but
+she lost in her anxiety no ray of the joy which the mere presence of the
+strangers seemed to give her, and she kept smiling sunnily upon them
+while she waited for them to speak.
+
+"Oh!" Mrs. Lander began with involuntary apology in her tone, "we just
+wished to know which of these roads went to South Middlemount.  We've
+come from the hotel, and we wa'n't quite ce'tain."
+
+The girl laughed as she said, "Both roads go to South Middlemount'm; they
+join together again just a little piece farther on."
+
+The girl and the woman in their parlance replaced the letter 'r' by vowel
+sounds almost too obscure to be represented, except where it came last in
+a word before a word beginning with a vowel; there it was annexed to the
+vowel by a strong liaison, according to the custom universal in rural New
+England.
+
+"Oh, do they?" said Mrs. Lander.
+
+"Yes'm," answered the girl.  "It's a kind of tu'nout in the wintatime; or
+I guess that's what made it in the beginning; sometimes folks take one
+hand side and sometimes the other, and that keeps them separate; but
+they're really the same road, 'm."
+
+"Thank you," said Mrs. Lander, and she pushed her husband to make him say
+something, too, but he remained silently intent upon the child's
+prettiness, which her blue eyes seemed to illumine with a light of their
+own.  She had got hold of the door, now, and was using it as if it was a
+piece of drapery, to hide not only the tear in her gown, but somehow both
+her bare feet.  She leaned out beyond the edge of it; and then, at
+moments she vanished altogether behind it.
+
+Since Mr. Lander would not speak, and made no sign of starting up his
+horse, Mrs. Lander added, "I presume you must be used to havin' people
+ask about the road, if it's so puzzlin'."
+
+"O, yes'm," returned the girl, gladly.  "Almost every day, in the
+summatime."
+
+"You have got a pretty place for a home, he'e," said Mrs. Lander.
+
+"Well, it will be when it's finished up."  Without leaning forward
+inconveniently Mrs. Lander could see that the partitions of the house
+within were lathed, but not plastered, and the girl looked round as if to
+realize its condition and added, "It isn't quite finished inside."
+
+"We wouldn't, have troubled you," said Mrs. Lander, "if we had seen
+anybody to inquire of."
+
+"Yes'm," said the girl.  "It a'n't any trouble."
+
+"There are not many otha houses about, very nea', but I don't suppose you
+get lonesome; young folks are plenty of company for themselves, and if
+you've got any brothas and sistas--"
+
+"Oh," said the girl, with a tender laugh, "I've got eva so many of them!"
+
+There was a stir in the bushes about the carriage, and Mrs. Lander was
+aware for an instant of children's faces looking through the leaves at
+her and then flashing out of sight, with gay cries at being seen.  A boy,
+older than the rest, came round in front of the horse and passed out of
+sight at the corner of the house.
+
+Lander now leaned back and looked over his shoulder at his wife as if he
+might hopefully suppose she had come to the end of her questions, but she
+gave no sign of encouraging him to start on their way again.
+
+"That your brotha, too?" she asked the girl.
+
+"Yes'm.  He's the oldest of the boys; he's next to me."
+
+"I don't know," said Mrs. Lander thoughtfully, "as I noticed how many
+boys there were, or how many girls."
+
+"I've got two sistas, and three brothas, 'm," said the girl, always
+smiling sweetly.  She now emerged from the shelter of the door, and Mrs.
+Lander perceived that the slight movements of such parts of her person as
+had been evident beyond its edge were the effects of some endeavor at
+greater presentableness.  She had contrived to get about her an overskirt
+which covered the rent in her frock, and she had got a pair of shoes on
+her feet.  Stockings were still wanting, but by a mutual concession of
+her shoe-tops and the border of her skirt, they were almost eliminated
+from the problem.  This happened altogether when the girl sat down on the
+threshold, and got herself into such foreshortening that the eye of Mrs.
+Lander in looking down upon her could not detect their absence.  Her
+little head then showed in the dark of the doorway like a painted head
+against its background.
+
+"You haven't been livin' here a great while, by the looks," said Mrs.
+Lander.  "It don't seem to be clea'ed off very much."
+
+"We've got quite a ga'den-patch back of the house," replied the girl,
+"and we should have had moa, but fatha wasn't very well, this spring;
+he's eva so much better than when we fust came he'e."
+
+"It has, the name of being a very healthy locality," said Mrs. Lander,
+somewhat discontentedly, "though I can't see as it's done me so very much
+good, yit.  Both your payrints livin'?"
+
+"Yes'm.  Oh, yes, indeed!"
+
+"And your mother, is she real rugged?  She need to be, with such a flock
+of little ones!"
+
+"Yes, motha's always well.  Fatha was just run down, the doctas said, and
+ought to keep more in the open aia.  That's what he's done since he came
+he'e.  He helped a great deal on the house and he planned it all out
+himself."
+
+"Is he a ca'penta?  " asked Mrs. Lander.
+
+"No'm; but he's--I don't know how to express it--he likes to do every
+kind of thing."
+
+"But he's got some business, ha'n't he?"  A shadow of severity crept over
+Mrs. Lander's tone, in provisional reprehension of possible
+shiftlessness.
+
+"Yes'm.  He was a machinist at the Mills; that's what the doctas thought
+didn't agree with him.  He bought a piece of land he'e, so as to be in
+the pine woods, and then we built this house."
+
+"When did you say you came?"
+
+"Two yea's ago, this summa."
+
+"Well!  What did you do befoa you built this house?"
+
+"We camped the first summa."
+
+"You camped?  In a tent?"
+
+"Well, it was pahtly a tent, and pahtly bank."
+
+"I should have thought you would have died."
+
+The girl laughed.  "Oh, no, we all kept fast-rate.  We slept in the tents
+we had two--and we cooked in the shanty."  She smiled at the notion in
+adding, "At fast the neighbas thought we we'e Gipsies; and the summa
+folks thought we were Indians, and wanted to get baskets of us."
+
+Mrs. Lander did not know what to think, and she asked, "But didn't it
+almost perish you, stayin' through the winter in an unfinished house?"
+
+"Well, it was pretty cold.  But it was so dry, the aia was, and the woods
+kept the wind off nicely."
+
+The same shrill voice in the region of the stovepipe which had sent the
+girl to the Landers now called her from them.  "Clem !  Come here a
+minute!"
+
+The girl said to Mrs. Lander, politely, "You'll have to excuse me, now'm.
+I've got to go to motha."
+
+"So do!" said Mrs. Lander, and she was so taken by the girl's art and
+grace in getting to her feet and fading into the background of the
+hallway without visibly casting any detail of her raiment, that she was
+not aware of her husband's starting up the horse in time to stop him.
+They were fairly under way again, when she lamented, "What you doin',
+Albe't?  Whe'e you goin'?"
+
+"I'm goin' to South Middlemount.  Didn't you want to?"
+
+"Well, of all the men!  Drivin' right off without waitin' to say thankye
+to the child, or take leave, or anything!"
+
+"Seemed to me as if SHE took leave."
+
+"But she was comin' back!  And I wanted to ask--"
+
+"I guess you asked enough for one while.  Ask the rest to-morra."
+
+Mrs. Lander was a woman who could often be thrown aside from an immediate
+purpose, by the suggestion of some remoter end, which had already,
+perhaps, intimated itself to her.  She said, " That's true," but by the
+time her husband had driven down one of the roads beyond the woods into
+open country, she was a quiver of intolerable curiosity.  "Well, all I've
+got to say is that I sha'n't rest till I know all about 'em."
+
+"Find out when we get back to the hotel, I guess," said her husband.
+
+"No, I can't wait till I get back to the hotel.  I want to know now.  I
+want you should stop at the very fust house we come to.  Dea'!  The'e
+don't seem to be any houses, any moa."  She peered out around the side of
+the carry-all and scrutinized the landscape.  "Hold on!  No, yes it is,
+too!  Whoa!  Whoa!  The'e's a man in that hay-field, now!"
+
+She laid hold of the reins and pulled the horse to a stand.  Mr. Lander
+looked round over his shoulder at her.  "Hadn't you betta wait till you
+get within half a mile of the man?"
+
+"Well, I want you should stop when you do git to him.  Will you?  I want
+to speak to him, and ask him all about those folks."
+
+"I didn't suppose you'd let me have much of a chance," said her husband.
+When he came within easy hail of the man in the hay-field, he pulled up
+beside the meadow-wall, where the horse began to nibble the blackberry
+vines that overran it.
+
+Mrs. Lander beckoned and called to the man, who had stopped pitching hay
+and now stood leaning on the handle of his fork.  At the signs and sounds
+she made, he came actively forward to the road, bringing his fork with
+him.  When he arrived within easy conversational distance, he planted the
+tines in the ground and braced himself at an opposite incline from the
+long smooth handle, and waited for Mrs. Lander to begin.
+
+"Will you please tell us who those folks ah', livin' back there in the
+edge of the woods, in that new unfinished house?"
+
+The man released his fork with one hand to stoop for a head of timothy
+that had escaped the scythe, and he put the stem of it between his teeth,
+where it moved up and down, and whipped fantastically about as he talked,
+before he answered, "You mean the Claxons?"
+
+"I don't know what thei' name is."  Mrs. Lander repeated exactly what she
+had said.
+
+The farmer said, "Long, red-headed man, kind of sickly-lookin'?"
+
+"We didn't see the man"--
+
+"Little woman, skinny-lookin; pootty tonguey?"
+
+"We didn't see her, eitha; but I guess we hea'd her at the back of the
+house."
+
+"Lot o' children, about as big as pa'tridges, runnin' round in the
+bushes?"
+
+"Yes!  And a very pretty-appearing girl; about thi'teen or fou'teen, I
+should think."
+
+The farmer pulled his fork out of the ground, and planted it with his
+person at new slopes in the figure of a letter A, rather more upright
+than before.  "Yes; it's them," he said.  "Ha'n't been in the neighbahood
+a great while, eitha.  Up from down Po'tland way, some'res, I guess.
+Built that house last summer, as far as it's got, but I don't believe
+it's goin' to git much fa'tha."
+
+"Why, what's the matta?"  demanded Mrs. Lander in an anguish of interest.
+
+The man in the hay-field seemed to think it more dignified to include
+Lander in this inquiry, and he said with a glimmer of the eye for him,
+"Hea'd of do-nothin' folks?"
+
+"Seen 'em, too," answered Lander, comprehensively.
+
+"Well, that a'n't Claxon's complaint exactly.  He a'n't a do-nothin';
+he's a do-everything.  I guess it's about as bad."  Lander glimmered back
+at the man, but did not speak.
+
+"Kind of a machinist down at the Mills, where he come from," the farmer
+began again, and Mrs. Lander, eager not to be left out of the affair for
+a moment, interrupted:
+
+"Yes, Yes!  That's what the gul said."
+
+"But he don't seem to think't the i'on agreed with him, and now he's
+goin' in for wood.  Well, he did have a kind of a foot-powa tu'nin'
+lathe, and tuned all sots o' things; cups, and bowls, and u'ns for fence-
+posts, and vases, and sleeve-buttons and little knick-knacks; but the
+place bunt down, here, a while back, and he's been huntin' round for
+wood, the whole winta long, to make canes out of for the summa-folks.
+Seems to think that the smell o' the wood, whether it's green or it's
+dry, is goin' to cure him, and he can't git too much of it."
+
+"Well, I believe it's so, Albe't!" cried Mrs. Lander, as if her husband
+had disputed the theory with his taciturn back.  He made no other sign of
+controversy, and the man in the hay-field went on.
+
+"I hea' he's goin' to put up a wind mill, back in an open place he's got,
+and use the powa for tu'nin', if he eva gits it up.  But he don't seem to
+be in any great of a hurry, and they scrape along somehow.  Wife takes in
+sewin' and the girl wo'ked at the Middlemount House last season.  Whole
+fam'ly's got to tu'n in and help s'po't a man that can do everything."
+
+The farmer appealed with another humorous cast of his eye to Lander; but
+the old man tacitly refused to take any further part in the talk, which
+began to flourish apace, in question and answer, between his wife and the
+man in the hay-field.  It seemed that the children had all inherited the
+father's smartness.  The oldest boy could beat the nation at figures, and
+one of the young ones could draw anything you had a mind to.  They were
+all clear up in their classes at school, and yet you might say they
+almost ran wild, between times.  The oldest girl was a pretty-behaved
+little thing, but the man in the hay-field guessed there was not very
+much to her, compared with some of the boys.  Any rate, she had not the
+name of being so smart at school.  Good little thing, too, and kind of
+mothered the young ones.
+
+Mrs. Lander, when she had wrung the last drop of information out of him,
+let him crawl back to his work, mentally flaccid, and let her husband
+drive on, but under a fire of conjecture and asseveration that was
+scarcely intermitted till they reached their hotel.  That night she
+talked along time about their afternoon's adventure before she allowed
+him to go to sleep.  She said she must certainly see the child again;
+that they must drive down there in the morning, and ask her all about
+herself.
+
+"Albe't," she concluded; "I wish we had her to live with us.  Yes, I do!
+I wonder if we could get her to.  You know I always did want to adopt a
+baby."
+
+"You neva said so," Mr. Lander opened his mouth almost for the first
+time, since the talk began.
+
+"I didn't suppose you'd like it," said his wife.
+
+"Well, she a'n't a baby.  I guess you'd find you had your hands full,
+takon' a half-grown gul like that to bring up."
+
+"I shouldn't be afraid any," the wife declared.  "She has just twined
+herself round my heat.  I can't get her pretty looks out of my eyes.
+I know she's good."
+
+"We'll see how you feel about it in the morning."
+
+The old man began to wind his watch, and his wife seemed to take this for
+a sign that the incident was closed, for the present at least.  He seldom
+talked, but there came times when he would not even listen.  One of these
+was the time after he had wound his watch.  A minute later he had
+undressed, with an agility incredible of his years, and was in bed, as
+effectively blind and deaf to his wife's appeals as if he were already
+asleep.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+When Albert Gallatin Lander (he was named for an early Secretary of the
+Treasury as a tribute to the statesman's financial policy) went out of
+business, his wife began to go out of health; and it became the most
+serious affair of his declining years to provide for her invalid fancies.
+He would have liked to buy a place in the Boston suburbs (he preferred
+one of the Newtons) where they could both have had something to do, she
+inside of the house, and he outside; but she declared that what they both
+needed was a good long rest, with freedom from care and trouble of every
+kind.  She broke up their establishment in Boston, and stored their
+furniture, and she would have made him sell the simple old house in which
+they had always lived, on an unfashionable up-and-down-hill street of the
+West End, if he had not taken one of his stubborn stands, and let it for
+a term of years without consulting her.  But she had her way about their
+own movements, and they began that life of hotels, which they had now
+lived so long that she believed any other impossible.  Its luxury and
+idleness had told upon each of them with diverse effect.
+
+They had both entered upon it in much the same corporal figure, but she
+had constantly grown in flesh, while he had dwindled away until he was
+not much more than half the weight of his prime.  Their digestion was
+alike impaired by their joint life, but as they took the same medicines
+Mrs. Lander was baffled to account for the varying result.  She was sure
+that all the anxiety came upon her, and that logically she was the one
+who ought to have wasted away.  But she had before her the spectacle of a
+husband who, while he gave his entire attention to her health, did not
+audibly or visibly worry about it, and yet had lost weight in such
+measure that upon trying on a pair of his old trousers taken out of
+storage with some clothes of her own, he found it impossible to use the
+side pockets which the change in his figure carried so far to the rear
+when the garment was reduced at the waist.  At the same time her own
+dresses of ten years earlier would not half meet round her; and one of
+the most corroding cares of a woman who had done everything a woman could
+to get rid of care, was what to do with those things which they could
+neither of them ever wear again.  She talked the matter over with herself
+before her husband, till he took the desperate measure of sending them
+back to storage; and they had been left there in the spring when the
+Landers came away for the summer.
+
+They always spent the later spring months at a hotel in the suburbs of
+Boston, where they arrived in May from a fortnight in a hotel at New
+York, on their way up from hotels in Washington, Ashville, Aiken and
+St. Augustine.  They passed the summer months in the mountains, and early
+in the autumn they went back to the hotel in the Boston suburbs, where
+Mrs. Lander considered it essential to make some sojourn before going to
+a Boston hotel for November and December, and getting ready to go down to
+Florida in January.  She would not on any account have gone directly to
+the city from the mountains, for people who did that were sure to lose
+the good of their summer, and to feel the loss all the winter, if they
+did not actually come down with a fever.
+
+She was by no means aware that she was a selfish or foolish person.  She
+made Mr. Lander subscribe statedly to worthy objects in Boston, which she
+still regarded as home, because they had not dwelt any where else since
+they ceased to live there; and she took lavishly of tickets for all the
+charitable entertainments in the hotels where they stayed.  Few if any
+guests at hotels enjoyed so much honor from porters, bell-boys, waiters,
+chambermaids and bootblacks as the Landers, for they gave richly in fees
+for every conceivable service which could be rendered them; they went out
+of their way to invent debts of gratitude to menials who had done nothing
+for them.  He would make the boy who sold papers at the dining-room door
+keep the change, when he had been charged a profit of a hundred per cent.
+already; and she would let no driver who had plundered them according to
+the carriage tariff escape without something for himself.
+
+A sense of their munificence penetrated the clerks and proprietors with a
+just esteem for guests who always wanted the best of everything, and
+questioned no bill for extras.  Mrs. Lander, in fact, who ruled these
+expenditures, had no knowledge of the value of things, and made her
+husband pay whatever was asked.  Yet when they lived under their own roof
+they had lived simply, and Lander had got his money in an old-fashioned
+business way, and not in some delirious speculation such as leaves a man
+reckless of money afterwards.  He had been first of all a tailor, and
+then he had gone into boys' and youths' clothing in a small way, and
+finally he had mastered this business and come out at the top, with his
+hands full.  He invested his money so prosperously that the income for
+two elderly people, who had no children, and only a few outlying
+relations on his side, was far beyond their wants, or even their whims.
+
+She as a woman, who in spite of her bulk and the jellylike majesty with
+which she shook in her smoothly casing brown silks, as she entered hotel
+dining-rooms, and the severity with which she frowned over her fan down
+the length of the hotel drawing-rooms, betrayed more than her husband the
+commonness of their origin.  She could not help talking, and her accent
+and her diction gave her away for a middle-class New England person of
+village birth and unfashionable sojourn in Boston.  He, on the contrary,
+lurked about the hotels where they passed their days in a silence so
+dignified that when his verbs and nominatives seemed not to agree, you
+accused your own hearing.  He was correctly dressed, as an elderly man
+should be, in the yesterday of the fashions, and he wore with
+impressiveness a silk hat whenever such a hat could be worn.  A pair of
+drab cloth gaiters did much to identify him with an old school of
+gentlemen, not very definite in time or place.  He had a full gray beard
+cut close, and he was in the habit of pursing his mouth a great deal.
+But he meant nothing by it, and his wife meant nothing by her frowning.
+They had no wish to subdue or overawe any one, or to pass for persons of
+social distinction.  They really did not know what society was, and they
+were rather afraid of it than otherwise as they caught sight of it in
+their journeys and sojourns.  They led a life of public seclusion, and
+dwelling forever amidst crowds, they were all in all to each other, and
+nothing to the rest of the world, just as they had been when they resided
+(as they would have said) on Pinckney street.  In their own house they
+had never entertained, though they sometimes had company, in the style of
+the country town where Mrs. Lander grew up.  As soon as she was released
+to the grandeur of hotel life, she expanded to the full measure of its
+responsibilities and privileges, but still without seeking to make it the
+basis of approach to society.  Among the people who surrounded her, she
+had not so much acquaintance as her husband even, who talked so little
+that he needed none.  She sometimes envied his ease in getting on with
+people when he chose; and his boldness in speaking to fellow guests and
+fellow travellers, if he really wanted anything.  She wanted something of
+them all the time, she wanted their conversation and their companionship;
+but in her ignorance of the social arts she was thrown mainly upon the
+compassion of the chambermaids.  She kept these talking as long as she
+could detain them in her rooms; and often fed them candy (which she ate
+herself with childish greed) to bribe them to further delays.  If she was
+staying some days in a hotel, she sent for the house-keeper, and made all
+she could of her as a listener, and as soon as she settled herself for a
+week, she asked who was the best doctor in the place.  With doctors she
+had no reserves, and she poured out upon them the history of her diseases
+and symptoms in an inexhaustible flow of statement, conjecture and
+misgiving, which was by no means affected by her profound and
+inexpugnable ignorance of the principles of health.  From time to time
+she forgot which side her liver was on, but she had been doctored (as she
+called it) for all her organs, and she was willing to be doctored for any
+one of them that happened to be in the place where she fancied a present
+discomfort.  She was not insensible to the claims which her husband's
+disorders had upon science, and she liked to end the tale of her own
+sufferings with some such appeal as: "I wish you could do something for
+Mr. Landa, too, docta."  She made him take a little of each medicine that
+was left for her; but in her presence he always denied that there was
+anything the matter with him, though he was apt to follow the doctor out
+of the room, and get a prescription from him for some ailment which he
+professed not to believe in himself, but wanted to quiet Mrs. Lander's
+mind about.
+
+He rose early, both from long habit, and from the scant sleep of an
+elderly man; he could not lie in bed; but his wife always had her
+breakfast there and remained so long that the chambermaid had done up
+most of the other rooms and had leisure for talk with her.  As soon as he
+was awake, he stole softly out and was the first in the dining-room for
+breakfast.  He owned to casual acquaintance in moments of expansion that
+breakfast was his best meal, but he did what he could to make it his
+worst by beginning with oranges and oatmeal, going forward to beefsteak
+and fried potatoes, and closing with griddle cakes and syrup, washed down
+with a cup of cocoa, which his wife decided to be wholesomer than coffee.
+By the time he had finished such a repast, he crept out of the dining-
+room in a state of tension little short of anguish, which he confided to
+the sympathy of the bootblack in the washroom.
+
+He always went from having his shoes polished to get a toothpick at the
+clerk's desk; and at the Middlemount House, the morning after he had been
+that drive with Mrs. Lander, he lingered a moment with his elbows beside
+the register.  "How about a buckboa'd?" he asked.
+
+"Something you can drive yourself "--the clerk professionally dropped his
+eye to the register--"Mr. Lander?"
+
+"Well, no, I guess not, this time," the little man returned, after a
+moment's reflection.  "Know anything of a family named Claxon, down the
+road, here, a piece?"  He twisted his head in the direction he meant.
+
+"This is my first season at Middlemount; but I guess Mr. Atwell will
+know."  The clerk called to the landlord, who was smoking in his private
+room behind the office, and the landlord came out.  The clerk repeated
+Mr. Lander's questions.
+
+"Pootty good kind of folks, I guess," said the landlord provisionally,
+through his cigar-smoke.  "Man's a kind of univussal genius, but he's got
+a nice family of children; smaht as traps, all of 'em."
+
+"How about that oldest gul?" asked Mr. Lander.
+
+"Well, the'a," said the landlord, taking the cigar out of his mouth.
+"I think she's about the nicest little thing goin'.  We've had her up
+he'e, to help out in a busy time, last summer, and she's got moo sense
+than guls twice as old.  Takes hold like--lightnin'."
+
+"About how old did you say she was?"
+
+"Well, you've got me the'a, Mr. Landa; I guess I'll ask Mis' Atwell."
+
+"The'e's no hurry," said Lander.  "That buckboa'd be round pretty soon?"
+he asked of the clerk.
+
+"Be right along now, Mr. Lander," said the clerk, soothingly.  He stepped
+out to the platform that the teams drove up to from the stable, and came
+back to say that it was coming.  "I believe you said you wanted something
+you could drive yourself?"
+
+"No, I didn't, young man," answered the elder sharply.  But the next
+moment he added, "Come to think of it, I guess it's just as well.  You
+needn't get me no driver.  I guess I know the way well enough.  You put
+me in a hitchin' strap."
+
+"All right, Mr. Lander," said the clerk, meekly.
+
+The landlord had caught the peremptory note in Lander's voice, and he
+came out of his room again to see that there was nothing going wrong.
+
+"It's all right," said Lander, and went out and got into his buckboard.
+
+"Same horse you had yesterday," said the young clerk.  "You don't need to
+spare the whip."
+
+"I guess I can look out for myself," said Lander, and he shook the reins
+and gave the horse a smart cut, as a hint of what he might expect.
+
+The landlord joined the clerk in looking after the brisk start the horse
+made.  "Not the way he set off with the old lady, yesterday," suggested
+the clerk.
+
+The landlord rolled his cigar round in his tubed lips.  "I guess he's
+used to ridin' after a good hoss."  He added gravely to the clerk, "You
+don't want to make very free with that man, Mr. Pane.  He won't stan' it,
+and he's a class of custom that you want to cata to when it comes in your
+way.  I suspicioned what he was when they came here and took the highest
+cost rooms without tu'nin' a haia.  They're a class of custom that you
+won't get outside the big hotels in the big reso'ts.  Yes, sir," said the
+landlord taking a fresh start, "they're them kind of folks that live the
+whole yea' round in hotels; no'th in summa, south in winta, and city
+hotels between times.  They want the best their money can buy, and they
+got plenty of it.  She"--he meant Mrs. Lander--"has been tellin' my wife
+how they do; she likes to talk a little betta than he doos; and I guess
+when it comes to society, they're away up, and they won't stun' any
+nonsense."
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+Lander came into his wife's room between ten and eleven o'clock, and
+found her still in bed, but with her half-finished breakfast on a tray
+before her.  As soon as he opened the door she said, "I do wish you would
+take some of that heat-tonic of mine, Albe't, that the docta left for me
+in Boston.  You'll find it in the upper right bureau box, the'a; and I
+know it'll be the very thing for you.  It'll relieve you of that
+suffocatin' feeling that I always have, comin' up stars.  Dea'!  I don't
+see why they don't have an elevata; they make you pay enough; and I wish
+you'd get me a little more silva, so's't I can give to the chambamaid and
+the bell-boy; I do hate to be out of it.  I guess you been up and out
+long ago.  They did make that polonaise of mine too tight after all I
+said, and I've been thinkin' how I could get it alt'ed; but I presume
+there ain't a seamstress to be had around he'e for love or money.  Well,
+now, that's right, Albe't; I'm glad to see you doin' it."
+
+Lander had opened the lid of the bureau box, and uncorked a bottle from
+it, and tilted this to his lips.
+
+"Don't take too much," she cautioned him, "or you'll lose the effects.
+When I take too much of a medicine, it's wo'se than nothing, as fah's I
+can make out.  When I had that spell in Thomasville spring before last,
+I believe I should have been over it twice as quick if I had taken just
+half the medicine I did.  You don't really feel anyways bad about the
+heat, do you, Albe't?"
+
+"I'm all right," said Lander.  He put back the bottle in its place and
+sat down.
+
+Mrs. Lander lifted herself on her elbow and looked over at him.
+"Show me on the bottle how much you took."
+
+He got the bottle out again and showed her with his thumb nail a point
+which he chose at random.
+
+"Well, that was just about the dose for you," she said; and she sank down
+in bed again with the air of having used a final precaution.  "You don't
+want to slow your heat up too quick."
+
+Lander did not put the bottle back this time.  He kept it in his hand,
+with his thumb on the cork, and rocked it back and forth on his knees as
+he spoke.  "Why don't you get that woman to alter it for you?"
+
+"What woman alta what?"
+
+"Your polonaise.  The one whe'e we stopped yestaday."
+
+"Oh!  Well, I've been thinkin' about that child, Albe't; I did before I
+went to sleep; and I don't believe I want to risk anything with her.  It
+would be a ca'e," said Mrs. Lander with a sigh, "and I guess I don't want
+to take any moa ca'e than what I've got now.  What makes you think she
+could alta my polonaise?"
+
+"Said she done dress-makin'," said Lander, doggedly.
+
+"You ha'n't been the'a?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"You didn't say anything to her about her daughta?"
+
+"Yes, I did," said Lander.
+
+"Well, you ce'tainly do equal anything," said his wife.  She lay still
+awhile, and then she roused herself with indignant energy.  "Well, then,
+I can tell you what, Albe't Landa: yon can go right straight and take
+back everything you said.  I don't want the child, and I won't have her.
+I've got care enough to worry me now, I should think; and we should have
+her whole family on our hands, with that shiftless father of hers, and
+the whole pack of her brothas and sistas.  What made you think I wanted
+you to do such a thing?"
+
+"You wanted me to do it last night.  Wouldn't ha'dly let me go to bed."
+
+"Yes!  And how many times have I told you nova to go off and do a thing
+that I wanted you to, unless you asked me if I did?  Must I die befo'e
+you can find out that there is such a thing as talkin', and such anotha
+thing as doin'?  You wouldn't get yourself into half as many scrapes if
+you talked more and done less, in this wo'ld."  Lander rose.
+
+"Wait!  Hold on!  What are you going to say to the pooa thing?  She'll be
+so disappointed!"
+
+"I don't know as I shall need to say anything myself," answered the
+little man, at his dryest.  "Leave that to you."
+
+"Well, I can tell you," returned his wife, "I'm not goin' nea' them
+again; and if you think-- What did you ask the woman, anyway?"
+
+"I asked her," he said, "if she wanted to let the gul come and see you
+about some sewing you had to have done, and she said she did."
+
+"And you didn't speak about havin' her come to live with us?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, why in the land didn't you say so before, Albe't?"
+
+"You didn't ask me.  What do you want I should say to her now?"
+
+"Say to who?"
+
+"The gul.  She's down in the pahlor, waitin'."
+
+"Well, of all the men!"  cried Mrs. Lander.  But she seemed to find
+herself, upon reflection, less able to cope with Lander personally than
+with the situation generally.  "Will you send her up, Albe't?" she asked,
+very patiently, as if he might be driven to further excesses, if not
+delicately handled.  As soon as he had gone out of the room she wished
+that she had told him to give her time to dress and have her room put in
+order, before he sent the child up; but she could only make the best of
+herself in bed with a cap and a breakfast jacket, arranged with the help
+of a handglass.  She had to get out of bed to put her other clothes away
+in the closet and she seized the chance to push the breakfast tray out of
+the door, and smooth up the bed, while she composed her features and her
+ideas to receive her visitor.  Both, from long habit rather than from any
+cause or reason, were of a querulous cast, and her ordinary tone was a
+snuffle expressive of deep-seated affliction.  She was at once plaintive
+and voluable, and in moments of excitement her need of freeing her mind
+was so great that she took herself into her own confidence, and found a
+more sympathetic listener than when she talked to her husband.  As she
+now whisked about her room in her bed-gown with an activity not
+predicable of her age and shape, and finally plunged under the covering
+and drew it up to her chin with one hand while she pressed it out
+decorously over her person with the other, she kept up a rapid flow of
+lamentation and conjecture.  "I do suppose he'll be right back with her
+before I'm half ready; and what the man was thinkin' of to do such a
+thing anyway, I don't know.  I don't know as she'll notice much, comin'
+out of such a lookin' place as that, and I don't know as I need to care
+if she did.  But if the'e's care anywhe's around, I presume I'm the one
+to have it.  I presume I did take a fancy to her, and I guess I shall be
+glad to see how I like her now; and if he's only told her I want some
+sewin' done, I can scrape up something to let her carry home with her.
+It's well I keep my things where I can put my hand on 'em at a time like
+this, and I don't believe I shall sca'e the child, as it is.  I do hope
+Albe't won't hang round half the day before he brings her; I like to have
+a thing ova."
+
+Lander wandered about looking for the girl through the parlors and the
+piazzas, and then went to the office to ask what had become of her.
+
+The landlord came out of his room at his question to the clerk.  "Oh, I
+guess she's round in my wife's room, Mr. Landa.  She always likes to see
+Clementina, and I guess they all do.  She's a so't o' pet amongst 'em."
+
+"No hurry," said Lander, "I guess my wife ain't quite ready for her yet."
+
+"Well, she'll be right out, in a minute or so," said the landlord.
+
+The old man tilted his hat forward over his eyes, and went to sit on the
+veranda and look at the landscape while he waited.  It was one of the
+loveliest landscapes in the mountains; the river flowed at the foot of an
+abrupt slope from the road before the hotel, stealing into and out of the
+valley, and the mountains, gray in the farther distance, were draped with
+folds of cloud hanging upon their flanks and tops.  But Lander was tired
+of nearly all kinds of views and prospects, though he put' up with them,
+in his perpetual movement from place to place, in the same resignation
+that he suffered the limitations of comfort in parlor cars and sleepers,
+and the unwholesomeness of hotel tables.  He was chained to the restless
+pursuit of an ideal not his own, but doomed to suffer for its
+impossibility as if he contrived each of his wife's disappointments from
+it.  He did not philosophize his situation, but accepted it as in an
+order of Providence which it would be useless for him to oppose; though
+there were moments when he permitted himself to feel a modest doubt of
+its justice.  He was aware that when he had a house of his own he was
+master in it, after a fashion, and that as long as he was in business he
+was in some sort of authority.  He perceived that now he was a slave to
+the wishes of a mistress who did not know what she wanted, and that he
+was never farther from pleasing her than when he tried to do what she
+asked.  He could not have told how all initiative had been taken from
+him, and he had fallen into the mere follower of a woman guided only by
+her whims, who had no object in life except to deprive it of all object.
+He felt no rancor toward her for this; he knew that she had a tender
+regard for him, and that she believed she was considering him first in
+her most selfish arrangements.  He always hoped that sometime she would
+get tired of her restlessness, and be willing to settle down again in
+some stated place; and wherever it was, he meant to get into some kind of
+business again.  Till this should happen he waited with an apathetic
+patience of which his present abeyance was a detail.  He would hardly
+have thought it anything unfit, and certainly nothing surprising, that
+the landlady should have taken the young girl away from where he had left
+her, and then in the pleasure of talking with her, and finding her a
+centre of interest for the whole domestic force of the hotel, should have
+forgotten to bring her back.
+
+The Middlemount House had just been organized on the scale of a first
+class hotel, with prices that had risen a little in anticipation of the
+other improvements.  The landlord had hitherto united in himself the
+functions of clerk and head waiter, but he had now got a senior, who was
+working his way through college, to take charge of the dining-room, and
+had put in the office a youth of a year's experience as under clerk at a
+city hotel.  But he meant to relinquish no more authority than his wife
+who frankly kept the name as well as duty of house-keeper.  It was in
+making her morning inspection of the dusting that she found Clementina in
+the parlor where Lander had told her to sit down till he should come for
+her.
+
+"Why, Clem!" she said, "I didn't know you!  You have grown so!  Youa
+folks all well?  I decla'e you ah' quite a woman now," she added, as the
+girl stood up in her slender, graceful height.  "You look as pretty as a
+pink in that hat.  Make that dress youaself?  Well, you do beat the
+witch!  I want you should come to my room with me."
+
+Mrs. Atwell showered other questions and exclamations on the girl, who
+explained how she happened to be there, and said that she supposed she
+must stay where she was for fear Mr. Lander should come back and find her
+gone; but Mrs. Atwell overruled her with the fact that Mrs. Lander's
+breakfast had just gone up to her; and she made her come out and see the
+new features of the enlarged house-keeping.  In the dining-room there
+were some of the waitresses who had been there the summer before, and
+recognitions of more or less dignity passed between them and Clementina.
+The place was now shut against guests, and the head-waiter was having it
+put in order for the one o'clock dinner.  As they came near him, Mrs.
+Atwell introduced him to Clementina, and he behaved deferentially, as if
+she were some young lady visitor whom Mrs. Atwell was showing the
+improvements, but he seemed harassed and impatient, as if he were anxious
+about his duties, and eager to get at them again.  He was a handsome
+little fellow, with hair lighter than Clementina's and a sanguine
+complexion, and the color coming and going.
+
+"He's smaht," said Mrs. Atwell, when they had left him--he held the
+dining-room door open for them, and bowed them out.  "I don't know but he
+worries almost too much.  That'll wear off when he gets things runnin' to
+suit him.  He's pretty p'tic'la'.  Now I'll show you how they've made the
+office over, and built in a room for Mr. Atwell behind it."
+
+The landlord welcomed Clementina as if she had been some acceptable class
+of custom, and when the tall young clerk came in to ask him something,
+and Mrs. Atwell said, "I want to introduce you to Miss Claxon, Mr. Fane,"
+the clerk smiled down upon her from the height of his smooth, acquiline
+young face, which he held bent encouragingly upon one side.
+
+"Now, I want you should come in and see where I live, a minute," said
+Mrs. Atwell.  She took the girl from the clerk, and led her to the
+official housekeeper's room which she said had been prepared for her so
+that folks need not keep running to her in her private room where she
+wanted to be alone with her children, when she was there.  "Why, you
+a'n't much moa than a child youaself, Clem, and here I be talkin' to you
+as if you was a mother in Israel.  How old ah' you, this summa?  Time
+does go so!"
+
+"I'm sixteen now," said Clementina, smiling.
+
+"You be?  Well, I don't see why I say that, eitha!  You're full lahge
+enough for your age, but not seein' you in long dresses before, I didn't
+realize your age so much.  My, but you do all of you know how to do
+things!"
+
+"I'm about the only one that don't, Mrs. Atwell," said the girl.  "If it
+hadn't been for mother, I don't believe I could have eva finished this
+dress."  She began to laugh at something passing in her mind, and Mrs.
+Atwell laughed too, in sympathy, though she did not know what at till
+Clementina said, "Why, Mrs. Atwell, nea'ly the whole family wo'ked on
+this dress.  Jim drew the patte'n of it from the dress of one of the
+summa boa'das that he took a fancy to at the Centa, and fatha cut it out,
+and I helped motha make it.  I guess every one of the children helped a
+little."
+
+"Well, it's just as I said, you can all of you do things," said Mrs.
+Atwell.  "But I guess you ah' the one that keeps 'em straight.  What did
+you say Mr. Landa said his wife wanted of you?"
+
+"He said some kind of sewing that motha could do."
+
+"Well, I'll tell you what!  Now, if she ha'n't really got anything that
+your motha'll want you to help with, I wish you'd come here again and
+help me.  I tuned my foot, here, two-three weeks back, and I feel it,
+times, and I should like some one to do about half my steppin' for me.
+I don't want to take you away from her, but IF.  You sha'n't go int' the
+dinin'room, or be under anybody's oddas but mine.  Now, will you?"
+
+"I'll see, Mrs. Atwell.  I don't like to say anything till I know what
+Mrs. Landa wants."
+
+"Well, that's right.  I decla'e, you've got moa judgment!  That's what I
+used to say about you last summa to my husband: she's got judgment.
+Well, what's wanted?"  Mrs. Atwell spoke to her husband, who had opened
+her door and looked in, and she stopped rocking, while she waited his
+answer.
+
+"I guess you don't want to keep Clementina from Mr. Landa much longa.
+He's settin' out there on the front piazza waitin' for her."
+
+"Well, the'a!" cried Mrs. Atwell.  "Ain't that just like me?  Why didn't
+you tell me sooner, Alonzo?  Don't you forgit what I said, Clem!"
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+Mrs. Lander had taken twice of a specific for what she called her nerve-
+fag before her husband came with Clementina, and had rehearsed aloud many
+of the things she meant to say to the girl.  In spite of her preparation,
+they were all driven out of her head when Clementina actually appeared,
+and gave her a bow like a young birch's obeisance in the wind.
+
+"Take a chaia," said Lander, pushing her one, and the girl tilted over
+toward him, before she sank into it.  He went out of the room, and left
+Mrs. Lander to deal with the problem alone.  She apologized for being in
+bed, but Clementina said so sweetly, "Mr. Landa told me you were not
+feeling very well, 'm," that she began to be proud of her ailments, and
+bragged of them at length, and of the different doctors who had treated
+her for them.  While she talked she missed one thing or another, and
+Clementina seemed to divine what it was she wanted, and got it for her,
+with a gentle deference which made the elder feel her age cushioned by
+the girl's youth.  When she grew a little heated from the interest she
+took in her personal annals, and cast off one of the folds of her bed
+clothing, Clementina got her a fan, and asked her if she should put up
+one of the windows a little.
+
+"How you do think of things!" said Mrs. Lander.  "I guess I will let you.
+I presume you get used to thinkin' of othas in a lahge family like youas.
+I don't suppose they could get along without you very well," she
+suggested.
+
+"I've neva been away except last summa, for a little while."
+
+"And where was you then?"
+
+"I was helping Mrs. Atwell."
+
+"Did you like it?"
+
+"I don't know," said Clementina.  "It's pleasant to be whe'e things ah'
+going on."
+
+"Yes--for young folks," said Mrs. Lander, whom the going on of things had
+long ceased to bring pleasure.
+
+"It's real nice at home, too," said Clementina.  "We have very good
+times--evenings in the winta; in the summer it's very nice in the woods,
+around there.  It's safe for the children, and they enjoy it, and fatha
+likes to have them.  Motha don't ca'e so much about it.  I guess she'd
+ratha have the house fixed up more, and the place.  Fatha's going to do
+it pretty soon.  He thinks the'e's time enough."
+
+"That's the way with men," said Mrs. Lander.  "They always think the's
+time enough; but I like to have things over and done with.  What chuhch
+do you 'tend?"
+
+"Well, there isn't any but the Episcopal," Clementina answered.  "I go to
+that, and some of the children go to the Sunday School.  I don't believe
+fatha ca'es very much for going to chuhch, but he likes Mr. Richling;
+he's the recta.  They take walks in the woods; and they go up the
+mountains togetha."
+
+"They want," said Mrs. Lander, severely, "to be ca'eful how they drink of
+them cold brooks when they're heated.  Mr. Richling a married man?"
+
+"Oh, yes'm !  But they haven't got any family."
+
+"If I could see his wife, I sh'd caution her about lettin' him climb
+mountains too much.  A'n't your father afraid he'll ovado?"
+
+"I don't know.  He thinks he can't be too much in the open air on the
+mountains."
+
+"Well, he may not have the same complaint as Mr. Landa; but I know if I
+was to climb a mountain,' it would lay me up for a yea'."
+
+The girl did not urge anything against this conviction.  She smiled
+politely and waited patiently for the next turn Mrs. Lander's talk should
+take, which was oddly enough toward the business Clementina had come
+upon.
+
+"I declare I most forgot about my polonaise.  Mr. Landa said your motha
+thought she could do something to it for me."
+
+"Yes'm."
+
+"Well, I may as well 'let you see it.  If you'll reach into that fuhthest
+closet, you'll find it on the last uppa hook on the right hand, and if
+you'll give it to me, I'll show you what I want done.  Don't mind the
+looks of that closet; I've just tossed my things in, till I could get a
+little time and stren'th to put 'em in odda."
+
+Clementina brought the polonaise to Mrs. Lander, who sat up and spread it
+before her on the bed, and had a happy half hour in telling the girl
+where she had bought the material and where she had it made up, and how
+it came home just as she was going away, and she did not find out that it
+was all wrong till a week afterwards when she tried it on.  By the end of
+this time the girl had commended herself so much by judicious and
+sympathetic assent, that Mrs. Lander learned with a shock of
+disappointment that her mother expected her to bring the garment home
+with her, where Mrs. Lander was to come and have it fitted over for the
+alterations she wanted made.
+
+"But I supposed, from what Mr. Landa said, that your motha would come
+here and fit me!"  she lamented.
+
+"I guess he didn't undastand, 'm.  Motha doesn't eva go out to do wo'k,"
+said Clementina gently but firmly.
+
+"Well, I might have known Mr. Landa would mix it up, if it could be
+mixed; "Mrs. Lander's sense of injury was aggravated by her suspicion
+that he had brought the girl in the hope of pleasing her, and confirming
+her in the wish to have her with them; she was not a woman who liked to
+have her way in spite of herself; she wished at every step to realize
+that she was taking it, and that no one else was taking it for her.
+
+"Well," she said dryly, " I shall have to see about it.  I'm a good deal
+of an invalid, and I don't know as I could go back and fo'th to try on.
+I'm moa used to havin' the things brought to me."
+
+"Yes'm," said Clementina.  She moved a little from the bed, on her way to
+the door, to be ready for Mrs. Lander in leave-taking.
+
+"I'm real sorry," said Mrs. Lander.  "I presume it's a disappointment for
+you, too."
+
+"Oh, not at all," answered Clementina.  "I'm sorry we can't do the wo'k
+he'a; but I know mocha wouldn't like to.  Good-mo'ning,'m!"
+
+"No, no!  Don't go yet a minute!  Won't you just give me my hand bag off
+the bureau the'a?  "Mrs. Lander entreated, and when the girl gave her the
+bag she felt about among the bank-notes which she seemed to have loose in
+it, and drew out a handful of them without regard to their value.
+"He'a!" she said, and she tried to put the notes into Clementina's hand,
+"I want you should get yourself something."
+
+The girl shrank back.  "Oh, no'm," she said, with an effect of seeming to
+know that her refusal would hurt, and with the wish to soften it.
+"I--couldn't; indeed I couldn't."
+
+"Why couldn't you?  Now you must!  If I can't let you have the wo'k the
+way you want, I don't think it's fair, and you ought to have the money
+for it just the same."
+
+Clementina shook her head smiling.  "I don't believe motha would like to
+have me take it."
+
+"Oh, now, pshaw!" said Mrs. Lander, inadequately.  "I want you should
+take this for youaself; and if you don't want to buy anything to wea',
+you can get something to fix your room up with.  Don't you be afraid of
+robbin' us.  Land!  We got moa money!  Now you take this."
+
+Mrs. Lander reached the money as far toward Clementina as she could and
+shook it in the vehemence of her desire.
+
+"Thank you, I couldn't take it," Clementina persisted.  "I'm afraid I
+must be going; I guess I must bid you good-mo'ning."
+
+"Why, I believe the child's sca'ed of me!  But you needn't be.  Don't you
+suppose I know how you feel?  You set down in that chai'a there, and I'll
+tell you how you feel.  I guess we've been pooa, too--I don't mean
+anything that a'n't exactly right--and I guess I've had the same
+feelin's.  You think it's demeanin' to you to take it.  A'n't that it?"
+Clementina sank provisionally upon the edge of the chair.  "Well, it did
+use to be so consid'ed.  But it's all changed, nowadays.  We travel
+pretty nee' the whole while, Mr. Lander and me, and we see folks
+everywhere, and it a'n't the custom to refuse any moa.  Now, a'n't there
+any little thing for your own room, there in your nice new house?  Or
+something your motha's got her heat set on?  Or one of your brothas?  My,
+if you don't have it, some one else will!  Do take it!"
+
+The girl kept slipping toward the door.  "I shouldn't know what to tell
+them, when I got home.  They would think I must be--out of my senses."
+
+"I guess you mean they'd think I was.  Now, listen to me a minute!"
+Mrs. Lander persisted.
+
+"You just take this money, and when you get home, you tell your mother
+every word about it, and if she says, you bring it right straight back
+to me.  Now, can't you do that?"
+
+"I don't know but I can," Clementina faltered.  "Well, then take it!"
+Mrs. Lander put the bills into her hand but she did not release her at
+once.  She pulled Clementina down and herself up till she could lay her
+other arm on her neck.  "I want you should let me kiss you.  Will you?"
+
+"Why, certainly," said Clementina, and she kissed the old woman.
+
+"You tell your mother I'm comin' to see her before I go; and I guess,"
+said Mrs. Lander in instant expression of the idea that came into her
+mind, "we shall be goin' pretty soon, now."
+
+"Yes'm," said Clementina.
+
+She went out, and shortly after Lander came in with a sort of hopeful
+apathy in his face.
+
+Mrs. Lander turned her head on her pillow, and so confronted him.
+"Albe't, what made you want me to see that child?"
+
+Lander must have perceived that his wife meant business, and he came to
+it at once.  "I thought you might take a fancy to her, and get her to
+come and live with us."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"We're both of us gettin' pretty well on, and you'd ought to have
+somebody to look after you if--I'm not around.  You want somebody that
+can do for you; and keep you company, and read to you, and talk to you--
+well, moa like a daughta than a suvvant--somebody that you'd get attached
+to, maybe"--
+
+"And don't you see," Mrs. Lander broke out severely upon him, "what a
+ca'e that would be?  Why, it's got so already that I can't help thinkin'
+about her the whole while, and if I got attached to her I'd have her on
+my mind day and night, and the moa she done for me the more I should be
+tewin' around to do for her.  I shouldn't have any peace of my life any
+moa.  Can't you see that?"
+
+"I guess if you see it, I don't need to," said Lander.
+
+"Well, then, I want you shouldn't eva mention her to me again.  I've had
+the greatest escape!  But I've got her off home, and I've give her money
+enough! had a time with her about it--so that they won't feel as if we'd
+made 'em trouble for nothing, and now I neva want to hear of her again.
+I don't want we should stay here a great while longer; I shall be
+frettin' if I'm in reach of her, and I shan't get any good of the ai'a.
+Will you promise?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, then!"  Mrs. Lander turned her face upon the pillow again in the
+dramatization of her exhaustion; but she was not so far gone that she was
+insensible to the possible interest that a light rap at the door
+suggested.  She once more twisted her head in that direction and called,
+"Come in!"
+
+The door opened and Clementina came in.  She advanced to the bedside
+smiling joyously, and put the money Mrs. Lander had given her down upon
+the counterpane.
+
+"Why, you haven't been home, child?"
+
+"No'm," said Clementina, breathlessly.  "But I couldn't take it.  I knew
+they wouldn't want me to, and I thought you'd like it better if I just
+brought it back myself.  Good-mo'ning."  She slipped out of the door.
+Mrs. Lander swept the bank-notes from the coverlet and pulled it over her
+head, and sent from beneath it a stifled wail.  "Now we got to go!  And
+it's all youa fault, Albe't."
+
+Lander took the money from the floor, and smoothed each bill out, and
+then laid them in a neat pile on the corner of the bureau.  He sighed
+profoundly but left the room without an effort to justify himself.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+The Landers had been gone a week before Clementina's mother decided that
+she could spare her to Mrs. Atwell for a while.  It was established that
+she was not to serve either in the dining-room or the carving room; she
+was not to wash dishes or to do any part of the chamber work, but to
+carry messages and orders for the landlady, and to save her steps, when
+she wished to see the head-waiter, or the head-cook; or to make an excuse
+or a promise to some of the lady-boarders; or to send word to Mr. Atwell
+about the buying, or to communicate with the clerk about rooms taken or
+left.
+
+She had a good deal of dignity of her own and such a gravity in the
+discharge of her duties that the chef, who was a middle-aged Yankee with
+grown girls of his own, liked to pretend that it was Mrs. Atwell herself
+who was talking with him, and to discover just as she left him that it
+was Clementina.  He called her the Boss when he spoke of her to others in
+her hearing, and he addressed her as Boss when he feigned to find that it
+was not Mrs. Atwell.  She did not mind that in him, and let the chef have
+his joke as if it were not one.  But one day when the clerk called her
+Boss she merely looked at him without speaking, and made him feel that he
+had taken a liberty which he must not repeat.  He was a young man who
+much preferred a state of self-satisfaction to humiliation of any sort,
+and after he had endured Clementina's gaze as long as he could, he said,
+"Perhaps you don't allow anybody but the chef to call you that?"
+
+She did not answer, but repeated the message Mrs. Atwell had given her
+for him, and went away.
+
+It seemed to him undue that a person who exchanged repartees with the
+young lady boarders across his desk, when they came many times a day to
+look at the register, or to ask for letters, should remain snubbed by a
+girl who still wore her hair in a braid; but he was an amiable youth, and
+he tried to appease her by little favors and services, instead of trying
+to bully her.
+
+He was great friends with the head-waiter, whom he respected as a college
+student, though for the time being he ranked the student socially.  He
+had him in behind the frame of letter-boxes, which formed a sort of
+little private room for him, and talked with him at such hours of the
+forenoon and the late evening as the student was off duty.  He found
+comfort in the student's fretful strength, which expressed itself in the
+pugnacious frown of his hot-looking young face, where a bright sorrel
+mustache was beginning to blaze on a short upper lip.
+
+Fane thought himself a good-looking fellow, and he regarded his figure
+with pleasure, as it was set off by the suit of fine gray check that he
+wore habitually; but he thought Gregory's educational advantages told in
+his face.  His own education had ended at a commercial college, where he
+acquired a good knowledge of bookkeeping, and the fine business hand he
+wrote, but where it seemed to him sometimes that the earlier learning of
+the public school had been hermetically sealed within him by several
+coats of mathematical varnish.  He believed that he had once known a
+number of things that he no longer knew, and that he had not always been
+so weak in his double letters as he presently found himself.
+
+One night while Gregory sat on a high stool and rested his elbow on the
+desk before it, with his chin in his hand, looking down upon Fane, who
+sprawled sadly in his chair, and listening to the last dance playing in
+the distant parlor, Fane said.  "Now, what'll you bet that they won't
+every one of 'em come and look for a letter in her box before she goes to
+bed?  I tell you, girls are queer, and there's no place like a hotel to
+study 'em."
+
+"I don't want to study them," said Gregory, harshly.
+
+"Think Greek's more worth your while, or know 'em well enough already?"
+Fane suggested.
+
+"No, I don't know them at all," said the student.
+
+"I don't believe," urged the clerk, as if it were relevant, "that there's
+a girl in the house that you couldn't marry, if you gave your mind to
+it."
+
+Gregory twitched irascibly.  "I don't want to marry them."
+
+"Pretty cheap lot, you mean?  Well, I don't know."
+
+"I don't mean that," retorted the student.  "But I've got other things to
+think of."
+
+"Don't you believe," the clerk modestly urged, "that it is natural for a
+man--well, a young man--to think about girls?"
+
+"I suppose it is."
+
+"And you don't consider it wrong?"
+
+"How, wrong?"
+
+"Well, a waste of time.  I don't know as I always think about wanting to
+marry 'em, or be in love, but I like to let my mind run on 'em.  There's
+something about a girl that, well, you don't know what it is, exactly.
+Take almost any of 'em," said the clerk, with an air of inductive
+reasoning.  "Take that Claxon girl, now for example, I don't know what it
+is about her.  She's good-looking, I don't deny that; and she's got
+pretty manners, and she's as graceful as a bird.  But it a'n't any one of
+'em, and it don't seem to be all of 'em put together that makes you want
+to keep your eyes on her the whole while.  Ever noticed what a nice
+little foot she's got?  Or her hands?"
+
+"No," said the student.
+
+"I don't mean that she ever tries to show them off; though I know some
+girls that would.  But she's not that kind.  She ain't much more than a
+child, and yet you got to treat her just like a woman.  Noticed the kind
+of way she's got?"
+
+"No," said the student, with impatience.
+
+The clerk mused with a plaintive air for a moment before he spoke.
+"Well, it's something as if she'd been trained to it, so that she knew
+just the right thing to do, every time, and yet I guess it's nature.  You
+know how the chef always calls her the Boss?  That explains it about as
+well as anything, and I presume that's what my mind was running on, the
+other day, when I called her Boss.  But, my!  I can't get anywhere near
+her since!"
+
+"It serves you right," said Gregory.  "You had no business to tease her."
+
+"Now, do you think it was teasing?  I did, at first, and then again it
+seemed to me that I came out with the word because it seemed the right
+one.  I presume I couldn't explain that to her."
+
+"It wouldn't be easy."
+
+"I look upon her," said Fane, with an effect of argument in the sweetness
+of his smile, "just as I would upon any other young lady in the house.
+Do you spell apology with one p or two?"
+
+"One," said the student, and the clerk made a minute on a piece of paper.
+
+"I feel badly for the girl.  I don't want her to think I was teasing her
+or taking any sort of liberty with her.  Now, would you apologize to her,
+if you was in my place, and would you write a note, or just wait your
+chance and speak to her?"
+
+Gregory got down from his stool with a disdainful laugh, and went out of
+the place.  "You make me sick, Fane," he said.
+
+The last dance was over, and the young ladies who had been waltzing with
+one another, came out of the parlor with gay cries and laughter, like
+summer girls who had been at a brilliant hop, and began to stray down the
+piazzas, and storm into the office.  Several of them fluttered up to the
+desk, as the clerk had foretold, and looked for letters in the boxes
+bearing their initials.  They called him out, and asked if he had not
+forgotten something for them.  He denied it with a sad, wise smile, and
+then they tried to provoke him to a belated flirtation, in lack of other
+material, but he met their overtures discreetly, and they presently said,
+Well, they guessed they must go; and went.  Fane turned to encounter
+Gregory, who had come in by a side door.
+
+"Fane, I want to beg your pardon.  I was rude to you just now."
+
+"Oh, no!  Oh, no!" the clerk protested.  "That's all right.  Sit down a
+while, can't you, and talk with a fellow.  It's early, yet."
+
+"No, I can't.  I just wanted to say I was sorry I spoke in that way.
+Good-night.  Is there anything in particular?"
+
+"No; good-night.  I was just wondering about--that girl."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Gregory had an habitual severity with his own behavior which did not stop
+there, but was always passing on to the behavior of others; and his days
+went by in alternate offence and reparation to those he had to do with.
+He had to do chiefly with the dining-room girls, whose susceptibilities
+were such that they kept about their work bathed in tears or suffused
+with anger much of the time.  He was not only good-looking but he was a
+college student, and their feelings were ready to bud toward him in
+tender efflorescence, but he kept them cropped and blighted by his curt
+words and impatient manner.  Some of them loved him for the hurts he did
+them, and some hated him, but all agreed fondly or furiously that he was
+too cross for anything.  They were mostly young school-mistresses, and
+whether they were of a soft and amorous make, or of a forbidding temper,
+they knew enough in spite of their hurts to value a young fellow whose
+thoughts were not running upon girls all the time.  Women, even in their
+spring-time, like men to treat them as if they had souls as well as
+hearts, and it was a saving grace in Gregory that he treated them all,
+the silliest of them, as if they had souls.  Very likely they responded
+more with their hearts than with their souls, but they were aware that
+this was not his fault.
+
+The girls that waited at table saw that he did not distinguish in manner
+between them and the girls whom they served.  The knot between his brows
+did not dissolve in the smiling gratitude of the young ladies whom he
+preceded to their places, and pulled out their chairs for, any more than
+in the blandishments of a waitress who thanked him for some correction.
+
+They owned when he had been harshest that no one could be kinder if he
+saw a girl really trying, or more patient with well meaning stupidity,
+but some things fretted him, and he was as apt to correct a girl in her
+grammar as in her table service.  Out of work hours, if he met any of
+them, he recognized them with deferential politeness; but he shunned
+occasions of encounter with them as distinctly as he avoided the ladies
+among the hotel guests.  Some of the table girls pitied his loneliness,
+and once they proposed that he should read to them on the back piazza in
+the leisure of their mid-afternoons.  He said that he had to keep up with
+his studies in all the time he could get; he treated their request with
+grave civility, but they felt his refusal to be final.
+
+He was seen very little about the house outside of his own place and
+function, and he was scarcely known to consort with anyone but Fane, who
+celebrated his high sense of the honor to the lady-guests; but if any of
+these would have been willing to show Gregory that they considered his
+work to get an education as something that redeemed itself from discredit
+through the nobility of its object, he gave them no chance to do so.
+
+The afternoon following their talk about Clementina, Gregory looked in
+for Fane behind the letter boxes, but did not find him, and the girl
+herself came round from the front to say that he was out buying, but
+would be back now, very soon; it was occasionally the clerk's business to
+forage among the farmers for the lighter supplies, such as eggs, and
+butter, and poultry, and this was the buying that Clementina meant.
+"Very well, I'll wait here for him a little while," Gregory answered.
+
+"So do," said Clementina, in a formula which she thought polite; but she
+saw the frown with which Gregory took a Greek book from his pocket, and
+she hurried round in front of the boxes again, wondering how she could
+have displeased him.  She put her face in sight a moment to explain, "I
+have got to be here and give out the lettas till Mr. Fane gets back," and
+then withdrew it.  He tried to lose himself in his book, but her tender
+voice spoke from time to time beyond the boxes, and Gregory kept
+listening for Clementina to say, "No'm, there a'n't.  Perhaps, the'e'll
+be something the next mail," and "Yes'm, he'e's one, and I guess this
+paper is for some of youa folks, too."
+
+Gregory shut his book with a sudden bang at last and jumped to his feet,
+to go away.
+
+The girl came running round the corner of the boxes.  "Oh!  I thought
+something had happened."
+
+"No, nothing has happened," said Gregory, with a sort of violence; which
+was heightened by a sense of the rings and tendrils of loose hair
+springing from the mass that defined her pretty head.  "Don't you know
+that you oughtn't to say 'No'm' and 'Yes'm?"' he demanded, bitterly, and
+then he expected to see the water come into her eyes, or the fire into
+her cheeks.
+
+Clementina merely looked interested.  "Did I say that?  I meant to say
+Yes, ma'am and No, ma'am; but I keep forgetting."
+
+"You oughtn't to say anything!"  Gregory answered savagely, "Just say
+Yes, and No, and let your voice do the rest."
+
+"Oh!" said the girl, with the gentlest abeyance, as if charmed with the
+novelty of the idea.  "I should be afraid it wasn't polite."
+
+Gregory took an even brutal tone.  It seemed to him as if he were forced
+to hurt her feelings.  But his words, in spite of his tone, were not
+brutal; they might have even been thought flattering.  "The politeness is
+in the manner, and you don't need anything but your manner."
+
+"Do you think so, truly?" asked the girl joyously.  "I should like to try
+it once!"
+
+He frowned again.  "I've no business to criticise your way of speaking."
+
+"Oh yes'm--yes, ma'am; sir, I mean; I mean, Oh, yes, indeed!  The'a!
+It does sound just as well, don't it?"  Clementina laughed in triumph at
+the outcome of her efforts, so that a reluctant visional smile came upon
+Gregory's face, too.  I'm very mach obliged to you, Mr. Gregory--I shall
+always want to do it, if it's the right way."
+
+"It's the right way," said Gregory coldly.
+
+"And don't they," she urged, "don't they really say Sir and Ma'am, whe'e
+--whe'e you came from?"
+
+He said gloomily, "Not ladies and gentlemen.  Servants do.  Waiters--like
+me."  He inflicted this stab to his pride with savage fortitude and he
+bore with self-scorn the pursuit of her innocent curiosity.
+
+"But I thought--I thought you was a college student."
+
+"Were," Gregory corrected her, involuntarily, and she said, "Were, I
+mean."
+
+"I'm a student at college, and here I'm a servant!  It's all right!" he
+said with a suppressed gritting of the teeth; and he added, "My Master
+was the servant of the meanest, and I must-- I beg your pardon for
+meddling with your manner of speaking"--
+
+"Oh, I'm very much obliged to you; indeed I am.  And I shall not care if
+you tell me of anything that's out of the way in my talking," said
+Clementina, generously.
+
+"Thank you; I think I won't wait any longer for Mr. Fane."
+
+"Why, I'm su'a he'll be back very soon, now.  I'll try not to disturb you
+any moa."
+
+Gregory turned from taking some steps towards the door, and said, "I wish
+you would tell Mr. Fane something."
+
+"For you?  Why, suttainly!"
+
+"No.  For you.  Tell him that it's all right about his calling you Boss."
+
+The indignant color came into Clementina's face.  "He had no business to
+call me that."
+
+"No; and he doesn't think he had, now.  He's truly sorry for it."
+
+"I'll see," said Clementina.
+
+She had not seen by the time Fane got back.  She received his apologies
+for being gone so long coldly, and went away to Mrs. Atwell, whom she
+told what had passed between Gregory and herself.
+
+"Is he truly so proud?"  she asked.
+
+"He's a very good young man," said Mrs. Atwell, "but I guess he's proud.
+He can't help it, but you can see he fights against it.  If I was you,
+Clem, I wouldn't say anything to the guls about it."
+
+"Oh, no'm--I mean, no, indeed.  I shouldn't think of it.  But don't you
+think that was funny, his bringing in Christ, that way?"
+
+"Well, he's going to be a minister, you know."
+
+"Is he really?"  Clementina was a while silent.  At last she said, "Don't
+you think Mr. Gregory has a good many freckles?"
+
+"Well, them red-complected kind is liable to freckle," said Mrs. Atwell,
+judicially.
+
+After rather a long pause for both of them, Clementina asked, "Do you
+think it would be nice for me to ask Mr. Gregory about things, when I
+wasn't suttain?"
+
+"Like what?"
+
+"Oh-wo'ds, and pronunciation; and books to read."
+
+"Why, I presume he'd love to have you.  He's always correctin' the guls;
+I see him take up a book one day, that one of 'em was readin', and when
+she as't him about it, he said it was rubbage.  I guess you couldn't have
+a betta guide."
+
+"Well, that was what I was thinking.  I guess I sha'n't do it, though.
+I sh'd neva have the courage."  Clementina laughed and then fell rather
+seriously silent again.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+One day the shoeman stopped his wagon at the door of the helps' house,
+and called up at its windows, "Well, guls, any of you want to git a numba
+foua foot into a rumba two shoe, to-day?  Now's youa chance, but you got
+to be quick abort it.  The'e ha'r't but just so many numba two shoes
+made, and the wohld's full o' rumba foua feet."
+
+The windows filled with laughing faces at the first sound of the
+shoeman's ironical voice; and at sight of his neat wagon, with its
+drawers at the rear and sides, and its buggy-hood over the seat where the
+shoeman lounged lazily holding the reins, the girls flocked down the
+stairs, and out upon the piazza where the shoe man had handily ranged his
+vehicle.
+
+They began to ask him if he had not this thing and that, but he said with
+firmness, "Nothin' but shoes, guls.  I did carry a gen'l line, one while,
+of what you may call ankle-wea', such as spats, and stockin's, and
+gaitas, but I nova did like to speak of such things befoa ladies, and now
+I stick ex-elusively to shoes.  You know that well enough, guls; what's
+the use?"
+
+He kept a sober face amidst the giggling that his words aroused,--and let
+his voice sink into a final note of injury.
+
+"Well, if you don't want any shoes, to-day, I guess I must be goin'."
+He made a feint of jerking his horse's reins, but forebore at the
+entreaties that went up from the group of girls.
+
+"Yes, we do!"  " Let's see them!"  "Oh, don't go!" they chorused in an
+equally histrionic alarm, and the shoeman got down from his perch to show
+his wares.
+
+"Now, the'a, ladies," he said, pulling out one of the drawers, and
+dangling a pair of shoes from it by the string that joined their heels,
+"the'e's a shoe that looks as good as any Sat'd'y-night shoe you eva see.
+Looks as han'some as if it had a pasteboa'd sole and was split stock all
+through, like the kind you buy for a dollar at the store, and kick out in
+the fust walk you take with your fella--'r some other gul's fella, I
+don't ca'e which.  And yet that's an honest shoe, made of the best of
+material all the way through, and in the best manna.  Just look at that
+shoe, ladies; ex-amine it; sha'n't cost you a cent, and I'll pay for youa
+lost time myself, if any complaint is made."  He began to toss pairs of
+the shoes into the crowd of girls, who caught them from each other before
+they fell, with hysterical laughter, and ran away with them in-doors to
+try them on.  "This is a shoe that I'm intaducin'," the shoeman went on,
+"and every pair is warranted--warranted numba two; don't make any otha
+size, because we want to cata to a strictly numba two custom.  If any
+lady doos feel 'em a little mite too snug, I'm sorry for her, but I can't
+do anything to help her in this shoe."
+
+"Too snug !"  came a gay voice from in-doors.  "Why my foot feels
+puffectly lost in this one."
+
+"All right," the shoeman shouted back.  "Call it a numba one shoe and
+then see if you can't find that lost foot in it, some'eres.  Or try a
+little flour, and see if it won't feel more at home.  I've hea'd of a
+shoe that give that sensation of looseness by not goin' on at all."
+
+The girls exulted joyfully together at the defeat of their companion,
+but the shoeman kept a grave face, while he searched out other sorts of
+shoes and slippers, and offered them, or responded to some definite
+demand with something as near like as he could hope to make serve.
+The tumult of talk and laughter grew till the chef put his head out of
+the kitchen door, and then came sauntering across the grass to the helps'
+piazza.  At the same time the clerk suffered himself to be lured from his
+post by the excitement.  He came and stood beside the chef, who listened
+to the shoeman's flow of banter with a longing to take his chances with
+him.
+
+"That's a nice hawss," he said.  "What'll you take for him?"
+
+"Why, hello!" said the shoeman, with an eye that dwelt upon the chef's
+official white cap and apron, "You talk English, don't you?  Fust off, I
+didn't know but it was one of them foreign dukes come ova he'a to marry
+some oua poor millionai'es daughtas."  The girls cried out for joy, and
+the chef bore their mirth stoically, but not without a personal relish of
+the shoeman's up-and-comingness.  "Want a hawss?" asked the shoeman with
+an air of business.  "What'll you give?"
+
+"I'll give you thutty-seven dollas and a half," said the chef.
+
+"Sorry I can't take it.  That hawss is sellin' at present for just one
+hundred and fifty dollas."
+
+"Well," said the chef, "I'll raise you a dolla and a quahta.  Say thutty-
+eight and seventy-five."
+
+"W-ell now, you're gittin' up among the figgas where you're liable to own
+a hawss.  You just keep right on a raisin' me, while I sell these ladies
+some shoes, and maybe you'll hit it yit, 'fo'e night."
+
+The girls were trying on shoes on every side now, and they had dispensed
+with the formality of going in-doors for the purpose.  More than one put
+out her foot to the clerk for his opinion of the fit, and the shoeman was
+mingling with the crowd, testing with his hand, advising from his
+professional knowledge, suggesting, urging, and in some cases artfully
+agreeing with the reluctance shown.
+
+"This man," said the chef, indicating Fane, "says you can tell moa lies
+to the square inch than any man out o' Boston."
+
+"Doos he?"  asked the shoeman, turning with a pair of high-heeled bronze
+slippers in his hand from the wagon.  "Well, now, if I stood as nea' to
+him as you do, I believe I sh'd hit him."
+
+"Why, man, I can't dispute him!" said the chef, and as if he had now at
+last scored a point, he threw back his head and laughed.  When he brought
+down his head again, it was to perceive the approach of Clementina.
+"Hello," he said for her to hear, "he'e comes the Boss.  Well, I guess I
+must be goin'," he added, in mock anxiety.  "I'm a goin', Boss, I'm a
+goin'."
+
+Clementina ignored him.  "Mr. Atwell wants to see you a moment, Mr.
+Fane," she said to the clerk.
+
+"All right, Miss Claxon," Fane answered, with the sorrowful respect which
+he always showed Clementina, now, "I'll be right there."  But he waited a
+moment, either in expression of his personal independence, or from
+curiosity to know what the shoeman was going to say of the bronze
+slippers.
+
+Clementina felt the fascination, too; she thought the slippers were
+beautiful, and her foot thrilled with a mysterious prescience of its
+fitness for them.
+
+"Now, the'e, ladies, or as I may say guls, if you'll excuse it in one
+that's moa like a fatha to you than anything else, in his feelings"--the
+girls tittered, and some one shouted derisively--"It's true!--now there
+is a shoe, or call it a slippa, that I've rutha hesitated about showin'
+to you, because I know that you're all rutha serious-minded, I don't ca'e
+how young ye be, or how good-lookin' ye be; and I don't presume the'e's
+one among you that's eve head o' dancin'."  In the mirthful hooting and
+mocking that followed, the shoeman hedged gravely from the extreme
+position he had taken.  "What?  Well, maybe you have among some the summa
+folks, but we all know what summa folks ah', and I don't expect you to
+patte'n by them.  But what I will say is that if any young lady within
+the sound of my voice,"--he looked round for the applause which did not
+fail him in his parody of the pulpit style--"should get an invitation to
+a dance next winta, and should feel it a wo'k of a charity to the young
+man to go, she'll be sorry--on his account, rememba--that she ha'n't got
+this pair o' slippas.
+
+The'a!  They're a numba two, and they'll fit any lady here, I don't ca'e
+how small a foot she's got.  Don't all speak at once, sistas !  Ample
+time allowed for meals.  That's a custom-made shoe, and if it hadn't b'en
+too small for the lady they was oddid foh, you couldn't-'a' got 'em for
+less than seven dollas; but now I'm throwin' on 'em away for three."
+
+A groan of dismay went up from the whole circle, and some who had pressed
+forward for a sight of the slippers, shrank back again.
+
+"Did I hea' just now," asked the shoeman, with a soft insinuation in his
+voice, and in the glance he suddenly turned upon Clementina, "a party
+addressed as Boss?"  Clementina flushed, but she did not cower; the chef
+walked away with a laugh, and the shoeman pursued him with his voice.
+"Not that I am goin' to folla the wicked example of a man who tries to
+make spot of young ladies; but if the young lady addressed as Boss"--
+
+"Miss Claxon," said the clerk with ingratiating reverence.
+
+"Miss Claxon--I Stan' corrected," pursued the shoeman.  "If Miss Claxon
+will do me the fava just to try on this slippa, I sh'd be able to tell at
+the next place I stopped just how it looked on a lady's foot.  I see you
+a'n't any of you disposed to buy 'em this aftanoon, 'and I a'n't
+complainin'; you done pootty well by me, already, and I don't want to
+uhge you; but I do want to carry away the picture, in my mind's eye--what
+you may call a mental photograph--of this slipper on the kind of a foot
+it was made fob, so't I can praise it truthfully to my next customer.
+What do you say, ma'am?" he addressed himself with profound respect to
+Clementina.
+
+"Oh, do let him, Clem!" said one of the girls, and another pleaded, "Just
+so he needn't tell a story to his next customa," and that made the rest
+laugh.
+
+Clementina's heart was throbbing, and joyous lights were dancing in her
+eyes.  "I don't care if I do," she said, and she stooped to unlace her
+shoe, but one of the big girls threw herself on her knees at her feet to
+prevent her.  Clementina remembered too late that there was a hole in her
+stocking and that her little toe came through it, but she now folded the
+toe artfully down, and the big girl discovered the hole in time to abet
+her attempt at concealment.  She caught the slipper from the shoeman and
+harried it on; she tied the ribbons across the instep, and then put on
+the other.  "Now put out youa foot, Clem!  Fast dancin' position!" She
+leaned back upon her own heels, and Clementina daintily lifted the edge
+of her skirt a little, and peered over at her feet.  The slippers might
+or might not have been of an imperfect taste, in their imitation of the
+prevalent fashion, but on Clementina's feet they had distinction.
+
+"Them feet was made for them slippas," said the shoeman devoutly.
+
+The clerk was silent; he put his hand helplessly to his mouth, and then
+dropped it at his side again.
+
+Gregory came round the corner of the building from the dining-room, and
+the big girl who was crouching before Clementina, and who boasted that
+she was not afraid of the student, called saucily to him, "Come here, a
+minute, Mr. Gregory," and as he approached, she tilted aside, to let him
+see Clementina's slippers.
+
+Clementina beamed up at him with all her happiness in her eyes, but after
+a faltering instant, his face reddened through its freckles, and he gave
+her a rebuking frown and passed on.
+
+"Well, I decla'e!" said the big girl.  Fane turned uneasily, and said
+with a sigh, he guessed he must be going, now.
+
+A blight fell upon the gay spirits of the group, and the shoeman asked
+with an ironical glance after Gregory's retreating figure, "Owna of this
+propaty?"
+
+"No, just the ea'th," said the big girl, angrily.
+
+The voice of Clementina made itself heard with a cheerfulness which had
+apparently suffered no chill, but was really a rising rebellion.  "How
+much ah' the slippas?"
+
+"Three dollas," said the shoeman in a surprise which he could not conceal
+at Clementina's courage.
+
+She laughed, and stooped to untie the slippers.  "That's too much for
+me."
+
+"Let me untie 'em, Clem," said the big girl.  "It's a shame for you eva
+to take 'em off."
+
+"That's right, lady," said the shoeman.  "And you don't eva need to," he
+added, to Clementina, " unless you object to sleepin' in 'em.  You pay me
+what you want to now, and the rest when I come around the latta paht of
+August."
+
+"Oh keep 'em, Clem!" the big girl urged, passionately, and the rest
+joined her with their entreaties.
+
+"I guess I betta not," said Clementina, and she completed the work of
+taking off the slippers in which the big girl could lend her no further
+aid, such was her affliction of spirit.
+
+"All right, lady," said the shoeman.  "Them's youa slippas, and I'll just
+keep 'em for you till the latta paht of August."
+
+He drove away, and in the woods which he had to pass through on the road
+to another hotel he overtook the figure of a man pacing rapidly.  He
+easily recognized Gregory, but he bore him no malice.  "Like a lift?"
+he asked, slowing up beside him.
+
+"No, thank you," said Gregory.  "I'm out for the walk."  He looked round
+furtively, and then put his hand on the side of the wagon, mechanically,
+as if to detain it, while he walked on.
+
+"Did you sell the slippers to the young lady?"
+
+"Well, not as you may say sell, exactly," returned the shoeman,
+cautiously.
+
+"Have you-got them yet?"  asked the student.
+
+"Guess so," said the man.  "Like to see 'em?"
+
+He pulled up his horse.
+
+Gregory faltered a moment.  Then he said, I'd like to buy them.  Quick!"
+
+He looked guiltily about, while the shoeman alertly obeyed, with some
+delay for a box to put them in.  "How much are they?"
+
+"Well, that's a custom made slipper, and the price to the lady that
+oddid'em was seven dollas.  But I'll let you have 'em for three--if you
+want 'em for a present."  --The shoeman was far too discreet to permit
+himself anything so overt as a smile; he merely let a light of
+intelligence come into his face.
+
+Gregory paid the money.  "Please consider this as confidential," he said,
+and he made swiftly away.  Before the shoeman could lock the drawer that
+had held the slippers, and clamber to his perch under the buggy-hood,
+Gregory was running back to him again.
+
+"Stop!" he called, and as he came up panting in an excitement which the
+shoeman might well have mistaken for indignation attending the discovery
+of some blemish in his purchase.  "Do you regard this as in any manner a
+deception?" he palpitated.
+
+"Why," the shoeman began cautiously, "it wa'n't what you may call a
+promise, exactly.  More of a joke than anything else, I looked on it.  I
+just said I'd keep 'em for her; but"--
+
+"You don't understand.  If I seemed to disapprove--if I led any one to
+suppose, by my manner, or by--anything--that I thought it unwise or
+unbecoming to buy the shoes, and then bought them myself, do you think it
+is in the nature of an acted falsehood?"
+
+"Lo'd no!"  said the shoeman, and he caught up the slack of his reins to
+drive on, as if he thought this amusing maniac might also be dangerous.
+
+Gregory stopped him with another question.  "And shall--will you--think
+it necessary to speak of--of this transaction?  I leave you free!"
+
+"Well," said the shoeman.  "I don't know what you're after, exactly, but
+if you think I'm so shot on for subjects that I've got to tell the folks
+at the next stop that I sold a fellar a pair of slippas for his gul--Go
+'long!" he called to his horse, and left Gregory standing in the middle
+of the road.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+The people who came to the Middlemount in July were ordinarily the
+nicest, but that year the August folks were nicer than usual and there
+were some students among them, and several graduates just going into
+business, who chose to take their outing there instead of going to the
+sea-side or the North Woods.  This was a chance that might not happen in
+years again, and it made the house very gay for the young ladies; they
+ceased to pay court to the clerk, and asked him for letters only at mail-
+time.  Five or six couples were often on the floor together, at the hops,
+and the young people sat so thick upon the stairs that one could scarcely
+get up or down.
+
+So many young men made it gay not only for the young ladies, but also for
+a certain young married lady, when she managed to shirk her rather filial
+duties to her husband, who was much about the verandas, purblindly
+feeling his way with a stick, as he walked up and down, or sitting opaque
+behind the glasses that preserved what was left of his sight, while his
+wife read to him.  She was soon acquainted with a good many more people
+than he knew, and was in constant request for such occasions as needed a
+chaperon not averse to mountain climbing, or drives to other hotels for
+dancing and supper and return by moonlight, or the more boisterous sorts
+of charades; no sheet and pillow case party was complete without her; for
+welsh-rarebits her presence was essential.  The event of the conflict
+between these social claims and her duties to her husband was her appeal
+to Mrs. Atwell on a point which the landlady referred to Clementina.
+
+"She wants somebody to read to her husband, and I don't believe but what
+you could do it, Clem.  You're a good reader, as good as I want to hear,
+and while you may say that you don't put in a great deal of elocution, I
+guess you can read full well enough.  All he wants is just something to
+keep him occupied, and all she wants is a chance to occupy herself with
+otha folks.  Well, she is moa their own age.  I d'know as the's any hahm
+in her.  And my foot's so much betta, now, that I don't need you the
+whole while, any moa."
+
+"Did you speak to her about me?" asked the girl.
+
+"Well, I told her I'd tell you.  I couldn't say how you'd like."
+
+"Oh, I guess I should like," said Clementina, with her eyes shining.
+"But--I should have to ask motha."
+
+"I don't believe but what your motha'd be willin'," said Mrs. Atwell.
+"You just go down and see her about it."
+
+The next day Mrs. Milray was able to take leave of her husband, in
+setting off to matronize a coaching party, with an exuberance of good
+conscience that she shared with the spectators.  She kissed him with
+lively affection, and charged him not to let the child read herself to
+death for him.  She captioned Clementina that Mr. Milray never knew when
+he was tired, and she had better go by the clock in her reading, and not
+trust to any sign from him.
+
+Clementina promised, and when the public had followed Mrs. Milray away,
+to watch her ascent to the topmost seat of the towering coach, by means
+of the ladder held in place by two porters, and by help of the down-
+stretched hands of all the young men on the coach, Clementina opened the
+book at the mark she found in it, and began to read to Mr. Milray.
+
+The book was a metaphysical essay, which he professed to find a lighter
+sort of reading than fiction; he said most novelists were too seriously
+employed in preventing the marriage of the lovers, up to a certain point,
+to be amusing; but you could always trust a metaphysician for
+entertainment if he was very much in earnest, and most metaphysicians
+were.  He let Clementina read on a good while in her tender voice, which
+had still so many notes of childhood in it, before he manifested any
+consciousness of being read to.  He kept the smile on his delicate face
+which had come there when his wife said at parting, "I don't believe I
+should leave her with you if you could see how prettty she was," and he
+held his head almost motionlessly at the same poise he had given it in
+listening to her final charges.  It was a fine head, still well covered
+with soft hair, which lay upon it in little sculpturesque masses, like
+chiseled silver, and the acquiline profile had a purity of line in the
+arch of the high nose and the jut of the thin lips and delicate chin,
+which had not been lost in the change from youth to age.  One could never
+have taken it for the profile of a New York lawyer who had early found
+New York politics more profitable than law, and after a long time passed
+in city affairs, had emerged with a name shadowed by certain doubtful
+transactions.  But this was Milray's history, which in the rapid progress
+of American events, was so far forgotten that you had first to remind
+people of what he had helped do before you could enjoy their surprise in
+realizing that this gentle person, with the cast of intellectual
+refinement which distinguished his face, was the notorious Milray, who
+was once in all the papers.  When he made his game and retired from
+politics, his family would have sacrificed itself a good deal to reclaim
+him socially, though they were of a severer social than spiritual
+conscience, in the decay of some ancestral ideals.  But be had rendered
+their willingness hopeless by marrying, rather late in life, a young girl
+from the farther West who had come East with a general purpose to get on.
+She got on very well with Milray, and it was perhaps not altogether her
+own fault that she did not get on so well with his family, when she began
+to substitute a society aim for the artistic ambition that had brought
+her to New York.  They might have forgiven him for marrying her, but they
+could not forgive her for marrying him.  They were of New England origin
+and they were perhaps a little more critical with her than if they had
+been New Yorkers of Dutch strain.  They said that she was a little
+Western hoyden, but that the stage would have been a good place for her
+if she could have got over her Pike county accent; in the hush of family
+councils they confided to one another the belief that there were phases
+of the variety business in which her accent would have been no barrier to
+her success, since it could not have been heard in the dance, and might
+have been disguised in the song.
+
+"Will you kindly read that passage over again?" Milray asked as
+Clementina paused at the end of a certain paragraph.  She read it, while
+he listened attentively.  "Could you tell me just what you understand by
+that?"  he pursued, as if he really expected Clementina to instruct him.
+
+She hesitated a moment before she answered, " I don't believe I undastand
+anything at all."
+
+"Do you know," said Milray, "that's exactly my own case?  And I've an
+idea that the author is in the same box," and Clementina perceived she
+might laugh, and laughed discreetly.
+
+Milray seemed to feel the note of discreetness in her laugh, and he
+asked, smiling, "How old did you tell me you were?"
+
+"I'm sixteen," said Clementina.
+
+"It's a great age," said Milray.  "I remember being sixteen myself; I
+have never been so old since.  But I was very old for my age, then.  Do
+you think you are?"
+
+"I don't believe I am," said Clementina, laughing again, but still very
+discreetly.
+
+"Then I should like to tell you that you have a very agreeable voice.  Do
+you sing?"
+
+"No'm--no, sir--no," said Clementina, "I can't sing at all."
+
+"Ah, that's very interesting," said Milray, "but it's not surprising.
+I wish I could see your face distinctly; I've a great curiosity about
+matching voices and faces; I must get Mrs. Milray to tell me how you
+look.  Where did you pick up your pretty knack at reading?  In school,
+here?"
+
+"I don't know," answered Clementina.  "Do I read-the way you want?"
+
+"Oh, perfectly.  You let the meaning come through--when there is any."
+
+"Sometimes," said Clementina ingenuously, "I read too fast; the children
+ah' so impatient when I'm reading to them at home, and they hurry me.
+But I can read a great deal slower if you want me to."
+
+"No, I'm impatient, too," said Milray.  "Are there many of them,--the
+children?"
+
+"There ah' six in all."
+
+"And are you the oldest?"
+
+"Yes," said Clementina.  She still felt it very blunt not to say sir,
+too, but she tried to make her tone imply the sir, as Mr. Gregory had
+bidden her.
+
+"You've got a very pretty name."
+
+Clementina brightened.  "Do you like it?  Motha gave it to me; she took
+it out of a book that fatha was reading to her."
+
+"I like it very much," said Milray.  "Are you tall for your age?"
+
+"I guess I am pretty tall."
+
+"You're fair, of course.  I can tell that by your voice; you've got a
+light-haired voice.  And what are your eyes?"
+
+"Blue!" Clementina laughed at his pursuit.
+
+"Ah, of course!  It isn't a gray-eyed blonde voice.  Do you think--has
+anybody ever told you-that you were graceful?"
+
+"I don't know as they have," said Clementina, after thinking.
+
+"And what is your own opinion?"  Clementina began to feel her dignity
+infringed; she did not answer, and now Milray laughed.  "I felt the
+little tilt in your step as you came up.  It's all right.  Shall we try
+for our friend's meaning, now?"
+
+Clementina began again, and again Milray stopped her.  "You mustn't bear
+malice.  I can hear the grudge in your voice; but I didn't mean to laugh
+at you.  You don't like being made fun of, do you?"
+
+"I don't believe anybody does," said Clementina.
+
+"No, indeed," said Milray.  "If I had tried such a thing I should be
+afraid you would make it uncomfortable for me.  But I haven't, have I?"
+
+"I don't know," said Clementina, reluctantly.
+
+Milray laughed gleefully.  "Well, you'll forgive me, because I'm an old
+fellow.  If I were young, you wouldn't, would you?"
+
+Clementina thought of the clerk; she had certainly never forgiven him.
+"Shall I read on?" she asked.
+
+"Yes, yes.  Read on," he said, respectfully.  Once he interrupted her to
+say that she pronounced admirable, but he would like now and then to
+differ with her about a word if she did not mind.  She answered, Oh no,
+indeed; she should like it ever so much, if he would tell her when she
+was wrong.  After that he corrected her, and he amused himself by
+studying forms of respect so delicate that they should not alarm her
+pride; Clementina reassured him in terms as fine as his own.  She did not
+accept his instructions implicitly; she meant to bring them to the bar of
+Gregory's knowledge.  If he approved of them, then she would submit.
+
+Milray easily possessed himself of the history of her life and of all its
+circumstances, and he said he would like to meet her father and make the
+acquaintance of a man whose mind, as Clementina interpreted it to him, he
+found so original.
+
+He authorized his wife to arrange with Mrs. Atwell for a monopoly of
+Clementina's time while he stayed at Middlemount, and neither he nor Mrs.
+Milray seemed surprised at the good round sum, as the landlady thought
+it, which she asked in the girl's behalf.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+The Milrays stayed through August, and Mrs. Milray was the ruling spirit
+of the great holiday of the summer, at Middlemount.  It was this year
+that the landlords of the central mountain region had decided to compete
+in a coaching parade, and to rival by their common glory the splendor of
+the East Side and the West Side parades.  The boarding-houses were to
+take part, as well as the hotels; the farms where only three or four
+summer folks were received, were to send their mountain-wagons, and all
+were to be decorated with bunting.  An arch draped with flags and covered
+with flowers spanned the entrance to the main street at Middlemount
+Centre, and every shop in the village was adorned for the event.
+
+Mrs. Milray made the landlord tell her all about coaching parades, and
+the champions of former years on the East Side and the West Side, and
+then she said that the Middlemount House must take the prize from them
+all this year, or she should never come near his house again.  He
+answered, with a dignity and spirit he rarely showed with Mrs. Milray's
+class of custom, "I'm goin' to drive our hossis myself."
+
+She gave her whole time to imagining and organizing the personal display
+on the coach.  She consulted with the other ladies as to the kind of
+dresses that were to be worn, but she decided everything herself; and
+when the time came she had all the young men ravaging the lanes and
+pastures for the goldenrod and asters which formed the keynote of her
+decoration for the coach.
+
+She made peace and kept it between factions that declared themselves
+early in the affair, and of all who could have criticized her for taking
+the lead perhaps none would have willingly relieved her of the trouble.
+She freely declared that it was killing her, and she sounded her accents
+of despair all over the place.  When their dresses were finished she made
+the persons of her drama rehearse it on the coach top in the secret of
+the barn, where no one but the stable men were suffered to see the
+effects she aimed at.  But on the eve of realizing these in public she
+was overwhelmed by disaster.  The crowning glory of her composition was
+to be a young girl standing on the highest seat of the coach, in the
+character of the Spirit of Summer, wreathed and garlanded with flowers,
+and invisibly sustained by the twelve months of the year, equally divided
+as to sex, but with the more difficult and painful attitudes assigned to
+the gentlemen who were to figure as the fall and winter months.  It had
+been all worked out and the actors drilled in their parts, when the
+Spirit of Summer, who had been chosen for the inoffensiveness of her
+extreme youth, was taken with mumps, and withdrawn by the doctor's
+orders.  Mrs. Milray had now not only to improvise another Spirit of
+Summer, but had to choose her from a group of young ladies, with the
+chance of alienating and embittering those who were not chosen.  In her
+calamity she asked her husband what she should do, with but the least
+hope that he could tell her.  But he answered promptly, "Take Clementina;
+I'll let you have her for the day," and then waited for the storm of her
+renunciations and denunciations to spend itself.
+
+"To be sure," she said, when this had happened, "it isn't as if she were
+a servant in the house; and the position can be regarded as a kind of
+public function, anyhow.  I can't say that I've hired her to take the
+part, but I can give her a present afterwards, and it will be the same
+thing."
+
+The question of clothes for Clementina Mrs. Milray declared was almost as
+sweeping in its implication as the question of the child's creation."
+She has got to be dressed new from head to foot," she said, "every
+stitch, and how am I to manage it in twenty-four hours?"
+
+By a succession of miracles with cheese-cloth, and sashes and ribbons, it
+was managed; and ended in a triumph so great that Mrs. Milray took the
+girl in her arms and kissed her for looking the Spirit of Summer to a
+perfection that the victim of the mumps could not have approached.  The
+victory was not lastingly marred by the failure of Clementina's shoes to
+look the Spirit of Summer as well as the rest of her costume.  No shoes
+at all world have been the very thing, but shoes so shabby and worn down
+at one side of the heel as Clementina's were very far from the thing.
+Mrs. Milray decided that another fold of cheese-cloth would add to the
+statuesque charm of her figure, and give her more height; and she was
+richly satisfied with the effect when the Middlemount coach drove up to
+the great veranda the next morning, with all the figures of her picture
+in position on its roof, and Clementina supreme among them.  She herself
+mounted in simple, undramatized authority to her official seat beside the
+landlord, who in coachman's dress, with a bouquet of autumnal flowers in
+his lapel, sat holding his garlanded reins over the backs of his six
+horses; and then the coach as she intended it to appear in the parade set
+out as soon as the turnouts of the other houses joined it.  They were all
+to meet at the Middlemount, which was thickly draped and festooned in
+flags, with knots of evergreen and the first red boughs of the young
+swamp maples holding them in place over its irregular facade.  The coach
+itself was amass of foliage and flowers, from which it defined itself as
+a wheeled vehicle in vague and partial outline; the other wagons and
+coaches, as they drove tremulously up, with an effect of having been
+mired in blossoms about their spokes and hubs, had the unwieldiness which
+seems inseparable from spectacularity.  They represented motives in color
+and design sometimes tasteless enough, and sometimes so nearly very good
+that Mrs. Milray's heart was a great deal in her mouth, as they arrived,
+each with its hotel-cry roared and shrilled from a score of masculine and
+feminine throats, and finally spelled for distinctness sake, with an
+ultimate yell or growl.  But she had not finished giving the lady-
+representative of a Sunday newspaper the points of her own tableau,
+before she regained the courage and the faith in which she remained
+serenely steadfast throughout the parade.
+
+It was when all the equipages of the neighborhood had arrived that she
+climbed to her place; the ladder was taken away; the landlord spoke to
+his horses, and the Middlemount coach led the parade, amid the renewed
+slogans, and the cries and fluttered handkerchiefs of the guests crowding
+the verandas.
+
+The line of march was by one road to Middlemount Centre, where the prize
+was to be awarded at the judges' stand, and then the coaches were to
+escort the triumphant vehicle homeward by another route, so as to pass as
+many houses on the way as possible.  It was a curious expression of the
+carnival spirit in a region immemorially starved of beauty in the lives
+of its people; and whatever was the origin of the mountain coaching
+parade, or from whatever impulse of sentimentality or advertising it
+came, the effect was of undeniable splendor, and of phantasmagoric
+strangeness.
+
+Gregory watched its progress from a hill-side pasture as it trailed
+slowly along the rising and falling road.  The songs of the young girls,
+interrupted by the explosion of hotel slogans and college cries from the
+young men, floated off to him on the thin breeze of the cloudless August
+morning, like the hymns and shouts of a saturnalian rout going in holiday
+processional to sacrifice to their gods.  Words of fierce Hebrew poetry
+burned in his thought; the warnings and the accusals and the
+condemnations of the angry prophets; and he stood rapt from his own time
+and place in a dream of days when the Most High stooped to commune face
+to face with His ministers, while the young voices of those forgetful or
+ignorant of Him, called to his own youth, and the garlanded chariots,
+with their banners and their streamers passed on the road beneath him and
+out of sight in the shadow of the woods beyond.
+
+When the prize was given to the Middlemount coach at the Center the
+landlord took the flag, and gallantly transferred it to Mrs. Milray, and
+Mrs. Milray passed it up to Clementina, and bade her, "Wave it, wave it!"
+
+The village street was thronged with people that cheered, and swung their
+hats and handkerchiefs to the coach as it left the judges' stand and
+drove under the triumphal arch, with the other coaches behind it.  Then
+Atwell turned his horses heads homewards, and at the brisker pace with
+which people always return from festivals or from funerals, he left the
+village and struck out upon the country road with his long escort before
+him.  The crowd was quick to catch the courteous intention of the
+victors, and followed them with applause as far beyond the village
+borders as wind and limb would allow; but the last noisy boy had dropped
+off breathless before they reached a half-finished house in the edge of
+some woods.  A line of little children was drawn up by the road-side
+before it, who watched the retinue with grave eagerness, till the
+Middlemount coach came in full sight.  Then they sprang into the air, and
+beating their hands together, screamed, "Clem!  Clem!  Oh it's Clem!"
+and jumped up and down, and a shabby looking work worn woman came round
+the corner of the house and stared up at Clementina waving her banner
+wildly to the children, and shouting unintelligible words to them.  The
+young people on the coach joined in response to the children, some
+simply, some ironically, and one of the men caught up a great wreath of
+flowers which lay at Clementina's feet, and flung it down to them; the
+shabby woman quickly vanished round the corner of the house again.  Mrs.
+Milray leaned over to ask the landlord, "Who in the world are
+Clementina's friends?"
+
+"Why don't you know?"  he retorted in abated voice.  "Them's her brothas
+and sistas."
+
+"And that woman?"
+
+"The lady at the conna?  That's her motha."
+
+When the event was over, and all the things had been said and said again,
+and there was nothing more to keep the spring and summer months from
+going up to their rooms to lie down, and the fall and winter months from
+trying to get something to eat, Mrs. Milray found herself alone with
+Clementina.
+
+The child seemed anxious about something, and Mrs. Milray, who wanted to
+go and lie down, too, asked a little impatiently, "What is it,
+Clementina?"
+
+"Oh, nothing.  Only I was afraid maybe you didn't like my waving to the
+children, when you saw how queea they looked."  Clementina's lips
+quivered.
+
+"Did any of the rest say anything?"
+
+"I know what they thought.  But I don't care!  I should do it right over
+again!"
+
+Mrs. Milray's happiness in the day's triumph was so great that she could
+indulge a generous emotion.  She caught the girl in her arms.  "I want to
+kiss you; I want to hug you, Clementina!"
+
+The notion of a dance for the following night to celebrate the success of
+the house in the coaching parade came to Mrs. Milray aver a welsh-rarebit
+which she gave at the close of the evening.  The party was in the charge
+of Gregory, who silently served them at their orgy with an austerity that
+might have conspired with the viand itself against their dreams, if they
+had not been so used to the gloom of his ministrations.  He would not
+allow the waitresses to be disturbed in their evening leisure, or kept
+from their sleep by such belated pleasures; and when he had provided the
+materials for the rarebit, he stood aloof, and left their combination to
+Mrs. Milray and her chafing-dish.
+
+She had excluded Clementina on account of her youth, as she said to one
+of the fall and winter months, who came in late, and noticed Clementina's
+absence with a "Hello!  Anything the matter with the Spirit of Summer?"
+Clementina had become both a pet and a joke with these months before the
+parade was over, and now they clamored together, and said they must have
+her at the dance anyway.  They were more tepidly seconded by the spring
+and summer months, and Mrs. Milray said, "Well, then, you'll have to all
+subscribe and get her a pair of dancing slippers."  They pressed her for
+her meaning, and she had to explain the fact of Clementina's destitution,
+which that additional fold of cheese-cloth had hidden so well in the
+coaching tableau that it had never been suspected.  The young men
+entreated her to let them each buy a pair of slippers for the Spirit of
+Summer, which she should wear in turn for the dance that she must give
+each of them; and this made Mrs. Milray declare that, no, the child
+should not come to the dance at all, and that she was not going to have
+her spoiled.  But, before the party broke up, she promised that she would
+see what could be done, and she put it very prettily to the child the
+next day, and waited for her to say, as she knew she must, that she could
+not go, and why.  They agreed that the cheese-cloth draperies of the
+Spirit of Summer were surpassingly fit for the dance; but they had to
+agree that this still left the question of slippers untouched.  It
+remained even more hopeless when Clementina tried on all of Mrs. Milray's
+festive shoes, and none of her razorpoints and high heels would avail.
+She went away disappointed, but not yet disheartened; youth does not so
+easily renounce a pleasure pressed to the lips; and Clementina had it in
+her head to ask some of the table girls to help her out.  She meant to
+try first with that big girl who had helped her put on the shoeman's
+bronze slippers; and she hurried through the office, pushing purblindly
+past Fane without looking his way, when he called to her in the deference
+which he now always used with her, "Here's a package here for you,
+Clementina--Miss Claxon," and he gave her an oblong parcel, addressed in
+a hand strange to her.  "Who is it from?" she asked, innocently, and Fane
+replied with the same ingenuousness: "I'm sure I don't know."  Afterwards
+he thought of having retorted, "I haven't opened it," but still without
+being certain that he would have had the courage to say it.
+
+Clementina did not think of opening it herself, even when she was alone
+in her little room above Mrs. Atwell's, until she had carefully felt it
+over, and ascertained that it was a box of pasteboard, three or four
+inches deep and wide, and eight or ten inches long.  She looked at the
+address again, "Miss Clementina Claxon," and at the narrow notched ribbon
+which tied it, and noted that the paper it was wrapped in was very white
+and clean.  Then she sighed, and loosed the knot, and the paper slipped
+off the box, and at the same time the lid fell off, and the shoe man's
+bronze slippers fell out upon the floor.
+
+Either it must be a dream or it must be a joke; it could not be both real
+and earnest; somebody was trying to tease her; such flattery of fortune
+could not be honestly meant.  But it went to her head, and she was so
+giddy with it as she caught the slippers from the floor, and ran down to
+Mrs. Atwell, that she knocked against the sides of the narrow staircase.
+
+"What is it?  What does it mean?  Who did it?" she panted, with the
+slippers in her hand.  "Whe'e did they come from?"  She poured out the
+history of her trying on these shoes, and of her present need of them and
+of their mysterious coming, to meet her longing after it had almost
+ceased to be a hope.  Mrs. Atwell closed with her in an exultation hardly
+short of a clapping the hands.  Her hair was gray, and the girl's hair
+still hung in braids down her back, but they were of the same age in
+their transport, which they referred to Mrs. Milray, and joined with her
+in glad but fruitless wonder who had sent Clementina the shoes.  Mrs.
+Atwell held that the help who had seen the girl trying them on had
+clubbed together and got them for her at the time; and had now given them
+to her for the honor she had done the Middlemount House in the parade.
+Mrs. Milray argued that the spring and summer months had secretly
+dispatched some fall and winter month to ransack the stores at
+Middlemount Centre for them.  Clementina believed that they came from the
+shoe man himself, who had always wanted to send them, in the hope that
+she would keep them, and had merely happened to send them just then in
+that moment of extremity when she was helpless against them.  Each
+conjecture involved improbabilities so gross that it left the field free
+to any opposite theory.
+
+Rumor of the fact could not fail to go through the house, and long before
+his day's work was done it reached the chef, and amused him as a piece of
+the Boss's luck.  He was smoking his evening pipe at the kitchen door
+after supper, when Clementina passed him on one of the many errands that
+took her between Mrs. Milray's room and her own, and he called to her:
+"Boss, what's this I hear about a pair o' glass slippas droppin' out the
+sky int' youa lap?"
+
+Clementina was so happy that she thought she might trust him for once,
+and she said, "Oh, yes, Mr. Mahtin!  Who do you suppose sent them?" she
+entreated him so sweetly that it would have softened any heart but the
+heart of a tease.
+
+"I believe I could give a pootty good guess if I had the facts."
+
+Clementina innocently gave them to him, and he listened with a well-
+affected sympathy.
+
+"Say Fane fust told you about 'em?"
+
+"Yes.  'He'e's a package for you,' he said.  Just that way; and he
+couldn't tell me who left it, or anything."
+
+"Anybody asked him about it since?"
+
+"Oh, yes!  Mrs. Milray, and Mrs. Atwell, and Mr. Atwell, and everybody."
+
+"Everybody."  The chef smiled with a peculiar droop of one eye.  "And he
+didn't know when the slippas got into the landlo'd's box?"
+
+"No.  The fust thing he knew, the' they we'e!" Clementina stood
+expectant, but the chef smoked on as if that were all there was to say,
+and seemed to have forgotten her.  " Who do you think put them thea, Mr.
+Mahtin?"
+
+The chef looked up as if surprised to find her still there.  "Oh! Oh,
+yes!  Who d' I think?  Why, I know, Boss.  But I don't believe I'd betta
+tell you."
+
+"Oh, do, Mr. Mahtin!  If you knew how I felt about it"--
+
+"No, no!  I guess I betta not.  'Twouldn't do you any good.  I guess I
+won't say anything moa.  But if I was in youa place, and I really wanted
+to know whe'e them slippas come from"--
+
+"I do--I do indeed"--
+
+The chef paused before he added, "I should go at Fane.  I guess what he
+don't know ain't wo'th knowin', and I guess nobody else knows anything.
+Thea!  I don't know but I said mo'n I ought, now."
+
+What the chef said was of a piece with what had been more than once in
+Clementina's mind; but she had driven it out, not because it might not be
+true, but because she would not have it true.  Her head drooped; she
+turned limp and springless away.  Even the heart of the tease was
+touched; he had not known that it would worry her so much, though he knew
+that she disliked the clerk.
+
+"Mind," he called after her, too late, "I ain't got no proof 't he done
+it."
+
+She did not answer him, or look round.  She went to her room, and sat
+down in the growing dusk to think, with a hot lump in her throat.
+
+Mrs. Atwell found her there an hour later, when she climbed to the
+chamber where she thought she ought to have heard Clementina moving about
+over her own room.
+
+"Didn't know but I could help you do youa dressin'," she began, and then
+at sight of the dim figure she broke off: "Why, Clem!  What's the matte?
+Ah' you asleep?  Ah' you sick?  It's half an hour of the time and"--
+
+"I'm not going," Clementina answered, and she did not move.
+
+"Not goin'!  Why the land o'--"
+
+"Oh, I can't go, Mrs. Atwell.  Don't ask me!  Tell Mrs. Milray, please!"
+
+"I will, when I got something to tell," said Mrs. Atwell.  "Now, you just
+say what's happened, Clementina Claxon!  "Clementina suffered the woful
+truth to be drawn from her.  "But you don't know whether it's so or not,"
+the landlady protested.
+
+"Yes, yes, I do!  It was the fast thing I thought of, and the chef
+wouldn't have said it if he didn't believe it."
+
+"That's just what he would done," cried Mrs. Atwell.  "And I'll give him
+such a goin' ova, for his teasin', as he ain't had in one while.  He just
+said it to tease.  What you goin' to say to Mrs. Milray?"
+
+"Oh, tell her I'm not a bit well, Mrs. Atwell!  My head does ache,
+truly."
+
+"Why, listen," said Mrs. Atwell, recklessly.  "If you believe he done it
+--and he no business to--why don't you just go to the dance, in 'em, and
+then give 'em back to him after it's ova?  It would suv him right."
+
+Clementina listened for a moment of temptation, and then shook her head.
+"It wouldn't do, Mrs. Atwell; you know it wouldn't," she said, and Mrs.
+Atwell had too little faith in her suggestion to make it prevail.  She
+went away to carry Clementina's message to Mrs. Milray, and her task was
+greatly eased by the increasing difficulty Mrs. Milray had begun to find,
+since the way was perfectly smoothed for her, in imagining the management
+of Clementina at the dance: neither child nor woman, neither servant nor
+lady, how was she to be carried successfully through it, without sorrow
+to herself or offence to others?  In proportion to the relief she felt,
+Mrs. Milray protested her irreconcilable grief; but when the simpler Mrs.
+Atwell proposed her going and reasoning with Clementina, she said, No,
+no; better let her alone, if she felt as she did; and perhaps after all
+she was right.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+Clementina listened to the music of the dance, till the last note was
+played; and she heard the gay shouts and laughter of the dancers as they
+issued from the ball room and began to disperse about the halls and
+verandas, and presently to call good night to one another.  Then she
+lighted her lamp, and put the slippers back into the box and wrapped it
+up in the nice paper it had come in, and tied it with the notched ribbon.
+She thought how she had meant to put the slippers away so, after the
+dance, when she had danced her fill in them, and how differently she was
+doing it all now.  She wrote the clerk's .name on the parcel, and then
+she took the box, and descended to the office with it.  There seemed to
+be nobody there, but at the noise of her step Fane came round the case of
+letter-boxes, and advanced to meet her at the long desk.
+
+"What's wanted, Miss Claxon?" he asked, with his hopeless respectfulness.
+"Anything I can do for you?"
+
+She did not answer, but looked him solemnly in the eyes and laid the
+parcel down on the open register, and then went out.
+
+He looked at the address on the parcel, and when he untied it, the box
+fell open and the shoes fell out of it, as they had with Clementina.  He
+ran with them behind the letter-box frame, and held them up before
+Gregory, who was seated there on the stool he usually occupied, gloomily
+nursing his knee.
+
+"What do you suppose this means, Frank?"
+
+Gregory looked at the shoes frowningly.  "They're the slippers she got
+to-day.  She thinks you sent them to her."
+
+"And she wouldn't have them because she thought I sent them!  As sure as
+I'm standing here, I never did it," said the clerk, solemnly.
+
+"I know it," said Gregory.  "I sent them."
+
+"You!"
+
+"What's so wonderful?"  Gregory retorted.  "I saw that she wanted them
+that day when the shoe peddler was here.  I could see it, and you could."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I went across into the woods, and the man overtook me with his wagon.  I
+was tempted, and I bought the slippers of him.  I wanted to give them to
+her then, but I resisted, and I thought I should never give them.  To-
+day, when I heard that she was going to that dance, I sent them to her
+anonymously.  That's all there is about it."
+
+The clerk had a moment of bitterness.  "If she'd known it was you, she
+wouldn't have given them back."
+
+"That's to be seen.  I shall tell her, now.  I never meant her to know,
+but she must, because she's doing you wrong in her ignorance."
+
+Gregory was silent, and Fane was trying to measure the extent of his own
+suffering, and to get the whole bearing of the incident in his mind.  In
+the end his attempt was a failure.  He asked Gregory, "And do you think
+you've done just right by me?"
+
+"I've done right by nobody," said Gregory, "not even by myself; and I can
+see that it was my own pleasure I had in mind.  I must tell her the
+truth, and then I must leave this place."
+
+"I suppose you want I should keep it quiet," said Fane.
+
+"I don't ask anything of you."
+
+"And she wouldn't," said Fane, after reflection.  "But I know she'd be
+glad of it, and I sha'n't say anything.  Of course, she never can care
+for me; and--there's my hand with my word, if you want it."  Gregory
+silently took the hand stretched toward him and Fane added: "All I'll ask
+is that you'll tell her I wouldn't have presumed to send her the shoes.
+She wouldn't be mad at you for it."
+
+Gregory took the box, and after some efforts to speak, he went away.  It
+was an old trouble, an old error, an old folly; he had yielded to impulse
+at every step, and at every step he had sinned against another or against
+himself.  What pain he had now given the simple soul of Fane; what pain
+he had given that poor child who had so mistaken and punished the simple
+soul!  With Fane it was over now, but with Clementina the worst was
+perhaps to come yet.  He could not hope to see the girl before morning,
+and then, what should he say to her?  At sight of a lamp burning in Mrs.
+Atwell's room, which was on a level with the veranda where he was
+walking, it came to him that first of all he ought to go to her, and
+confess the whole affair; if her husband were with her, he ought to
+confess before him; they were there in the place of the child's father
+and mother, and it was due to them.  As he pressed rapidly toward the
+light he framed in his thought the things he should say, and he did not
+notice, as he turned to enter the private hallway leading to Mrs.
+Atwell's apartment, a figure at the door.  It shrank back from his
+contact, and he recognized Clementina.  His purpose instantly changed,
+and he said, "Is that you, Miss Claxon?  I want to speak with you.  Will
+you come a moment where I can?"
+
+"I--I don't know as I'd betta," she faltered.  But she saw the box under
+his arm, and she thought that he wished to speak to her about that, and
+she wanted to hear what he would say.  She had been waiting at the door
+there, because she could not bear to go to her room without having
+something more happen.
+
+"You needn't be afraid.  I shall not keep you.  Come with me a moment.
+There is something I must tell you at once.  You have made a mistake.
+And it is my fault.  Come!"
+
+Clementina stepped out into the moonlight with him, and they walked
+across the grass that sloped between the hotel and the river.  There were
+still people about, late smokers singly, and in groups along the piazzas,
+and young couples, like themselves, strolling in the dry air, under the
+pure sky.
+
+Gregory made several failures in trying to begin, before he said: "I have
+to tell you that you are mistaken about Mr. Fane.  I was there behind the
+letter boxes when you came in, and I know that you left these shoes
+because you thought he sent them to you.  He didn't send them."
+Clementina did not say anything, and Gregory was forced to ask: "Do you
+wish to know who sent them?  I won't tell you unless you do wish it."
+
+"I think I ought to know," she said, and she asked, "Don't you?"
+
+"Yes; for you must blame some one else now, for what you thought Fane
+did.  I sent them to you."
+
+Clementina's heart gave a leap in her breast, and she could not say
+anything.  He went on.
+
+"I saw that you wanted them that day, and when the peddler happened to
+overtake me in the woods where I was walking, after I left you, I acted
+on a sudden impulse, and I bought them for you.  I meant to send them to
+you anonymously, then.  I had committed one error in acting upon impulse-
+my rashness is my besetting sin--and I wished to add a species of deceit
+to that.  But I was kept from it until-to-day.  I hoped you would like to
+wear them to the dance to-night, and I put them in the post-office for
+you myself.  Mr. Fane didn't know anything about it.  That is all.  I am
+to blame, and no one else."
+
+He waited for her to speak, but Clementina could only say, "I don't know
+what to say."
+
+"You can't say anything that would be punishment enough for me.  I have
+acted foolishly, cruelly."
+
+Clementina did not think so.  She was not indignant, as she was when she
+thought Fane had taken this liberty with her, but if Mr. Gregory thought
+it was so very bad, it must be something much more serious than she had
+imagined.  She said, "I don't see why you wanted to do it," hoping that
+he would be able to tell her something that would make his behavior seem
+less dreadful than he appeared to think it was.
+
+"There is only one thing that could justify it, and that is something
+that I cannot justify."  It was very mysterious, but youth loves mystery,
+and Clementina was very young.  "I did it," said Gregory solemnly, and he
+felt that now he was acting from no impulse, but from a wisely considered
+decision which he might not fail in without culpability, "because I love
+you."
+
+"Oh!" said Clementina, and she started away from him.
+
+"I knew that it would make me detestable!" he cried, bitterly.  "I had to
+tell you, to explain what I did.  I couldn't help doing it.  But now if
+you can forget it, and never think of me again, I can go away, and try to
+atone for it somehow.  I shall be guided."
+
+Clementina did not know why she ought to feel affronted or injured by
+what he had said to her; but if Mr. Gregory thought it was wrong for him
+to have spoken so, it must be wrong.  She did not wish him to feel badly,
+even if he had done wrong, but she had to take his view of what he had
+done.  "Why, suttainly, Mr. Gregory," she answered.  "You mustn't mind
+it."
+
+"But I do mind it.  I have been very, very selfish, very thoughtless.  We
+are both too young.  I can't ask you to wait for me till I could marry"--
+
+The word really frightened Clementina.  She said, "I don't believe I
+betta promise."
+
+"Oh, I know it!"  said Gregory.  "I am going away from here.  I am going
+to-morrow as soon as I can arrange--as soon as I can get away.  Good-
+night--I"--Clementina in her agitation put her hands up to her face.
+"Oh, don't cry--I can't bear to have you cry."
+
+She took down her hands.  "I'm not crying!  But I wish I had neva seen
+those slippas."
+
+They had come to the bank of the river, whose current quivered at that
+point in a scaly ripple in the moonlight.  At her words Gregory suddenly
+pulled the box from under his arm, and flung it into the stream as far as
+he could.  It caught upon a shallow of the ripple, hung there a moment,
+then loosed itself, and swam swiftly down the stream.
+
+"Oh!" Clementina moaned.
+
+"Do you want them back?"  he demanded.  "I will go in for them!"
+
+"No, no!  No.  But it seemed such a--waste!"
+
+"Yes, that is a sin, too."  They climbed silently to the hotel.  At Mrs.
+Atwell's door, he spoke.  "Try to forget what I said, and forgive me, if
+you can."
+
+"Yes--yes, I will, Mr. Gregory.  You mustn't think of it any moa."
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+Clementina did not sleep till well toward morning, and she was still
+sleeping when Mrs. Atwell knocked and called in to her that her brother
+Jim wanted to see her.  She hurried down, and in the confusion of mind
+left over from the night before she cooed sweetly at Jim as if he had
+been Mr. Gregory, "What is it, Jim?  What do you want me for?"
+
+The boy answered with the disgust a sister's company manners always rouse
+in a brother.  "Motha wants you.  Says she's wo'ked down, and she wants
+you to come and help."  Then he went his way.
+
+Mrs. Atwell was used to having help snatched from her by their families
+at a moment's notice.  "I presume you've got to go, Clem," she said.
+
+"Oh, yes, I've got to go," Clementina assented, with a note of relief
+which mystified Mrs. Atwell.
+
+"You tied readin' to Mr. Milray?"
+
+"Oh, no'm-no, I mean.  But I guess I betta go home.  I guess I've been
+away long enough."
+
+"Well, you're a good gul, Clem.  I presume your motha's got a right to
+have you home if she wants you."  Clementina said nothing to this, but
+turned briskly, and started upstairs toward her room again.  The landlady
+called after her, "Shall you speak to Mis' Milray, or do you want I
+should?"
+
+Clementina looked back at her over her shoulder to warble, "Why, if you
+would, Mrs. Atwell," and kept on to her room.
+
+Mrs. Milray was not wholly sorry to have her go; she was going herself
+very soon, and Clementina's earlier departure simplified the question of
+getting rid of her; but she overwhelmed her with reproaches which
+Clementina received with such sweet sincerity that another than Mrs.
+Milray might have blamed herself for having abused her ingenuousness.
+
+The Atwells could very well have let the girl walk home, but they sent
+her in a buckboard, with one of the stablemen to drive her.  The landlord
+put her neat bundle under the seat of the buckboard with his own hand.
+There was something in the child's bearing, her dignity and her
+amiability, which made people offer her, half in fun, and half in
+earnest, the deference paid to age and state.
+
+She did not know whether Gregory would try to see her before she went.
+She thought he must have known she was going, but since he neither came
+to take leave of her, nor sent her any message, she decided that she had
+not expected him to do so.  About the third week of September she heard
+that he had left Middlemount and gone back to college.
+
+She kept at her work in the house and helped her mother, and looked after
+the little ones; she followed her father in the woods, in his quest of
+stuff for walking sticks, and advised with both concerning the taste of
+summer folks in dress and in canes.  The winter came, and she read many
+books in its long leisure, mostly novels, out of the rector's library.
+He had a whole set of Miss Edgeworth, and nearly all of Miss Austen and
+Miss Gurney, and he gave of them to Clementina, as the best thing for her
+mind as well as her morals; he believed nothing could be better for any
+one than these old English novels, which he had nearly forgotten in their
+details.  She colored the faded English life of the stories afresh from
+her Yankee circumstance; and it seemed the consensus of their testimony
+that she had really been made love to, and not so very much too soon, at
+her age of sixteen, for most of their heroines were not much older.  The
+terms of Gregory's declaration and of its withdrawal were mystifying, but
+not more mystifying than many such things, and from what happened in the
+novels she read, the affair might be trusted to come out all right of
+itself in time.  She was rather thoughtfuller for it, and once her mother
+asked her what was the matter with her.  "Oh, I guess I'm getting old,
+motha," she said, and turned the question off.  She would not have minded
+telling her mother about Gregory, but it would not have been the custom;
+and her mother would have worried, and would have blamed him.  Clementina
+could have more easily trusted her father with the case, but so far as
+she knew fathers never were trusted with anything of the kind.  She would
+have been willing that accident should bring it to the knowledge of Mrs.
+Richling; but the moment never came when she could voluntarily confide in
+her, though she was a great deal with her that winter.  She was Mrs.
+Richling's lieutenant in the social affairs of the parish, which the
+rector's wife took under her care.  She helped her get up entertainments
+of the kind that could be given in the church parlor, and they managed
+together some dances which had to be exiled to the town hall.  They
+contrived to make the young people of the village feel that they were
+having a gay time, and Clementina did not herself feel that it was a dull
+one.  She taught them some of the new steps and figures which the help
+used to pick up from the summer folks at the Middlemount, and practise
+together; she liked doing that; her mother said the child would rather
+dance than eat, any time.  She was never sad, but so much dignity got
+into her sweetness that the rector now and then complained of feeling put
+down by her.
+
+She did not know whether she expected Gregory to write to her or not; but
+when no letters came she decided that she had not expected them.  She
+wondered if he would come back to the Middlemount the next summer; but
+when the summer came, she heard that they had another student in his
+place.  She heard that they had a new clerk, and that the boarders were
+not so pleasant.  Another year passed, and towards the end of the season
+Mrs. Atwell wished her to come and help her again, and Clementina went
+over to the hotel to soften her refusal.  She explained that her mother
+had so much sewing now that she could not spare her; and Mrs. Atwell
+said: Well, that was right, and that she must be the greatest kind of
+dependence for her mother.  "You ah' going on seventeen this year, ain't
+you?"
+
+"I was nineteen the last day of August," said Clementina, and Mrs. Atwell
+sighed, and said, How the time did fly.
+
+It was the second week of September, but Mrs. Atwell said they were going
+to keep the house open till the middle of October, if they could, for the
+autumnal foliage, which there was getting to be quite a class of custom
+for.
+
+"I presume you knew Mr. Landa was dead," she added, and at Clementina's
+look of astonishment, she said with a natural satisfaction, "Mm! died the
+thutteenth day of August.  I presumed somehow you'd know it, though you
+didn't see a great deal of 'em, come to think of it.  I guess he was a
+good man; too good for her, I guess," she concluded, in the New England
+necessity of blaming some one.  "She sent us the papah."
+
+There was an early frost; and people said there was going to be a hard
+winter, but it was not this that made Clementina's father set to work
+finishing his house.  His turning business was well started, now, and he
+had got together money enough to pay for the work.  He had lately
+enlarged the scope of his industry by turning gate-posts and urns for the
+tops of them, which had become very popular, for the front yards of the
+farm and village houses in a wide stretch of country.  They sold more
+steadily than the smaller wares, the cups, and tops, and little vases and
+platters which had once been the output of his lathe; after the first
+season the interest of the summer folks in these fell off; but the gate
+posts and the urns appealed to a lasting taste in the natives.
+
+Claxon wished to put the finishing touches on the house himself, and he
+was willing to suspend more profitable labors to do so.  After some
+attempts at plastering he was forced to leave that to the plasterers, but
+he managed the clap-boarding, with Clementina to hand him boards and
+nails, and to keep him supplied with the hammer he was apt to drop at
+critical moments.  They talked pretty constantly at their labors, and in
+their leisure, which they spent on the brown needles under the pines at
+the side of the house.  Sometimes the hammering or the talking would be
+interrupted by a voice calling, from a passing vehicle in the hidden
+roadway, something about urns.  Claxon would answer, without troubling
+himself to verify the inquirer; or moving from his place, that he would
+get round to them, and then would hammer on, or talk on with Clementina.
+
+One day in October a carriage drove up to the door, after the work on the
+house had been carried as far as Claxon's mood and money allowed, and he
+and Clementina were picking up the litter of his carpentering.  He had
+replaced the block of wood which once served at the front door by some
+steps under an arbor of rustic work; but this was still so novel that the
+younger children had not outgrown their pride in it and were playing at
+house-keeping there.  Clementina ran around to the back door and out
+through the front entry in time to save the visitor and the children from
+the misunderstanding they began to fall into, and met her with a smile of
+hospitable brilliancy, and a recognition full of compassionate welcome.
+
+Mrs. Lander gave way to her tears as she broke out, " Oh, it ain't the
+way it was the last time I was he'a!  You hea'd that he--that Mr. Landa"--
+
+"Mrs. Atwell told me," said Clementina.  "Won't you come in, and sit
+down?"
+
+"Why, yes."  Mrs. Lander pushed in through the narrow door of what was to
+be the parlor.  Her crapes swept about her and exhaled a strong scent of
+their dyes.  Her veil softened her heavy face; but she had not grown
+thinner in her bereavement.
+
+"I just got to the Middlemount last night," she said, "and I wanted to
+see you and your payrents, both, Miss Claxon.  It doos bring him back so!
+You won't neva know how much he thought of you, and you'll all think I'm
+crazy.  I wouldn't come as long as he was with me, and now I have to come
+without him; I held out ag'inst him as long as I had him to hold out
+ag'inst.  Not that he was eva one to push, and I don't know as he so much
+as spoke of it, afta we left the hotel two yea's ago; but I presume it
+wa'n't out of his mind a single minute.  Time and time again I'd say to
+him, 'Now, Albe't, do you feel about it just the way you done?' and he'd
+say, 'I ha'r't had any call to charge my mind about it,' and then I'd
+begin tryin' to ahgue him out of it, and keep a hectorin', till he'd say,
+'Well, I'm not askin' you to do it,' and that's all I could get out of
+him.  But I see all the while 't he wanted me to do it, whateva he asked,
+and now I've got to do it when it can't give him any pleasure."  Mrs.
+Lander put up her black-bordered handkerchief and sobbed into it, and
+Clementina waited till her grief had spent itself; then she gave her a
+fan, and Mrs. Lander gratefully cooled her hot wet face.  The children
+had found the noises of her affliction and the turbid tones of her
+monologue annoying, and had gone off to play in the woods; Claxon kept
+incuriously about the work that Clementina had left him to; his wife
+maintained the confidence which she always felt in Clementina's ability
+to treat with the world when it presented itself, and though she was
+curious enough, she did not offer to interrupt the girl's interview with
+Mrs. Lander; Clementina would know how to behave.
+
+Mrs. Lander, when she had refreshed herself with the fan, seemed to get a
+fresh grip of her theme, and she told Clementina all abort Mr. Lander's
+last sickness.  It had been so short that it gave her no time to try the
+climate of Colorado upon him, which she now felt sure would have brought
+him right up; and she had remembered, when too late, to give him a liver-
+medicine of her own, though it did not appear that it was his liver which
+was affected; that was the strange part of it.  But, brief as his
+sickness was, he had felt that it was to be his last, and had solemnly
+talked over her future with her, which he seemed to think would be
+lonely.  He had not named Clementina, but Mrs. Lander had known well
+enough what he meant; and now she wished to ask her, and her father and
+mother, how they would all like Clementina to come and spend the winter
+with her at Boston first, and then further South, and wherever she should
+happen to go.  She apologized for not having come sooner upon this
+errand; she had resolved upon it as soon as Mr. Lander was gone, but she
+had been sick herself, and had only just now got out of bed.
+
+Clementina was too young to feel the pathos of the case fully, or perhaps
+even to follow the tortuous course of Mrs. Lander's motives, but she was
+moved by her grief; and she could not help a thrill of pleasure in the
+vague splendor of the future outlined by Mrs. Lander's proposal.  For a
+time she had thought that Mrs. Milray was going to ask her to visit her
+in New York; Mrs. Milray had thrown out a hint of something of the kind
+at parting, but that was the last of it; and now she at once made up her
+mind that she would like to go with Mrs. Lander, while discreetly saying
+that she would ask her father and mother to come and talk with her.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+Her parents objected to leaving their work; each suggested that the other
+had better go; but they both came at Clementina's urgence.  Her father
+laughed and her mother frowned when she told them what Mrs. Lander
+wanted, from the same misgiving of her sanity.  They partly abandoned
+this theory for a conviction of Mrs. Lander's mere folly when she began
+to talk, and this slowly yielded to the perception that she had some
+streaks of sense.  It was sense in the first place to want to have
+Clementina with her, and though it might not be sense to suppose that
+they would be anxious to let her go, they did not find so much want of it
+as Mrs. Lander talked on.  It was one of her necessities to talk away her
+emotions before arriving at her ideas, which were often found in a
+tangle, but were not without a certain propriety.  She was now, after her
+interview with Clementina, in the immediate presence of these, and it was
+her ideas that she began to produce for the girl's father and mother.
+She said, frankly, that she had more money than she knew what to do with,
+and they must not think she supposed she was doing a favor, for she was
+really asking one.
+
+She was alone in the world, without near connections of her own, or
+relatives of her husband's, and it would be a mercy if they could let
+their daughter come and visit her; she would not call it more than a
+visit; that would be the best thing on both sides; she told of her great
+fancy for Clementina the first time she saw her, and of her husband's
+wish that she would come and visit with them then for the winter.  As for
+that money she had tried to make the child take, she presumed that they
+knew about it, and she wished to say that she did it because she was
+afraid Mr. Lander had said so much about the sewing, that they would be
+disappointed.  She gave way to her tears at the recollection, and
+confessed that she wanted the child to have the money anyway.  She ended
+by asking Mrs. Claxon if she would please to let her have a drink of
+water; and she looked about the room, and said that they had got it
+finished up a great deal, now, had not they?  She made other remarks upon
+it, so apt that Mrs. Claxon gave her a sort of permissive invitation to
+look about the whole lower floor, ending with the kitchen.
+
+Mrs. Lander sat down there while Mrs. Claxon drew from the pipes a glass
+of water, which she proudly explained was pumped all over the house by
+the wind mill that supplied the power for her husband's turning lathes.
+
+"Well, I wish mah husband could have tasted that wata," said Mrs. Lander,
+as if reminded of husbands by the word, and by the action of putting down
+the glass.  "He was always such a great hand for good, cold wata.  My!
+He'd 'a liked youa kitchen, Mrs. Claxon.  He always was such a home-body,
+and he did get so ti'ed of hotels.  For all he had such an appearance,
+when you see him, of bein'--well!--stiff and proud, he was fah moa common
+in his tastes--I don't mean common, exactly, eitha--than what I was; and
+many a time when we'd be drivin' through the country, and we'd pass some
+o' them long-strung-out houses, don't you know, with the kitchen next to
+the wood shed, and then an ahchway befoa you get to the stable, Mr. Landa
+he'd get out, and make an urrand, just so's to look in at the kitchen
+dooa; he said it made him think of his own motha's kitchen.  We was both
+brought up in the country, that's a fact, and I guess if the truth was
+known we both expected to settle down and die thea, some time; but now
+he's gone, and I don't know what'll become o' me, and sometimes I don't
+much care.  I guess if Mr. Landa'd 'a seen youa kitchen, it wouldn't 'a'
+been so easy to git him out of it; and I do believe if he's livin'
+anywhe' now he takes as much comfo't in my settin' here as what I do.
+I presume I shall settle down somewhe's before a great while, and if you
+could make up youa mind to let your daughta come to me for a little visit
+till spring, you couldn't do a thing that 'd please Mr. Landa moa."
+
+Mrs. Claxon said that she would talk it over with the child's father; and
+then Mrs. Lander pressed her to let her take Clementina back to the
+Middlemount with her for supper, if they wouldn't let her stay the night.
+After Clementina had driven away, Mrs. Claxon accused herself to her
+husband of being the greatest fool in the State, but he said that the
+carriage was one of the Middlemount rigs, and he guessed it was all
+right.  He could see that Clem was wild to go, and he didn't see why she
+shouldn't.
+
+"Well, I do, then," his wife retorted.  "We don't know anything about the
+woman, or who she is."
+
+"I guess no harm'll come to Clem for one night," said Claxon, and Mrs.
+Claxon was forced back upon the larger question for the maintenance of
+her anxiety.  She asked what he was going to do about letting Clem go the
+whole winter with a perfect stranger; and he answered that he had not got
+round to that yet, and that there were a good many things to be thought
+of first.  He got round to see the rector before dark, and in the light
+of his larger horizon, was better able to orient Mrs. Lander and her
+motives than he had been before.
+
+When she came back with the girl the next morning, she had thought of
+something in the nature of credentials.  It was the letter from her
+church in Boston, which she took whenever she left home, so that if she
+wished she might unite with the church in any place where she happened to
+be stopping.  It did not make a great impression upon the Klaxons, who
+were of no religion, though they allowed their children to go to the
+Episcopal church and Sunday-school, and always meant to go themselves.
+They said they would like to talk the matter over with the rector, if
+Mrs. Lander did not object; she offered to send her carriage for him, and
+the rector was brought at once.
+
+He was one of those men who have, in the breaking down of the old
+Puritanical faith, and the dying out of the later Unitarian rationalism,
+advanced and established the Anglican church so notably in the New
+England hill-country, by a wise conformity to the necessities and
+exactions of the native temperament.  On the ecclesiastical side he was
+conscientiously uncompromising, but personally he was as simple-mannered
+as he was simple-hearted.  He was a tall lean man in rusty black, with a
+clerical waistcoat that buttoned high, and scholarly glasses, but with a
+belated straw hat that had counted more than one summer, and a farmer's
+tan on his face and hands.  He pronounced the church-letter, though quite
+outside of his own church, a document of the highest respectability, and
+he listened with patient deference to the autobiography which Mrs. Lander
+poured out upon him, and her identifications, through reference to this
+or that person in Boston whom he knew either at first or second hand.
+He had not to pronounce upon her syntax, or her social quality; it was
+enough for him, in behalf of the Claxons, to find her what she professed
+to be.
+
+"You must think," he said, laughing, "that we are over-particular; but
+the fact is that we value Clementina rather highly, and we wish to be
+sure that your hospitable offer will be for her real good."
+
+"Of cou'se," said Mrs. Lander.  "I should be just so myself abort her."
+
+"I don't know," he continued, "that I've ever said how much we think of
+her, Mrs. Richling and I, but this seems a good opportunity, as she is
+not present.
+
+She is not perfect, but she comes as near being a thoroughly good girl as
+she can without knowing it.  She has a great deal of common-sense, and we
+all want her to have the best chance."
+
+"Well, that's just the way I feel about her, and that's just what I mean
+to give her," said Mrs. Lander.
+
+"I am not sure that I make myself quite clear," said the rector.
+"I mean, a chance to prove how useful and helpful she can be.  Do you
+think you can make life hard for her occasionally?  Can you be peevish
+and exacting, and unreasonable?  Can you do something to make her value
+superfluity and luxury at their true worth?"
+
+Mrs. Lander looked a little alarmed and a little offended.  "I don't know
+as I undastand what you mean, exactly," she said, frowning rather with
+perplexity than resentment.  "But the child sha'n't have a care, and her
+own motha couldn't be betta to her than me.  There a'n't anything money
+can buy that she sha'n't have, if she wants it, and all I'll ask of her
+is 't she'll enjoy herself as much as she knows how.  I want her with me
+because I should love to have her round; and we did from the very fust
+minute she spoke, Mr. Lander and me, both.  She shall have her own money,
+and spend it for anything she pleases, and she needn't do a stitch o'
+work from mohnin' till night.  But if you're afraid I shall put upon her"
+
+"No, no," said the rector, and he threw back his head with a laugh.
+
+"When it was all arranged, a few days later, after the verification of
+certain of Mrs. Lander's references by letters to Boston, he said to
+Clementina's father and mother, "There's only one danger, now, and that
+is that she will spoil Clementina; but there's a reasonable hope that she
+won't know how."  He found the Claxons struggling with a fresh misgiving,
+which Claxon expressed.  "The way I look at it is like this.  I don't
+want that woman should eva think Clem was after her money.  On the face
+of it there a'n't very much to her that would make anybody think but what
+we was after it; and I should want it pootty well undastood that we
+wa'n't that kind.  But I don't seem to see any way of tellin' her."
+
+"No," said the rector, with a sympathetic twinkle, "that would be
+difficult."
+
+"It's plain to be seen," Mrs. Claxon interposed, "that she thinks a good
+deal of her money; and I d' know but what she'd think she was doin' Clem
+most too much of a favor anyway.  If it can't be a puffectly even thing,
+all round, I d' know as I should want it to be at all."
+
+"You're quite right., Mrs. Claxon, quite right.  But I believe Mrs.
+Lander may be safely left to look out for her own interests.  After all,
+she has merely asked Clementina to pass the winter with her.  It will be
+a good opportunity for her to see something of the world; and perhaps it
+may bring her the chance of placing herself in life.  We have got to
+consider these things with reference to a young girl."
+
+Mrs. Claxon said, "Of cou'se," but Claxon did not assent so readily.
+
+"I don't feel as if I should want Clem to look at it in that light.  If
+the chance don't come to her, I don't want she should go huntin' round
+for it."
+
+"I thoroughly agree with you," said the rector.  "But I was thinking that
+there was not only no chance worthy of her in Middlemount, but there is
+no chance at all."
+
+"I guess that's so," Claxon owned with a laugh.  "Well, I guess we can
+leave it to Clem to do what's right and proper everyway.  As you say,
+she's got lots of sense."
+
+From that moment he emptied his mind of care concerning the matter; but
+husband and wife are never both quite free of care on the same point of
+common interest, and Mrs. Claxon assumed more and more of the anxieties
+which he had abandoned.  She fretted under the load, and expressed an
+exasperated tenderness for Clementina when the girl seemed forgetful of
+any of the little steps to be taken before the great one in getting her
+clothes ready for leaving home.  She said finally that she presumed they
+were doing a wild thing, and that it looked crazier and crazier the more
+she thought of it; but all was, if Clem didn't like, she could come home.
+By this time her husband was in something of that insensate eagerness to
+have the affair over that people feel in a house where there is a
+funeral.
+
+At the station, when Clementina started for Boston with Mrs. Lander, her
+father and mother, with the rector and his wife, came to see her off.
+Other friends mistakenly made themselves of the party, and kept her
+talking vacuities when her heart was full, till the train drew up.  Her
+father went with her into the parlor car, where the porter of the
+Middlemount House set down Mrs. Lander's hand baggage and took the final
+fee she thrust upon him.  When Claxon came out he was not so satisfactory
+about the car as he might have been to his wife, who had never been
+inside a parlor car, and who had remained proudly in the background,
+where she could not see into it from the outside.  He said that he had
+felt so bad about Clem that he did not notice what the car was like.
+But he was able to report that she looked as well as any of the folks in
+it, and that, if there were any better dressed, he did not see them.  He
+owned that she cried some, when he said good-bye to her.
+
+"I guess," said his wife, grimly, "we're a passel o' fools to let her go.
+Even if she don't like, the'a, with that crazy-head, she won't be the
+same Clem when she comes back."
+
+They were too heavy-hearted to dispute much, and were mostly silent as
+they drove home behind Claxon's self-broken colt: a creature that had
+taken voluntarily to harness almost from its birth, and was an example to
+its kind in sobriety and industry.
+
+The children ran out from the house to meet them, with a story of having
+seen Clem at a point in the woods where the train always slowed up before
+a crossing, and where they had all gone to wait for her.  She had seen
+them through the car-window, and had come out on the car platform, and
+waved her handkerchief, as she passed, and called something to them,
+but they could not hear what it was, they were all cheering so.
+
+At this their mother broke down, and went crying into the house.  Not to
+have had the last words of the child whom she should never see the same
+again if she ever saw her at all, was more, she said, than heart could
+bear.
+
+The rector's wife arrived home with her husband in a mood of mounting
+hopefulness, which soared to tops commanding a view of perhaps more of
+this world's kingdoms than a clergyman's wife ought ever to see, even for
+another.  She decided that Clementina's chances of making a splendid
+match, somewhere, were about of the nature of certainties, and she
+contended that she would adorn any station, with experience, and with her
+native tact, especially if it were a very high station in Europe, where
+Mrs. Lander would now be sure to take her.  If she did not take her to
+Europe, however, she would be sure to leave her all her money, and this
+would serve the same end, though more indirectly.
+
+Mr. Richling scoffed at this ideal of Clementina's future with a contempt
+which was as little becoming to his cloth.  He made his wife reflect
+that, with all her inherent grace and charm, Clementina was an ignorant
+little country girl, who had neither the hardness of heart nor the
+greediness of soul, which gets people on in the world, and repair for
+them the disadvantages of birth and education.  He represented that even
+if favorable chances for success in society showed themselves to the
+girl, the intense and inexpugnable vulgarity of Mrs. Lander would spoil
+them; and he was glad of this, he said, for he believed that the best
+thing which could happen to the child would be to come home as sweet and
+good as she had gone away; he added this was what they ought both to pray
+for.
+
+His wife admitted this, but she retorted by asking if he thought such a
+thing was possible, and he was obliged to own that it was not possible.
+He marred the effect of his concession by subjoining that it was no more
+possible than her making a brilliant and triumphant social figure in
+society, either at home or in Europe.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+So far from embarking at once for Europe, Mrs. Lander went to that hotel
+in a suburb of Boston, where she had the habit of passing the late autumn
+months, in order to fortify herself for the climate of the early winter
+months in the city.  She was a little puzzled how to provide for
+Clementina, with respect to herself, but she decided that the best thing
+would be to have her sleep in a room opening out of her own, with a
+folding bed in it, so that it could be used as a sort of parlor for both
+of them during the day, and be within easy reach, for conversation, at
+all times.
+
+On her part, Clementina began by looking after Mrs. Lander's comforts,
+large and little, like a daughter, to her own conception and to that of
+Mrs. Lander, but to other eyes, like a servant.  Mrs. Lander shyly shrank
+from acquaintance among the other ladies, and in the absence of this, she
+could not introduce Clementina, who went down to an early breakfast
+alone, and sat apart with her at lunch and dinner, ministering to her in
+public as she did in private.  She ran back to their rooms to fetch her
+shawl, or her handkerchief, or whichever drops or powders she happened to
+be taking with her meals, and adjusted with closer care the hassock which
+the head waiter had officially placed at her feet.  They seldom sat in
+the parlor where the ladies met, after dinner; they talked only to each
+other; and there, as elsewhere, the girl kept her filial care of the old
+woman.  The question of her relation to Mrs. Lander became so pressing
+among several of the guests that, after Clementina had watched over the
+banisters, with throbbing heart and feet, a little dance one night which
+the other girls had got up among themselves, and had fled back to her
+room at the approach of one of the kindlier and bolder of them, the
+landlord felt forced to learn from Mrs. Lander how Miss Claxon was to be
+regarded.  He managed delicately, by saying he would give the Sunday
+paper she had ordered to her nurse, "Or, I beg your pardon," he added, as
+if he had made a mistake.  "Why, she a'n't my nuhse," Mrs. Lander
+explained, simply, neither annoyed nor amused; " she's just a young lady
+that's visiting me, as you may say," and this put an end to the misgiving
+among the ladies.  But it suggested something to Mrs. Lander, and a few
+days afterwards, when they came out from Boston where they had been
+shopping, and she had been lavishing a bewildering waste of gloves, hats,
+shoes, capes and gowns upon Clementina, she said, "I'll tell you what.
+We've got to have a maid."
+
+"A maid?" cried the girl.
+
+"It isn't me, or my things I want her for," said Mrs. Lander.  "It's you
+and these dresses of youas.  I presume you could look afta them, come to
+give youa mind to it; but I don't want to have you tied up to a lot of
+clothes; and I presume we should find her a comfo't in moa ways than one,
+both of us.  I don't know what we shall want her to do, exactly; but I
+guess she will, if she undastands her business, and I want you should go
+in with me, to-morror, and find one.  I'll speak to some of the ladies,
+and find out whe's the best place to go, and we'll get the best there
+is."
+
+A lady whom Mrs. Lander spoke to entered into the affair with zeal born
+of a lurking sense of the wrong she had helped do Clementina in the
+common doubt whether she was not herself Mrs. Lander's maid.  She offered
+to go into Boston with them to an intelligence office, where you could
+get nice girls of all kinds; but she ended by giving Mrs. Lander the
+address, and instructions as to what she was to require in a maid.  She
+was chiefly to get an English maid, if at all possible, for the
+qualifications would more or less naturally follow from her nationality.
+There proved to be no English maid, but there was a Swedish one who had
+received a rigid training in an English family living on the Continent,
+and had come immediately from that service to seek her first place in
+America.  The manager of the office pronounced her character, as set down
+in writing, faultless, and Mrs. Lander engaged her.  "You want to look
+afta this young lady," she said, indicating Clementina.  "I can look afta
+myself," but Ellida took charge of them both on the train out from Boston
+with prompt intelligence.
+
+"We got to get used to it, I guess," Mrs. Lander confided at the first
+chance of whispering to Clementina.
+
+Within a month after washing the faces and combing the hair of all her
+brothers and sisters who would suffer it at her hands, Clementina's own
+head was under the brush of a lady's maid, who was of as great a
+discreetness in her own way as Clementina herself.  She supplied the
+defects of Mrs. Lander's elementary habits by simply asking if she should
+get this thing and that thing for the toilet, without criticising its
+absence,--and then asking whether she should get the same things for her
+young lady.  She appeared to let Mrs. Lander decide between having her
+brushes in ivory or silver, but there was really no choice for her, and
+they came in silver.  She knew not only her own place, but the places of
+her two ladies, and she presently had them in such training that they
+were as proficient in what they might and might not do for themselves and
+for each other, as if making these distinctions were the custom of their
+lives.
+
+Their hearts would both have gone out to Ellida, but Ellida kept them at
+a distance with the smooth respectfulness of the iron hand in the glove
+of velvet; and Clementina first learned from her to imagine the
+impassable gulf between mistress and maid.
+
+At the end of her month she gave them, out of a clear sky, a week's
+warning.  She professed no grievance, and was not moved by Mrs. Lander's
+appeal to say what wages she wanted.  She would only say that she was
+going to take a place an Commonwealth Avenue, where a friend of hers was
+living, and when the week was up, she went, and left her late mistresses
+feeling rather blank.  " I presume we shall have to get anotha," said
+Mrs. Lander.
+
+"Oh, not right away!  " Clementina pleaded.
+
+"Well, not right away," Mrs. Lander assented; and provisionally they each
+took the other into her keeping, and were much freer and happier
+together.
+
+Soon after Clementina was startled one morning, as she was going in to
+breakfast, by seeing Mr. Fane at the clerk's desk.  He did not see her;
+he was looking down at the hotel register, to compute the bill of a
+departing guest; but when she passed out she found him watching for her,
+with some letters.
+
+"I didn't know you were with us," he said, with his pensive smile, "till
+I found your letters here, addressed to Mrs. Lander's care; and then I
+put two and two together.  It only shows how small the world is, don't
+you think so?  I've just got back from my vacation; I prefer to take it
+in the fall of the year, because it's so much pleasanter to travel, then.
+I suppose you didn't know I was here?"
+
+"No, I didn't," said Clementina.  "I never dreamed of such a thing."
+
+"To be sure; why should you?" Fane reflected.  "I've been here ever since
+last spring.  But I'll say this, Miss Claxon, that if it's the least
+unpleasant to you, or the least disagreeable, or awakens any kind of
+associations"--
+
+"Oh, no!" Clementina protested, and Fane was spared the pain of saying
+what he would do if it were.
+
+He bowed, and she said sweetly, "It's pleasant to meet any one I've seen
+before.  I suppose you don't know how much it's changed at Middlemount
+since you we' e thea."  Fane answered blankly, while he felt in his
+breast pocket, Oh, he presumed so; and she added: "Ha'dly any of the same
+guests came back this summer, and they had more in July than they had in
+August, Mrs. Atwell said.  Mr. Mahtin, the chef, is gone, and newly all
+the help is different."
+
+Fane kept feeling in one pocket and then slapped himself over the other
+pockets.  "No," he said, "I haven't got it with me.  I must have left it
+in my room.  I just received a letter from Frank--Mr. Gregory, you know,
+I always call him Frank--and I thought I had it with me.  He was asking
+about Middlemount; and I wanted to read you what he said.  But I'll find
+it upstairs.  He's out of college, now, and he's begun his studies in the
+divinity school.  He's at Andover.  I don't know what to make of Frank,
+oftentimes," the clerk continued, confidentially.  "I tell him he's a
+kind of a survival, in religion; he's so aesthetic."  It seemed to Fane
+that he had not meant aesthetic, exactly, but he could not ask Clementina
+what the word was.  He went on to say, "He's a grand good fellow, Frank
+is, but he don't make enough allowance for human nature.  He's more like
+one of those old fashioned orthodox.  I go in for having a good time, so
+long as you don't do anybody else any hurt."
+
+He left her, and went to receive the commands of a lady who was leaning
+over the desk, and saying severely, "My mail, if you please," and
+Clementina could not wait for him to come back; she had to go to Mrs.
+Lander, and get her ready for breakfast; Ellida had taught Mrs. Lander a
+luxury of helplessness in which she persisted after the maid's help was
+withdrawn.
+
+Clementina went about the whole day with the wonder what Gregory had said
+about Middlemount filling her mind.  It must have had something to do
+with her; he could not have forgotten the words he had asked her to
+forget.  She remembered them now with a curiosity, which had no rancor in
+it, to know why he really took them back.  She had never blamed him, and
+she had outlived the hurt she had felt at not hearing from him.  But she
+had never lost the hope of hearing from him, or rather the expectation,
+and now she found that she was eager for his message; she decided that it
+must be something like a message, although it could not be anything
+direct.  No one else had come to his place in her fancy, and she was
+willing to try what they would think of each other now, to measure her
+own obligation to the past by a knowledge of his.  There was scarcely
+more than this in her heart when she allowed herself to drift near Fane's
+place that night, that he might speak to her, and tell her what Gregory
+had said.  But he had apparently forgotten about his letter, and only
+wished to talk about himself.  He wished to analyze himself, to tell her
+what sort of person he was.  He dealt impartially with the subject; he
+did not spare some faults of his; and after a week, he proposed a
+correspondence with her, in a letter of carefully studied spelling, as a
+means of mutual improvement as well as further acquaintance.
+
+It cost Clementina a good deal of trouble to answer him as she wished and
+not hurt his feelings.  She declined in terms she thought so cold that
+they must offend him beyond the point of speaking to her again; but he
+sought her out, as soon after as he could, and thanked her for her
+kindness, and begged her pardon.  He said he knew that she was a very
+busy person, with all the lessons she was taking, and that she had no
+time for carrying on a correspondence.  He regretted that he could not
+write French, because then the correspondence would have been good
+practice for her.  Clementina had begun taking French lessons, of a
+teacher who came out from Boston.  She lunched three times a week with
+her and Mrs. Lander, and spoke the language with Clementina, whose accent
+she praised for its purity; purity of accent was characteristic of all
+this lady's pupils; but what was really extraordinary in Mademoiselle
+Claxon was her sense of grammatical structure; she wrote the language
+even more perfectly than she spoke it; but beautifully, but wonderfully;
+her exercises were something marvellous.
+
+Mrs. Lander would have liked Clementina to take all the lessons that she
+heard any of the other young ladies in the hotel were taking.  One of
+them went in town every day, and studied drawing at an art-school, and
+she wanted Clementina to do that, too.  But Clementina would not do that;
+she had tried often enough at home, when her brother Jim was drawing, and
+her father was designing the patterns of his woodwork; she knew that she
+never could do it, and the time would be wasted.  She decided against
+piano lessons and singing lessons, too; she did not care for either, and
+she pleaded that it would be a waste to study them; but she suggested
+dancing lessons, and her gift for dancing won greater praise, and perhaps
+sincerer, than her accent won from Mademoiselle Blanc, though Mrs. Lander
+said that she would not have believed any one could be more
+complimentary.  She learned the new steps and figures in all the
+fashionable dances; she mastered some fancy dances, which society was
+then beginning to borrow from the stage; and she gave these before Mrs.
+Lander with a success which she felt herself.
+
+"I believe I could teach dancing," she said.
+
+"Well, you won't eve haf to, child," returned Mrs. Lander, with an eye on
+the side of the case that seldom escaped her.
+
+In spite of his wish to respect these preoccupations, Fane could not keep
+from offering Clementina attentions, which took the form of persecution
+when they changed from flowers for Mrs. Lander's table to letters for
+herself.  He apologized for his letters whenever he met her; but at last
+one of them came to her before breakfast with a special delivery stamp
+from Boston.  He had withdrawn to the city to write it, and he said that
+if she could not make him a favorable answer, he should not come back to
+Woodlake.
+
+She had to show this letter to Mrs. Lander, who asked: "You want he
+should come back?"
+
+"No, indeed!  I don't want eva to see him again."
+
+"Well, then, I guess you'll know how to tell him so.
+
+The girl went into her own room to write, and when she brought her answer
+to show it to Mrs. Lander she found her in frowning thought.  "I don't
+know but you'll have to go back and write it all over again, Clementina,"
+she said, "if you've told him not to come.  I've been thinkin', if you
+don't want to have anything to do with him, we betta go ouaselves."
+
+"Yes," answered Clementina, "that's what I've said."
+
+"You have?  Well, the witch is in it!  How came you to"--
+
+"I just wanted to talk with you about it.  But I thought maybe you'd like
+to go.  Or at least I should.  I should like to go home, Mrs. Landa."
+
+"Home!" retorted Mrs. Lander.  "The'e's plenty of places where you can be
+safe from the fella besides home, though I'll take you back the'a this
+minute if you say so.  But you needn't to feel wo'ked up about it."
+
+"Oh, I'm not," said Clementina, but with a gulp which betrayed her
+nervousness.
+
+"I did think," Mrs. Lander went on, "that I should go into the Vonndome,
+for December and January, but just as likely as not he'd come pesterin'
+the'a, too, and I wouldn't go, now, if you was to give me the whole city
+of Boston.  Why shouldn't we go to Florid?"
+
+When Mrs. Lander had once imagined the move, the nomadic impulse mounted
+irresistably in her.  She spoke of hotels in the South, where they could
+renew the summer, and she mapped out a campaign which she put into
+instant action so far as to advance upon New York.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+All in all to each other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Chained to the restless pursuit of an ideal not his own. . . . . . . . .
+Composed her features and her ideas to receive her visitor . . . . . . .
+Going on of things had long ceased to bring pleasure . . . . . . . . . .
+He a'n't a do-nothin'; he's a do-everything. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Hopeful apathy in his face.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Inexhaustible flow of statement, conjecture and misgiving. . . . . . . .
+Kept her talking vacuities when her heart was full . . . . . . . . . . .
+Led a life of public seclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Luxury of helplessness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+New England necessity of blaming some one. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+No object in life except to deprive it of all object . . . . . . . . . .
+Perverse reluctance to find out where they were. . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Provisional reprehension of possible shiftlessness . . . . . . . . . . .
+Scant sleep of an elderly man. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Seldom talked, but there came times when he would'nt even listen . . . .
+Thrown mainly upon the compassion of the chambermaids. . . . . . . . . .
+Tone was a snuffle expressive of deep-seated affliction. . . . . . . . .
+Unaware that she was a selfish or foolish person . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Under a fire of conjecture and asseveration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Weak in his double letters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Wishes of a mistress who did not know what she wanted. . . . . . . . . .
+You've got a light-haired voice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Ragged Lady, V1, by W. D. Howells
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Ragged Lady, by W. D. Howells, v1
+#51 in our series by William Dean Howells
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+Title: Ragged Lady, v1
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+Author: William Dean Howells
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+Release Date: September, 2002  [Etext #3405]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Ragged Lady, by W. D. Howells, v1
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+
+This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+
+
+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks at the end of this file
+for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making
+an entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+
+RAGGED LADY.
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+Part 1.
+
+I.
+
+It was their first summer at Middlemount and the Landers did not know the
+roads.  When they came to a place where they had a choice of two, she
+said that now he must get out of the carry-all and ask at the house
+standing a little back in the edge of the pine woods, which road they
+ought to take for South Middlemount.  She alleged many cases in which
+they had met trouble through his perverse reluctance to find out where
+they were before he pushed rashly forward in their drives.  Whilst she
+urged the facts she reached forward from the back seat where she sat, and
+held her hand upon the reins to prevent his starting the horse, which was
+impartially cropping first the sweet fern on one side and then the
+blueberry bushes on the other side of the narrow wheel-track.  She
+declared at last that if he would not get out and ask she would do it
+herself, and at this the dry little man jerked the reins in spite of her,
+and the horse suddenly pulled the carry-all to the right, and seemed
+about to overset it.
+
+"Oh, what are you doing, Albe't?  "Mrs. Lander lamented, falling helpless
+against the back of her seat.  "Haven't I always told you to speak to the
+hoss fust?"
+
+"He wouldn't have minded my speakin'," said her husband.  "I'm goin' to
+take you up to the dooa so that you can ask for youaself without gettin'
+out."
+
+This was so well, in view of Mrs. Lander's age and bulk, and the hardship
+she must have undergone, if she had tried to carry out her threat, that
+she was obliged to take it in some sort as a favor; and while the vehicle
+rose and sank over the surface left rough, after building, in front of
+the house, like a vessel on a chopping sea, she was silent for several
+seconds.
+
+The house was still in a raw state of unfinish, though it seemed to have
+been lived in for a year at least.  The earth had been banked up at the
+foundations for warmth in winter, and the sheathing of the walls had been
+splotched with irregular spaces of weather boarding; there was a good
+roof over all, but the window-casings had been merely set in their places
+and the trim left for a future impulse of the builder.  A block of wood
+suggested the intention of steps at the front door, which stood
+hospitably open, but remained unresponsive for some time after the
+Landers made their appeal to the house at large by anxious noises in
+their throats, and by talking loud with each other, and then talking low.
+They wondered whether there were anybody in the house; and decided that
+there must be, for there was smoke coming out of the stove pipe piercing
+the roof of the wing at the rear.
+
+Mr. Lander brought himself under censure by venturing, without his wife's
+authority, to lean forward and tap on the door-frame with the butt of his
+whip.  At the sound, a shrill voice called instantly from the region of
+the stove pipe, "Clem!  Clementina?  Go to the front dooa!  The'e's
+somebody knockin'."  The sound of feet, soft and quick, made itself heard
+within, and in a few moments a slim maid, too large for a little girl,
+too childlike for a young girl, stood in the open doorway, looking down
+on the elderly people in the buggy, with a face as glad as a flower's.
+She had blue eyes, and a smiling mouth, a straight nose, and a pretty
+chin whose firm jut accented a certain wistfulness of her lips.  She had
+hair of a dull, dark yellow, which sent out from its thick mass light
+prongs, or tendrils, curving inward again till they delicately touched
+it.  Her tanned face was not very different in color from her hair, and
+neither were her bare feet, which showed well above her ankles in the
+calico skirt she wore.  At sight of the elders in the buggy she
+involuntarily stooped a little to lengthen her skirt in effect, and at
+the same time she pulled it together sidewise, to close a tear in it, but
+she lost in her anxiety no ray of the joy which the mere presence of the
+strangers seemed to give her, and she kept smiling sunnily upon them
+while she waited for them to speak.
+
+"Oh!" Mrs. Lander began with involuntary apology in her tone, "we just
+wished to know which of these roads went to South Middlemount.  We've
+come from the hotel, and we wa'n't quite ce'tain."
+
+The girl laughed as she said, "Both roads go to South Middlemount'm; they
+join together again just a little piece farther on."
+
+The girl and the woman in their parlance replaced the letter 'r' by vowel
+sounds almost too obscure to be represented, except where it came last in
+a word before a word beginning with a vowel; there it was annexed to the
+vowel by a strong liaison, according to the custom universal in rural New
+England.
+
+"Oh, do they?" said Mrs. Lander.
+
+"Yes'm," answered the girl.  "It's a kind of tu'nout in the wintatime; or
+I guess that's what made it in the beginning; sometimes folks take one
+hand side and sometimes the other, and that keeps them separate; but
+they're really the same road, 'm."
+
+"Thank you," said Mrs. Lander, and she pushed her husband to make him say
+something, too, but he remained silently intent upon the child's
+prettiness, which her blue eyes seemed to illumine with a light of their
+own.  She had got hold of the door, now, and was using it as if it was a
+piece of drapery, to hide not only the tear in her gown, but somehow both
+her bare feet.  She leaned out beyond the edge of it; and then, at
+moments she vanished altogether behind it.
+
+Since Mr. Lander would not speak, and made no sign of starting up his
+horse, Mrs. Lander added, "I presume you must be used to havin' people
+ask about the road, if it's so puzzlin'."
+
+"O, yes'm," returned the girl, gladly.  "Almost every day, in the
+summatime."
+
+"You have got a pretty place for a home, he'e," said Mrs. Lander.
+
+"Well, it will be when it's finished up."  Without leaning forward
+inconveniently Mrs. Lander could see that the partitions of the house
+within were lathed, but not plastered, and the girl looked round as if to
+realize its condition and added, "It isn't quite finished inside."
+
+"We wouldn't, have troubled you," said Mrs. Lander, "if we had seen
+anybody to inquire of."
+
+"Yes'm," said the girl.  "It a'n't any trouble."
+
+"There are not many otha houses about, very nea', but I don't suppose you
+get lonesome; young folks are plenty of company for themselves, and if
+you've got any brothas and sistas--"
+
+"Oh," said the girl, with a tender laugh, "I've got eva so many of them!"
+
+There was a stir in the bushes about the carriage, and Mrs. Lander was
+aware for an instant of children's faces looking through the leaves at
+her and then flashing out of sight, with gay cries at being seen.  A boy,
+older than the rest, came round in front of the horse and passed out of
+sight at the corner of the house.
+
+Lander now leaned back and looked over his shoulder at his wife as if he
+might hopefully suppose she had come to the end of her questions, but she
+gave no sign of encouraging him to start on their way again.
+
+"That your brotha, too?" she asked the girl.
+
+"Yes'm.  He's the oldest of the boys; he's next to me."
+
+"I don't know," said Mrs. Lander thoughtfully, "as I noticed how many
+boys there were, or how many girls."
+
+"I've got two sistas, and three brothas, 'm," said the girl, always
+smiling sweetly.  She now emerged from the shelter of the door, and Mrs.
+Lander perceived that the slight movements of such parts of her person as
+had been evident beyond its edge were the effects of some endeavor at
+greater presentableness.  She had contrived to get about her an overskirt
+which covered the rent in her frock, and she had got a pair of shoes on
+her feet.  Stockings were still wanting, but by a mutual concession of
+her shoe-tops and the border of her skirt, they were almost eliminated
+from the problem.  This happened altogether when the girl sat down on the
+threshold, and got herself into such foreshortening that the eye of Mrs.
+Lander in looking down upon her could not detect their absence.  Her
+little head then showed in the dark of the doorway like a painted head
+against its background.
+
+"You haven't been livin' here a great while, by the looks," said Mrs.
+Lander.  "It don't seem to be clea'ed off very much."
+
+"We've got quite a ga'den-patch back of the house," replied the girl,
+"and we should have had moa, but fatha wasn't very well, this spring;
+he's eva so much better than when we fust came he'e."
+
+"It has, the name of being a very healthy locality," said Mrs. Lander,
+somewhat discontentedly, "though I can't see as it's done me so very much
+good, yit.  Both your payrints livin'?"
+
+"Yes'm.  Oh, yes, indeed!"
+
+"And your mother, is she real rugged?  She need to be, with such a flock
+of little ones!"
+
+"Yes, motha's always well.  Fatha was just run down, the doctas said, and
+ought to keep more in the open aia.  That's what he's done since he came
+he'e.  He helped a great deal on the house and he planned it all out
+himself."
+
+"Is he a ca'penta?" asked Mrs. Lander.
+
+"No'm; but he's--I don't know how to express it--he likes to do every
+kind of thing."
+
+"But he's got some business, ha'n't he?"  A shadow of severity crept over
+Mrs. Lander's tone, in provisional reprehension of possible
+shiftlessness.
+
+"Yes'm.  He was a machinist at the Mills; that's what the doctas thought
+didn't agree with him.  He bought a piece of land he'e, so as to be in
+the pine woods, and then we built this house."
+
+"When did you say you came?"
+
+"Two yea's ago, this summa."
+
+"Well!  What did you do befoa you built this house?"
+
+"We camped the first summa."
+
+"You camped?  In a tent?"
+
+"Well, it was pahtly a tent, and pahtly bank."
+
+"I should have thought you would have died."
+
+The girl laughed.  "Oh, no, we all kept fast-rate.  We slept in the tents
+we had two--and we cooked in the shanty."  She smiled at the notion in
+adding, "At fast the neighbas thought we we'e Gipsies; and the summa
+folks thought we were Indians, and wanted to get baskets of us."
+
+Mrs. Lander did not know what to think, and she asked, "But didn't it
+almost perish you, stayin' through the winter in an unfinished house?"
+
+"Well, it was pretty cold.  But it was so dry, the aia was, and the woods
+kept the wind off nicely."
+
+The same shrill voice in the region of the stovepipe which had sent the
+girl to the Landers now called her from them.  "Clem!  Come here a
+minute!"
+
+The girl said to Mrs. Lander, politely, "You'll have to excuse me, now'm.
+I've got to go to motha."
+
+"So do!" said Mrs. Lander, and she was so taken by the girl's art and
+grace in getting to her feet and fading into the background of the
+hallway without visibly casting any detail of her raiment, that she was
+not aware of her husband's starting up the horse in time to stop him.
+They were fairly under way again, when she lamented, "What you doin',
+Albe't?  Whe'e you goin'?"
+
+"I'm goin' to South Middlemount.  Didn't you want to?"
+
+"Well, of all the men!  Drivin' right off without waitin' to say thankye
+to the child, or take leave, or anything!"
+
+"Seemed to me as if SHE took leave."
+
+"But she was comin' back!  And I wanted to ask--"
+
+"I guess you asked enough for one while.  Ask the rest to-morra."
+
+Mrs. Lander was a woman who could often be thrown aside from an immediate
+purpose, by the suggestion of some remoter end, which had already,
+perhaps, intimated itself to her.  She said, "That's true," but by the
+time her husband had driven down one of the roads beyond the woods into
+open country, she was a quiver of intolerable curiosity.  "Well, all I've
+got to say is that I sha'n't rest till I know all about 'em."
+
+"Find out when we get back to the hotel, I guess," said her husband.
+
+"No, I can't wait till I get back to the hotel.  I want to know now.  I
+want you should stop at the very fust house we come to.  Dea'!  The'e
+don't seem to be any houses, any moa."  She peered out around the side of
+the carry-all and scrutinized the landscape.  "Hold on!  No, yes it is,
+too!  Whoa!  Whoa!  The'e's a man in that hay-field, now!"
+
+She laid hold of the reins and pulled the horse to a stand.  Mr. Lander
+looked round over his shoulder at her.  "Hadn't you betta wait till you
+get within half a mile of the man?"
+
+"Well, I want you should stop when you do git to him.  Will you?  I want
+to speak to him, and ask him all about those folks."
+
+"I didn't suppose you'd let me have much of a chance," said her husband.
+When he came within easy hail of the man in the hay-field, he pulled up
+beside the meadow-wall, where the horse began to nibble the blackberry
+vines that overran it.
+
+Mrs. Lander beckoned and called to the man, who had stopped pitching hay
+and now stood leaning on the handle of his fork.  At the signs and sounds
+she made, he came actively forward to the road, bringing his fork with
+him.  When he arrived within easy conversational distance, he planted the
+tines in the ground and braced himself at an opposite incline from the
+long smooth handle, and waited for Mrs. Lander to begin.
+
+"Will you please tell us who those folks ah', livin' back there in the
+edge of the woods, in that new unfinished house?"
+
+The man released his fork with one hand to stoop for a head of timothy
+that had escaped the scythe, and he put the stem of it between his teeth,
+where it moved up and down, and whipped fantastically about as he talked,
+before he answered, "You mean the Claxons?"
+
+"I don't know what thei' name is."  Mrs. Lander repeated exactly what she
+had said.
+
+The farmer said, "Long, red-headed man, kind of sickly-lookin'?"
+
+"We didn't see the man"--
+
+"Little woman, skinny-lookin; pootty tonguey?"
+
+"We didn't see her, eitha; but I guess we hea'd her at the back of the
+house."
+
+"Lot o' children, about as big as pa'tridges, runnin' round in the
+bushes?"
+
+"Yes!  And a very pretty-appearing girl; about thi'teen or fou'teen, I
+should think."
+
+The farmer pulled his fork out of the ground, and planted it with his
+person at new slopes in the figure of a letter A, rather more upright
+than before.  "Yes; it's them," he said.  "Ha'n't been in the neighbahood
+a great while, eitha.  Up from down Po'tland way, some'res, I guess.
+Built that house last summer, as far as it's got, but I don't believe
+it's goin' to git much fa'tha."
+
+"Why, what's the matta?"  demanded Mrs. Lander in an anguish of interest.
+
+The man in the hay-field seemed to think it more dignified to include
+Lander in this inquiry, and he said with a glimmer of the eye for him,
+"Hea'd of do-nothin' folks?"
+
+"Seen 'em, too," answered Lander, comprehensively.
+
+"Well, that a'n't Claxon's complaint exactly.  He a'n't a do-nothin';
+he's a do-everything.  I guess it's about as bad."  Lander glimmered back
+at the man, but did not speak.
+
+"Kind of a machinist down at the Mills, where he come from," the farmer
+began again, and Mrs. Lander, eager not to be left out of the affair for
+a moment, interrupted:
+
+"Yes, Yes!  That's what the gul said."
+
+"But he don't seem to think't the i'on agreed with him, and now he's
+goin' in for wood.  Well, he did have a kind of a foot-powa tu'nin'
+lathe, and tuned all sots o' things; cups, and bowls, and u'ns for fence-
+posts, and vases, and sleeve-buttons and little knick-knacks; but the
+place bunt down, here, a while back, and he's been huntin' round for
+wood, the whole winta long, to make canes out of for the summa-folks.
+Seems to think that the smell o' the wood, whether it's green or it's
+dry, is goin' to cure him, and he can't git too much of it."
+
+"Well, I believe it's so, Albe't!" cried Mrs. Lander, as if her husband
+had disputed the theory with his taciturn back.  He made no other sign of
+controversy, and the man in the hay-field went on.
+
+"I hea' he's goin' to put up a wind mill, back in an open place he's got,
+and use the powa for tu'nin', if he eva gits it up.  But he don't seem to
+be in any great of a hurry, and they scrape along somehow.  Wife takes in
+sewin' and the girl wo'ked at the Middlemount House last season.  Whole
+fam'ly's got to tu'n in and help s'po't a man that can do everything."
+
+The farmer appealed with another humorous cast of his eye to Lander; but
+the old man tacitly refused to take any further part in the talk, which
+began to flourish apace, in question and answer, between his wife and the
+man in the hay-field.  It seemed that the children had all inherited the
+father's smartness.  The oldest boy could beat the nation at figures, and
+one of the young ones could draw anything you had a mind to.  They were
+all clear up in their classes at school, and yet you might say they
+almost ran wild, between times.  The oldest girl was a pretty-behaved
+little thing, but the man in the hay-field guessed there was not very
+much to her, compared with some of the boys.  Any rate, she had not the
+name of being so smart at school.  Good little thing, too, and kind of
+mothered the young ones.
+
+Mrs. Lander, when she had wrung the last drop of information out of him,
+let him crawl back to his work, mentally flaccid, and let her husband
+drive on, but under a fire of conjecture and asseveration that was
+scarcely intermitted till they reached their hotel.  That night she
+talked along time about their afternoon's adventure before she allowed
+him to go to sleep.  She said she must certainly see the child again;
+that they must drive down there in the morning, and ask her all about
+herself.
+
+"Albe't," she concluded; "I wish we had her to live with us.  Yes, I do!
+I wonder if we could get her to.  You know I always did want to adopt a
+baby."
+
+"You neva said so," Mr. Lander opened his mouth almost for the first
+time, since the talk began.
+
+"I didn't suppose you'd like it," said his wife.
+
+"Well, she a'n't a baby.  I guess you'd find you had your hands full,
+takon' a half-grown gul like that to bring up."
+
+"I shouldn't be afraid any," the wife declared.  "She has just twined
+herself round my heat.  I can't get her pretty looks out of my eyes.
+I know she's good."
+
+"We'll see how you feel about it in the morning."
+
+The old man began to wind his watch, and his wife seemed to take this for
+a sign that the incident was closed, for the present at least.  He seldom
+talked, but there came times when he would not even listen.  One of these
+was the time after he had wound his watch.  A minute later he had
+undressed, with an agility incredible of his years, and was in bed, as
+effectively blind and deaf to his wife's appeals as if he were already
+asleep.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+When Albert Gallatin Lander (he was named for an early Secretary of the
+Treasury as a tribute to the statesman's financial policy) went out of
+business, his wife began to go out of health; and it became the most
+serious affair of his declining years to provide for her invalid fancies.
+He would have liked to buy a place in the Boston suburbs (he preferred
+one of the Newtons) where they could both have had something to do, she
+inside of the house, and he outside; but she declared that what they both
+needed was a good long rest, with freedom from care and trouble of every
+kind.  She broke up their establishment in Boston, and stored their
+furniture, and she would have made him sell the simple old house in which
+they had always lived, on an unfashionable up-and-down-hill street of the
+West End, if he had not taken one of his stubborn stands, and let it for
+a term of years without consulting her.  But she had her way about their
+own movements, and they began that life of hotels, which they had now
+lived so long that she believed any other impossible.  Its luxury and
+idleness had told upon each of them with diverse effect.
+
+They had both entered upon it in much the same corporal figure, but she
+had constantly grown in flesh, while he had dwindled away until he was
+not much more than half the weight of his prime.  Their digestion was
+alike impaired by their joint life, but as they took the same medicines
+Mrs. Lander was baffled to account for the varying result.  She was sure
+that all the anxiety came upon her, and that logically she was the one
+who ought to have wasted away.  But she had before her the spectacle of a
+husband who, while he gave his entire attention to her health, did not
+audibly or visibly worry about it, and yet had lost weight in such
+measure that upon trying on a pair of his old trousers taken out of
+storage with some clothes of her own, he found it impossible to use the
+side pockets which the change in his figure carried so far to the rear
+when the garment was reduced at the waist.  At the same time her own
+dresses of ten years earlier would not half meet round her; and one of
+the most corroding cares of a woman who had done everything a woman could
+to get rid of care, was what to do with those things which they could
+neither of them ever wear again.  She talked the matter over with herself
+before her husband, till he took the desperate measure of sending them
+back to storage; and they had been left there in the spring when the
+Landers came away for the summer.
+
+They always spent the later spring months at a hotel in the suburbs of
+Boston, where they arrived in May from a fortnight in a hotel at New
+York, on their way up from hotels in Washington, Ashville, Aiken and
+St. Augustine.  They passed the summer months in the mountains, and early
+in the autumn they went back to the hotel in the Boston suburbs, where
+Mrs. Lander considered it essential to make some sojourn before going to
+a Boston hotel for November and December, and getting ready to go down to
+Florida in January.  She would not on any account have gone directly to
+the city from the mountains, for people who did that were sure to lose
+the good of their summer, and to feel the loss all the winter, if they
+did not actually come down with a fever.
+
+She was by no means aware that she was a selfish or foolish person.  She
+made Mr. Lander subscribe statedly to worthy objects in Boston, which she
+still regarded as home, because they had not dwelt any where else since
+they ceased to live there; and she took lavishly of tickets for all the
+charitable entertainments in the hotels where they stayed.  Few if any
+guests at hotels enjoyed so much honor from porters, bell-boys, waiters,
+chambermaids and bootblacks as the Landers, for they gave richly in fees
+for every conceivable service which could be rendered them; they went out
+of their way to invent debts of gratitude to menials who had done nothing
+for them.  He would make the boy who sold papers at the dining-room door
+keep the change, when he had been charged a profit of a hundred per cent.
+already; and she would let no driver who had plundered them according to
+the carriage tariff escape without something for himself.
+
+A sense of their munificence penetrated the clerks and proprietors with a
+just esteem for guests who always wanted the best of everything, and
+questioned no bill for extras.  Mrs. Lander, in fact, who ruled these
+expenditures, had no knowledge of the value of things, and made her
+husband pay whatever was asked.  Yet when they lived under their own roof
+they had lived simply, and Lander had got his money in an old-fashioned
+business way, and not in some delirious speculation such as leaves a man
+reckless of money afterwards.  He had been first of all a tailor, and
+then he had gone into boys' and youths' clothing in a small way, and
+finally he had mastered this business and come out at the top, with his
+hands full.  He invested his money so prosperously that the income for
+two elderly people, who had no children, and only a few outlying
+relations on his side, was far beyond their wants, or even their whims.
+
+She as a woman, who in spite of her bulk and the jellylike majesty with
+which she shook in her smoothly casing brown silks, as she entered hotel
+dining-rooms, and the severity with which she frowned over her fan down
+the length of the hotel drawing-rooms, betrayed more than her husband the
+commonness of their origin.  She could not help talking, and her accent
+and her diction gave her away for a middle-class New England person of
+village birth and unfashionable sojourn in Boston.  He, on the contrary,
+lurked about the hotels where they passed their days in a silence so
+dignified that when his verbs and nominatives seemed not to agree, you
+accused your own hearing.  He was correctly dressed, as an elderly man
+should be, in the yesterday of the fashions, and he wore with
+impressiveness a silk hat whenever such a hat could be worn.  A pair of
+drab cloth gaiters did much to identify him with an old school of
+gentlemen, not very definite in time or place.  He had a full gray beard
+cut close, and he was in the habit of pursing his mouth a great deal.
+But he meant nothing by it, and his wife meant nothing by her frowning.
+They had no wish to subdue or overawe any one, or to pass for persons of
+social distinction.  They really did not know what society was, and they
+were rather afraid of it than otherwise as they caught sight of it in
+their journeys and sojourns.  They led a life of public seclusion, and
+dwelling forever amidst crowds, they were all in all to each other, and
+nothing to the rest of the world, just as they had been when they resided
+(as they would have said) on Pinckney street.  In their own house they
+had never entertained, though they sometimes had company, in the style of
+the country town where Mrs. Lander grew up.  As soon as she was released
+to the grandeur of hotel life, she expanded to the full measure of its
+responsibilities and privileges, but still without seeking to make it the
+basis of approach to society.  Among the people who surrounded her, she
+had not so much acquaintance as her husband even, who talked so little
+that he needed none.  She sometimes envied his ease in getting on with
+people when he chose; and his boldness in speaking to fellow guests and
+fellow travellers, if he really wanted anything.  She wanted something of
+them all the time, she wanted their conversation and their companionship;
+but in her ignorance of the social arts she was thrown mainly upon the
+compassion of the chambermaids.  She kept these talking as long as she
+could detain them in her rooms; and often fed them candy (which she ate
+herself with childish greed) to bribe them to further delays.  If she was
+staying some days in a hotel, she sent for the house-keeper, and made all
+she could of her as a listener, and as soon as she settled herself for a
+week, she asked who was the best doctor in the place.  With doctors she
+had no reserves, and she poured out upon them the history of her diseases
+and symptoms in an inexhaustible flow of statement, conjecture and
+misgiving, which was by no means affected by her profound and
+inexpugnable ignorance of the principles of health.  From time to time
+she forgot which side her liver was on, but she had been doctored (as she
+called it) for all her organs, and she was willing to be doctored for any
+one of them that happened to be in the place where she fancied a present
+discomfort.  She was not insensible to the claims which her husband's
+disorders had upon science, and she liked to end the tale of her own
+sufferings with some such appeal as: "I wish you could do something for
+Mr. Landa, too, docta."  She made him take a little of each medicine that
+was left for her; but in her presence he always denied that there was
+anything the matter with him, though he was apt to follow the doctor out
+of the room, and get a prescription from him for some ailment which he
+professed not to believe in himself, but wanted to quiet Mrs. Lander's
+mind about.
+
+He rose early, both from long habit, and from the scant sleep of an
+elderly man; he could not lie in bed; but his wife always had her
+breakfast there and remained so long that the chambermaid had done up
+most of the other rooms and had leisure for talk with her.  As soon as he
+was awake, he stole softly out and was the first in the dining-room for
+breakfast.  He owned to casual acquaintance in moments of expansion that
+breakfast was his best meal, but he did what he could to make it his
+worst by beginning with oranges and oatmeal, going forward to beefsteak
+and fried potatoes, and closing with griddle cakes and syrup, washed down
+with a cup of cocoa, which his wife decided to be wholesomer than coffee.
+By the time he had finished such a repast, he crept out of the dining-
+room in a state of tension little short of anguish, which he confided to
+the sympathy of the bootblack in the washroom.
+
+He always went from having his shoes polished to get a toothpick at the
+clerk's desk; and at the Middlemount House, the morning after he had been
+that drive with Mrs. Lander, he lingered a moment with his elbows beside
+the register.  "How about a buckboa'd?" he asked.
+
+"Something you can drive yourself "--the clerk professionally dropped his
+eye to the register--"Mr. Lander?"
+
+"Well, no, I guess not, this time," the little man returned, after a
+moment's reflection.  "Know anything of a family named Claxon, down the
+road, here, a piece?"  He twisted his head in the direction he meant.
+
+"This is my first season at Middlemount; but I guess Mr. Atwell will
+know."  The clerk called to the landlord, who was smoking in his private
+room behind the office, and the landlord came out.  The clerk repeated
+Mr. Lander's questions.
+
+"Pootty good kind of folks, I guess," said the landlord provisionally,
+through his cigar-smoke.  "Man's a kind of univussal genius, but he's got
+a nice family of children; smaht as traps, all of 'em."
+
+"How about that oldest gul?" asked Mr. Lander.
+
+"Well, the'a," said the landlord, taking the cigar out of his mouth.
+"I think she's about the nicest little thing goin'.  We've had her up
+he'e, to help out in a busy time, last summer, and she's got moo sense
+than guls twice as old.  Takes hold like--lightnin'."
+
+"About how old did you say she was?"
+
+"Well, you've got me the'a, Mr. Landa; I guess I'll ask Mis' Atwell."
+
+"The'e's no hurry," said Lander.  "That buckboa'd be round pretty soon?"
+he asked of the clerk.
+
+"Be right along now, Mr. Lander," said the clerk, soothingly.  He stepped
+out to the platform that the teams drove up to from the stable, and came
+back to say that it was coming.  "I believe you said you wanted something
+you could drive yourself?"
+
+"No, I didn't, young man," answered the elder sharply.  But the next
+moment he added, "Come to think of it, I guess it's just as well.  You
+needn't get me no driver.  I guess I know the way well enough.  You put
+me in a hitchin' strap."
+
+"All right, Mr. Lander," said the clerk, meekly.
+
+The landlord had caught the peremptory note in Lander's voice, and he
+came out of his room again to see that there was nothing going wrong.
+
+"It's all right," said Lander, and went out and got into his buckboard.
+
+"Same horse you had yesterday," said the young clerk.  "You don't need to
+spare the whip."
+
+"I guess I can look out for myself," said Lander, and he shook the reins
+and gave the horse a smart cut, as a hint of what he might expect.
+
+The landlord joined the clerk in looking after the brisk start the horse
+made.  "Not the way he set off with the old lady, yesterday," suggested
+the clerk.
+
+The landlord rolled his cigar round in his tubed lips.  "I guess he's
+used to ridin' after a good hoss."  He added gravely to the clerk, "You
+don't want to make very free with that man, Mr. Pane.  He won't stan' it,
+and he's a class of custom that you want to cata to when it comes in your
+way.  I suspicioned what he was when they came here and took the highest
+cost rooms without tu'nin' a haia.  They're a class of custom that you
+won't get outside the big hotels in the big reso'ts.  Yes, sir," said the
+landlord taking a fresh start, "they're them kind of folks that live the
+whole yea' round in hotels; no'th in summa, south in winta, and city
+hotels between times.  They want the best their money can buy, and they
+got plenty of it.  She"--he meant Mrs. Lander--"has been tellin' my wife
+how they do; she likes to talk a little betta than he doos; and I guess
+when it comes to society, they're away up, and they won't stun' any
+nonsense."
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+Lander came into his wife's room between ten and eleven o'clock, and
+found her still in bed, but with her half-finished breakfast on a tray
+before her.  As soon as he opened the door she said, "I do wish you would
+take some of that heat-tonic of mine, Albe't, that the docta left for me
+in Boston.  You'll find it in the upper right bureau box, the'a; and I
+know it'll be the very thing for you.  It'll relieve you of that
+suffocatin' feeling that I always have, comin' up stars.  Dea'!  I don't
+see why they don't have an elevata; they make you pay enough; and I wish
+you'd get me a little more silva, so's't I can give to the chambamaid and
+the bell-boy; I do hate to be out of it.  I guess you been up and out
+long ago.  They did make that polonaise of mine too tight after all I
+said, and I've been thinkin' how I could get it alt'ed; but I presume
+there ain't a seamstress to be had around he'e for love or money.  Well,
+now, that's right, Albe't; I'm glad to see you doin' it."
+
+Lander had opened the lid of the bureau box, and uncorked a bottle from
+it, and tilted this to his lips.
+
+"Don't take too much," she cautioned him, "or you'll lose the effects.
+When I take too much of a medicine, it's wo'se than nothing, as fah's I
+can make out.  When I had that spell in Thomasville spring before last,
+I believe I should have been over it twice as quick if I had taken just
+half the medicine I did.  You don't really feel anyways bad about the
+heat, do you, Albe't?"
+
+"I'm all right," said Lander.  He put back the bottle in its place and
+sat down.
+
+Mrs. Lander lifted herself on her elbow and looked over at him.
+"Show me on the bottle how much you took."
+
+He got the bottle out again and showed her with his thumb nail a point
+which he chose at random.
+
+"Well, that was just about the dose for you," she said; and she sank down
+in bed again with the air of having used a final precaution.  "You don't
+want to slow your heat up too quick."
+
+Lander did not put the bottle back this time.  He kept it in his hand,
+with his thumb on the cork, and rocked it back and forth on his knees as
+he spoke.  "Why don't you get that woman to alter it for you?"
+
+"What woman alta what?"
+
+"Your polonaise.  The one whe'e we stopped yestaday."
+
+"Oh!  Well, I've been thinkin' about that child, Albe't; I did before I
+went to sleep; and I don't believe I want to risk anything with her.  It
+would be a ca'e," said Mrs. Lander with a sigh, "and I guess I don't want
+to take any moa ca'e than what I've got now.  What makes you think she
+could alta my polonaise?"
+
+"Said she done dress-makin'," said Lander, doggedly.
+
+"You ha'n't been the'a?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"You didn't say anything to her about her daughta?"
+
+"Yes, I did," said Lander.
+
+"Well, you ce'tainly do equal anything," said his wife.  She lay still
+awhile, and then she roused herself with indignant energy.  "Well, then,
+I can tell you what, Albe't Landa: yon can go right straight and take
+back everything you said.  I don't want the child, and I won't have her.
+I've got care enough to worry me now, I should think; and we should have
+her whole family on our hands, with that shiftless father of hers, and
+the whole pack of her brothas and sistas.  What made you think I wanted
+you to do such a thing?"
+
+"You wanted me to do it last night.  Wouldn't ha'dly let me go to bed."
+
+"Yes!  And how many times have I told you nova to go off and do a thing
+that I wanted you to, unless you asked me if I did?  Must I die befo'e
+you can find out that there is such a thing as talkin', and such anotha
+thing as doin'?  You wouldn't get yourself into half as many scrapes if
+you talked more and done less, in this wo'ld."  Lander rose.
+
+"Wait!  Hold on!  What are you going to say to the pooa thing?  She'll be
+so disappointed!"
+
+"I don't know as I shall need to say anything myself," answered the
+little man, at his dryest.  "Leave that to you."
+
+"Well, I can tell you," returned his wife, "I'm not goin' nea' them
+again; and if you think--What did you ask the woman, anyway?"
+
+"I asked her," he said, "if she wanted to let the gul come and see you
+about some sewing you had to have done, and she said she did."
+
+"And you didn't speak about havin' her come to live with us?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, why in the land didn't you say so before, Albe't?"
+
+"You didn't ask me.  What do you want I should say to her now?"
+
+"Say to who?"
+
+"The gul.  She's down in the pahlor, waitin'."
+
+"Well, of all the men!"  cried Mrs. Lander.  But she seemed to find
+herself, upon reflection, less able to cope with Lander personally than
+with the situation generally.  "Will you send her up, Albe't?" she asked,
+very patiently, as if he might be driven to further excesses, if not
+delicately handled.  As soon as he had gone out of the room she wished
+that she had told him to give her time to dress and have her room put in
+order, before he sent the child up; but she could only make the best of
+herself in bed with a cap and a breakfast jacket, arranged with the help
+of a handglass.  She had to get out of bed to put her other clothes away
+in the closet and she seized the chance to push the breakfast tray out of
+the door, and smooth up the bed, while she composed her features and her
+ideas to receive her visitor.  Both, from long habit rather than from any
+cause or reason, were of a querulous cast, and her ordinary tone was a
+snuffle expressive of deep-seated affliction.  She was at once plaintive
+and voluable, and in moments of excitement her need of freeing her mind
+was so great that she took herself into her own confidence, and found a
+more sympathetic listener than when she talked to her husband.  As she
+now whisked about her room in her bed-gown with an activity not
+predicable of her age and shape, and finally plunged under the covering
+and drew it up to her chin with one hand while she pressed it out
+decorously over her person with the other, she kept up a rapid flow of
+lamentation and conjecture.  "I do suppose he'll be right back with her
+before I'm half ready; and what the man was thinkin' of to do such a
+thing anyway, I don't know.  I don't know as she'll notice much, comin'
+out of such a lookin' place as that, and I don't know as I need to care
+if she did.  But if the'e's care anywhe's around, I presume I'm the one
+to have it.  I presume I did take a fancy to her, and I guess I shall be
+glad to see how I like her now; and if he's only told her I want some
+sewin' done, I can scrape up something to let her carry home with her.
+It's well I keep my things where I can put my hand on 'em at a time like
+this, and I don't believe I shall sca'e the child, as it is.  I do hope
+Albe't won't hang round half the day before he brings her; I like to have
+a thing ova."
+
+Lander wandered about looking for the girl through the parlors and the
+piazzas, and then went to the office to ask what had become of her.
+
+The landlord came out of his room at his question to the clerk.  "Oh, I
+guess she's round in my wife's room, Mr. Landa.  She always likes to see
+Clementina, and I guess they all do.  She's a so't o' pet amongst 'em."
+
+"No hurry," said Lander, "I guess my wife ain't quite ready for her yet."
+
+"Well, she'll be right out, in a minute or so," said the landlord.
+
+The old man tilted his hat forward over his eyes, and went to sit on the
+veranda and look at the landscape while he waited.  It was one of the
+loveliest landscapes in the mountains; the river flowed at the foot of an
+abrupt slope from the road before the hotel, stealing into and out of the
+valley, and the mountains, gray in the farther distance, were draped with
+folds of cloud hanging upon their flanks and tops.  But Lander was tired
+of nearly all kinds of views and prospects, though he put' up with them,
+in his perpetual movement from place to place, in the same resignation
+that he suffered the limitations of comfort in parlor cars and sleepers,
+and the unwholesomeness of hotel tables.  He was chained to the restless
+pursuit of an ideal not his own, but doomed to suffer for its
+impossibility as if he contrived each of his wife's disappointments from
+it.  He did not philosophize his situation, but accepted it as in an
+order of Providence which it would be useless for him to oppose; though
+there were moments when he permitted himself to feel a modest doubt of
+its justice.  He was aware that when he had a house of his own he was
+master in it, after a fashion, and that as long as he was in business he
+was in some sort of authority.  He perceived that now he was a slave to
+the wishes of a mistress who did not know what she wanted, and that he
+was never farther from pleasing her than when he tried to do what she
+asked.  He could not have told how all initiative had been taken from
+him, and he had fallen into the mere follower of a woman guided only by
+her whims, who had no object in life except to deprive it of all object.
+He felt no rancor toward her for this; he knew that she had a tender
+regard for him, and that she believed she was considering him first in
+her most selfish arrangements.  He always hoped that sometime she would
+get tired of her restlessness, and be willing to settle down again in
+some stated place; and wherever it was, he meant to get into some kind of
+business again.  Till this should happen he waited with an apathetic
+patience of which his present abeyance was a detail.  He would hardly
+have thought it anything unfit, and certainly nothing surprising, that
+the landlady should have taken the young girl away from where he had left
+her, and then in the pleasure of talking with her, and finding her a
+centre of interest for the whole domestic force of the hotel, should have
+forgotten to bring her back.
+
+The Middlemount House had just been organized on the scale of a first
+class hotel, with prices that had risen a little in anticipation of the
+other improvements.  The landlord had hitherto united in himself the
+functions of clerk and head waiter, but he had now got a senior, who was
+working his way through college, to take charge of the dining-room, and
+had put in the office a youth of a year's experience as under clerk at a
+city hotel.  But he meant to relinquish no more authority than his wife
+who frankly kept the name as well as duty of house-keeper.  It was in
+making her morning inspection of the dusting that she found Clementina in
+the parlor where Lander had told her to sit down till he should come for
+her.
+
+"Why, Clem!" she said, "I didn't know you!  You have grown so!  Youa
+folks all well?  I decla'e you ah' quite a woman now," she added, as the
+girl stood up in her slender, graceful height.  "You look as pretty as a
+pink in that hat.  Make that dress youaself?  Well, you do beat the
+witch!  I want you should come to my room with me."
+
+Mrs. Atwell showered other questions and exclamations on the girl, who
+explained how she happened to be there, and said that she supposed she
+must stay where she was for fear Mr. Lander should come back and find her
+gone; but Mrs. Atwell overruled her with the fact that Mrs. Lander's
+breakfast had just gone up to her; and she made her come out and see the
+new features of the enlarged house-keeping.  In the dining-room there
+were some of the waitresses who had been there the summer before, and
+recognitions of more or less dignity passed between them and Clementina.
+The place was now shut against guests, and the head-waiter was having it
+put in order for the one o'clock dinner.  As they came near him, Mrs.
+Atwell introduced him to Clementina, and he behaved deferentially, as if
+she were some young lady visitor whom Mrs. Atwell was showing the
+improvements, but he seemed harassed and impatient, as if he were anxious
+about his duties, and eager to get at them again.  He was a handsome
+little fellow, with hair lighter than Clementina's and a sanguine
+complexion, and the color coming and going.
+
+"He's smaht," said Mrs. Atwell, when they had left him--he held the
+dining-room door open for them, and bowed them out.  "I don't know but he
+worries almost too much.  That'll wear off when he gets things runnin' to
+suit him.  He's pretty p'tic'la'.  Now I'll show you how they've made the
+office over, and built in a room for Mr. Atwell behind it."
+
+The landlord welcomed Clementina as if she had been some acceptable class
+of custom, and when the tall young clerk came in to ask him something,
+and Mrs. Atwell said, "I want to introduce you to Miss Claxon, Mr. Fane,"
+the clerk smiled down upon her from the height of his smooth, acquiline
+young face, which he held bent encouragingly upon one side.
+
+"Now, I want you should come in and see where I live, a minute," said
+Mrs. Atwell.  She took the girl from the clerk, and led her to the
+official housekeeper's room which she said had been prepared for her so
+that folks need not keep running to her in her private room where she
+wanted to be alone with her children, when she was there.  "Why, you
+a'n't much moa than a child youaself, Clem, and here I be talkin' to you
+as if you was a mother in Israel.  How old ah' you, this summa?  Time
+does go so!"
+
+"I'm sixteen now," said Clementina, smiling.
+
+"You be?  Well, I don't see why I say that, eitha!  You're full lahge
+enough for your age, but not seein' you in long dresses before, I didn't
+realize your age so much.  My, but you do all of you know how to do
+things!"
+
+"I'm about the only one that don't, Mrs. Atwell," said the girl.  "If it
+hadn't been for mother, I don't believe I could have eva finished this
+dress."  She began to laugh at something passing in her mind, and Mrs.
+Atwell laughed too, in sympathy, though she did not know what at till
+Clementina said, "Why, Mrs. Atwell, nea'ly the whole family wo'ked on
+this dress.  Jim drew the patte'n of it from the dress of one of the
+summa boa'das that he took a fancy to at the Centa, and fatha cut it out,
+and I helped motha make it.  I guess every one of the children helped a
+little."
+
+"Well, it's just as I said, you can all of you do things," said Mrs.
+Atwell.  "But I guess you ah' the one that keeps 'em straight.  What did
+you say Mr. Landa said his wife wanted of you?"
+
+"He said some kind of sewing that motha could do."
+
+"Well, I'll tell you what!  Now, if she ha'n't really got anything that
+your motha'll want you to help with, I wish you'd come here again and
+help me.  I tuned my foot, here, two-three weeks back, and I feel it,
+times, and I should like some one to do about half my steppin' for me.
+I don't want to take you away from her, but IF.  You sha'n't go int' the
+dinin'room, or be under anybody's oddas but mine.  Now, will you?"
+
+"I'll see, Mrs. Atwell.  I don't like to say anything till I know what
+Mrs. Landa wants."
+
+"Well, that's right.  I decla'e, you've got moa judgment!  That's what I
+used to say about you last summa to my husband: she's got judgment.
+Well, what's wanted?"  Mrs. Atwell spoke to her husband, who had opened
+her door and looked in, and she stopped rocking, while she waited his
+answer.
+
+"I guess you don't want to keep Clementina from Mr. Landa much longa.
+He's settin' out there on the front piazza waitin' for her."
+
+"Well, the'a!" cried Mrs. Atwell.  "Ain't that just like me?  Why didn't
+you tell me sooner, Alonzo?  Don't you forgit what I said, Clem!"
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+Mrs. Lander had taken twice of a specific for what she called her nerve-
+fag before her husband came with Clementina, and had rehearsed aloud many
+of the things she meant to say to the girl.  In spite of her preparation,
+they were all driven out of her head when Clementina actually appeared,
+and gave her a bow like a young birch's obeisance in the wind.
+
+"Take a chaia," said Lander, pushing her one, and the girl tilted over
+toward him, before she sank into it.  He went out of the room, and left
+Mrs. Lander to deal with the problem alone.  She apologized for being in
+bed, but Clementina said so sweetly, "Mr. Landa told me you were not
+feeling very well, 'm," that she began to be proud of her ailments, and
+bragged of them at length, and of the different doctors who had treated
+her for them.  While she talked she missed one thing or another, and
+Clementina seemed to divine what it was she wanted, and got it for her,
+with a gentle deference which made the elder feel her age cushioned by
+the girl's youth.  When she grew a little heated from the interest she
+took in her personal annals, and cast off one of the folds of her bed
+clothing, Clementina got her a fan, and asked her if she should put up
+one of the windows a little.
+
+"How you do think of things!" said Mrs. Lander.  "I guess I will let you.
+I presume you get used to thinkin' of othas in a lahge family like youas.
+I don't suppose they could get along without you very well," she
+suggested.
+
+"I've neva been away except last summa, for a little while."
+
+"And where was you then?"
+
+"I was helping Mrs. Atwell."
+
+"Did you like it?"
+
+"I don't know," said Clementina.  "It's pleasant to be whe'e things ah'
+going on."
+
+"Yes--for young folks," said Mrs. Lander, whom the going on of things had
+long ceased to bring pleasure.
+
+"It's real nice at home, too," said Clementina.  "We have very good
+times--evenings in the winta; in the summer it's very nice in the woods,
+around there.  It's safe for the children, and they enjoy it, and fatha
+likes to have them.  Motha don't ca'e so much about it.  I guess she'd
+ratha have the house fixed up more, and the place.  Fatha's going to do
+it pretty soon.  He thinks the'e's time enough."
+
+"That's the way with men," said Mrs. Lander.  "They always think the's
+time enough; but I like to have things over and done with.  What chuhch
+do you 'tend?"
+
+"Well, there isn't any but the Episcopal," Clementina answered.  "I go to
+that, and some of the children go to the Sunday School.  I don't believe
+fatha ca'es very much for going to chuhch, but he likes Mr. Richling;
+he's the recta.  They take walks in the woods; and they go up the
+mountains togetha."
+
+"They want," said Mrs. Lander, severely, "to be ca'eful how they drink of
+them cold brooks when they're heated.  Mr. Richling a married man?"
+
+"Oh, yes'm!  But they haven't got any family."
+
+"If I could see his wife, I sh'd caution her about lettin' him climb
+mountains too much.  A'n't your father afraid he'll ovado?"
+
+"I don't know.  He thinks he can't be too much in the open air on the
+mountains."
+
+"Well, he may not have the same complaint as Mr. Landa; but I know if I
+was to climb a mountain,' it would lay me up for a yea'."
+
+The girl did not urge anything against this conviction.  She smiled
+politely and waited patiently for the next turn Mrs. Lander's talk should
+take, which was oddly enough toward the business Clementina had come
+upon.
+
+"I declare I most forgot about my polonaise.  Mr. Landa said your motha
+thought she could do something to it for me."
+
+"Yes'm."
+
+"Well, I may as well 'let you see it.  If you'll reach into that fuhthest
+closet, you'll find it on the last uppa hook on the right hand, and if
+you'll give it to me, I'll show you what I want done.  Don't mind the
+looks of that closet; I've just tossed my things in, till I could get a
+little time and stren'th to put 'em in odda."
+
+Clementina brought the polonaise to Mrs. Lander, who sat up and spread it
+before her on the bed, and had a happy half hour in telling the girl
+where she had bought the material and where she had it made up, and how
+it came home just as she was going away, and she did not find out that it
+was all wrong till a week afterwards when she tried it on.  By the end of
+this time the girl had commended herself so much by judicious and
+sympathetic assent, that Mrs. Lander learned with a shock of
+disappointment that her mother expected her to bring the garment home
+with her, where Mrs. Lander was to come and have it fitted over for the
+alterations she wanted made.
+
+"But I supposed, from what Mr. Landa said, that your motha would come
+here and fit me!"  she lamented.
+
+"I guess he didn't undastand, 'm.  Motha doesn't eva go out to do wo'k,"
+said Clementina gently but firmly.
+
+"Well, I might have known Mr. Landa would mix it up, if it could be
+mixed; "Mrs. Lander's sense of injury was aggravated by her suspicion
+that he had brought the girl in the hope of pleasing her, and confirming
+her in the wish to have her with them; she was not a woman who liked to
+have her way in spite of herself; she wished at every step to realize
+that she was taking it, and that no one else was taking it for her.
+
+"Well," she said dryly, "I shall have to see about it.  I'm a good deal
+of an invalid, and I don't know as I could go back and fo'th to try on.
+I'm moa used to havin' the things brought to me."
+
+"Yes'm," said Clementina.  She moved a little from the bed, on her way to
+the door, to be ready for Mrs. Lander in leave-taking.
+
+"I'm real sorry," said Mrs. Lander.  "I presume it's a disappointment for
+you, too."
+
+"Oh, not at all," answered Clementina.  "I'm sorry we can't do the wo'k
+he'a; but I know mocha wouldn't like to.  Good-mo'ning,'m!"
+
+"No, no!  Don't go yet a minute!  Won't you just give me my hand bag off
+the bureau the'a?  "Mrs. Lander entreated, and when the girl gave her the
+bag she felt about among the bank-notes which she seemed to have loose in
+it, and drew out a handful of them without regard to their value.
+"He'a!" she said, and she tried to put the notes into Clementina's hand,
+"I want you should get yourself something."
+
+The girl shrank back.  "Oh, no'm," she said, with an effect of seeming to
+know that her refusal would hurt, and with the wish to soften it.
+"I--couldn't; indeed I couldn't."
+
+"Why couldn't you?  Now you must!  If I can't let you have the wo'k the
+way you want, I don't think it's fair, and you ought to have the money
+for it just the same."
+
+Clementina shook her head smiling.  "I don't believe motha would like to
+have me take it."
+
+"Oh, now, pshaw!" said Mrs. Lander, inadequately.  "I want you should
+take this for youaself; and if you don't want to buy anything to wea',
+you can get something to fix your room up with.  Don't you be afraid of
+robbin' us.  Land!  We got moa money!  Now you take this."
+
+Mrs. Lander reached the money as far toward Clementina as she could and
+shook it in the vehemence of her desire.
+
+"Thank you, I couldn't take it," Clementina persisted.  "I'm afraid I
+must be going; I guess I must bid you good-mo'ning."
+
+"Why, I believe the child's sca'ed of me!  But you needn't be.  Don't you
+suppose I know how you feel?  You set down in that chai'a there, and I'll
+tell you how you feel.  I guess we've been pooa, too--I don't mean
+anything that a'n't exactly right--and I guess I've had the same
+feelin's.  You think it's demeanin' to you to take it.  A'n't that it?"
+Clementina sank provisionally upon the edge of the chair.  "Well, it did
+use to be so consid'ed.  But it's all changed, nowadays.  We travel
+pretty nee' the whole while, Mr. Lander and me, and we see folks
+everywhere, and it a'n't the custom to refuse any moa.  Now, a'n't there
+any little thing for your own room, there in your nice new house?  Or
+something your motha's got her heat set on?  Or one of your brothas?  My,
+if you don't have it, some one else will!  Do take it!"
+
+The girl kept slipping toward the door.  "I shouldn't know what to tell
+them, when I got home.  They would think I must be--out of my senses."
+
+"I guess you mean they'd think I was.  Now, listen to me a minute!"
+Mrs. Lander persisted.
+
+"You just take this money, and when you get home, you tell your mother
+every word about it, and if she says, you bring it right straight back
+to me.  Now, can't you do that?"
+
+"I don't know but I can," Clementina faltered.  "Well, then take it!"
+Mrs. Lander put the bills into her hand but she did not release her at
+once.  She pulled Clementina down and herself up till she could lay her
+other arm on her neck.  "I want you should let me kiss you.  Will you?"
+
+"Why, certainly," said Clementina, and she kissed the old woman.
+
+"You tell your mother I'm comin' to see her before I go; and I guess,"
+said Mrs. Lander in instant expression of the idea that came into her
+mind, "we shall be goin' pretty soon, now."
+
+"Yes'm," said Clementina.
+
+She went out, and shortly after Lander came in with a sort of hopeful
+apathy in his face.
+
+Mrs. Lander turned her head on her pillow, and so confronted him.
+"Albe't, what made you want me to see that child?"
+
+Lander must have perceived that his wife meant business, and he came to
+it at once.  "I thought you might take a fancy to her, and get her to
+come and live with us."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"We're both of us gettin' pretty well on, and you'd ought to have
+somebody to look after you if--I'm not around.  You want somebody that
+can do for you; and keep you company, and read to you, and talk to you--
+well, moa like a daughta than a suvvant--somebody that you'd get attached
+to, maybe"--
+
+"And don't you see," Mrs. Lander broke out severely upon him, "what a
+ca'e that would be?  Why, it's got so already that I can't help thinkin'
+about her the whole while, and if I got attached to her I'd have her on
+my mind day and night, and the moa she done for me the more I should be
+tewin' around to do for her.  I shouldn't have any peace of my life any
+moa.  Can't you see that?"
+
+"I guess if you see it, I don't need to," said Lander.
+
+"Well, then, I want you shouldn't eva mention her to me again.  I've had
+the greatest escape!  But I've got her off home, and I've give her money
+enough! had a time with her about it--so that they won't feel as if we'd
+made 'em trouble for nothing, and now I neva want to hear of her again.
+I don't want we should stay here a great while longer; I shall be
+frettin' if I'm in reach of her, and I shan't get any good of the ai'a.
+Will you promise?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, then!"  Mrs. Lander turned her face upon the pillow again in the
+dramatization of her exhaustion; but she was not so far gone that she was
+insensible to the possible interest that a light rap at the door
+suggested.  She once more twisted her head in that direction and called,
+"Come in!"
+
+The door opened and Clementina came in.  She advanced to the bedside
+smiling joyously, and put the money Mrs. Lander had given her down upon
+the counterpane.
+
+"Why, you haven't been home, child?"
+
+"No'm," said Clementina, breathlessly.  "But I couldn't take it.  I knew
+they wouldn't want me to, and I thought you'd like it better if I just
+brought it back myself.  Good-mo'ning."  She slipped out of the door.
+Mrs. Lander swept the bank-notes from the coverlet and pulled it over her
+head, and sent from beneath it a stifled wail.  "Now we got to go!  And
+it's all youa fault, Albe't."
+
+Lander took the money from the floor, and smoothed each bill out, and
+then laid them in a neat pile on the corner of the bureau.  He sighed
+profoundly but left the room without an effort to justify himself.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+The Landers had been gone a week before Clementina's mother decided that
+she could spare her to Mrs. Atwell for a while.  It was established that
+she was not to serve either in the dining-room or the carving room; she
+was not to wash dishes or to do any part of the chamber work, but to
+carry messages and orders for the landlady, and to save her steps, when
+she wished to see the head-waiter, or the head-cook; or to make an excuse
+or a promise to some of the lady-boarders; or to send word to Mr. Atwell
+about the buying, or to communicate with the clerk about rooms taken or
+left.
+
+She had a good deal of dignity of her own and such a gravity in the
+discharge of her duties that the chef, who was a middle-aged Yankee with
+grown girls of his own, liked to pretend that it was Mrs. Atwell herself
+who was talking with him, and to discover just as she left him that it
+was Clementina.  He called her the Boss when he spoke of her to others in
+her hearing, and he addressed her as Boss when he feigned to find that it
+was not Mrs. Atwell.  She did not mind that in him, and let the chef have
+his joke as if it were not one.  But one day when the clerk called her
+Boss she merely looked at him without speaking, and made him feel that he
+had taken a liberty which he must not repeat.  He was a young man who
+much preferred a state of self-satisfaction to humiliation of any sort,
+and after he had endured Clementina's gaze as long as he could, he said,
+"Perhaps you don't allow anybody but the chef to call you that?"
+
+She did not answer, but repeated the message Mrs. Atwell had given her
+for him, and went away.
+
+It seemed to him undue that a person who exchanged repartees with the
+young lady boarders across his desk, when they came many times a day to
+look at the register, or to ask for letters, should remain snubbed by a
+girl who still wore her hair in a braid; but he was an amiable youth, and
+he tried to appease her by little favors and services, instead of trying
+to bully her.
+
+He was great friends with the head-waiter, whom he respected as a college
+student, though for the time being he ranked the student socially.  He
+had him in behind the frame of letter-boxes, which formed a sort of
+little private room for him, and talked with him at such hours of the
+forenoon and the late evening as the student was off duty.  He found
+comfort in the student's fretful strength, which expressed itself in the
+pugnacious frown of his hot-looking young face, where a bright sorrel
+mustache was beginning to blaze on a short upper lip.
+
+Fane thought himself a good-looking fellow, and he regarded his figure
+with pleasure, as it was set off by the suit of fine gray check that he
+wore habitually; but he thought Gregory's educational advantages told in
+his face.  His own education had ended at a commercial college, where he
+acquired a good knowledge of bookkeeping, and the fine business hand he
+wrote, but where it seemed to him sometimes that the earlier learning of
+the public school had been hermetically sealed within him by several
+coats of mathematical varnish.  He believed that he had once known a
+number of things that he no longer knew, and that he had not always been
+so weak in his double letters as he presently found himself.
+
+One night while Gregory sat on a high stool and rested his elbow on the
+desk before it, with his chin in his hand, looking down upon Fane, who
+sprawled sadly in his chair, and listening to the last dance playing in
+the distant parlor, Fane said.  "Now, what'll you bet that they won't
+every one of 'em come and look for a letter in her box before she goes to
+bed?  I tell you, girls are queer, and there's no place like a hotel to
+study 'em."
+
+"I don't want to study them," said Gregory, harshly.
+
+"Think Greek's more worth your while, or know 'em well enough already?"
+Fane suggested.
+
+"No, I don't know them at all," said the student.
+
+"I don't believe," urged the clerk, as if it were relevant, "that there's
+a girl in the house that you couldn't marry, if you gave your mind to
+it."
+
+Gregory twitched irascibly.  "I don't want to marry them."
+
+"Pretty cheap lot, you mean?  Well, I don't know."
+
+"I don't mean that," retorted the student.  "But I've got other things to
+think of."
+
+"Don't you believe," the clerk modestly urged, "that it is natural for a
+man--well, a young man--to think about girls?"
+
+"I suppose it is."
+
+"And you don't consider it wrong?"
+
+"How, wrong?"
+
+"Well, a waste of time.  I don't know as I always think about wanting to
+marry 'em, or be in love, but I like to let my mind run on 'em.  There's
+something about a girl that, well, you don't know what it is, exactly.
+Take almost any of 'em," said the clerk, with an air of inductive
+reasoning.  "Take that Claxon girl, now for example, I don't know what it
+is about her.  She's good-looking, I don't deny that; and she's got
+pretty manners, and she's as graceful as a bird.  But it a'n't any one of
+'em, and it don't seem to be all of 'em put together that makes you want
+to keep your eyes on her the whole while.  Ever noticed what a nice
+little foot she's got?  Or her hands?"
+
+"No," said the student.
+
+"I don't mean that she ever tries to show them off; though I know some
+girls that would.  But she's not that kind.  She ain't much more than a
+child, and yet you got to treat her just like a woman.  Noticed the kind
+of way she's got?"
+
+"No," said the student, with impatience.
+
+The clerk mused with a plaintive air for a moment before he spoke.
+"Well, it's something as if she'd been trained to it, so that she knew
+just the right thing to do, every time, and yet I guess it's nature.  You
+know how the chef always calls her the Boss?  That explains it about as
+well as anything, and I presume that's what my mind was running on, the
+other day, when I called her Boss.  But, my!  I can't get anywhere near
+her since!"
+
+"It serves you right," said Gregory.  "You had no business to tease her."
+
+"Now, do you think it was teasing?  I did, at first, and then again it
+seemed to me that I came out with the word because it seemed the right
+one.  I presume I couldn't explain that to her."
+
+"It wouldn't be easy."
+
+"I look upon her," said Fane, with an effect of argument in the sweetness
+of his smile, "just as I would upon any other young lady in the house.
+Do you spell apology with one p or two?"
+
+"One," said the student, and the clerk made a minute on a piece of paper.
+
+"I feel badly for the girl.  I don't want her to think I was teasing her
+or taking any sort of liberty with her.  Now, would you apologize to her,
+if you was in my place, and would you write a note, or just wait your
+chance and speak to her?"
+
+Gregory got down from his stool with a disdainful laugh, and went out of
+the place.  "You make me sick, Fane," he said.
+
+The last dance was over, and the young ladies who had been waltzing with
+one another, came out of the parlor with gay cries and laughter, like
+summer girls who had been at a brilliant hop, and began to stray down the
+piazzas, and storm into the office.  Several of them fluttered up to the
+desk, as the clerk had foretold, and looked for letters in the boxes
+bearing their initials.  They called him out, and asked if he had not
+forgotten something for them.  He denied it with a sad, wise smile, and
+then they tried to provoke him to a belated flirtation, in lack of other
+material, but he met their overtures discreetly, and they presently said,
+Well, they guessed they must go; and went.  Fane turned to encounter
+Gregory, who had come in by a side door.
+
+"Fane, I want to beg your pardon.  I was rude to you just now."
+
+"Oh, no!  Oh, no!" the clerk protested.  "That's all right.  Sit down a
+while, can't you, and talk with a fellow.  It's early, yet."
+
+"No, I can't.  I just wanted to say I was sorry I spoke in that way.
+Good-night.  Is there anything in particular?"
+
+"No; good-night.  I was just wondering about--that girl."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Gregory had an habitual severity with his own behavior which did not stop
+there, but was always passing on to the behavior of others; and his days
+went by in alternate offence and reparation to those he had to do with.
+He had to do chiefly with the dining-room girls, whose susceptibilities
+were such that they kept about their work bathed in tears or suffused
+with anger much of the time.  He was not only good-looking but he was a
+college student, and their feelings were ready to bud toward him in
+tender efflorescence, but he kept them cropped and blighted by his curt
+words and impatient manner.  Some of them loved him for the hurts he did
+them, and some hated him, but all agreed fondly or furiously that he was
+too cross for anything.  They were mostly young school-mistresses, and
+whether they were of a soft and amorous make, or of a forbidding temper,
+they knew enough in spite of their hurts to value a young fellow whose
+thoughts were not running upon girls all the time.  Women, even in their
+spring-time, like men to treat them as if they had souls as well as
+hearts, and it was a saving grace in Gregory that he treated them all,
+the silliest of them, as if they had souls.  Very likely they responded
+more with their hearts than with their souls, but they were aware that
+this was not his fault.
+
+The girls that waited at table saw that he did not distinguish in manner
+between them and the girls whom they served.  The knot between his brows
+did not dissolve in the smiling gratitude of the young ladies whom he
+preceded to their places, and pulled out their chairs for, any more than
+in the blandishments of a waitress who thanked him for some correction.
+
+They owned when he had been harshest that no one could be kinder if he
+saw a girl really trying, or more patient with well meaning stupidity,
+but some things fretted him, and he was as apt to correct a girl in her
+grammar as in her table service.  Out of work hours, if he met any of
+them, he recognized them with deferential politeness; but he shunned
+occasions of encounter with them as distinctly as he avoided the ladies
+among the hotel guests.  Some of the table girls pitied his loneliness,
+and once they proposed that he should read to them on the back piazza in
+the leisure of their mid-afternoons.  He said that he had to keep up with
+his studies in all the time he could get; he treated their request with
+grave civility, but they felt his refusal to be final.
+
+He was seen very little about the house outside of his own place and
+function, and he was scarcely known to consort with anyone but Fane, who
+celebrated his high sense of the honor to the lady-guests; but if any of
+these would have been willing to show Gregory that they considered his
+work to get an education as something that redeemed itself from discredit
+through the nobility of its object, he gave them no chance to do so.
+
+The afternoon following their talk about Clementina, Gregory looked in
+for Fane behind the letter boxes, but did not find him, and the girl
+herself came round from the front to say that he was out buying, but
+would be back now, very soon; it was occasionally the clerk's business to
+forage among the farmers for the lighter supplies, such as eggs, and
+butter, and poultry, and this was the buying that Clementina meant.
+"Very well, I'll wait here for him a little while," Gregory answered.
+
+"So do," said Clementina, in a formula which she thought polite; but she
+saw the frown with which Gregory took a Greek book from his pocket, and
+she hurried round in front of the boxes again, wondering how she could
+have displeased him.  She put her face in sight a moment to explain, "I
+have got to be here and give out the lettas till Mr. Fane gets back," and
+then withdrew it.  He tried to lose himself in his book, but her tender
+voice spoke from time to time beyond the boxes, and Gregory kept
+listening for Clementina to say, "No'm, there a'n't.  Perhaps, the'e'll
+be something the next mail," and "Yes'm, he'e's one, and I guess this
+paper is for some of youa folks, too."
+
+Gregory shut his book with a sudden bang at last and jumped to his feet,
+to go away.
+
+The girl came running round the corner of the boxes.  "Oh!  I thought
+something had happened."
+
+"No, nothing has happened," said Gregory, with a sort of violence; which
+was heightened by a sense of the rings and tendrils of loose hair
+springing from the mass that defined her pretty head.  "Don't you know
+that you oughtn't to say 'No'm' and 'Yes'm?"' he demanded, bitterly, and
+then he expected to see the water come into her eyes, or the fire into
+her cheeks.
+
+Clementina merely looked interested.  "Did I say that?  I meant to say
+Yes, ma'am and No, ma'am; but I keep forgetting."
+
+"You oughtn't to say anything!"  Gregory answered savagely, "Just say
+Yes, and No, and let your voice do the rest."
+
+"Oh!" said the girl, with the gentlest abeyance, as if charmed with the
+novelty of the idea.  "I should be afraid it wasn't polite."
+
+Gregory took an even brutal tone.  It seemed to him as if he were forced
+to hurt her feelings.  But his words, in spite of his tone, were not
+brutal; they might have even been thought flattering.  "The politeness is
+in the manner, and you don't need anything but your manner."
+
+"Do you think so, truly?" asked the girl joyously.  "I should like to try
+it once!"
+
+He frowned again.  "I've no business to criticise your way of speaking."
+
+"Oh yes'm--yes, ma'am; sir, I mean; I mean, Oh, yes, indeed!  The'a!
+It does sound just as well, don't it?"  Clementina laughed in triumph at
+the outcome of her efforts, so that a reluctant visional smile came upon
+Gregory's face, too.  I'm very mach obliged to you, Mr. Gregory--I shall
+always want to do it, if it's the right way."
+
+"It's the right way," said Gregory coldly.
+
+"And don't they," she urged, "don't they really say Sir and Ma'am, whe'e
+--whe'e you came from?"
+
+He said gloomily, "Not ladies and gentlemen.  Servants do.  Waiters--like
+me."  He inflicted this stab to his pride with savage fortitude and he
+bore with self-scorn the pursuit of her innocent curiosity.
+
+"But I thought--I thought you was a college student."
+
+"Were," Gregory corrected her, involuntarily, and she said, "Were, I
+mean."
+
+"I'm a student at college, and here I'm a servant!  It's all right!" he
+said with a suppressed gritting of the teeth; and he added, "My Master
+was the servant of the meanest, and I must--I beg your pardon for
+meddling with your manner of speaking"--
+
+"Oh, I'm very much obliged to you; indeed I am.  And I shall not care if
+you tell me of anything that's out of the way in my talking," said
+Clementina, generously.
+
+"Thank you; I think I won't wait any longer for Mr. Fane."
+
+"Why, I'm su'a he'll be back very soon, now.  I'll try not to disturb you
+any moa."
+
+Gregory turned from taking some steps towards the door, and said, "I wish
+you would tell Mr. Fane something."
+
+"For you?  Why, suttainly!"
+
+"No.  For you.  Tell him that it's all right about his calling you Boss."
+
+The indignant color came into Clementina's face.  "He had no business to
+call me that."
+
+"No; and he doesn't think he had, now.  He's truly sorry for it."
+
+"I'll see," said Clementina.
+
+She had not seen by the time Fane got back.  She received his apologies
+for being gone so long coldly, and went away to Mrs. Atwell, whom she
+told what had passed between Gregory and herself.
+
+"Is he truly so proud?"  she asked.
+
+"He's a very good young man," said Mrs. Atwell, "but I guess he's proud.
+He can't help it, but you can see he fights against it.  If I was you,
+Clem, I wouldn't say anything to the guls about it."
+
+"Oh, no'm--I mean, no, indeed.  I shouldn't think of it.  But don't you
+think that was funny, his bringing in Christ, that way?"
+
+"Well, he's going to be a minister, you know."
+
+"Is he really?"  Clementina was a while silent.  At last she said, "Don't
+you think Mr. Gregory has a good many freckles?"
+
+"Well, them red-complected kind is liable to freckle," said Mrs. Atwell,
+judicially.
+
+After rather a long pause for both of them, Clementina asked, "Do you
+think it would be nice for me to ask Mr. Gregory about things, when I
+wasn't suttain?"
+
+"Like what?"
+
+"Oh-wo'ds, and pronunciation; and books to read."
+
+"Why, I presume he'd love to have you.  He's always correctin' the guls;
+I see him take up a book one day, that one of 'em was readin', and when
+she as't him about it, he said it was rubbage.  I guess you couldn't have
+a betta guide."
+
+"Well, that was what I was thinking.  I guess I sha'n't do it, though.
+I sh'd neva have the courage."  Clementina laughed and then fell rather
+seriously silent again.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+One day the shoeman stopped his wagon at the door of the helps' house,
+and called up at its windows, "Well, guls, any of you want to git a numba
+foua foot into a rumba two shoe, to-day?  Now's youa chance, but you got
+to be quick abort it.  The'e ha'r't but just so many numba two shoes
+made, and the wohld's full o' rumba foua feet."
+
+The windows filled with laughing faces at the first sound of the
+shoeman's ironical voice; and at sight of his neat wagon, with its
+drawers at the rear and sides, and its buggy-hood over the seat where the
+shoeman lounged lazily holding the reins, the girls flocked down the
+stairs, and out upon the piazza where the shoe man had handily ranged his
+vehicle.
+
+They began to ask him if he had not this thing and that, but he said with
+firmness, "Nothin' but shoes, guls.  I did carry a gen'l line, one while,
+of what you may call ankle-wea', such as spats, and stockin's, and
+gaitas, but I nova did like to speak of such things befoa ladies, and now
+I stick ex-elusively to shoes.  You know that well enough, guls; what's
+the use?"
+
+He kept a sober face amidst the giggling that his words aroused,--and let
+his voice sink into a final note of injury.
+
+"Well, if you don't want any shoes, to-day, I guess I must be goin'."
+He made a feint of jerking his horse's reins, but forebore at the
+entreaties that went up from the group of girls.
+
+"Yes, we do!"  "Let's see them!"  "Oh, don't go!" they chorused in an
+equally histrionic alarm, and the shoeman got down from his perch to show
+his wares.
+
+"Now, the'a, ladies," he said, pulling out one of the drawers, and
+dangling a pair of shoes from it by the string that joined their heels,
+"the'e's a shoe that looks as good as any Sat'd'y-night shoe you eva see.
+Looks as han'some as if it had a pasteboa'd sole and was split stock all
+through, like the kind you buy for a dollar at the store, and kick out in
+the fust walk you take with your fella--'r some other gul's fella, I
+don't ca'e which.  And yet that's an honest shoe, made of the best of
+material all the way through, and in the best manna.  Just look at that
+shoe, ladies; ex-amine it; sha'n't cost you a cent, and I'll pay for youa
+lost time myself, if any complaint is made."  He began to toss pairs of
+the shoes into the crowd of girls, who caught them from each other before
+they fell, with hysterical laughter, and ran away with them in-doors to
+try them on.  "This is a shoe that I'm intaducin'," the shoeman went on,
+"and every pair is warranted--warranted numba two; don't make any otha
+size, because we want to cata to a strictly numba two custom.  If any
+lady doos feel 'em a little mite too snug, I'm sorry for her, but I can't
+do anything to help her in this shoe."
+
+"Too snug !"  came a gay voice from in-doors.  "Why my foot feels
+puffectly lost in this one."
+
+"All right," the shoeman shouted back.  "Call it a numba one shoe and
+then see if you can't find that lost foot in it, some'eres.  Or try a
+little flour, and see if it won't feel more at home.  I've hea'd of a
+shoe that give that sensation of looseness by not goin' on at all."
+
+The girls exulted joyfully together at the defeat of their companion,
+but the shoeman kept a grave face, while he searched out other sorts of
+shoes and slippers, and offered them, or responded to some definite
+demand with something as near like as he could hope to make serve.
+The tumult of talk and laughter grew till the chef put his head out of
+the kitchen door, and then came sauntering across the grass to the helps'
+piazza.  At the same time the clerk suffered himself to be lured from his
+post by the excitement.  He came and stood beside the chef, who listened
+to the shoeman's flow of banter with a longing to take his chances with
+him.
+
+"That's a nice hawss," he said.  "What'll you take for him?"
+
+"Why, hello!" said the shoeman, with an eye that dwelt upon the chef's
+official white cap and apron, "You talk English, don't you?  Fust off, I
+didn't know but it was one of them foreign dukes come ova he'a to marry
+some oua poor millionai'es daughtas."  The girls cried out for joy, and
+the chef bore their mirth stoically, but not without a personal relish of
+the shoeman's up-and-comingness.  "Want a hawss?" asked the shoeman with
+an air of business.  "What'll you give?"
+
+"I'll give you thutty-seven dollas and a half," said the chef.
+
+"Sorry I can't take it.  That hawss is sellin' at present for just one
+hundred and fifty dollas."
+
+"Well," said the chef, "I'll raise you a dolla and a quahta.  Say thutty-
+eight and seventy-five."
+
+"W-ell now, you're gittin' up among the figgas where you're liable to own
+a hawss.  You just keep right on a raisin' me, while I sell these ladies
+some shoes, and maybe you'll hit it yit, 'fo'e night."
+
+The girls were trying on shoes on every side now, and they had dispensed
+with the formality of going in-doors for the purpose.  More than one put
+out her foot to the clerk for his opinion of the fit, and the shoeman was
+mingling with the crowd, testing with his hand, advising from his
+professional knowledge, suggesting, urging, and in some cases artfully
+agreeing with the reluctance shown.
+
+"This man," said the chef, indicating Fane, "says you can tell moa lies
+to the square inch than any man out o' Boston."
+
+"Doos he?"  asked the shoeman, turning with a pair of high-heeled bronze
+slippers in his hand from the wagon.  "Well, now, if I stood as nea' to
+him as you do, I believe I sh'd hit him."
+
+"Why, man, I can't dispute him!" said the chef, and as if he had now at
+last scored a point, he threw back his head and laughed.  When he brought
+down his head again, it was to perceive the approach of Clementina.
+"Hello," he said for her to hear, "he'e comes the Boss.  Well, I guess I
+must be goin'," he added, in mock anxiety.  "I'm a goin', Boss, I'm a
+goin'."
+
+Clementina ignored him.  "Mr. Atwell wants to see you a moment, Mr.
+Fane," she said to the clerk.
+
+"All right, Miss Claxon," Fane answered, with the sorrowful respect which
+he always showed Clementina, now, "I'll be right there."  But he waited a
+moment, either in expression of his personal independence, or from
+curiosity to know what the shoeman was going to say of the bronze
+slippers.
+
+Clementina felt the fascination, too; she thought the slippers were
+beautiful, and her foot thrilled with a mysterious prescience of its
+fitness for them.
+
+"Now, the'e, ladies, or as I may say guls, if you'll excuse it in one
+that's moa like a fatha to you than anything else, in his feelings"--the
+girls tittered, and some one shouted derisively--"It's true!"--"now there
+is a shoe, or call it a slippa, that I've rutha hesitated about showin'
+to you, because I know that you're all rutha serious-minded, I don't ca'e
+how young ye be, or how good-lookin' ye be; and I don't presume the'e's
+one among you that's eve head o' dancin'."  In the mirthful hooting and
+mocking that followed, the shoeman hedged gravely from the extreme
+position he had taken.  "What?  Well, maybe you have among some the summa
+folks, but we all know what summa folks ah', and I don't expect you to
+patte'n by them.  But what I will say is that if any young lady within
+the sound of my voice,"--he looked round for the applause which did not
+fail him in his parody of the pulpit style--"should get an invitation to
+a dance next winta, and should feel it a wo'k of a charity to the young
+man to go, she'll be sorry--on his account, rememba--that she ha'n't got
+this pair o' slippas.
+
+"The'a!  They're a numba two, and they'll fit any lady here, I don't ca'e
+how small a foot she's got.  Don't all speak at once, sistas!  Ample
+time allowed for meals.  That's a custom-made shoe, and if it hadn't b'en
+too small for the lady they was oddid foh, you couldn't-'a' got 'em for
+less than seven dollas; but now I'm throwin' on 'em away for three."
+
+A groan of dismay went up from the whole circle, and some who had pressed
+forward for a sight of the slippers, shrank back again.
+
+"Did I hea' just now," asked the shoeman, with a soft insinuation in his
+voice, and in the glance he suddenly turned upon Clementina, "a party
+addressed as Boss?"  Clementina flushed, but she did not cower; the chef
+walked away with a laugh, and the shoeman pursued him with his voice.
+"Not that I am goin' to folla the wicked example of a man who tries to
+make spot of young ladies; but if the young lady addressed as Boss"--
+
+"Miss Claxon," said the clerk with ingratiating reverence.
+
+"Miss Claxon--I Stan' corrected," pursued the shoeman.  "If Miss Claxon
+will do me the fava just to try on this slippa, I sh'd be able to tell at
+the next place I stopped just how it looked on a lady's foot.  I see you
+a'n't any of you disposed to buy 'em this aftanoon, 'and I a'n't
+complainin'; you done pootty well by me, already, and I don't want to
+uhge you; but I do want to carry away the picture, in my mind's eye--what
+you may call a mental photograph--of this slipper on the kind of a foot
+it was made fob, so't I can praise it truthfully to my next customer.
+What do you say, ma'am?" he addressed himself with profound respect to
+Clementina.
+
+"Oh, do let him, Clem!" said one of the girls, and another pleaded, "Just
+so he needn't tell a story to his next customa," and that made the rest
+laugh.
+
+Clementina's heart was throbbing, and joyous lights were dancing in her
+eyes.  "I don't care if I do," she said, and she stooped to unlace her
+shoe, but one of the big girls threw herself on her knees at her feet to
+prevent her.  Clementina remembered too late that there was a hole in her
+stocking and that her little toe came through it, but she now folded the
+toe artfully down, and the big girl discovered the hole in time to abet
+her attempt at concealment.  She caught the slipper from the shoeman and
+harried it on; she tied the ribbons across the instep, and then put on
+the other.  "Now put out youa foot, Clem!  Fast dancin' position!" She
+leaned back upon her own heels, and Clementina daintily lifted the edge
+of her skirt a little, and peered over at her feet.  The slippers might
+or might not have been of an imperfect taste, in their imitation of the
+prevalent fashion, but on Clementina's feet they had distinction.
+
+"Them feet was made for them slippas," said the shoeman devoutly.
+
+The clerk was silent; he put his hand helplessly to his mouth, and then
+dropped it at his side again.
+
+Gregory came round the corner of the building from the dining-room, and
+the big girl who was crouching before Clementina, and who boasted that
+she was not afraid of the student, called saucily to him, "Come here, a
+minute, Mr. Gregory," and as he approached, she tilted aside, to let him
+see Clementina's slippers.
+
+Clementina beamed up at him with all her happiness in her eyes, but after
+a faltering instant, his face reddened through its freckles, and he gave
+her a rebuking frown and passed on.
+
+"Well, I decla'e!" said the big girl.  Fane turned uneasily, and said
+with a sigh, he guessed he must be going, now.
+
+A blight fell upon the gay spirits of the group, and the shoeman asked
+with an ironical glance after Gregory's retreating figure, "Owna of this
+propaty?"
+
+"No, just the ea'th," said the big girl, angrily.
+
+The voice of Clementina made itself heard with a cheerfulness which had
+apparently suffered no chill, but was really a rising rebellion.  "How
+much ah' the slippas?"
+
+"Three dollas," said the shoeman in a surprise which he could not conceal
+at Clementina's courage.
+
+She laughed, and stooped to untie the slippers.  "That's too much for
+me."
+
+"Let me untie 'em, Clem," said the big girl.  "It's a shame for you eva
+to take 'em off."
+
+"That's right, lady," said the shoeman.  "And you don't eva need to," he
+added, to Clementina, "unless you object to sleepin' in 'em.  You pay me
+what you want to now, and the rest when I come around the latta paht of
+August."
+
+"Oh keep 'em, Clem!" the big girl urged, passionately, and the rest
+joined her with their entreaties.
+
+"I guess I betta not," said Clementina, and she completed the work of
+taking off the slippers in which the big girl could lend her no further
+aid, such was her affliction of spirit.
+
+"All right, lady," said the shoeman.  "Them's youa slippas, and I'll just
+keep 'em for you till the latta paht of August."
+
+He drove away, and in the woods which he had to pass through on the road
+to another hotel he overtook the figure of a man pacing rapidly.  He
+easily recognized Gregory, but he bore him no malice.  "Like a lift?"
+he asked, slowing up beside him.
+
+"No, thank you," said Gregory.  "I'm out for the walk."  He looked round
+furtively, and then put his hand on the side of the wagon, mechanically,
+as if to detain it, while he walked on.
+
+"Did you sell the slippers to the young lady?"
+
+"Well, not as you may say sell, exactly," returned the shoeman,
+cautiously.
+
+"Have you-got them yet?"  asked the student.
+
+"Guess so," said the man.  "Like to see 'em?"
+
+He pulled up his horse.
+
+Gregory faltered a moment.  Then he said, "I'd like to buy them.  Quick!"
+
+He looked guiltily about, while the shoeman alertly obeyed, with some
+delay for a box to put them in.  "How much are they?"
+
+"Well, that's a custom made slipper, and the price to the lady that
+oddid'em was seven dollas.  But I'll let you have 'em for three--if you
+want 'em for a present."--The shoeman was far too discreet to permit
+himself anything so overt as a smile; he merely let a light of
+intelligence come into his face.
+
+Gregory paid the money.  "Please consider this as confidential," he said,
+and he made swiftly away.  Before the shoeman could lock the drawer that
+had held the slippers, and clamber to his perch under the buggy-hood,
+Gregory was running back to him again.
+
+"Stop!" he called, and as he came up panting in an excitement which the
+shoeman might well have mistaken for indignation attending the discovery
+of some blemish in his purchase.  "Do you regard this as in any manner a
+deception?" he palpitated.
+
+"Why," the shoeman began cautiously, "it wa'n't what you may call a
+promise, exactly.  More of a joke than anything else, I looked on it.  I
+just said I'd keep 'em for her; but"--
+
+"You don't understand.  If I seemed to disapprove--if I led any one to
+suppose, by my manner, or by--anything--that I thought it unwise or
+unbecoming to buy the shoes, and then bought them myself, do you think it
+is in the nature of an acted falsehood?"
+
+"Lo'd no!"  said the shoeman, and he caught up the slack of his reins to
+drive on, as if he thought this amusing maniac might also be dangerous.
+
+Gregory stopped him with another question.  "And shall--will you--think
+it necessary to speak of--of this transaction?  I leave you free!"
+
+"Well," said the shoeman.  "I don't know what you're after, exactly, but
+if you think I'm so shot on for subjects that I've got to tell the folks
+at the next stop that I sold a fellar a pair of slippas for his gul--Go
+'long!" he called to his horse, and left Gregory standing in the middle
+of the road.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+The people who came to the Middlemount in July were ordinarily the
+nicest, but that year the August folks were nicer than usual and there
+were some students among them, and several graduates just going into
+business, who chose to take their outing there instead of going to the
+sea-side or the North Woods.  This was a chance that might not happen in
+years again, and it made the house very gay for the young ladies; they
+ceased to pay court to the clerk, and asked him for letters only at mail-
+time.  Five or six couples were often on the floor together, at the hops,
+and the young people sat so thick upon the stairs that one could scarcely
+get up or down.
+
+So many young men made it gay not only for the young ladies, but also for
+a certain young married lady, when she managed to shirk her rather filial
+duties to her husband, who was much about the verandas, purblindly
+feeling his way with a stick, as he walked up and down, or sitting opaque
+behind the glasses that preserved what was left of his sight, while his
+wife read to him.  She was soon acquainted with a good many more people
+than he knew, and was in constant request for such occasions as needed a
+chaperon not averse to mountain climbing, or drives to other hotels for
+dancing and supper and return by moonlight, or the more boisterous sorts
+of charades; no sheet and pillow case party was complete without her; for
+welsh-rarebits her presence was essential.  The event of the conflict
+between these social claims and her duties to her husband was her appeal
+to Mrs. Atwell on a point which the landlady referred to Clementina.
+
+"She wants somebody to read to her husband, and I don't believe but what
+you could do it, Clem.  You're a good reader, as good as I want to hear,
+and while you may say that you don't put in a great deal of elocution, I
+guess you can read full well enough.  All he wants is just something to
+keep him occupied, and all she wants is a chance to occupy herself with
+otha folks.  Well, she is moa their own age.  I d'know as the's any hahm
+in her.  And my foot's so much betta, now, that I don't need you the
+whole while, any moa."
+
+"Did you speak to her about me?" asked the girl.
+
+"Well, I told her I'd tell you.  I couldn't say how you'd like."
+
+"Oh, I guess I should like," said Clementina, with her eyes shining.
+"But--I should have to ask motha."
+
+"I don't believe but what your motha'd be willin'," said Mrs. Atwell.
+"You just go down and see her about it."
+
+The next day Mrs. Milray was able to take leave of her husband, in
+setting off to matronize a coaching party, with an exuberance of good
+conscience that she shared with the spectators.  She kissed him with
+lively affection, and charged him not to let the child read herself to
+death for him.  She captioned Clementina that Mr. Milray never knew when
+he was tired, and she had better go by the clock in her reading, and not
+trust to any sign from him.
+
+Clementina promised, and when the public had followed Mrs. Milray away,
+to watch her ascent to the topmost seat of the towering coach, by means
+of the ladder held in place by two porters, and by help of the down-
+stretched hands of all the young men on the coach, Clementina opened the
+book at the mark she found in it, and began to read to Mr. Milray.
+
+The book was a metaphysical essay, which he professed to find a lighter
+sort of reading than fiction; he said most novelists were too seriously
+employed in preventing the marriage of the lovers, up to a certain point,
+to be amusing; but you could always trust a metaphysician for
+entertainment if he was very much in earnest, and most metaphysicians
+were.  He let Clementina read on a good while in her tender voice, which
+had still so many notes of childhood in it, before he manifested any
+consciousness of being read to.  He kept the smile on his delicate face
+which had come there when his wife said at parting, "I don't believe I
+should leave her with you if you could see how prettty she was," and he
+held his head almost motionlessly at the same poise he had given it in
+listening to her final charges.  It was a fine head, still well covered
+with soft hair, which lay upon it in little sculpturesque masses, like
+chiseled silver, and the acquiline profile had a purity of line in the
+arch of the high nose and the jut of the thin lips and delicate chin,
+which had not been lost in the change from youth to age.  One could never
+have taken it for the profile of a New York lawyer who had early found
+New York politics more profitable than law, and after a long time passed
+in city affairs, had emerged with a name shadowed by certain doubtful
+transactions.  But this was Milray's history, which in the rapid progress
+of American events, was so far forgotten that you had first to remind
+people of what he had helped do before you could enjoy their surprise in
+realizing that this gentle person, with the cast of intellectual
+refinement which distinguished his face, was the notorious Milray, who
+was once in all the papers.  When he made his game and retired from
+politics, his family would have sacrificed itself a good deal to reclaim
+him socially, though they were of a severer social than spiritual
+conscience, in the decay of some ancestral ideals.  But be had rendered
+their willingness hopeless by marrying, rather late in life, a young girl
+from the farther West who had come East with a general purpose to get on.
+She got on very well with Milray, and it was perhaps not altogether her
+own fault that she did not get on so well with his family, when she began
+to substitute a society aim for the artistic ambition that had brought
+her to New York.  They might have forgiven him for marrying her, but they
+could not forgive her for marrying him.  They were of New England origin
+and they were perhaps a little more critical with her than if they had
+been New Yorkers of Dutch strain.  They said that she was a little
+Western hoyden, but that the stage would have been a good place for her
+if she could have got over her Pike county accent; in the hush of family
+councils they confided to one another the belief that there were phases
+of the variety business in which her accent would have been no barrier to
+her success, since it could not have been heard in the dance, and might
+have been disguised in the song.
+
+"Will you kindly read that passage over again?" Milray asked as
+Clementina paused at the end of a certain paragraph.  She read it, while
+he listened attentively.  "Could you tell me just what you understand by
+that?"  he pursued, as if he really expected Clementina to instruct him.
+
+She hesitated a moment before she answered, "I don't believe I undastand
+anything at all."
+
+"Do you know," said Milray, "that's exactly my own case?  And I've an
+idea that the author is in the same box," and Clementina perceived she
+might laugh, and laughed discreetly.
+
+Milray seemed to feel the note of discreetness in her laugh, and he
+asked, smiling, "How old did you tell me you were?"
+
+"I'm sixteen," said Clementina.
+
+"It's a great age," said Milray.  "I remember being sixteen myself; I
+have never been so old since.  But I was very old for my age, then.  Do
+you think you are?"
+
+"I don't believe I am," said Clementina, laughing again, but still very
+discreetly.
+
+"Then I should like to tell you that you have a very agreeable voice.  Do
+you sing?"
+
+"No'm--no, sir--no," said Clementina, "I can't sing at all."
+
+"Ah, that's very interesting," said Milray, "but it's not surprising.
+I wish I could see your face distinctly; I've a great curiosity about
+matching voices and faces; I must get Mrs. Milray to tell me how you
+look.  Where did you pick up your pretty knack at reading?  In school,
+here?"
+
+"I don't know," answered Clementina.  "Do I read-the way you want?"
+
+"Oh, perfectly.  You let the meaning come through--when there is any."
+
+"Sometimes," said Clementina ingenuously, "I read too fast; the children
+ah' so impatient when I'm reading to them at home, and they hurry me.
+But I can read a great deal slower if you want me to."
+
+"No, I'm impatient, too," said Milray.  "Are there many of them,--the
+children?"
+
+"There ah' six in all."
+
+"And are you the oldest?"
+
+"Yes," said Clementina.  She still felt it very blunt not to say sir,
+too, but she tried to make her tone imply the sir, as Mr. Gregory had
+bidden her.
+
+"You've got a very pretty name."
+
+Clementina brightened.  "Do you like it?  Motha gave it to me; she took
+it out of a book that fatha was reading to her."
+
+"I like it very much," said Milray.  "Are you tall for your age?"
+
+"I guess I am pretty tall."
+
+"You're fair, of course.  I can tell that by your voice; you've got a
+light-haired voice.  And what are your eyes?"
+
+"Blue!" Clementina laughed at his pursuit.
+
+"Ah, of course!  It isn't a gray-eyed blonde voice.  Do you think--has
+anybody ever told you-that you were graceful?"
+
+"I don't know as they have," said Clementina, after thinking.
+
+"And what is your own opinion?"  Clementina began to feel her dignity
+infringed; she did not answer, and now Milray laughed.  "I felt the
+little tilt in your step as you came up.  It's all right.  Shall we try
+for our friend's meaning, now?"
+
+Clementina began again, and again Milray stopped her.  "You mustn't bear
+malice.  I can hear the grudge in your voice; but I didn't mean to laugh
+at you.  You don't like being made fun of, do you?"
+
+"I don't believe anybody does," said Clementina.
+
+"No, indeed," said Milray.  "If I had tried such a thing I should be
+afraid you would make it uncomfortable for me.  But I haven't, have I?"
+
+"I don't know," said Clementina, reluctantly.
+
+Milray laughed gleefully.  "Well, you'll forgive me, because I'm an old
+fellow.  If I were young, you wouldn't, would you?"
+
+Clementina thought of the clerk; she had certainly never forgiven him.
+"Shall I read on?" she asked.
+
+"Yes, yes.  Read on," he said, respectfully.  Once he interrupted her to
+say that she pronounced admirable, but he would like now and then to
+differ with her about a word if she did not mind.  She answered, Oh no,
+indeed; she should like it ever so much, if he would tell her when she
+was wrong.  After that he corrected her, and he amused himself by
+studying forms of respect so delicate that they should not alarm her
+pride; Clementina reassured him in terms as fine as his own.  She did not
+accept his instructions implicitly; she meant to bring them to the bar of
+Gregory's knowledge.  If he approved of them, then she would submit.
+
+Milray easily possessed himself of the history of her life and of all its
+circumstances, and he said he would like to meet her father and make the
+acquaintance of a man whose mind, as Clementina interpreted it to him, he
+found so original.
+
+He authorized his wife to arrange with Mrs. Atwell for a monopoly of
+Clementina's time while he stayed at Middlemount, and neither he nor Mrs.
+Milray seemed surprised at the good round sum, as the landlady thought
+it, which she asked in the girl's behalf.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+The Milrays stayed through August, and Mrs. Milray was the ruling spirit
+of the great holiday of the summer, at Middlemount.  It was this year
+that the landlords of the central mountain region had decided to compete
+in a coaching parade, and to rival by their common glory the splendor of
+the East Side and the West Side parades.  The boarding-houses were to
+take part, as well as the hotels; the farms where only three or four
+summer folks were received, were to send their mountain-wagons, and all
+were to be decorated with bunting.  An arch draped with flags and covered
+with flowers spanned the entrance to the main street at Middlemount
+Centre, and every shop in the village was adorned for the event.
+
+Mrs. Milray made the landlord tell her all about coaching parades, and
+the champions of former years on the East Side and the West Side, and
+then she said that the Middlemount House must take the prize from them
+all this year, or she should never come near his house again.  He
+answered, with a dignity and spirit he rarely showed with Mrs. Milray's
+class of custom, "I'm goin' to drive our hossis myself."
+
+She gave her whole time to imagining and organizing the personal display
+on the coach.  She consulted with the other ladies as to the kind of
+dresses that were to be worn, but she decided everything herself; and
+when the time came she had all the young men ravaging the lanes and
+pastures for the goldenrod and asters which formed the keynote of her
+decoration for the coach.
+
+She made peace and kept it between factions that declared themselves
+early in the affair, and of all who could have criticized her for taking
+the lead perhaps none would have willingly relieved her of the trouble.
+She freely declared that it was killing her, and she sounded her accents
+of despair all over the place.  When their dresses were finished she made
+the persons of her drama rehearse it on the coach top in the secret of
+the barn, where no one but the stable men were suffered to see the
+effects she aimed at.  But on the eve of realizing these in public she
+was overwhelmed by disaster.  The crowning glory of her composition was
+to be a young girl standing on the highest seat of the coach, in the
+character of the Spirit of Summer, wreathed and garlanded with flowers,
+and invisibly sustained by the twelve months of the year, equally divided
+as to sex, but with the more difficult and painful attitudes assigned to
+the gentlemen who were to figure as the fall and winter months.  It had
+been all worked out and the actors drilled in their parts, when the
+Spirit of Summer, who had been chosen for the inoffensiveness of her
+extreme youth, was taken with mumps, and withdrawn by the doctor's
+orders.  Mrs. Milray had now not only to improvise another Spirit of
+Summer, but had to choose her from a group of young ladies, with the
+chance of alienating and embittering those who were not chosen.  In her
+calamity she asked her husband what she should do, with but the least
+hope that he could tell her.  But he answered promptly, "Take Clementina;
+I'll let you have her for the day," and then waited for the storm of her
+renunciations and denunciations to spend itself.
+
+"To be sure," she said, when this had happened, "it isn't as if she were
+a servant in the house; and the position can be regarded as a kind of
+public function, anyhow.  I can't say that I've hired her to take the
+part, but I can give her a present afterwards, and it will be the same
+thing."
+
+The question of clothes for Clementina Mrs. Milray declared was almost as
+sweeping in its implication as the question of the child's creation."
+She has got to be dressed new from head to foot," she said, "every
+stitch, and how am I to manage it in twenty-four hours?"
+
+By a succession of miracles with cheese-cloth, and sashes and ribbons, it
+was managed; and ended in a triumph so great that Mrs. Milray took the
+girl in her arms and kissed her for looking the Spirit of Summer to a
+perfection that the victim of the mumps could not have approached.  The
+victory was not lastingly marred by the failure of Clementina's shoes to
+look the Spirit of Summer as well as the rest of her costume.  No shoes
+at all world have been the very thing, but shoes so shabby and worn down
+at one side of the heel as Clementina's were very far from the thing.
+Mrs. Milray decided that another fold of cheese-cloth would add to the
+statuesque charm of her figure, and give her more height; and she was
+richly satisfied with the effect when the Middlemount coach drove up to
+the great veranda the next morning, with all the figures of her picture
+in position on its roof, and Clementina supreme among them.  She herself
+mounted in simple, undramatized authority to her official seat beside the
+landlord, who in coachman's dress, with a bouquet of autumnal flowers in
+his lapel, sat holding his garlanded reins over the backs of his six
+horses; and then the coach as she intended it to appear in the parade set
+out as soon as the turnouts of the other houses joined it.  They were all
+to meet at the Middlemount, which was thickly draped and festooned in
+flags, with knots of evergreen and the first red boughs of the young
+swamp maples holding them in place over its irregular facade.  The coach
+itself was amass of foliage and flowers, from which it defined itself as
+a wheeled vehicle in vague and partial outline; the other wagons and
+coaches, as they drove tremulously up, with an effect of having been
+mired in blossoms about their spokes and hubs, had the unwieldiness which
+seems inseparable from spectacularity.  They represented motives in color
+and design sometimes tasteless enough, and sometimes so nearly very good
+that Mrs. Milray's heart was a great deal in her mouth, as they arrived,
+each with its hotel-cry roared and shrilled from a score of masculine and
+feminine throats, and finally spelled for distinctness sake, with an
+ultimate yell or growl.  But she had not finished giving the lady-
+representative of a Sunday newspaper the points of her own tableau,
+before she regained the courage and the faith in which she remained
+serenely steadfast throughout the parade.
+
+It was when all the equipages of the neighborhood had arrived that she
+climbed to her place; the ladder was taken away; the landlord spoke to
+his horses, and the Middlemount coach led the parade, amid the renewed
+slogans, and the cries and fluttered handkerchiefs of the guests crowding
+the verandas.
+
+The line of march was by one road to Middlemount Centre, where the prize
+was to be awarded at the judges' stand, and then the coaches were to
+escort the triumphant vehicle homeward by another route, so as to pass as
+many houses on the way as possible.  It was a curious expression of the
+carnival spirit in a region immemorially starved of beauty in the lives
+of its people; and whatever was the origin of the mountain coaching
+parade, or from whatever impulse of sentimentality or advertising it
+came, the effect was of undeniable splendor, and of phantasmagoric
+strangeness.
+
+Gregory watched its progress from a hill-side pasture as it trailed
+slowly along the rising and falling road.  The songs of the young girls,
+interrupted by the explosion of hotel slogans and college cries from the
+young men, floated off to him on the thin breeze of the cloudless August
+morning, like the hymns and shouts of a saturnalian rout going in holiday
+processional to sacrifice to their gods.  Words of fierce Hebrew poetry
+burned in his thought; the warnings and the accusals and the
+condemnations of the angry prophets; and he stood rapt from his own time
+and place in a dream of days when the Most High stooped to commune face
+to face with His ministers, while the young voices of those forgetful or
+ignorant of Him, called to his own youth, and the garlanded chariots,
+with their banners and their streamers passed on the road beneath him and
+out of sight in the shadow of the woods beyond.
+
+When the prize was given to the Middlemount coach at the Center the
+landlord took the flag, and gallantly transferred it to Mrs. Milray, and
+Mrs. Milray passed it up to Clementina, and bade her, "Wave it, wave it!"
+
+The village street was thronged with people that cheered, and swung their
+hats and handkerchiefs to the coach as it left the judges' stand and
+drove under the triumphal arch, with the other coaches behind it.  Then
+Atwell turned his horses heads homewards, and at the brisker pace with
+which people always return from festivals or from funerals, he left the
+village and struck out upon the country road with his long escort before
+him.  The crowd was quick to catch the courteous intention of the
+victors, and followed them with applause as far beyond the village
+borders as wind and limb would allow; but the last noisy boy had dropped
+off breathless before they reached a half-finished house in the edge of
+some woods.  A line of little children was drawn up by the road-side
+before it, who watched the retinue with grave eagerness, till the
+Middlemount coach came in full sight.  Then they sprang into the air, and
+beating their hands together, screamed, "Clem!  Clem!  Oh it's Clem!"
+and jumped up and down, and a shabby looking work worn woman came round
+the corner of the house and stared up at Clementina waving her banner
+wildly to the children, and shouting unintelligible words to them.  The
+young people on the coach joined in response to the children, some
+simply, some ironically, and one of the men caught up a great wreath of
+flowers which lay at Clementina's feet, and flung it down to them; the
+shabby woman quickly vanished round the corner of the house again.  Mrs.
+Milray leaned over to ask the landlord, "Who in the world are
+Clementina's friends?"
+
+"Why don't you know?"  he retorted in abated voice.  "Them's her brothas
+and sistas."
+
+"And that woman?"
+
+"The lady at the conna?  That's her motha."
+
+When the event was over, and all the things had been said and said again,
+and there was nothing more to keep the spring and summer months from
+going up to their rooms to lie down, and the fall and winter months from
+trying to get something to eat, Mrs. Milray found herself alone with
+Clementina.
+
+The child seemed anxious about something, and Mrs. Milray, who wanted to
+go and lie down, too, asked a little impatiently, "What is it,
+Clementina?"
+
+"Oh, nothing.  Only I was afraid maybe you didn't like my waving to the
+children, when you saw how queea they looked."  Clementina's lips
+quivered.
+
+"Did any of the rest say anything?"
+
+"I know what they thought.  But I don't care!  I should do it right over
+again!"
+
+Mrs. Milray's happiness in the day's triumph was so great that she could
+indulge a generous emotion.  She caught the girl in her arms.  "I want to
+kiss you; I want to hug you, Clementina!"
+
+The notion of a dance for the following night to celebrate the success of
+the house in the coaching parade came to Mrs. Milray aver a welsh-rarebit
+which she gave at the close of the evening.  The party was in the charge
+of Gregory, who silently served them at their orgy with an austerity that
+might have conspired with the viand itself against their dreams, if they
+had not been so used to the gloom of his ministrations.  He would not
+allow the waitresses to be disturbed in their evening leisure, or kept
+from their sleep by such belated pleasures; and when he had provided the
+materials for the rarebit, he stood aloof, and left their combination to
+Mrs. Milray and her chafing-dish.
+
+She had excluded Clementina on account of her youth, as she said to one
+of the fall and winter months, who came in late, and noticed Clementina's
+absence with a "Hello!  Anything the matter with the Spirit of Summer?"
+Clementina had become both a pet and a joke with these months before the
+parade was over, and now they clamored together, and said they must have
+her at the dance anyway.  They were more tepidly seconded by the spring
+and summer months, and Mrs. Milray said, "Well, then, you'll have to all
+subscribe and get her a pair of dancing slippers."  They pressed her for
+her meaning, and she had to explain the fact of Clementina's destitution,
+which that additional fold of cheese-cloth had hidden so well in the
+coaching tableau that it had never been suspected.  The young men
+entreated her to let them each buy a pair of slippers for the Spirit of
+Summer, which she should wear in turn for the dance that she must give
+each of them; and this made Mrs. Milray declare that, no, the child
+should not come to the dance at all, and that she was not going to have
+her spoiled.  But, before the party broke up, she promised that she would
+see what could be done, and she put it very prettily to the child the
+next day, and waited for her to say, as she knew she must, that she could
+not go, and why.  They agreed that the cheese-cloth draperies of the
+Spirit of Summer were surpassingly fit for the dance; but they had to
+agree that this still left the question of slippers untouched.  It
+remained even more hopeless when Clementina tried on all of Mrs. Milray's
+festive shoes, and none of her razorpoints and high heels would avail.
+She went away disappointed, but not yet disheartened; youth does not so
+easily renounce a pleasure pressed to the lips; and Clementina had it in
+her head to ask some of the table girls to help her out.  She meant to
+try first with that big girl who had helped her put on the shoeman's
+bronze slippers; and she hurried through the office, pushing purblindly
+past Fane without looking his way, when he called to her in the deference
+which he now always used with her, "Here's a package here for you,
+Clementina--Miss Claxon," and he gave her an oblong parcel, addressed in
+a hand strange to her.  "Who is it from?" she asked, innocently, and Fane
+replied with the same ingenuousness: "I'm sure I don't know."  Afterwards
+he thought of having retorted, "I haven't opened it," but still without
+being certain that he would have had the courage to say it.
+
+Clementina did not think of opening it herself, even when she was alone
+in her little room above Mrs. Atwell's, until she had carefully felt it
+over, and ascertained that it was a box of pasteboard, three or four
+inches deep and wide, and eight or ten inches long.  She looked at the
+address again, "Miss Clementina Claxon," and at the narrow notched ribbon
+which tied it, and noted that the paper it was wrapped in was very white
+and clean.  Then she sighed, and loosed the knot, and the paper slipped
+off the box, and at the same time the lid fell off, and the shoe man's
+bronze slippers fell out upon the floor.
+
+Either it must be a dream or it must be a joke; it could not be both real
+and earnest; somebody was trying to tease her; such flattery of fortune
+could not be honestly meant.  But it went to her head, and she was so
+giddy with it as she caught the slippers from the floor, and ran down to
+Mrs. Atwell, that she knocked against the sides of the narrow staircase.
+
+"What is it?  What does it mean?  Who did it?" she panted, with the
+slippers in her hand.  "Whe'e did they come from?"  She poured out the
+history of her trying on these shoes, and of her present need of them and
+of their mysterious coming, to meet her longing after it had almost
+ceased to be a hope.  Mrs. Atwell closed with her in an exultation hardly
+short of a clapping the hands.  Her hair was gray, and the girl's hair
+still hung in braids down her back, but they were of the same age in
+their transport, which they referred to Mrs. Milray, and joined with her
+in glad but fruitless wonder who had sent Clementina the shoes.  Mrs.
+Atwell held that the help who had seen the girl trying them on had
+clubbed together and got them for her at the time; and had now given them
+to her for the honor she had done the Middlemount House in the parade.
+Mrs. Milray argued that the spring and summer months had secretly
+dispatched some fall and winter month to ransack the stores at
+Middlemount Centre for them.  Clementina believed that they came from the
+shoe man himself, who had always wanted to send them, in the hope that
+she would keep them, and had merely happened to send them just then in
+that moment of extremity when she was helpless against them.  Each
+conjecture involved improbabilities so gross that it left the field free
+to any opposite theory.
+
+Rumor of the fact could not fail to go through the house, and long before
+his day's work was done it reached the chef, and amused him as a piece of
+the Boss's luck.  He was smoking his evening pipe at the kitchen door
+after supper, when Clementina passed him on one of the many errands that
+took her between Mrs. Milray's room and her own, and he called to her:
+"Boss, what's this I hear about a pair o' glass slippas droppin' out the
+sky int' youa lap?"
+
+Clementina was so happy that she thought she might trust him for once,
+and she said, "Oh, yes, Mr. Mahtin!  Who do you suppose sent them?" she
+entreated him so sweetly that it would have softened any heart but the
+heart of a tease.
+
+"I believe I could give a pootty good guess if I had the facts."
+
+Clementina innocently gave them to him, and he listened with a well-
+affected sympathy.
+
+"Say Fane fust told you about 'em?"
+
+"Yes.  'He'e's a package for you,' he said.  Just that way; and he
+couldn't tell me who left it, or anything."
+
+"Anybody asked him about it since?"
+
+"Oh, yes!  Mrs. Milray, and Mrs. Atwell, and Mr. Atwell, and everybody."
+
+"Everybody."  The chef smiled with a peculiar droop of one eye.  "And he
+didn't know when the slippas got into the landlo'd's box?"
+
+"No.  The fust thing he knew, the' they we'e!"  Clementina stood
+expectant, but the chef smoked on as if that were all there was to say,
+and seemed to have forgotten her.  "Who do you think put them thea, Mr.
+Mahtin?"
+
+The chef looked up as if surprised to find her still there.  "Oh! Oh,
+yes!  Who d' I think?  Why, I know, Boss.  But I don't believe I'd betta
+tell you."
+
+"Oh, do, Mr. Mahtin!  If you knew how I felt about it"--
+
+"No, no!  I guess I betta not.  'Twouldn't do you any good.  I guess I
+won't say anything moa.  But if I was in youa place, and I really wanted
+to know whe'e them slippas come from"--
+
+"I do--I do indeed"--
+
+The chef paused before he added, "I should go at Fane.  I guess what he
+don't know ain't wo'th knowin', and I guess nobody else knows anything.
+Thea!  I don't know but I said mo'n I ought, now."
+
+What the chef said was of a piece with what had been more than once in
+Clementina's mind; but she had driven it out, not because it might not be
+true, but because she would not have it true.  Her head drooped; she
+turned limp and springless away.  Even the heart of the tease was
+touched; he had not known that it would worry her so much, though he knew
+that she disliked the clerk.
+
+"Mind," he called after her, too late, "I ain't got no proof 't he done
+it."
+
+She did not answer him, or look round.  She went to her room, and sat
+down in the growing dusk to think, with a hot lump in her throat.
+
+Mrs. Atwell found her there an hour later, when she climbed to the
+chamber where she thought she ought to have heard Clementina moving about
+over her own room.
+
+"Didn't know but I could help you do youa dressin'," she began, and then
+at sight of the dim figure she broke off: "Why, Clem!  What's the matte?
+Ah' you asleep?  Ah' you sick?  It's half an hour of the time and"--
+
+"I'm not going," Clementina answered, and she did not move.
+
+"Not goin'!  Why the land o'--"
+
+"Oh, I can't go, Mrs. Atwell.  Don't ask me!  Tell Mrs. Milray, please!"
+
+"I will, when I got something to tell," said Mrs. Atwell.  "Now, you just
+say what's happened, Clementina Claxon!  "Clementina suffered the woful
+truth to be drawn from her.  "But you don't know whether it's so or not,"
+the landlady protested.
+
+"Yes, yes, I do!  It was the fast thing I thought of, and the chef
+wouldn't have said it if he didn't believe it."
+
+"That's just what he would done," cried Mrs. Atwell.  "And I'll give him
+such a goin' ova, for his teasin', as he ain't had in one while.  He just
+said it to tease.  What you goin' to say to Mrs. Milray?"
+
+"Oh, tell her I'm not a bit well, Mrs. Atwell!  My head does ache,
+truly."
+
+"Why, listen," said Mrs. Atwell, recklessly.  "If you believe he done it
+--and he no business to--why don't you just go to the dance, in 'em, and
+then give 'em back to him after it's ova?  It would suv him right."
+
+Clementina listened for a moment of temptation, and then shook her head.
+"It wouldn't do, Mrs. Atwell; you know it wouldn't," she said, and Mrs.
+Atwell had too little faith in her suggestion to make it prevail.  She
+went away to carry Clementina's message to Mrs. Milray, and her task was
+greatly eased by the increasing difficulty Mrs. Milray had begun to find,
+since the way was perfectly smoothed for her, in imagining the management
+of Clementina at the dance: neither child nor woman, neither servant nor
+lady, how was she to be carried successfully through it, without sorrow
+to herself or offence to others?  In proportion to the relief she felt,
+Mrs. Milray protested her irreconcilable grief; but when the simpler Mrs.
+Atwell proposed her going and reasoning with Clementina, she said, No,
+no; better let her alone, if she felt as she did; and perhaps after all
+she was right.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+Clementina listened to the music of the dance, till the last note was
+played; and she heard the gay shouts and laughter of the dancers as they
+issued from the ball room and began to disperse about the halls and
+verandas, and presently to call good night to one another.  Then she
+lighted her lamp, and put the slippers back into the box and wrapped it
+up in the nice paper it had come in, and tied it with the notched ribbon.
+She thought how she had meant to put the slippers away so, after the
+dance, when she had danced her fill in them, and how differently she was
+doing it all now.  She wrote the clerk's .name on the parcel, and then
+she took the box, and descended to the office with it.  There seemed to
+be nobody there, but at the noise of her step Fane came round the case of
+letter-boxes, and advanced to meet her at the long desk.
+
+"What's wanted, Miss Claxon?" he asked, with his hopeless respectfulness.
+"Anything I can do for you?"
+
+She did not answer, but looked him solemnly in the eyes and laid the
+parcel down on the open register, and then went out.
+
+He looked at the address on the parcel, and when he untied it, the box
+fell open and the shoes fell out of it, as they had with Clementina.  He
+ran with them behind the letter-box frame, and held them up before
+Gregory, who was seated there on the stool he usually occupied, gloomily
+nursing his knee.
+
+"What do you suppose this means, Frank?"
+
+Gregory looked at the shoes frowningly.  "They're the slippers she got
+to-day.  She thinks you sent them to her."
+
+"And she wouldn't have them because she thought I sent them!  As sure as
+I'm standing here, I never did it," said the clerk, solemnly.
+
+"I know it," said Gregory.  "I sent them."
+
+"You!"
+
+"What's so wonderful?"  Gregory retorted.  "I saw that she wanted them
+that day when the shoe peddler was here.  I could see it, and you could."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I went across into the woods, and the man overtook me with his wagon.  I
+was tempted, and I bought the slippers of him.  I wanted to give them to
+her then, but I resisted, and I thought I should never give them.  To-
+day, when I heard that she was going to that dance, I sent them to her
+anonymously.  That's all there is about it."
+
+The clerk had a moment of bitterness.  "If she'd known it was you, she
+wouldn't have given them back."
+
+"That's to be seen.  I shall tell her, now.  I never meant her to know,
+but she must, because she's doing you wrong in her ignorance."
+
+Gregory was silent, and Fane was trying to measure the extent of his own
+suffering, and to get the whole bearing of the incident in his mind.  In
+the end his attempt was a failure.  He asked Gregory, "And do you think
+you've done just right by me?"
+
+"I've done right by nobody," said Gregory, "not even by myself; and I can
+see that it was my own pleasure I had in mind.  I must tell her the
+truth, and then I must leave this place."
+
+"I suppose you want I should keep it quiet," said Fane.
+
+"I don't ask anything of you."
+
+"And she wouldn't," said Fane, after reflection.  "But I know she'd be
+glad of it, and I sha'n't say anything.  Of course, she never can care
+for me; and--there's my hand with my word, if you want it."  Gregory
+silently took the hand stretched toward him and Fane added: "All I'll ask
+is that you'll tell her I wouldn't have presumed to send her the shoes.
+She wouldn't be mad at you for it."
+
+Gregory took the box, and after some efforts to speak, he went away.  It
+was an old trouble, an old error, an old folly; he had yielded to impulse
+at every step, and at every step he had sinned against another or against
+himself.  What pain he had now given the simple soul of Fane; what pain
+he had given that poor child who had so mistaken and punished the simple
+soul!  With Fane it was over now, but with Clementina the worst was
+perhaps to come yet.  He could not hope to see the girl before morning,
+and then, what should he say to her?  At sight of a lamp burning in Mrs.
+Atwell's room, which was on a level with the veranda where he was
+walking, it came to him that first of all he ought to go to her, and
+confess the whole affair; if her husband were with her, he ought to
+confess before him; they were there in the place of the child's father
+and mother, and it was due to them.  As he pressed rapidly toward the
+light he framed in his thought the things he should say, and he did not
+notice, as he turned to enter the private hallway leading to Mrs.
+Atwell's apartment, a figure at the door.  It shrank back from his
+contact, and he recognized Clementina.  His purpose instantly changed,
+and he said, "Is that you, Miss Claxon?  I want to speak with you.  Will
+you come a moment where I can?"
+
+"I--I don't know as I'd betta," she faltered.  But she saw the box under
+his arm, and she thought that he wished to speak to her about that, and
+she wanted to hear what he would say.  She had been waiting at the door
+there, because she could not bear to go to her room without having
+something more happen.
+
+"You needn't be afraid.  I shall not keep you.  Come with me a moment.
+There is something I must tell you at once.  You have made a mistake.
+And it is my fault.  Come!"
+
+Clementina stepped out into the moonlight with him, and they walked
+across the grass that sloped between the hotel and the river.  There were
+still people about, late smokers singly, and in groups along the piazzas,
+and young couples, like themselves, strolling in the dry air, under the
+pure sky.
+
+Gregory made several failures in trying to begin, before he said: "I have
+to tell you that you are mistaken about Mr. Fane.  I was there behind the
+letter boxes when you came in, and I know that you left these shoes
+because you thought he sent them to you.  He didn't send them."
+Clementina did not say anything, and Gregory was forced to ask: "Do you
+wish to know who sent them?  I won't tell you unless you do wish it."
+
+"I think I ought to know," she said, and she asked, "Don't you?"
+
+"Yes; for you must blame some one else now, for what you thought Fane
+did.  I sent them to you."
+
+Clementina's heart gave a leap in her breast, and she could not say
+anything.  He went on.
+
+"I saw that you wanted them that day, and when the peddler happened to
+overtake me in the woods where I was walking, after I left you, I acted
+on a sudden impulse, and I bought them for you.  I meant to send them to
+you anonymously, then.  I had committed one error in acting upon impulse-
+my rashness is my besetting sin--and I wished to add a species of deceit
+to that.  But I was kept from it until-to-day.  I hoped you would like to
+wear them to the dance to-night, and I put them in the post-office for
+you myself.  Mr. Fane didn't know anything about it.  That is all.  I am
+to blame, and no one else."
+
+He waited for her to speak, but Clementina could only say, "I don't know
+what to say."
+
+"You can't say anything that would be punishment enough for me.  I have
+acted foolishly, cruelly."
+
+Clementina did not think so.  She was not indignant, as she was when she
+thought Fane had taken this liberty with her, but if Mr. Gregory thought
+it was so very bad, it must be something much more serious than she had
+imagined.  She said, "I don't see why you wanted to do it," hoping that
+he would be able to tell her something that would make his behavior seem
+less dreadful than he appeared to think it was.
+
+"There is only one thing that could justify it, and that is something
+that I cannot justify."  It was very mysterious, but youth loves mystery,
+and Clementina was very young.  "I did it," said Gregory solemnly, and he
+felt that now he was acting from no impulse, but from a wisely considered
+decision which he might not fail in without culpability, "because I love
+you."
+
+"Oh!" said Clementina, and she started away from him.
+
+"I knew that it would make me detestable!" he cried, bitterly.  "I had to
+tell you, to explain what I did.  I couldn't help doing it.  But now if
+you can forget it, and never think of me again, I can go away, and try to
+atone for it somehow.  I shall be guided."
+
+Clementina did not know why she ought to feel affronted or injured by
+what he had said to her; but if Mr. Gregory thought it was wrong for him
+to have spoken so, it must be wrong.  She did not wish him to feel badly,
+even if he had done wrong, but she had to take his view of what he had
+done.  "Why, suttainly, Mr. Gregory," she answered.  "You mustn't mind
+it."
+
+"But I do mind it.  I have been very, very selfish, very thoughtless.  We
+are both too young.  I can't ask you to wait for me till I could marry"--
+
+The word really frightened Clementina.  She said, "I don't believe I
+betta promise."
+
+"Oh, I know it!"  said Gregory.  "I am going away from here.  I am going
+to-morrow as soon as I can arrange--as soon as I can get away.  Good-
+night--I"--Clementina in her agitation put her hands up to her face.
+"Oh, don't cry--I can't bear to have you cry."
+
+She took down her hands.  "I'm not crying!  But I wish I had neva seen
+those slippas."
+
+They had come to the bank of the river, whose current quivered at that
+point in a scaly ripple in the moonlight.  At her words Gregory suddenly
+pulled the box from under his arm, and flung it into the stream as far as
+he could.  It caught upon a shallow of the ripple, hung there a moment,
+then loosed itself, and swam swiftly down the stream.
+
+"Oh!" Clementina moaned.
+
+"Do you want them back?"  he demanded.  "I will go in for them!"
+
+"No, no!  No.  But it seemed such a--waste!"
+
+"Yes, that is a sin, too."  They climbed silently to the hotel.  At Mrs.
+Atwell's door, he spoke.  "Try to forget what I said, and forgive me, if
+you can."
+
+"Yes--yes, I will, Mr. Gregory.  You mustn't think of it any moa."
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+Clementina did not sleep till well toward morning, and she was still
+sleeping when Mrs. Atwell knocked and called in to her that her brother
+Jim wanted to see her.  She hurried down, and in the confusion of mind
+left over from the night before she cooed sweetly at Jim as if he had
+been Mr. Gregory, "What is it, Jim?  What do you want me for?"
+
+The boy answered with the disgust a sister's company manners always rouse
+in a brother.  "Motha wants you.  Says she's wo'ked down, and she wants
+you to come and help."  Then he went his way.
+
+Mrs. Atwell was used to having help snatched from her by their families
+at a moment's notice.  "I presume you've got to go, Clem," she said.
+
+"Oh, yes, I've got to go," Clementina assented, with a note of relief
+which mystified Mrs. Atwell.
+
+"You tied readin' to Mr. Milray?"
+
+"Oh, no'm-no, I mean.  But I guess I betta go home.  I guess I've been
+away long enough."
+
+"Well, you're a good gul, Clem.  I presume your motha's got a right to
+have you home if she wants you."  Clementina said nothing to this, but
+turned briskly, and started upstairs toward her room again.  The landlady
+called after her, "Shall you speak to Mis' Milray, or do you want I
+should?"
+
+Clementina looked back at her over her shoulder to warble, "Why, if you
+would, Mrs. Atwell," and kept on to her room.
+
+Mrs. Milray was not wholly sorry to have her go; she was going herself
+very soon, and Clementina's earlier departure simplified the question of
+getting rid of her; but she overwhelmed her with reproaches which
+Clementina received with such sweet sincerity that another than Mrs.
+Milray might have blamed herself for having abused her ingenuousness.
+
+The Atwells could very well have let the girl walk home, but they sent
+her in a buckboard, with one of the stablemen to drive her.  The landlord
+put her neat bundle under the seat of the buckboard with his own hand.
+There was something in the child's bearing, her dignity and her
+amiability, which made people offer her, half in fun, and half in
+earnest, the deference paid to age and state.
+
+She did not know whether Gregory would try to see her before she went.
+She thought he must have known she was going, but since he neither came
+to take leave of her, nor sent her any message, she decided that she had
+not expected him to do so.  About the third week of September she heard
+that he had left Middlemount and gone back to college.
+
+She kept at her work in the house and helped her mother, and looked after
+the little ones; she followed her father in the woods, in his quest of
+stuff for walking sticks, and advised with both concerning the taste of
+summer folks in dress and in canes.  The winter came, and she read many
+books in its long leisure, mostly novels, out of the rector's library.
+He had a whole set of Miss Edgeworth, and nearly all of Miss Austen and
+Miss Gurney, and he gave of them to Clementina, as the best thing for her
+mind as well as her morals; he believed nothing could be better for any
+one than these old English novels, which he had nearly forgotten in their
+details.  She colored the faded English life of the stories afresh from
+her Yankee circumstance; and it seemed the consensus of their testimony
+that she had really been made love to, and not so very much too soon, at
+her age of sixteen, for most of their heroines were not much older.  The
+terms of Gregory's declaration and of its withdrawal were mystifying, but
+not more mystifying than many such things, and from what happened in the
+novels she read, the affair might be trusted to come out all right of
+itself in time.  She was rather thoughtfuller for it, and once her mother
+asked her what was the matter with her.  "Oh, I guess I'm getting old,
+motha," she said, and turned the question off.  She would not have minded
+telling her mother about Gregory, but it would not have been the custom;
+and her mother would have worried, and would have blamed him.  Clementina
+could have more easily trusted her father with the case, but so far as
+she knew fathers never were trusted with anything of the kind.  She would
+have been willing that accident should bring it to the knowledge of Mrs.
+Richling; but the moment never came when she could voluntarily confide in
+her, though she was a great deal with her that winter.  She was Mrs.
+Richling's lieutenant in the social affairs of the parish, which the
+rector's wife took under her care.  She helped her get up entertainments
+of the kind that could be given in the church parlor, and they managed
+together some dances which had to be exiled to the town hall.  They
+contrived to make the young people of the village feel that they were
+having a gay time, and Clementina did not herself feel that it was a dull
+one.  She taught them some of the new steps and figures which the help
+used to pick up from the summer folks at the Middlemount, and practise
+together; she liked doing that; her mother said the child would rather
+dance than eat, any time.  She was never sad, but so much dignity got
+into her sweetness that the rector now and then complained of feeling put
+down by her.
+
+She did not know whether she expected Gregory to write to her or not; but
+when no letters came she decided that she had not expected them.  She
+wondered if he would come back to the Middlemount the next summer; but
+when the summer came, she heard that they had another student in his
+place.  She heard that they had a new clerk, and that the boarders were
+not so pleasant.  Another year passed, and towards the end of the season
+Mrs. Atwell wished her to come and help her again, and Clementina went
+over to the hotel to soften her refusal.  She explained that her mother
+had so much sewing now that she could not spare her; and Mrs. Atwell
+said: Well, that was right, and that she must be the greatest kind of
+dependence for her mother.  "You ah' going on seventeen this year, ain't
+you?"
+
+"I was nineteen the last day of August," said Clementina, and Mrs. Atwell
+sighed, and said, How the time did fly.
+
+It was the second week of September, but Mrs. Atwell said they were going
+to keep the house open till the middle of October, if they could, for the
+autumnal foliage, which there was getting to be quite a class of custom
+for.
+
+"I presume you knew Mr. Landa was dead," she added, and at Clementina's
+look of astonishment, she said with a natural satisfaction, "Mm! died the
+thutteenth day of August.  I presumed somehow you'd know it, though you
+didn't see a great deal of 'em, come to think of it.  I guess he was a
+good man; too good for her, I guess," she concluded, in the New England
+necessity of blaming some one.  "She sent us the papah."
+
+There was an early frost; and people said there was going to be a hard
+winter, but it was not this that made Clementina's father set to work
+finishing his house.  His turning business was well started, now, and he
+had got together money enough to pay for the work.  He had lately
+enlarged the scope of his industry by turning gate-posts and urns for the
+tops of them, which had become very popular, for the front yards of the
+farm and village houses in a wide stretch of country.  They sold more
+steadily than the smaller wares, the cups, and tops, and little vases and
+platters which had once been the output of his lathe; after the first
+season the interest of the summer folks in these fell off; but the gate
+posts and the urns appealed to a lasting taste in the natives.
+
+Claxon wished to put the finishing touches on the house himself, and he
+was willing to suspend more profitable labors to do so.  After some
+attempts at plastering he was forced to leave that to the plasterers, but
+he managed the clap-boarding, with Clementina to hand him boards and
+nails, and to keep him supplied with the hammer he was apt to drop at
+critical moments.  They talked pretty constantly at their labors, and in
+their leisure, which they spent on the brown needles under the pines at
+the side of the house.  Sometimes the hammering or the talking would be
+interrupted by a voice calling, from a passing vehicle in the hidden
+roadway, something about urns.  Claxon would answer, without troubling
+himself to verify the inquirer; or moving from his place, that he would
+get round to them, and then would hammer on, or talk on with Clementina.
+
+One day in October a carriage drove up to the door, after the work on the
+house had been carried as far as Claxon's mood and money allowed, and he
+and Clementina were picking up the litter of his carpentering.  He had
+replaced the block of wood which once served at the front door by some
+steps under an arbor of rustic work; but this was still so novel that the
+younger children had not outgrown their pride in it and were playing at
+house-keeping there.  Clementina ran around to the back door and out
+through the front entry in time to save the visitor and the children from
+the misunderstanding they began to fall into, and met her with a smile of
+hospitable brilliancy, and a recognition full of compassionate welcome.
+
+Mrs. Lander gave way to her tears as she broke out, "Oh, it ain't the
+way it was the last time I was he'a!  You hea'd that he--that Mr. Landa"--
+
+"Mrs. Atwell told me," said Clementina.  "Won't you come in, and sit
+down?"
+
+"Why, yes."  Mrs. Lander pushed in through the narrow door of what was to
+be the parlor.  Her crapes swept about her and exhaled a strong scent of
+their dyes.  Her veil softened her heavy face; but she had not grown
+thinner in her bereavement.
+
+"I just got to the Middlemount last night," she said, "and I wanted to
+see you and your payrents, both, Miss Claxon.  It doos bring him back so!
+You won't neva know how much he thought of you, and you'll all think I'm
+crazy.  I wouldn't come as long as he was with me, and now I have to come
+without him; I held out ag'inst him as long as I had him to hold out
+ag'inst.  Not that he was eva one to push, and I don't know as he so much
+as spoke of it, afta we left the hotel two yea's ago; but I presume it
+wa'n't out of his mind a single minute.  Time and time again I'd say to
+him, 'Now, Albe't, do you feel about it just the way you done?' and he'd
+say, 'I ha'r't had any call to charge my mind about it,' and then I'd
+begin tryin' to ahgue him out of it, and keep a hectorin', till he'd say,
+'Well, I'm not askin' you to do it,' and that's all I could get out of
+him.  But I see all the while 't he wanted me to do it, whateva he asked,
+and now I've got to do it when it can't give him any pleasure."  Mrs.
+Lander put up her black-bordered handkerchief and sobbed into it, and
+Clementina waited till her grief had spent itself; then she gave her a
+fan, and Mrs. Lander gratefully cooled her hot wet face.  The children
+had found the noises of her affliction and the turbid tones of her
+monologue annoying, and had gone off to play in the woods; Claxon kept
+incuriously about the work that Clementina had left him to; his wife
+maintained the confidence which she always felt in Clementina's ability
+to treat with the world when it presented itself, and though she was
+curious enough, she did not offer to interrupt the girl's interview with
+Mrs. Lander; Clementina would know how to behave.
+
+Mrs. Lander, when she had refreshed herself with the fan, seemed to get a
+fresh grip of her theme, and she told Clementina all abort Mr. Lander's
+last sickness.  It had been so short that it gave her no time to try the
+climate of Colorado upon him, which she now felt sure would have brought
+him right up; and she had remembered, when too late, to give him a liver-
+medicine of her own, though it did not appear that it was his liver which
+was affected; that was the strange part of it.  But, brief as his
+sickness was, he had felt that it was to be his last, and had solemnly
+talked over her future with her, which he seemed to think would be
+lonely.  He had not named Clementina, but Mrs. Lander had known well
+enough what he meant; and now she wished to ask her, and her father and
+mother, how they would all like Clementina to come and spend the winter
+with her at Boston first, and then further South, and wherever she should
+happen to go.  She apologized for not having come sooner upon this
+errand; she had resolved upon it as soon as Mr. Lander was gone, but she
+had been sick herself, and had only just now got out of bed.
+
+Clementina was too young to feel the pathos of the case fully, or perhaps
+even to follow the tortuous course of Mrs. Lander's motives, but she was
+moved by her grief; and she could not help a thrill of pleasure in the
+vague splendor of the future outlined by Mrs. Lander's proposal.  For a
+time she had thought that Mrs. Milray was going to ask her to visit her
+in New York; Mrs. Milray had thrown out a hint of something of the kind
+at parting, but that was the last of it; and now she at once made up her
+mind that she would like to go with Mrs. Lander, while discreetly saying
+that she would ask her father and mother to come and talk with her.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+Her parents objected to leaving their work; each suggested that the other
+had better go; but they both came at Clementina's urgence.  Her father
+laughed and her mother frowned when she told them what Mrs. Lander
+wanted, from the same misgiving of her sanity.  They partly abandoned
+this theory for a conviction of Mrs. Lander's mere folly when she began
+to talk, and this slowly yielded to the perception that she had some
+streaks of sense.  It was sense in the first place to want to have
+Clementina with her, and though it might not be sense to suppose that
+they would be anxious to let her go, they did not find so much want of it
+as Mrs. Lander talked on.  It was one of her necessities to talk away her
+emotions before arriving at her ideas, which were often found in a
+tangle, but were not without a certain propriety.  She was now, after her
+interview with Clementina, in the immediate presence of these, and it was
+her ideas that she began to produce for the girl's father and mother.
+She said, frankly, that she had more money than she knew what to do with,
+and they must not think she supposed she was doing a favor, for she was
+really asking one.
+
+She was alone in the world, without near connections of her own, or
+relatives of her husband's, and it would be a mercy if they could let
+their daughter come and visit her; she would not call it more than a
+visit; that would be the best thing on both sides; she told of her great
+fancy for Clementina the first time she saw her, and of her husband's
+wish that she would come and visit with them then for the winter.  As for
+that money she had tried to make the child take, she presumed that they
+knew about it, and she wished to say that she did it because she was
+afraid Mr. Lander had said so much about the sewing, that they would be
+disappointed.  She gave way to her tears at the recollection, and
+confessed that she wanted the child to have the money anyway.  She ended
+by asking Mrs. Claxon if she would please to let her have a drink of
+water; and she looked about the room, and said that they had got it
+finished up a great deal, now, had not they?  She made other remarks upon
+it, so apt that Mrs. Claxon gave her a sort of permissive invitation to
+look about the whole lower floor, ending with the kitchen.
+
+Mrs. Lander sat down there while Mrs. Claxon drew from the pipes a glass
+of water, which she proudly explained was pumped all over the house by
+the wind mill that supplied the power for her husband's turning lathes.
+
+"Well, I wish mah husband could have tasted that wata," said Mrs. Lander,
+as if reminded of husbands by the word, and by the action of putting down
+the glass.  "He was always such a great hand for good, cold wata.  My!
+He'd 'a liked youa kitchen, Mrs. Claxon.  He always was such a home-body,
+and he did get so ti'ed of hotels.  For all he had such an appearance,
+when you see him, of bein'--well!--stiff and proud, he was fah moa common
+in his tastes--I don't mean common, exactly, eitha--than what I was; and
+many a time when we'd be drivin' through the country, and we'd pass some
+o' them long-strung-out houses, don't you know, with the kitchen next to
+the wood shed, and then an ahchway befoa you get to the stable, Mr. Landa
+he'd get out, and make an urrand, just so's to look in at the kitchen
+dooa; he said it made him think of his own motha's kitchen.  We was both
+brought up in the country, that's a fact, and I guess if the truth was
+known we both expected to settle down and die thea, some time; but now
+he's gone, and I don't know what'll become o' me, and sometimes I don't
+much care.  I guess if Mr. Landa'd 'a seen youa kitchen, it wouldn't 'a'
+been so easy to git him out of it; and I do believe if he's livin'
+anywhe' now he takes as much comfo't in my settin' here as what I do.
+I presume I shall settle down somewhe's before a great while, and if you
+could make up youa mind to let your daughta come to me for a little visit
+till spring, you couldn't do a thing that 'd please Mr. Landa moa."
+
+Mrs. Claxon said that she would talk it over with the child's father; and
+then Mrs. Lander pressed her to let her take Clementina back to the
+Middlemount with her for supper, if they wouldn't let her stay the night.
+After Clementina had driven away, Mrs. Claxon accused herself to her
+husband of being the greatest fool in the State, but he said that the
+carriage was one of the Middlemount rigs, and he guessed it was all
+right.  He could see that Clem was wild to go, and he didn't see why she
+shouldn't.
+
+"Well, I do, then," his wife retorted.  "We don't know anything about the
+woman, or who she is."
+
+"I guess no harm'll come to Clem for one night," said Claxon, and Mrs.
+Claxon was forced back upon the larger question for the maintenance of
+her anxiety.  She asked what he was going to do about letting Clem go the
+whole winter with a perfect stranger; and he answered that he had not got
+round to that yet, and that there were a good many things to be thought
+of first.  He got round to see the rector before dark, and in the light
+of his larger horizon, was better able to orient Mrs. Lander and her
+motives than he had been before.
+
+When she came back with the girl the next morning, she had thought of
+something in the nature of credentials.  It was the letter from her
+church in Boston, which she took whenever she left home, so that if she
+wished she might unite with the church in any place where she happened to
+be stopping.  It did not make a great impression upon the Klaxons, who
+were of no religion, though they allowed their children to go to the
+Episcopal church and Sunday-school, and always meant to go themselves.
+They said they would like to talk the matter over with the rector, if
+Mrs. Lander did not object; she offered to send her carriage for him, and
+the rector was brought at once.
+
+He was one of those men who have, in the breaking down of the old
+Puritanical faith, and the dying out of the later Unitarian rationalism,
+advanced and established the Anglican church so notably in the New
+England hill-country, by a wise conformity to the necessities and
+exactions of the native temperament.  On the ecclesiastical side he was
+conscientiously uncompromising, but personally he was as simple-mannered
+as he was simple-hearted.  He was a tall lean man in rusty black, with a
+clerical waistcoat that buttoned high, and scholarly glasses, but with a
+belated straw hat that had counted more than one summer, and a farmer's
+tan on his face and hands.  He pronounced the church-letter, though quite
+outside of his own church, a document of the highest respectability, and
+he listened with patient deference to the autobiography which Mrs. Lander
+poured out upon him, and her identifications, through reference to this
+or that person in Boston whom he knew either at first or second hand.
+He had not to pronounce upon her syntax, or her social quality; it was
+enough for him, in behalf of the Claxons, to find her what she professed
+to be.
+
+"You must think," he said, laughing, "that we are over-particular; but
+the fact is that we value Clementina rather highly, and we wish to be
+sure that your hospitable offer will be for her real good."
+
+"Of cou'se," said Mrs. Lander.  "I should be just so myself abort her."
+
+"I don't know," he continued, "that I've ever said how much we think of
+her, Mrs. Richling and I, but this seems a good opportunity, as she is
+not present.
+
+"She is not perfect, but she comes as near being a thoroughly good girl as
+she can without knowing it.  She has a great deal of common-sense, and we
+all want her to have the best chance."
+
+"Well, that's just the way I feel about her, and that's just what I mean
+to give her," said Mrs. Lander.
+
+"I am not sure that I make myself quite clear," said the rector.
+"I mean, a chance to prove how useful and helpful she can be.  Do you
+think you can make life hard for her occasionally?  Can you be peevish
+and exacting, and unreasonable?  Can you do something to make her value
+superfluity and luxury at their true worth?"
+
+Mrs. Lander looked a little alarmed and a little offended.  "I don't know
+as I undastand what you mean, exactly," she said, frowning rather with
+perplexity than resentment.  "But the child sha'n't have a care, and her
+own motha couldn't be betta to her than me.  There a'n't anything money
+can buy that she sha'n't have, if she wants it, and all I'll ask of her
+is 't she'll enjoy herself as much as she knows how.  I want her with me
+because I should love to have her round; and we did from the very fust
+minute she spoke, Mr. Lander and me, both.  She shall have her own money,
+and spend it for anything she pleases, and she needn't do a stitch o'
+work from mohnin' till night.  But if you're afraid I shall put upon her"
+
+"No, no," said the rector, and he threw back his head with a laugh.
+
+"When it was all arranged, a few days later, after the verification of
+certain of Mrs. Lander's references by letters to Boston, he said to
+Clementina's father and mother, "There's only one danger, now, and that
+is that she will spoil Clementina; but there's a reasonable hope that she
+won't know how."  He found the Claxons struggling with a fresh misgiving,
+which Claxon expressed.  "The way I look at it is like this.  I don't
+want that woman should eva think Clem was after her money.  On the face
+of it there a'n't very much to her that would make anybody think but what
+we was after it; and I should want it pootty well undastood that we
+wa'n't that kind.  But I don't seem to see any way of tellin' her."
+
+"No," said the rector, with a sympathetic twinkle, "that would be
+difficult."
+
+"It's plain to be seen," Mrs. Claxon interposed, "that she thinks a good
+deal of her money; and I d' know but what she'd think she was doin' Clem
+most too much of a favor anyway.  If it can't be a puffectly even thing,
+all round, I d' know as I should want it to be at all."
+
+"You're quite right, Mrs. Claxon, quite right.  But I believe Mrs.
+Lander may be safely left to look out for her own interests.  After all,
+she has merely asked Clementina to pass the winter with her.  It will be
+a good opportunity for her to see something of the world; and perhaps it
+may bring her the chance of placing herself in life.  We have got to
+consider these things with reference to a young girl."
+
+Mrs. Claxon said, "Of cou'se," but Claxon did not assent so readily.
+
+"I don't feel as if I should want Clem to look at it in that light.  If
+the chance don't come to her, I don't want she should go huntin' round
+for it."
+
+"I thoroughly agree with you," said the rector.  "But I was thinking that
+there was not only no chance worthy of her in Middlemount, but there is
+no chance at all."
+
+"I guess that's so," Claxon owned with a laugh.  "Well, I guess we can
+leave it to Clem to do what's right and proper everyway.  As you say,
+she's got lots of sense."
+
+From that moment he emptied his mind of care concerning the matter; but
+husband and wife are never both quite free of care on the same point of
+common interest, and Mrs. Claxon assumed more and more of the anxieties
+which he had abandoned.  She fretted under the load, and expressed an
+exasperated tenderness for Clementina when the girl seemed forgetful of
+any of the little steps to be taken before the great one in getting her
+clothes ready for leaving home.  She said finally that she presumed they
+were doing a wild thing, and that it looked crazier and crazier the more
+she thought of it; but all was, if Clem didn't like, she could come home.
+By this time her husband was in something of that insensate eagerness to
+have the affair over that people feel in a house where there is a
+funeral.
+
+At the station, when Clementina started for Boston with Mrs. Lander, her
+father and mother, with the rector and his wife, came to see her off.
+Other friends mistakenly made themselves of the party, and kept her
+talking vacuities when her heart was full, till the train drew up.  Her
+father went with her into the parlor car, where the porter of the
+Middlemount House set down Mrs. Lander's hand baggage and took the final
+fee she thrust upon him.  When Claxon came out he was not so satisfactory
+about the car as he might have been to his wife, who had never been
+inside a parlor car, and who had remained proudly in the background,
+where she could not see into it from the outside.  He said that he had
+felt so bad about Clem that he did not notice what the car was like.
+But he was able to report that she looked as well as any of the folks in
+it, and that, if there were any better dressed, he did not see them.  He
+owned that she cried some, when he said good-bye to her.
+
+"I guess," said his wife, grimly, "we're a passel o' fools to let her go.
+Even if she don't like, the'a, with that crazy-head, she won't be the
+same Clem when she comes back."
+
+They were too heavy-hearted to dispute much, and were mostly silent as
+they drove home behind Claxon's self-broken colt: a creature that had
+taken voluntarily to harness almost from its birth, and was an example to
+its kind in sobriety and industry.
+
+The children ran out from the house to meet them, with a story of having
+seen Clem at a point in the woods where the train always slowed up before
+a crossing, and where they had all gone to wait for her.  She had seen
+them through the car-window, and had come out on the car platform, and
+waved her handkerchief, as she passed, and called something to them,
+but they could not hear what it was, they were all cheering so.
+
+At this their mother broke down, and went crying into the house.  Not to
+have had the last words of the child whom she should never see the same
+again if she ever saw her at all, was more, she said, than heart could
+bear.
+
+The rector's wife arrived home with her husband in a mood of mounting
+hopefulness, which soared to tops commanding a view of perhaps more of
+this world's kingdoms than a clergyman's wife ought ever to see, even for
+another.  She decided that Clementina's chances of making a splendid
+match, somewhere, were about of the nature of certainties, and she
+contended that she would adorn any station, with experience, and with her
+native tact, especially if it were a very high station in Europe, where
+Mrs. Lander would now be sure to take her.  If she did not take her to
+Europe, however, she would be sure to leave her all her money, and this
+would serve the same end, though more indirectly.
+
+Mr. Richling scoffed at this ideal of Clementina's future with a contempt
+which was as little becoming to his cloth.  He made his wife reflect
+that, with all her inherent grace and charm, Clementina was an ignorant
+little country girl, who had neither the hardness of heart nor the
+greediness of soul, which gets people on in the world, and repair for
+them the disadvantages of birth and education.  He represented that even
+if favorable chances for success in society showed themselves to the
+girl, the intense and inexpugnable vulgarity of Mrs. Lander would spoil
+them; and he was glad of this, he said, for he believed that the best
+thing which could happen to the child would be to come home as sweet and
+good as she had gone away; he added this was what they ought both to pray
+for.
+
+His wife admitted this, but she retorted by asking if he thought such a
+thing was possible, and he was obliged to own that it was not possible.
+He marred the effect of his concession by subjoining that it was no more
+possible than her making a brilliant and triumphant social figure in
+society, either at home or in Europe.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+So far from embarking at once for Europe, Mrs. Lander went to that hotel
+in a suburb of Boston, where she had the habit of passing the late autumn
+months, in order to fortify herself for the climate of the early winter
+months in the city.  She was a little puzzled how to provide for
+Clementina, with respect to herself, but she decided that the best thing
+would be to have her sleep in a room opening out of her own, with a
+folding bed in it, so that it could be used as a sort of parlor for both
+of them during the day, and be within easy reach, for conversation, at
+all times.
+
+On her part, Clementina began by looking after Mrs. Lander's comforts,
+large and little, like a daughter, to her own conception and to that of
+Mrs. Lander, but to other eyes, like a servant.  Mrs. Lander shyly shrank
+from acquaintance among the other ladies, and in the absence of this, she
+could not introduce Clementina, who went down to an early breakfast
+alone, and sat apart with her at lunch and dinner, ministering to her in
+public as she did in private.  She ran back to their rooms to fetch her
+shawl, or her handkerchief, or whichever drops or powders she happened to
+be taking with her meals, and adjusted with closer care the hassock which
+the head waiter had officially placed at her feet.  They seldom sat in
+the parlor where the ladies met, after dinner; they talked only to each
+other; and there, as elsewhere, the girl kept her filial care of the old
+woman.  The question of her relation to Mrs. Lander became so pressing
+among several of the guests that, after Clementina had watched over the
+banisters, with throbbing heart and feet, a little dance one night which
+the other girls had got up among themselves, and had fled back to her
+room at the approach of one of the kindlier and bolder of them, the
+landlord felt forced to learn from Mrs. Lander how Miss Claxon was to be
+regarded.  He managed delicately, by saying he would give the Sunday
+paper she had ordered to her nurse, "Or, I beg your pardon," he added, as
+if he had made a mistake.  "Why, she a'n't my nuhse," Mrs. Lander
+explained, simply, neither annoyed nor amused; "she's just a young lady
+that's visiting me, as you may say," and this put an end to the misgiving
+among the ladies.  But it suggested something to Mrs. Lander, and a few
+days afterwards, when they came out from Boston where they had been
+shopping, and she had been lavishing a bewildering waste of gloves, hats,
+shoes, capes and gowns upon Clementina, she said, "I'll tell you what.
+We've got to have a maid."
+
+"A maid?" cried the girl.
+
+"It isn't me, or my things I want her for," said Mrs. Lander.  "It's you
+and these dresses of youas.  I presume you could look afta them, come to
+give youa mind to it; but I don't want to have you tied up to a lot of
+clothes; and I presume we should find her a comfo't in moa ways than one,
+both of us.  I don't know what we shall want her to do, exactly; but I
+guess she will, if she undastands her business, and I want you should go
+in with me, to-morror, and find one.  I'll speak to some of the ladies,
+and find out whe's the best place to go, and we'll get the best there
+is."
+
+A lady whom Mrs. Lander spoke to entered into the affair with zeal born
+of a lurking sense of the wrong she had helped do Clementina in the
+common doubt whether she was not herself Mrs. Lander's maid.  She offered
+to go into Boston with them to an intelligence office, where you could
+get nice girls of all kinds; but she ended by giving Mrs. Lander the
+address, and instructions as to what she was to require in a maid.  She
+was chiefly to get an English maid, if at all possible, for the
+qualifications would more or less naturally follow from her nationality.
+There proved to be no English maid, but there was a Swedish one who had
+received a rigid training in an English family living on the Continent,
+and had come immediately from that service to seek her first place in
+America.  The manager of the office pronounced her character, as set down
+in writing, faultless, and Mrs. Lander engaged her.  "You want to look
+afta this young lady," she said, indicating Clementina.  "I can look afta
+myself," but Ellida took charge of them both on the train out from Boston
+with prompt intelligence.
+
+"We got to get used to it, I guess," Mrs. Lander confided at the first
+chance of whispering to Clementina.
+
+Within a month after washing the faces and combing the hair of all her
+brothers and sisters who would suffer it at her hands, Clementina's own
+head was under the brush of a lady's maid, who was of as great a
+discreetness in her own way as Clementina herself.  She supplied the
+defects of Mrs. Lander's elementary habits by simply asking if she should
+get this thing and that thing for the toilet, without criticising its
+absence,--and then asking whether she should get the same things for her
+young lady.  She appeared to let Mrs. Lander decide between having her
+brushes in ivory or silver, but there was really no choice for her, and
+they came in silver.  She knew not only her own place, but the places of
+her two ladies, and she presently had them in such training that they
+were as proficient in what they might and might not do for themselves and
+for each other, as if making these distinctions were the custom of their
+lives.
+
+Their hearts would both have gone out to Ellida, but Ellida kept them at
+a distance with the smooth respectfulness of the iron hand in the glove
+of velvet; and Clementina first learned from her to imagine the
+impassable gulf between mistress and maid.
+
+At the end of her month she gave them, out of a clear sky, a week's
+warning.  She professed no grievance, and was not moved by Mrs. Lander's
+appeal to say what wages she wanted.  She would only say that she was
+going to take a place an Commonwealth Avenue, where a friend of hers was
+living, and when the week was up, she went, and left her late mistresses
+feeling rather blank.  "I presume we shall have to get anotha," said
+Mrs. Lander.
+
+"Oh, not right away!" Clementina pleaded.
+
+"Well, not right away," Mrs. Lander assented; and provisionally they each
+took the other into her keeping, and were much freer and happier
+together.
+
+Soon after Clementina was startled one morning, as she was going in to
+breakfast, by seeing Mr. Fane at the clerk's desk.  He did not see her;
+he was looking down at the hotel register, to compute the bill of a
+departing guest; but when she passed out she found him watching for her,
+with some letters.
+
+"I didn't know you were with us," he said, with his pensive smile, "till
+I found your letters here, addressed to Mrs. Lander's care; and then I
+put two and two together.  It only shows how small the world is, don't
+you think so?  I've just got back from my vacation; I prefer to take it
+in the fall of the year, because it's so much pleasanter to travel, then.
+I suppose you didn't know I was here?"
+
+"No, I didn't," said Clementina.  "I never dreamed of such a thing."
+
+"To be sure; why should you?" Fane reflected.  "I've been here ever since
+last spring.  But I'll say this, Miss Claxon, that if it's the least
+unpleasant to you, or the least disagreeable, or awakens any kind of
+associations"--
+
+"Oh, no!" Clementina protested, and Fane was spared the pain of saying
+what he would do if it were.
+
+He bowed, and she said sweetly, "It's pleasant to meet any one I've seen
+before.  I suppose you don't know how much it's changed at Middlemount
+since you we' e thea."  Fane answered blankly, while he felt in his
+breast pocket, Oh, he presumed so; and she added: "Ha'dly any of the same
+guests came back this summer, and they had more in July than they had in
+August, Mrs. Atwell said.  Mr. Mahtin, the chef, is gone, and newly all
+the help is different."
+
+Fane kept feeling in one pocket and then slapped himself over the other
+pockets.  "No," he said, "I haven't got it with me.  I must have left it
+in my room.  I just received a letter from Frank--Mr. Gregory, you know,
+I always call him Frank--and I thought I had it with me.  He was asking
+about Middlemount; and I wanted to read you what he said.  But I'll find
+it upstairs.  He's out of college, now, and he's begun his studies in the
+divinity school.  He's at Andover.  I don't know what to make of Frank,
+oftentimes," the clerk continued, confidentially.  "I tell him he's a
+kind of a survival, in religion; he's so aesthetic."  It seemed to Fane
+that he had not meant aesthetic, exactly, but he could not ask Clementina
+what the word was.  He went on to say, "He's a grand good fellow, Frank
+is, but he don't make enough allowance for human nature.  He's more like
+one of those old fashioned orthodox.  I go in for having a good time, so
+long as you don't do anybody else any hurt."
+
+He left her, and went to receive the commands of a lady who was leaning
+over the desk, and saying severely, "My mail, if you please," and
+Clementina could not wait for him to come back; she had to go to Mrs.
+Lander, and get her ready for breakfast; Ellida had taught Mrs. Lander a
+luxury of helplessness in which she persisted after the maid's help was
+withdrawn.
+
+Clementina went about the whole day with the wonder what Gregory had said
+about Middlemount filling her mind.  It must have had something to do
+with her; he could not have forgotten the words he had asked her to
+forget.  She remembered them now with a curiosity, which had no rancor in
+it, to know why he really took them back.  She had never blamed him, and
+she had outlived the hurt she had felt at not hearing from him.  But she
+had never lost the hope of hearing from him, or rather the expectation,
+and now she found that she was eager for his message; she decided that it
+must be something like a message, although it could not be anything
+direct.  No one else had come to his place in her fancy, and she was
+willing to try what they would think of each other now, to measure her
+own obligation to the past by a knowledge of his.  There was scarcely
+more than this in her heart when she allowed herself to drift near Fane's
+place that night, that he might speak to her, and tell her what Gregory
+had said.  But he had apparently forgotten about his letter, and only
+wished to talk about himself.  He wished to analyze himself, to tell her
+what sort of person he was.  He dealt impartially with the subject; he
+did not spare some faults of his; and after a week, he proposed a
+correspondence with her, in a letter of carefully studied spelling, as a
+means of mutual improvement as well as further acquaintance.
+
+It cost Clementina a good deal of trouble to answer him as she wished and
+not hurt his feelings.  She declined in terms she thought so cold that
+they must offend him beyond the point of speaking to her again; but he
+sought her out, as soon after as he could, and thanked her for her
+kindness, and begged her pardon.  He said he knew that she was a very
+busy person, with all the lessons she was taking, and that she had no
+time for carrying on a correspondence.  He regretted that he could not
+write French, because then the correspondence would have been good
+practice for her.  Clementina had begun taking French lessons, of a
+teacher who came out from Boston.  She lunched three times a week with
+her and Mrs. Lander, and spoke the language with Clementina, whose accent
+she praised for its purity; purity of accent was characteristic of all
+this lady's pupils; but what was really extraordinary in Mademoiselle
+Claxon was her sense of grammatical structure; she wrote the language
+even more perfectly than she spoke it; but beautifully, but wonderfully;
+her exercises were something marvellous.
+
+Mrs. Lander would have liked Clementina to take all the lessons that she
+heard any of the other young ladies in the hotel were taking.  One of
+them went in town every day, and studied drawing at an art-school, and
+she wanted Clementina to do that, too.  But Clementina would not do that;
+she had tried often enough at home, when her brother Jim was drawing, and
+her father was designing the patterns of his woodwork; she knew that she
+never could do it, and the time would be wasted.  She decided against
+piano lessons and singing lessons, too; she did not care for either, and
+she pleaded that it would be a waste to study them; but she suggested
+dancing lessons, and her gift for dancing won greater praise, and perhaps
+sincerer, than her accent won from Mademoiselle Blanc, though Mrs. Lander
+said that she would not have believed any one could be more
+complimentary.  She learned the new steps and figures in all the
+fashionable dances; she mastered some fancy dances, which society was
+then beginning to borrow from the stage; and she gave these before Mrs.
+Lander with a success which she felt herself.
+
+"I believe I could teach dancing," she said.
+
+"Well, you won't eve haf to, child," returned Mrs. Lander, with an eye on
+the side of the case that seldom escaped her.
+
+In spite of his wish to respect these preoccupations, Fane could not keep
+from offering Clementina attentions, which took the form of persecution
+when they changed from flowers for Mrs. Lander's table to letters for
+herself.  He apologized for his letters whenever he met her; but at last
+one of them came to her before breakfast with a special delivery stamp
+from Boston.  He had withdrawn to the city to write it, and he said that
+if she could not make him a favorable answer, he should not come back to
+Woodlake.
+
+She had to show this letter to Mrs. Lander, who asked: "You want he
+should come back?"
+
+"No, indeed!  I don't want eva to see him again."
+
+"Well, then, I guess you'll know how to tell him so."
+
+The girl went into her own room to write, and when she brought her answer
+to show it to Mrs. Lander she found her in frowning thought.  "I don't
+know but you'll have to go back and write it all over again, Clementina,"
+she said, "if you've told him not to come.  I've been thinkin', if you
+don't want to have anything to do with him, we betta go ouaselves."
+
+"Yes," answered Clementina, "that's what I've said."
+
+"You have?  Well, the witch is in it!  How came you to"--
+
+"I just wanted to talk with you about it.  But I thought maybe you'd like
+to go.  Or at least I should.  I should like to go home, Mrs. Landa."
+
+"Home!" retorted Mrs. Lander.  "The'e's plenty of places where you can be
+safe from the fella besides home, though I'll take you back the'a this
+minute if you say so.  But you needn't to feel wo'ked up about it."
+
+"Oh, I'm not," said Clementina, but with a gulp which betrayed her
+nervousness.
+
+"I did think," Mrs. Lander went on, "that I should go into the Vonndome,
+for December and January, but just as likely as not he'd come pesterin'
+the'a, too, and I wouldn't go, now, if you was to give me the whole city
+of Boston.  Why shouldn't we go to Florid?"
+
+When Mrs. Lander had once imagined the move, the nomadic impulse mounted
+irresistably in her.  She spoke of hotels in the South, where they could
+renew the summer, and she mapped out a campaign which she put into
+instant action so far as to advance upon New York.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+All in all to each other
+Chained to the restless pursuit of an ideal not his own
+Composed her features and her ideas to receive her visitor
+Going on of things had long ceased to bring pleasure
+He a'n't a do-nothin'; he's a do-everything
+Hopeful apathy in his face
+I'm moa used to havin' the things brought to me
+Inexhaustible flow of statement, conjecture and misgiving
+Kept her talking vacuities when her heart was full
+Led a life of public seclusion
+Luxury of helplessness
+New England necessity of blaming some one
+No object in life except to deprive it of all object
+Perverse reluctance to find out where they were
+Provisional reprehension of possible shiftlessness
+Scant sleep of an elderly man
+Seldom talked, but there came times when he would'nt even listen
+Thrown mainly upon the compassion of the chambermaids
+Tone was a snuffle expressive of deep-seated affliction
+Unaware that she was a selfish or foolish person
+Under a fire of conjecture and asseveration
+Weak in his double letters
+Wishes of a mistress who did not know what she wanted
+You've got a light-haired voice
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Ragged Lady, v1
+by William Dean Howells
+
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