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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Annie Kilburn, 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: Annie Kilburn
+       A Novel
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7502]
+This file was first posted on May 11, 2003
+Last Updated: February 25, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANNIE KILBURN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eric Eldred, William Flis, Charles Franks, and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ANNIE KILBURN
+
+A Novel
+
+By W. D. Howells
+
+
+Author of
+
+   “Indian Summer”
+    “The Rise of Silas Lapham”
+    “April Hopes” etc.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+After the death of Judge Kilburn his daughter came back to America. They
+had been eleven winters in Rome, always meaning to return, but staying on
+from year to year, as people do who have nothing definite to call them
+home. Toward the last Miss Kilburn tacitly gave up the expectation of
+getting her father away, though they both continued to say that they were
+going to take passage as soon as the weather was settled in the spring.
+At the date they had talked of for sailing he was lying in the Protestant
+cemetery, and she was trying to gather herself together, and adjust her
+life to his loss. This would have been easier with a younger person, for
+she had been her father's pet so long, and then had taken care of his
+helplessness with a devotion which was finally so motherly, that it was
+like losing at once a parent and a child when he died, and she remained
+with the habit of giving herself when there was no longer any one to
+receive the sacrifice. He had married late, and in her thirty-first year he
+was seventy-eight; but the disparity of their ages, increasing toward the
+end through his infirmities, had not loosened for her the ties of custom
+and affection that bound them; she had seen him grow more and more fitfully
+cognisant of what they had been to each other since her mother's death,
+while she grew the more tender and fond with him. People who came to
+condole with her seemed not to understand this, or else they thought it
+would help her to bear up if they treated her bereavement as a relief from
+hopeless anxiety. They were all surprised when she told them she still
+meant to go home.
+
+“Why, my dear,” said one old lady, who had been away from America twenty
+years, “_this_ is home! You've lived in this apartment longer now
+than the oldest inhabitant has lived in most American towns. What are you
+talking about? Do you mean that you are going back to Washington?”
+
+“Oh no. We were merely staying on in Washington from force of habit, after
+father gave up practice. I think we shall go back to the old homestead,
+where we used to spend our summers, ever since I can remember.”
+
+“And where is that?” the old lady asked, with the sharpness which people
+believe must somehow be good for a broken spirit.
+
+“It's in the interior of Massachusetts--you wouldn't know it: a place
+called Hatboro'.”
+
+“No, I certainly shouldn't,” said the old lady, with superiority. “Why
+Hatboro', of all the ridiculous reasons?”
+
+“It was one of the first places where they began to make straw hats; it was
+a nickname at first, and then they adopted it. The old name was Dorchester
+Farms. Father fought the change, but it was of no use; the people wouldn't
+have it Farms after the place began to grow; and by that time they had got
+used to Hatboro'. Besides, I don't see how it's any worse than Hatfield, in
+England.”
+
+“It's very American.”
+
+“Oh, it's American. We have Boxboro' too, you know, in Massachusetts.”
+
+“And you are going from Rome to Hatboro', Mass.,” said the old lady, trying
+to present the idea in the strongest light by abbreviating the name of the
+State.
+
+“Yes,” said Miss Kilburn. “It will be a change, but not so much of a change
+as you would think. It was father's wish to go back.”
+
+“Ah, my _dear_!” cried the old lady. “You're letting that weigh with
+you, I see. Don't do it! If it wasn't wise, don't you suppose that the last
+thing he could wish you to do would be to sacrifice yourself to a sick whim
+of his?”
+
+The kindness expressed in the words touched Annie Kilburn. She had a
+certain beauty of feature; she was near-sighted; but her eyes were brown
+and soft, her lips red and full; her dark hair grew low, and played in
+little wisps and rings on her temples, where her complexion was clearest;
+the bold contour of her face, with its decided chin and the rather large
+salient nose, was like her father's; it was this, probably, that gave an
+impression of strength, with a wistful qualification. She was at that time
+rather thin, and it could have been seen that she would be handsomer when
+her frame had rounded out in fulfilment of its generous design. She opened
+her lips to speak, but shut them again in an effort at self-control before
+she said--
+
+“But I really wish to do it. At this moment I would rather be in Hatboro'
+than in Rome.”
+
+“Oh, very well,” said the old lady, gathering herself up as one does from
+throwing away one's sympathy upon an unworthy object; “if you really
+_wish_ it--”
+
+“I know that it must seem preposterous and--and almost ungrateful that I
+should think of going back, when I might just as well stay. Why, I've a
+great many more friends here than I have there; I suppose I shall be almost
+a stranger when I get there, and there's no comparison in congeniality; and
+yet I feel that I must go back. I can't tell you why. But I have a longing;
+I feel that I must try to be of some use in the world--try to do some
+good--and in Hatboro' I think I shall know how.” She put on her glasses,
+and looked at the old lady as if she might attempt an explanation, but, as
+if a clearer vision of the veteran worldling discouraged her, she did not
+make the effort.
+
+“_Oh_!” said the old lady. “If you want to be of use, and do good--”
+ She stopped, as if then there were no more to be said by a sensible person.
+“And shall you be going soon?” she asked. The idea seemed to suggest her
+own departure, and she rose after speaking.
+
+“Just as soon as possible,” answered Miss Kilburn. Words take on a colour
+of something more than their explicit meaning from the mood in which they
+are spoken: Miss Kilburn had a sense of hurrying her visitor away, and the
+old lady had a sense of being turned out-of-doors, that the preparations
+for the homeward voyage might begin instantly.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+Many times after the preparations began, and many times after they were
+ended, Miss Kilburn faltered in doubt of her decision; and if there had
+been any will stronger than her own to oppose it, she might have reversed
+it, and stayed in Rome. All the way home there was a strain of misgiving
+in her satisfaction at doing what she believed to be for the best, and the
+first sight of her native land gave her a shock of emotion which was not
+unmixed joy. She felt forlorn among people who were coming home with all
+sorts of high expectations, while she only had high intentions.
+
+These dated back a good many years; in fact, they dated back to the time
+when the first flush of her unthinking girlhood was over, and she began
+to question herself as to the life she was living. It was a very pleasant
+life, ostensibly. Her father had been elected from the bench to Congress,
+and had kept his title and his repute as a lawyer through several terms
+in the House before he settled down to the practice of his profession
+in the courts at Washington, where he made a good deal of money. They
+passed from boarding to house-keeping, in the easy Washington way, after
+their impermanent Congressional years, and divided their time between
+a comfortable little place in Nevada Circle and the old homestead in
+Hatboro'. He was fond of Washington, and robustly content with the world
+as he found it there and elsewhere. If his daughter's compunctions came to
+her through him, it must have been from some remoter ancestry; he was not
+apparently characterised by their transmission, and probably she derived
+them from her mother, who died when she was a little girl, and of whom she
+had no recollection. Till he began to break, after they went abroad, he
+had his own way in everything; but as men grow old or infirm they fall
+into subjection to their womenkind; their rude wills yield in the suppler
+insistence of the feminine purpose; they take the colour of the feminine
+moods and emotions; the cycle of life completes itself where it began, in
+helpless dependence upon the sex; and Rufus Kilburn did not escape the
+common lot. He was often complaining and unlovely, as aged and ailing men
+must be; perhaps he was usually so; but he had moments when he recognised
+the beauty of his daughter's aspiration with a spiritual sympathy, which
+showed that he must always have had an intellectual perception of it.
+He expressed with rhetorical largeness and looseness the longing which
+was not very definite in her own heart, and mingled with it a strain of
+homesickness poignantly simple and direct for the places, the scenes, the
+persons, the things, of his early days. As he failed more and more, his
+homesickness was for natural aspects which had wholly ceased to exist
+through modern changes and improvements, and for people long since dead,
+whom he could find only in an illusion of that environment in some other
+world. In the pathos of this situation it was easy for his daughter to keep
+him ignorant of the passionate rebellion against her own ideals in which
+she sometimes surprised herself. When he died, all counter-currents were
+lost in the tidal revulsion of feeling which swept her to the fulfilment
+of what she hoped was deepest and strongest in her nature, with shame for
+what she hoped was shallowest, till that moment of repulsion in which she
+saw the thickly roofed and many towered hills of Boston grow up out of the
+western waves.
+
+She had always regarded her soul as the battlefield of two opposite
+principles, the good and the bad, the high and the low. God made her, she
+thought, and He alone; He made everything that she was; but she would not
+have said that He made the evil in her. Yet her belief did not admit the
+existence of Creative Evil; and so she said to herself that she herself
+was that evil, and she must struggle against herself; she must question
+whatever she strongly wished because she strongly wished it. It was not
+logical; she did not push her postulates to their obvious conclusions; and
+there was apt to be the same kind of break between her conclusions and her
+actions as between her reasons and her conclusions. She acted impulsively,
+and from a force which she could not analyse. She indulged reveries so
+vivid that they seemed to weaken and exhaust her for the grapple with
+realities; the recollection of them abashed her in the presence of facts.
+
+With all this, it must not be supposed that she was morbidly introspective.
+Her life had been apparently a life of cheerful acquiescence in worldly
+conditions; it had been, in some measure, a life of fashion, or at least
+of society. It had not been without the interests of other girls' lives,
+by any means; she had sometimes had fancies, flirtations, but she did not
+think she had been really in love, and she had refused some offers of
+marriage for that reason.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+The industry of making straw hats began at Hatboro', as many other
+industries have begun in New England, with no great local advantages, but
+simply because its founder happened to live there, and to believe that it
+would pay. There was a railroad, and labour of the sort he wanted was cheap
+and abundant in the village and the outlying farms. In time the work came
+to be done more and more by machinery, and to be gathered into large shops.
+The buildings increased in size and number; the single line of the railroad
+was multiplied into four, and in the region of the tracks several large,
+ugly, windowy wooden bulks grew up for shoe shops; a stocking factory
+followed; yet this business activity did not warp the old village from its
+picturesqueness or quiet. The railroad tracks crossed its main street; but
+the shops were all on one side of them, with the work-people's cottages
+and boarding-houses, and on the other were the simple, square, roomy old
+mansions, with their white paint and their green blinds, varied by the
+modern colour and carpentry of French-roofed villas. The old houses stood
+quite close to the street, with a strip of narrow door-yard before them;
+the new ones affected a certain depth of lawn, over which their owners
+personally pushed a clucking hand-mower in the summer evenings after tea.
+The fences had been taken away from the new houses, in the taste of some
+of the Boston suburbs; they generally remained before the old ones, whose
+inmates resented the ragged effect that their absence gave the street. The
+irregularity had hitherto been of an orderly and harmonious kind, such as
+naturally follows the growth of a country road into a village thoroughfare.
+The dwellings were placed nearer or further from the sidewalk as their
+builders fancied, and the elms that met in a low arch above the street had
+an illusive symmetry in the perspective; they were really set at uneven
+intervals, and in a line that wavered capriciously in and out. The street
+itself lounged and curved along, widening and contracting like a river,
+and then suddenly lost itself over the brow of an upland which formed a
+natural boundary of the village. Beyond this was South Hatboro', a group of
+cottages built by city people who had lately come in--idlers and invalids,
+the former for the cool summer, and the latter for the dry winter. At
+chance intervals in the old village new side streets branched from the
+thoroughfare to the right and the left, and here and there a Queen Anne
+cottage showed its chimneys and gables on them. The roadway under the
+elms that kept it dark and cool with their hovering shade, and swept the
+wagon-tops with their pendulous boughs at places, was unpaved; but the
+sidewalks were asphalted to the last dwelling in every direction, and they
+were promptly broken out in winter by the public snow-plough.
+
+Miss Kilburn saw them in the spring, when their usefulness was least
+apparent, and she did not know whether to praise the spirit of progress
+which showed itself in them as well as in other things at Hatboro'. She
+had come prepared to have misgivings, but she had promised herself to be
+just; she thought she could bear the old ugliness, if not the new. Some
+of the new things, however, were not so ugly; the young station-master
+was handsome in his railroad uniform, and pleasanter to the eye than the
+veteran baggage-master, incongruous in his stiff silk cap and his shirt
+sleeves and spectacles. The station itself, one of Richardson's, massive
+and low, with red-tiled, spreading veranda roofs, impressed her with
+its fitness, and strengthened her for her encounter with the business
+architecture of Hatboro', which was of the florid, ambitious New York type,
+prevalent with every American town in the early stages of its prosperity.
+The buildings were of pink brick, faced with granite, and supported in the
+first story by columns of painted iron; flat-roofed blocks looked down over
+the low-wooden structures of earlier Hatboro', and a large hotel had pushed
+back the old-time tavern, and planted itself flush upon the sidewalk. But
+the stores seemed very good, as she glanced at them from her carriage,
+and their show-windows were tastefully arranged; the apothecary's had an
+interior of glittering neatness unsurpassed by an Italian apothecary's; and
+the provision-man's, besides its symmetrical array of pendent sides and
+quarters indoors, had banks of fruit and vegetables without, and a large
+aquarium with a spraying fountain in its window.
+
+Bolton, the farmer who had always taken care of the Kilburn place, came
+to meet her at the station and drive her home. Miss Kilburn had bidden
+him drive slowly, so that she could see all the changes, and she noticed
+the new town-hall, with which she could find no fault; the Baptist and
+Methodist churches were the same as of old; the Unitarian church seemed to
+have shrunk as if the architecture had sympathised with its dwindling body
+of worshippers; just beyond it was the village green, with the soldiers'
+monument, and the tall white-painted flag-pole, and the four small brass
+cannon threatening the points of the compass at its base.
+
+“Stop a moment, Mr. Bolton,” said Miss Kilburn; and she put her head quite
+out of the carriage, and stared at the figure on the monument.
+
+It was strange that the first misgiving she could really make sure of
+concerning Hatboro' should relate to this figure, which she herself was
+mainly responsible for placing there. When the money was subscribed and
+voted for the statue, the committee wrote out to her at Rome as one who
+would naturally feel an interest in getting something fit and economical
+for them. She accepted the trust with zeal and pleasure; but she overruled
+their simple notion of an American volunteer at rest, with his hands folded
+on the muzzle of his gun, as intolerably hackneyed and commonplace. Her
+conscience, she said, would not let her add another recruit to the regiment
+of stone soldiers standing about in that posture on the tops of pedestals
+all over the country; and so, instead of going to an Italian statuary with
+her fellow-townsmen's letter, and getting him to make the figure they
+wanted, she doubled the money and gave the commission to a young girl
+from Kansas, who had come out to develop at Rome the genius recognised
+at Topeka. They decided together that it would be best to have something
+ideal, and the sculptor promptly imagined and rapidly executed a design
+for a winged Victory, poising on the summit of a white marble shaft, and
+clasping its hands under its chin, in expression of the grief that mingled
+with the popular exultation. Miss Kilburn had her doubts while the work
+went on, but she silenced them with the theory that when the figure was in
+position it would be all right.
+
+Now that she saw it in position she wished to ask Mr. Bolton what was
+thought of it, but she could not nerve herself to the question. He remained
+silent, and she felt that he was sorry for her. “Oh, may I be very humble;
+may I be helped to be very humble!” she prayed under her breath. It
+seemed as if she could not take her eyes from the figure; it was such a
+modern, such an American shape, so youthfully inadequate, so simple, so
+sophisticated, so like a young lady in society indecorously exposed for
+a _tableau vivant_. She wondered if the people in Hatboro' felt all
+this about it; if they realised how its involuntary frivolity insulted the
+solemn memory of the slain.
+
+“Drive on, please,” she said gently.
+
+Bolton pulled the reins, and as the horses started he pointed with his whip
+to a church at the other side of the green. “That's the new Orthodox
+church,” he explained.
+
+“Oh, is it?” asked Miss Kilburn. “It's very handsome, I'm sure.” She was
+not sensible of admiring the large Romanesque pile very much, though it
+was certainly not bad, but she remembered that Bolton was a member of the
+Orthodox church, and she was grateful to him for not saying anything about
+the soldiers' monument.
+
+“We sold the old buildin' to the Catholics, and they moved it down ont' the
+side street.”
+
+Miss Kilburn caught the glimmer of a cross where he beckoned, through the
+flutter of the foliage.
+
+“They had to razee the steeple some to git their cross on,” he added;
+and then he showed her the high-school building as they passed, and the
+Episcopal chapel, of blameless church-warden's Gothic, half hidden by its
+Japanese ivy, under a branching elm, on another side street.
+
+“Yes,” she said, “that was built before we went abroad.”
+
+“I disremember,” he said absently. He let the horses walk on the soft,
+darkly shaded road, where the wheels made a pleasant grinding sound, and
+set himself sidewise on his front seat, so as to talk to Miss Kilburn more
+at his ease.
+
+“I d'know,” he began, after clearing his throat, with a conscious air, “as
+you know we'd got a new minister to our church.”
+
+“No, I hadn't heard of it,” said Miss Kilburn, with her mind full of the
+monument still. “But I might have heard and forgotten it,” she added. “I
+was very much taken up toward the last before I left Rome.”
+
+“Well, come to think,” said Bolton; “I don't know's you'd had time to
+heard. He hain't been here a great while.”
+
+“Is he--satisfactory?” asked Miss Kilburn, feeling how far from
+satisfactory the Victory was, and formulating an explanatory apology to the
+committee in her mind.
+
+“Oh yes, he's satisfactory enough, as far forth as that goes. He's
+talented, and he's right up with the times. Yes, he's progressive. I guess
+they got pretty tired of Mr. Rogers, even before he died; and they kept the
+supply a-goin' till--all was blue, before they could settle on anybody. In
+fact they couldn't seem to agree on anybody till Mr. Peck come.”
+
+Miss Kilburn had got as far, in her tacit interview with the committee, as
+to have offered to replace at her own expense the Victory with a Volunteer,
+and she seemed to be listening to Bolton with rapt attention.
+
+“Well, it's like this,” continued the farmer. “He's progressive in his
+idees, 'n' at the same time he's spiritual-minded; and so I guess he suits
+pretty well all round. Of course you can't suit everybody. There's always
+got to be a dog in the manger, it don't matter where you go. But if anybody
+was to ask me, I should say Mr. Peck suited. Yes, I don't know but what I
+should.”
+
+Miss Kilburn instantaneously closed her transaction with the committee,
+removed the Victory, and had the Volunteer unveiled with appropriate
+ceremonies, opened with prayer by the Rev. Mr. Peck.
+
+“Peck?” she said. “Did you tell me his name was Peck?”
+
+“Yes, ma'am; Rev. Julius W. Peck. He's from down Penobscotport way, in
+Maine. I guess he's all right.”
+
+Miss Kilburn did not reply. Her mind had been taken off the monument for
+the moment by her dislike for the name of the new minister, and the Victory
+had seized the opportunity to get back.
+
+Bolton sighed deeply, and continued in a strain whose diffusiveness at last
+became perceptible to Miss Kilburn through her own humiliation. “There's
+some in every community that's bound to complain, I don't care what you do
+to accommodate 'em; and what I done, I done as much to stop their clack as
+anything, and give him the right sort of a start off, an' I guess I did.
+But Mis' Bolton she didn't know but what you'd look at it in the light of a
+libbutty, and I didn't know but what you _would_ think I no business
+to done it.”
+
+He seemed to be addressing a question to her, but she only replied with a
+dazed frown, and Bolton was obliged to go on.
+
+“I didn't let him room in your part of the house; that is to say, not sleep
+there; but I thought, as you was comin' home, and I better be airin' it up
+some, anyway, I might as well let him set in the old Judge's room. If you
+think it was more than I had a right to do, I'm willin' to pay for it. Git
+up!” Bolton turned fully round toward his horses, to hide the workings of
+emotion in his face, and shook the reins like a desperate man.
+
+“What _are_ you talking about, Mr. Bolton?” cried Miss Kilburn.
+“_Whom_ are you talking about?”
+
+Bolton answered, with a kind of violence, “Mr. Peck; I took him to board,
+first off.”
+
+“You took him to board?”
+
+“Yes. I know it wa'n't just accordin' to the letter o' the law, and the old
+Judge was always pootty p'tic'lah. But I've took care of the place goin'
+on twenty years now, and I hain't never had a chick nor a child in it
+before. The child,” he continued, partly turning his face round again, and
+beginning to look Miss Kilburn in the eye, “wa'n't one to touch anything,
+anyway, and we kep' her in our part all the while; Mis' Bolton she couldn't
+seem to let her out of her sight, she got so fond of her, and she used to
+follow me round among the hosses like a kitten. I declare, I _miss_
+her.”
+
+Bolton's face, the colour of one of the lean ploughed fields of Hatboro',
+and deeply furrowed, lighted up with real feeling, which he tried to make
+go as far in the work of reconciling Miss Kilburn as if it had been
+factitious.
+
+“But I don't understand,” she said. “What child are you talking about?”
+
+“Mr. Peck's.”
+
+“Was he married?” she asked, with displeasure, she did not know why.
+
+“Well, yes, he _had_ been,” answered Bolton. “But she'd be'n in the
+asylum ever since the child was born.”
+
+“Oh,” said Miss Kilburn, with relief; and she fell back upon the seat from
+which she had started forward.
+
+Bolton might easily have taken her tone for that of disgust. He faced round
+upon her once more. “It was kind of queer, his havin' the child with him,
+an' takin' most the care of her himself; and so, as I _say_, Mis'
+Bolton and me we took him in, as much to stop folks' mouths as anything,
+till they got kinder used to it. But we didn't take him into your part, as
+I _say_; and as _I_ say, I'm willin' to pay you whatever you say
+for the use of the old Judge's study. I presume that part of it _was_
+a libbutty.”
+
+“It was all perfectly right, Mr. Bolton,” said Miss Kilburn.
+
+“His wife died anyway, more than a year ago,” said Bolton, as if the fact
+completed his atonement to Miss Kilburn, “_Git_ ep! I told him from
+the start that it had got to be a temporary thing, an' 't I only took him
+till he could git settled somehow. I guess he means to go to house-keepin',
+if he can git the right kind of a house-keeper; he wants an old one. If it
+was a young one, I guess he wouldn't have any great trouble, if he went
+about it the right way.” Bolton's sarcasm was merely a race sarcasm. He was
+a very mild man, and his thick-growing eyelashes softened and shadowed his
+grey eyes, and gave his lean face pathos.
+
+“You could have let him stay till he had found a suitable place,” said Miss
+Kilburn.
+
+“Oh, I wa'n't goin' to do _that_,” said Bolton. “But I'm 'bliged to
+you just the same.”
+
+They came up in sight of the old square house, standing back a good
+distance from the road, with a broad sweep of grass sloping down before it
+into a little valley, and rising again to the wall fencing the grounds from
+the street. The wall was overhung there by a company of magnificent elms,
+which turned and formed one side of the avenue leading to the house. Their
+tops met and mixed somewhat incongruously with those of the stiff dark
+maples which more densely shaded the other side of the lane.
+
+Bolton drove into their gloom, and then out into the wide sunny space at
+the side of the house where Miss Kilburn had alighted so often with her
+father. Bolton's dog, grown now so very old as to be weak-minded, barked
+crazily at his master, and then, recognising him, broke into an imbecile
+whimper, and went back and coiled his rheumatism up in the sun on a warm
+stone before the door. Mrs. Bolton had to step over him as she came out,
+formally supporting her right elbow with her left hand as she offered the
+other in greeting to Miss Kilburn, with a look of question at her husband.
+
+Miss Kilburn intercepted the look, and began to laugh.
+
+All was unchanged, and all so strange; it seemed as if her father must both
+get down with her from the carriage and come to meet her from the house.
+Her glance involuntarily took in the familiar masses and details; the
+patches of short tough grass mixed with decaying chips and small weeds
+underfoot, and the spacious June sky overhead; the fine network and
+blisters of the cracking and warping white paint on the clapboarding, and
+the hills beyond the bulks of the village houses and trees; the woodshed
+stretching with its low board arches to the barn, and the milk-pans tilted
+to sun against the underpinning of the L, and Mrs. Bolton's pot plants in
+the kitchen window.
+
+“Did you think I could be hard about such a thing as that? It was perfectly
+right. O Mrs. Bolton!” She stopped laughing and began to cry; she put away
+Mrs. Bolton's carefully offered hand, she threw herself upon the bony
+structure of her bosom, and buried her face sobbing in the leathery folds
+of her neck.
+
+Mrs. Bolton suffered her embrace above the old dog, who fled with a cry of
+rheumatic apprehension from the sweep of Miss Kilburn's skirts, and then
+came back and snuffed at them in a vain effort to recall her.
+
+“Well, go in and lay down by the stove,” said Mrs. Bolton, with a divided
+interest, while she beat Miss Kilburn's back with her bony palm in sign of
+sympathy. But the dog went off up the lane, and stood there by the pasture
+bars, barking abstractedly at intervals.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+Miss Kilburn found that the house had been well aired for her coming, but
+an old earthy and mouldy smell, which it took days and nights of open doors
+and windows to drive out, stole back again with the first turn of rainy
+weather. She had fires built on the hearths and in the stoves, and after
+opening her trunks and scattering her dresses on beds and chairs, she spent
+most of the first week outside of the house, wandering about the fields and
+orchards to adjust herself anew to the estranged features of the place.
+The house she found lower-ceiled and smaller than she remembered it. The
+Boltons had kept it up very well, and in spite of the earthy and mouldy
+smell, it was conscientiously clean. There was not a speck of dust
+anywhere; the old yellowish-white paint was spotless; the windows shone.
+But there was a sort of frigidity in the perfect order and repair which
+repelled her, and she left her things tossed about, as if to break the ice
+of this propriety. In several places, within and without, she found marks
+of the faithful hand of Bolton in economical patches of the woodwork; but
+she was not sure that they had not been there eleven years before; and
+there were darnings in the carpets and curtains, which affected her with
+the same mixture of novelty and familiarity. Certain stale smells about the
+place (minor smells as compared with the prevalent odour) confused her; she
+could not decide whether she remembered them of old, or was reminded of the
+odours she used to catch in passing the pantry on the steamer.
+
+Her father had never been sure that he would not return any next year or
+month, and the house had always been ready to receive them. In his study
+everything was as he left it. His daughter looked for signs of Mr. Peck's
+occupation, but there were none; Mrs. Bolton explained that she had put
+him in a table from her own sitting-room to write at. The Judge's desk was
+untouched, and his heavy wooden arm-chair stood pulled up to it as if he
+were in it. The ranks of law-books, in their yellow sheepskin, with their
+red titles above and their black titles below, were in the order he had
+taught Mrs. Bolton to replace them in after dusting; the stuffed owl on a
+shelf above the mantel looked down with a clear solemnity in its gum-copal
+eyes, and Mrs. Bolton took it from its perch to show Miss Kilburn that
+there was not a moth on it, nor the sign of a moth.
+
+Miss Kilburn experienced here that refusal of the old associations to take
+the form of welcome which she had already felt in the earth and sky and air
+outside; in everything there was a sense of impassable separation. Her dead
+father was no nearer in his wonted place than the trees of the orchard, or
+the outline of the well-known hills, or the pink of the familiar sunsets.
+In her rummaging about the house she pulled open a chest of drawers which
+used to stand in the room where she slept when a child. It was full of her
+own childish clothing, a little girl's linen and muslin; and she thought
+with a throe of despair that she could as well hope to get back into these
+outgrown garments, which the helpless piety of Mrs. Bolton had kept from
+the rag-bag, as to think of re-entering the relations of the life so long
+left off.
+
+It surprised her to find how cold the Boltons were; she had remembered them
+as always very kind and willing; but she was so used now to the ways of
+the Italians and their showy affection, it was hard for her to realise
+that people could be both kind and cold. The Boltons seemed ashamed of
+their feelings, and hid them; it was the same in some degree with all the
+villagers when she began to meet them, and the fact slowly worked back into
+her consciousness, wounding its way in. People did not come to see her at
+once. They waited, as they told her, till she got settled, before they
+called, and then they did not appear very glad to have her back.
+
+But this was not altogether the effect of their temperament. The Kilburns
+had made a long summer always in Hatboro', and they had always talked of it
+as home; but they had never passed a whole year there since Judge Kilburn
+first went to Congress, and they were not regarded as full neighbours
+or permanent citizens. Miss Kilburn, however, kept up her childhood
+friendships, and she and some of the ladies called one another by their
+Christian names, but they believed that she met people in Washington whom
+she liked better; the winters she spent there certainly weakened the ties
+between them, and when it came to those eleven years in Rome, the letters
+they exchanged grew rarer and rarer, till they stopped altogether. Some of
+the girls went away; some died; others became dead and absent to her in
+their marriages and household cares.
+
+After waiting for one another, three of them came together to see her one
+day. They all kissed her, after a questioning glance at her face and dress,
+as if they wanted to see whether she had grown proud or too fashionable.
+But they were themselves apparently much better dressed, and certainly more
+richly dressed. In a place like Hatboro', where there is no dinner-giving,
+and evening parties are few, the best dress is a street costume, which
+may be worn for calls and shopping, and for church and all public
+entertainments. The well-to-do ladies make an effect of outdoor fashion, in
+which the poorest shop hand has her part; and in their turn they share her
+indoor simplicity. These old friends of Annie's wore bonnets and frocks of
+the latest style and costly material.
+
+They let her make the advances, receiving them with blank passivity,
+or repelling them with irony, according to the several needs of their
+self-respect, and talking to one another across her. One of them asked her
+when her hair had begun to turn, and they each told her how thin she was,
+but promised her that Hatboro' air would bring her up. At the same time
+they feigned humility in regard to everything about Hatboro' but the air;
+they laughed when she said she intended now to make it her home the whole
+year round, and said they guessed she would be tired of it long before
+fall; there were plenty of summer folks that passed the winter as long as
+the June weather lasted. As they grew more secure of themselves, or less
+afraid of one another in her presence, their voices rose; they laughed
+loudly at nothing, and they yelled in a nervous chorus at times, each
+trying to make herself heard above the others.
+
+She asked them about the social life in the village, and they told her that
+a good many new people had really settled there, but they did not know
+whether she would like them; they were not the old Hatboro' style. Annie
+showed them some of the things she had brought home, especially Roman
+views, and they said now she ought to give an evening in the church parlour
+with them.
+
+“You'll have to come to our church, Annie,” said Mrs. Putney. “The
+Unitarian doesn't have preaching once in a month, and Mr. Peck is very
+liberal.”
+
+“He's 'most _too_ liberal for some,” said Emmeline Gerrish. Of the
+three she had grown the stoutest, and from being a slight, light-minded
+girl, she had become a heavy matron, habitually censorious in her speech.
+She did not mean any more by it, however, than she did by her girlish
+frivolity, and if she was not supported in her severity, she was apt to
+break down and disown it with a giggle, as she now did.
+
+“Well, I don't know about his being _too_ liberal,” said Mrs.
+Wilmington, a large red-haired blonde, with a lazy laugh. “He makes you
+feel that you're a pretty miserable sinner.” She made a grimace of humorous
+disgust.
+
+“Mr. Gerrish says that's just the trouble,” Mrs. Gerrish broke in. “Mr.
+Peck don't put stress enough on the promises. That's what Mr. Gerrish says.
+You must have been surprised, Annie,” she added, “to find that he'd been
+staying in your house.”
+
+“I was glad Mrs. Bolton invited him,” answered Annie sincerely, but not
+instantly.
+
+The ladies waited, with an exchange of glances, for her reply, as if they
+had talked the matter over beforehand, and had agreed to find out just how
+Annie Kilburn felt about it.
+
+“Oh, I guess he paid his board,” said Mrs. Wilmington, jocosely rejecting
+the implication that he had been the guest of the Boltons.
+
+“I don't see what he expects to do with that little girl of his, without
+any mother, that way,” said Mrs. Gerrish. “He ought to get married.”
+
+“Perhaps he will, when he's waited a proper time,” suggested Mrs. Putney
+demurely.
+
+“Well, his wife's been the same as dead ever since the child was born. I
+don't know what you call a proper time, Ellen,” argued Mrs. Gerrish.
+
+“I presume a minister feels differently about such things,” Mrs. Wilmington
+remarked indolently.
+
+“I don't see why a minister should feel any different from anybody else,”
+ said Mrs. Gerrish. “It's his duty to do it on his child's account. I don't
+see why he don't have the remains brought to Hatboro', anyway.”
+
+They debated this point at some length, and they seemed to forget Annie.
+She listened with more interest than her concern in the last resting-place
+of the minister's dead wife really inspired. These old friends of hers
+seemed to have lost the sensitiveness of their girlhood without having
+gained tenderness in its place. They treated the affair with a nakedness
+that shocked her. In the country and in small towns people come face
+to face with life, especially women. It means marrying, child-bearing,
+household cares and burdens, neighbourhood gossip, sickness, death, burial,
+and whether the corpse appeared natural. But ever so much kindness goes
+with their disillusion; they are blunted, but not embittered.
+
+They ended by recalling Annie to mind, and Mrs. Putney said: “I suppose you
+haven't been to the cemetery yet? They've got it all fixed up since you
+went away--drives laid out, and paths cut through, and everything. A good
+many have put up family tombs, and they've taken away the old iron fences
+round the lots, and put granite curbing. They mow the grass all the time.
+It's a perfect garden.” Mrs. Putney was a small woman, already beginning
+to wrinkle. She had married a man whom Annie remembered as a mischievous
+little boy, with a sharp tongue and a nervous temperament; her father had
+always liked him when he came about the house, but Annie had lost sight of
+him in the years that make small boys and girls large ones, and he was at
+college when she went abroad. She had an impression of something unhappy in
+her friend's marriage.
+
+“I think it's _too_ much fixed up myself,” said Mrs. Gerrish. She
+turned suddenly to Annie: “You going to have your father fetched home?”
+
+The other ladies started a little at the question and looked at Annie; it
+was not that they were shocked, but they wanted to see whether she would
+not be so.
+
+“No,” she said briefly. She added, helplessly, “It wasn't his wish.”
+
+“I should have thought he would have liked to be buried alongside of your
+mother,” said Mrs. Gerrish. “But the Judge always _was_ a little
+peculiar. I presume you can have the name and the date put on the monument
+just the same.”
+
+Annie flushed at this intimate comment and suggestion from a woman whom as
+a girl she had never admitted to familiarity with her, but had tolerated
+her because she was such a harmless simpleton, and hung upon other girls
+whom she liked better. The word monument cowed her, however. She was afraid
+they might begin to talk about the soldiers' monument. She answered
+hastily, and began to ask them about their families.
+
+Mrs. Wilmington, who had no children, and Mrs. Putney, who had one, spoke
+of Mrs. Gerrish's large family. She had four children, and she refused the
+praises of her friends for them, though she celebrated them herself. “You
+ought to have seen the two little girls that Ellen lost, Annie,” she said.
+“Ellen Putney, I don't see how you ever got over that. Those two lovely,
+healthy children gone, and poor little Winthrop left! I always did say it
+was too hard.”
+
+She had married a clerk in the principal dry-goods store, who had prospered
+rapidly, and was now one of the first business men of the place, and had an
+ambition to be a leading citizen. She believed in his fitness to deal with
+the questions of religion and education which he took part in, and was
+always quoting Mr. Gerrish. She called him Mr. Gerrish so much that other
+people began to call him so too. But Mrs. Putney's husband held out against
+it, and had the habit of returning the little man's ceremonious salutations
+with an easy, “Hello, Billy,” “Good morning, Billy.” It was his theory that
+this was good for Gerrish, who might otherwise have forgotten when
+everybody called him Billy. He was one of the old Putneys; and he was a
+lawyer by profession.
+
+Mrs. Wilmington's husband had come to Hatboro' since Annie's long absence
+began; he had capital, and he had started a stocking-mill in Hatboro'.
+He was much older than his wife, whom he had married after a protracted
+widowerhood. She had one of the best houses and the most richly furnished
+in Hatboro'. She and Mrs. Putney saw Mrs. Gerrish at rare intervals, and in
+observance of some notable fact of their girlish friendship like the
+present.
+
+In pursuance of the subject of children, Mrs. Gerrish said that she
+sometimes had a notion to offer to take Mr. Peck's little girl herself till
+he could get fixed somehow, but Mr. Gerrish would not let her. Mr. Gerrish
+said Mr. Peck had better get married himself if he wanted a step-mother for
+his little girl. Mr. Gerrish was peculiar about keeping a family to itself.
+
+“Well, you'll think _we've_ come to board with you _too_,” said
+Mrs. Putney, in reference to Mr. Peck.
+
+The ladies all rose, and having got upon their feet, began to shout and
+laugh again--like girls, they implied.
+
+They stayed and talked a long time after rising, with the same note of
+unsparing personality in their talk. Where there are few public interests
+and few events, as in such places, there can be no small-talk, nothing of
+the careless touch-and-go of larger societies. Every one knows all the
+others, and knows the worst of them. People are not unkind; they are
+mutually and freely helpful; but they have only themselves to occupy their
+minds. Annie's friends had also to distinguish themselves to her from the
+rest of the villagers, and it was easiest to do this by an attitude of
+criticism mingled with large allowance. They ended a dissection of the
+community by saying that they believed there was no place like Hatboro',
+after all.
+
+In the contagion of their perfunctory gaiety Annie began to scream and
+laugh too, as she followed them to the door, and stood talking to them
+while they got into Mrs. Wilmington's extension-top carry-all. She answered
+with deafening promises, when they put their bonnets out of the carry-all
+and called back to her to be sure to come soon to see them soon.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+Mrs. Bolton made no advances with Annie toward the discussion of her
+friends; but when Annie asked about their families, she answered with the
+incisive directness of a country-bred woman. She delivered her judgments as
+she went about her work, the morning after the ladies' visit, while Annie
+sat before the breakfast-table, which she had given her leave to clear. As
+she passed in and out from the dining-room to the kitchen she kept talking;
+she raised her voice in the further room, and lowered it when she drew near
+again. She wore a dismal calico wrapper, which made no compromise with the
+gauntness of her figure; her reddish-brown hair, which grew in a fringe
+below her crown, was plaited into small tags or tails, pulled up and tied
+across the top of her head, the bare surfaces of which were curiously
+mottled with the dye which she sometimes put on her hair. Behind, this
+was gathered up into a small knob pierced with a single hair-pin; the
+arrangement left Mrs. Bolton's visage to the unrestricted expression of
+character. She did not let it express toward Annie any expectation of the
+confidential relations that are supposed to exist between people who have
+been a long time master and servant. She had never recognised her relations
+with the Kilburns in these terms. She was a mature Yankee single woman,
+of confirmed self-respect, when she first came as house-keeper to Judge
+Kilburn, twenty years ago, and she had not changed her nature in changing
+her condition by her marriage with Oliver Bolton; she was childless, unless
+his comparative youth conferred a sort of adoptive maternity upon her.
+
+Annie went into her father's study, where she had lit the fire in the
+Franklin-stove on her way to breakfast. It had come on to rain during the
+night, after the fine yesterday which Mrs. Gerrish had denounced to its
+face as a weather-breeder. At first it rained silently, stealthily; but
+toward morning Annie heard the wind rising, and when she looked out of her
+window after daylight she found a fierce north-easterly storm drenching
+and chilling the landscape. Now across the flattened and tangled grass of
+the lawn the elms were writhing in the gale, and swinging their long lean
+boughs to and fro; from another window she saw the cuffed and hustled
+maples ruffling their stiff masses of foliage, and shuddering in the
+storm. She turned away, with a sigh of the luxurious melancholy which a
+northeaster inspires in people safely sheltered from it, and sat down
+before her fire. She recalled the three women who had visited her the day
+before, in the better-remembered figures of their childhood and young
+girlhood; and their present character did not seem a broken promise.
+Nothing was really disappointed in it but the animal joy, the hopeful riot
+of their young blood, which must fade and die with the happiest fate. She
+perceived that what they had come to was not unjust to what they had been;
+and as our own fate always appears to us unaccomplished, a thing for the
+distant future to fulfil, she began to ask herself what was to be the
+natural sequence of such a temperament, such mental and moral traits, as
+hers. Had her life been so noble in anything but vague aspirations that she
+could ever reasonably expect the destiny of grand usefulness which she had
+always unreasonably expected? The question came home to her with such pain,
+in the light of what her old playmates had become, that she suddenly ceased
+to enjoy the misery of the storm out-of-doors, or the purring content of
+the fire on the hearth of the stove at her feet; the book she had taken
+down to read fell unopened into her lap, and she gave herself up to a
+half-hour of such piercing self-question as only a high-minded woman can
+endure when the flattering promises of youth have grown vague and few.
+
+There is no condition of life that is wholly acceptable, but none that is
+not tolerable when once it establishes itself; and while Annie Kilburn
+had never consented to be an old maid, she had become one without great
+suffering. At thirty-one she could not call herself anything else; she
+often called herself an old maid, with the mental reservation that she was
+not one. She was merely unmarried; she might marry any time. Now, when she
+assured herself of this, as she had done many times before, she suddenly
+wondered if she should ever marry; she wondered if she had seemed to her
+friends yesterday like a person who would never marry. Did one carry such
+a thing in one's looks? Perhaps they idealised her; they had not seen her
+since she was twenty, and perhaps they still thought of her as a young
+girl. It now seemed to her as if she had left her youth in Rome, as in Rome
+it had seemed to her that she should find it again in Hatboro'. A pang of
+aimless, unlocalised homesickness passed through her; she realised that she
+was alone in the world. She rose to escape the pang, and went to the window
+of the parlour which looked toward the street, where she saw the figure of
+a young man draped in a long indiarubber gossamer coat fluttering in the
+wind that pushed him along as he tacked on a southerly course; he bowed
+and twisted his head to escape the lash of the rain. She watched him till
+he turned into the lane leading to the house, and then, at a discreeter
+distance, she watched him through the window at the other corner, making
+his way up to the front door in the teeth of the gale. He seemed to have a
+bundle under his arm, and as he stepped into the shelter of the portico,
+and freed his arm to ring, she discovered that it was a bundle of books.
+Whether Mrs. Bolton did not hear the bell, or whether she heard it and
+decided that it would be absurd to leave her work for it, when Miss
+Kilburn, who was so much nearer, could answer it, she did not come, even at
+a second ring, and Annie was forced to go to the door herself, or leave the
+poor man dripping in the cold wind outside.
+
+She had made up her mind, at sight of the books, that he was a canvasser
+for some subscription book, such as used to come in her father's time, but
+when she opened to him he took off his hat with a great deal of manner, and
+said “Miss Kilburn?” with so much insinuation of gentle disinterestedness,
+that it flashed upon her that it might be Mr. Peck.
+
+“Yes,” she said, with confusion, while the flash of conjecture faded away.
+
+“Mr. Brandreth,” said her visitor, whom she now saw to be much younger than
+Mr. Peck could be. He looked not much more than twenty-two or twenty-three;
+his damp hair waved and curled upon his temples and forehead, and his blue
+eyes lightened from a beardless and freshly shaven face. “I called this
+morning because I felt sure of finding you at home.”
+
+He smiled at his reference to the weather, and Annie smiled too as she
+again answered, “Yes?” She did not want his books, but she liked something
+that was cheerful and enthusiastic in him; she added, “Won't you step into
+the study?”
+
+“Thanks, yes,” said the young man, flinging off his gossamer, and hanging
+it up to drip into the pan of the hat rack. He gathered up his books from
+the chair where he had laid them, and held them at his waist with both
+hands, while he bowed her precedence beside the study door.
+
+“I don't know,” he began, “but I ought to apologise for coming on a day
+like this, when you were not expecting to be interrupted.”
+
+“Oh no; I'm not at all busy. But you must have had courage to brave a storm
+like this.”
+
+“No. The truth is, Miss Kilburn, I was very anxious to see you about a
+matter I have at heart--that I desire your help with.”
+
+“He wants me,” Annie thought, “to give him the use of my name as a
+subscriber to his book”--there seemed really to be a half-dozen books in
+his bundle--“and he's come to me first.”
+
+“I had expected to come with Mrs. Munger--she's a great friend of mine;
+you haven't met her yet, but you'll like her; she's the leading spirit
+in South Hatboro'--and we were coming together this morning; but she was
+unexpectedly called away yesterday, and so I ventured to call alone.”
+
+“I'm very glad to see you, Mr. Brandreth,” Annie said. “Then Mrs. Munger
+has subscribed already, and I'm only second fiddle, after all,” she
+thought.
+
+“The truth is,” said Mr. Brandreth, “I'm the factotum, or teetotum, of the
+South Hatboro' ladies' book club, and I've been deputed to come and see if
+you wouldn't like to join it.”
+
+“Oh!” said Annie, and with a thrill of dismay she asked herself how much
+she had let her manner betray that she had supposed he was a book agent. “I
+shall be very glad indeed, Mr. Brandreth.”
+
+“Mrs. Munger was sure you would,” said Mr. Brandreth joyously. “I've
+brought some of the books with me--the last,” he said; and Annie had time
+to get into a new social attitude toward him during their discussion of the
+books. She chose one, and Mr. Brandreth took her subscription, and wrote
+her name in the club book.
+
+“One of the reasons,” he said, “why I would have preferred to come with
+Mrs. Munger is that she is so heart and soul with me in my little scheme.
+She could have put it before you in so much better light than I can. But
+she was called away so suddenly.”
+
+“I hope for no serious cause,” said Annie.
+
+“Oh no! It's just to Cambridge. Her son is one of the Freshman Nine, and
+he's been hit by a ball.”
+
+“Oh!” said Annie.
+
+“Yes; it's a great pity for Mrs. Munger. But I come to you for advice as
+well as co-operation, Miss Kilburn. You must have met a great many English
+people in Rome, and heard some of them talk about it. We're thinking, some
+of the young people here, about getting up some outdoor theatricals, like
+Lady Archibald Campbell's, don't you know. You know about them?” he added,
+at the blankness in her face.
+
+“I read accounts of them in the English papers. They must have been
+very--original. But do you think that in a community like Hatboro'--Are
+there enough who could--enter into the spirit?”
+
+“Oh yes, indeed!” cried Mr. Brandreth ardently. “You've no idea what a
+place Hatboro' has got to be. You've not been about much yet, Miss
+Kilburn?”
+
+“No,” said Annie; “I haven't really been off our own place since I came.
+I've seen nobody but two or three old friends, and we naturally talked more
+about old times than anything else. But I hear that there are great
+changes.”
+
+“Yes,” said Mr. Brandreth. “The social growth has been even greater than
+the business growth. You've no idea! People have come in for the winter
+as well as the summer. South Hatboro', where we live--you must see South
+Hatboro', Miss Kilburn!--is quite a famous health resort. A great many
+Boston doctors send their patients to us now, instead of Colorado or the
+Adirondacks. In fact, that's what brought _us_ to Hatboro'. My mother
+couldn't have lived, if she had tried to stay in Melrose. One lung all
+gone, and the other seriously affected. And people have found out what
+a charming place it is for the summer. It's cool; and it's so near, you
+know; the gentlemen can run out every night--only an hour and a quarter
+from town, and expresses both ways. All very agreeable people, too; and
+cultivated. Mr. Fellows, the painter, makes a long summer; he bought an old
+farm-house, and built a studio; Miss Jennings, the flower-painter, has a
+little box there, too; Mr. Chapley, the publisher, of New York, has built;
+the Misses Clevinger, and Mrs. Valence, are all near us. There's one family
+from Chicago--quite nice--New England by birth, you know; and Mrs. Munger,
+of course; so that there's a very pleasant variety.”
+
+“I certainly had no idea of it,” said Annie.
+
+“I knew you couldn't have,” said Mr. Brandreth, “or you wouldn't have felt
+any doubt about our having the material for the theatricals. You see,
+I want to interest all the nice people in it, and make it a whole-town
+affair. I think it's a great pity for some of the old village families and
+the summer folks, as they call us, not to mingle more than they do, and
+Mrs. Munger thinks so too; and we've been talking you over, Miss Kilburn,
+and we've decided that you could do more than anybody else to help on a
+scheme that's meant to bring them together.”
+
+“Because I'm neither summer folks nor old village families?” asked Annie.
+
+“Because you're both,” retorted Mr. Brandreth.
+
+“I don't see that,” said Annie; “but we'll suppose the case, for the sake
+of argument. What do you expect me to do in theatricals, in-doors or out?
+I never took part in anything of the kind; I can't see an inch beyond the
+end of my nose without glasses; I never could learn the simplest thing by
+heart; I'm clumsy and awkward; I get confused.”
+
+“Oh, my dear Miss Kilburn, spare yourself! We don't expect you to take part
+in the play. I don't admit that you're what you say at all; but we only
+want you to lend us your countenance.”
+
+“Oh, is that all? And what do you expect to do with my countenance?” Annie
+said, with a laugh of misgiving.
+
+“Everything. We know how much influence your name has--one of the old
+Hatboro' names--in the community, and all that; and we do want to interest
+the whole community in our scheme. We want to establish a Social Union for
+the work-people, don't you know, and we think it would be much nicer if it
+seemed to originate with the old village people.”
+
+Annie could not resist an impression in favour of the scheme. It gave
+definition to the vague intentions with which she had returned to Hatboro';
+it might afford her a chance to make reparation for the figure on the
+soldiers' monument.
+
+“I'm not sure,” she began. “If I knew just what a Social Union is--”
+
+“Well, at first,” Mr. Brandreth interposed, “it will only be a
+reading-room, supplied with the magazines and papers, and well lighted and
+heated, where the work-people--those who have no families especially--could
+spend their evenings. Afterward we should hope to have a kitchen, and
+supply tea and coffee--and oysters, perhaps--at a nominal cost; and
+ice-cream in the summer.”
+
+“But what have your outdoor theatricals to do--But of course. You intend
+to give the proceeds--”
+
+“Exactly. And we want the proceeds to be as large as possible. We propose
+to give our time and money to getting the thing up in the best shape, and
+then we want all the villagers to give their half-dollars and make it a
+success every way.”
+
+“I see,” said Annie.
+
+“We want it to be successful, and we want it to be distinguished; we
+want to make it unique. Mrs. Munger is going to give her grounds and the
+decorations, and there will be a supper afterward, and a little dance.”
+
+“Such things are a great deal of trouble,” said Annie, with a smile, from
+the vantage-ground of her larger experience. “What do you propose to
+do--what play?”
+
+“Well, we've about decided upon some scenes from _Romeo and Juliet_.
+They would be very easy to set, outdoors, don't you know, and everybody
+knows them, and they wouldn't be hard to do. The ballroom in the house of
+the Capulets could be made to open on a kind of garden terrace--Mrs. Munger
+has a lovely terrace in her grounds for lawn-tennis--and then we could have
+a minuet on the grass. You know Miss Mather introduces a minuet in that
+scene, and makes a great deal of it. Or, I forgot. She's come up since you
+went away.”
+
+“Yes; I hadn't heard of her. Isn't a minuet at Verona in the time of the
+Scaligeri rather--”
+
+“Well, yes, it is, rather. But you've no idea how pretty it is. And then,
+you know, we could have the whole of the balcony scene, and other bits
+that we choose to work in--perhaps parts of other acts that would suit the
+scene.”
+
+“Yes, it would be charming; I can see how very charming it could be made.”
+
+“Then we may count upon you?” he asked.
+
+“Yes, yes,” she said; “but I don't really know what I'm to do.”
+
+Mr. Brandreth had risen; but he sat down again, as if glad to afford her
+any light he could throw upon the subject.
+
+“How am I to 'influence people,' as you say?” she continued. “I'm quite a
+stranger in Hatboro'; I hardly know anybody.”
+
+“But a great many people know _you_, Miss Kilburn. Your name is
+associated with the history of the place, and you could do everything for
+us. You _won't_ refuse!” cried Mr. Brandreth winningly. “For instance,
+you know Mrs. Wilmington.”
+
+“Oh yes; she's an old girl-friend of mine.”
+
+“Then you know how enormously clever she is. She can do anything. We want
+her to take an active part--the part of the Nurse. She's delightfully
+funny. But you know her peculiar temperament--how she hates initiative of
+all kinds; and we want somebody to bring Mr. Wilmington round. If we could
+get them committed to the scheme, and a man like Mr. Putney--he'd make
+a capital Mercutio--it would go like wildfire. We want to interest the
+churches, too. The object is so worthy, and the theatricals will be so
+entirely unobjectionable in every respect. We have the Unitarians and
+Universalists, of course. The Baptists and Methodists will be hard to
+manage; but the Orthodox are of so many different shades; and I understand
+the new minister, Mr. Peck, is very liberal. He was here in your house, I
+believe.”
+
+“Yes; but I never saw him,” said Annie. “He boarded with the farmer. I'm a
+Unitarian myself.”
+
+“Of course. It would be a great point gained if we could interest him.
+Every care will be taken to have the affair unobjectionable. You see, the
+design is to let everybody come to the theatricals, and only those remain
+to the supper and dance whom we invite. That will keep out the socially
+objectionable element--the shoe-shop hands and the straw-shop girls.”
+
+“Oh,” said Annie. “But isn't the--the Social Union for just that class?”
+
+“Yes, it's _expressly_ for them, and we intend to organise a system of
+entertainments--lectures, concerts, readings--for the winter, and keep them
+interested the whole year round in it. The object is to show them that the
+best people in the community have their interests at heart, and wish to get
+on common ground with them.”
+
+“Yes,” said Annie, “the object is certainly very good.”
+
+Mr. Brandreth rose again, and put out his hand. “Then you will help us?”
+
+“Oh, I don't know about that yet.”
+
+“At least you won't hinder us?”
+
+“Certainly not.”
+
+“Then I consider you in a very hopeful condition, Miss Kilburn, and I feel
+that I can safely leave you to Mrs. Munger. She is coming to see you as
+soon as she gets back.”
+
+Annie found herself sadder when he was gone, and she threw herself upon the
+old feather-cushioned lounge to enjoy a reverie in keeping with the dreary
+storm outside. Was it for this that she had left Rome? She had felt, as
+every American of conscience feels abroad, the drawings of a duty, obscure
+and indefinable, toward her country, the duty to come home and do something
+for it, be something in it. This is the impulse of no common patriotism; it
+is perhaps a sense of the opportunity which America supremely affords for
+the race to help itself, and for each member of it to help all the rest.
+
+But from the moment Annie arrived in Hatboro' the difficulty of being
+helpful to anything or any one had increased upon her with every new fact
+that she had learned about it and the people in it. To her they seemed
+terribly self-sufficing. They seemed occupied and prosperous, from her
+front parlour window; she did not see anybody going by who appeared to be
+in need of her; and she shrank from a more thorough exploration of the
+place. She found she had fancied necessity coming to her and taking away
+her good works, as it were, in a basket; but till Mr. Brandreth appeared
+with his scheme, nothing had applied for her help. She had always hated
+theatricals; they bored her; and yet the Social Union was a good object,
+and if this scheme would bring her acquainted in Hatboro' it might be
+the stepping-stone to something better, something really or more ideally
+useful. She wondered what South Hatboro' was like; she would get Mrs.
+Bolton's opinion, which, if severe, would be just. She would ask Mrs.
+Bolton about Mrs. Munger, too. She would tell Mrs. Bolton to tell Mr. Peck
+to call to dine. Would it be thought patronising to Mr. Peck?
+
+The fire from the Franklin-stove diffused a drowsy comfort through the
+room, the rain lashed the window-panes, and the wind shrilled in the gable.
+Annie fell off to sleep. When she woke up she heard Mrs. Bolton laying the
+table for her one o'clock dinner, and she knew it was half-past twelve,
+because Mrs. Bolton always laid the table just half an hour beforehand. She
+went out to speak to Mrs. Bolton.
+
+There was no want of distinctness in Mrs. Bolton's opinion, but Annie felt
+that there was a want of perspective and proportion in it, arising from the
+narrowness of Mrs. Bolton's experience and her ignorance of the world; she
+was farm-bred, and she had always lived upon the outskirts of Hatboro',
+even when it was a much smaller place than now. But Mrs. Bolton had her
+criterions, and she believed in them firmly; in a time when agnosticism
+extends among cultivated people to every region of conjecture, the social
+convictions of Mrs. Bolton were untainted by misgiving. In the first place,
+she despised laziness, and as South Hatboro' was the summer home of open
+and avowed disoccupation, of an idleness so entire that it had to seek
+refuge from itself in all manner of pastimes, she held its population in
+a contempt to which her meagre phrase did imperfect justice. From time to
+time she had to stop altogether, and vent it in “Wells!” of varying accents
+and inflections, but all expressive of aversion, and in snorts and sniffs
+still more intense in purport.
+
+Then she held that people who had nothing else to do ought at least to be
+exemplary in their lives, and she was merciless to the goings-on in South
+Hatboro', which had penetrated on the breath of scandal to the elder
+village. When Annie came to find out what these were, she did not think
+them dreadful; they were small flirtations and harmless intimacies between
+the members of the summer community, which in the imagination of the
+village blackened into guilty intrigue. On the tongues of some, South
+Hatboro' was another Gomorrah; Mrs. Bolton believed the worst, especially
+of the women.
+
+“I hear,” said Mrs. Bolton, “that them women come up here for _rest_.
+I don't know what they want to rest _from_; but if it's from doin'
+nothin' all winter long, I guess they go back to the city poot' near's
+tired's they come.”
+
+Perhaps Annie felt that it was useless to try to enlighten her in regard
+to the fatigues from which the summer sojourner in the country escapes
+so eagerly; the cares of giving and going to lunches and dinners; the
+labour of afternoon teas; the late hours and the heavy suppers of evening
+receptions; the drain of charity-doing and play-going; the slavery of
+amateur art study, and parlour readings, and musicales; the writing of
+invitations and acceptances and refusals; the trying on of dresses; the
+calls made and received. She let her talk on, and tried to figure, as well
+as she could from her talk, the form and magnitude of the task laid upon
+her by Mr. Brandreth, of reconciling Old Hatboro' to South Hatboro', and
+uniting them in a common enterprise.
+
+“Mrs. Bolton,” she said, abruptly leaving the subject at last, “I've been
+thinking whether I oughtn't to do something about Mr. Peck. I don't want
+him to feel that he was unwelcome to me in my house; I should like him to
+feel that I approved of his having been here.”
+
+As this was not a question, Mrs. Bolton, after the fashion of country
+people, held her peace, and Annie went on--
+
+“Does he never come to see you?”
+
+“Well, he was here last night,” said Mrs. Bolton.
+
+“Last _night_!” cried Annie. “Why in the world didn't you let me
+know?”
+
+“I didn't know as you wanted to know,” began Mrs. Bolton, with a sullen
+defiance mixed with pleasure in Annie's reproach. “He was out there in my
+settin'-room with his little girl.”
+
+“But don't you see that if you didn't let me know he was here it would look
+to him as if I didn't wish to meet him--as if I had told you that you were
+not to introduce him?”
+
+Probably Mrs. Bolton believed too that a man's mind was agile enough for
+these conjectures; but she said she did not suppose he would take it in
+that way; she added that he stayed longer than she expected, because the
+little girl seemed to like it so much; she always cried when she had to go
+away.
+
+“Do you mean that she's attached to the place?” demanded Annie.
+
+“Well, yes, she is,” Mrs. Bolton admitted. “And the cat.”
+
+Annie had a great desire to tell Mrs. Bolton that she had behaved very
+stupidly. But she knew Mrs. Bolton would not stand that, and she had to
+content herself with saying, severely, “The next time he comes, let me know
+without fail, please. What is the child like?” she asked.
+
+“Well, I guess it must favour the mother, if anything. It don't seem to
+take after him any.”
+
+“Why don't you have it here often, then,” asked Annie, “if it's so much
+attached to the place?”
+
+“Well I didn't know as you wanted to have it round,” replied Mrs. Bolton
+bluntly.
+
+Annie made a “Tchk!” of impatience with her obtuseness, and asked, “Where
+is Mr. Peck staying?”
+
+“Well, he's staying at Mis' Warner's till he can get settled.”
+
+“Is it far from here?”
+
+“It's down in the north part of the village--Over the Track.”
+
+“Is Mr. Bolton at home?”
+
+“Yes, he is,” said Mrs. Bolton, with the effect of not intending to deny
+it.
+
+“Then I want him to hitch up--now--at once--right away--and go and get the
+child and bring her here to dinner with me.” Annie got so far with her
+severity, feeling that it was needed to mask a proceeding so romantic,
+perhaps so silly. She added timidly, “Can he do it?”
+
+“I d'know but what he can,” said Mrs. Bolton, dryly, and whatever her
+feeling really was in regard to the matter, her manner gave no hint of it.
+Annie did not know whether Bolton was going on her errand or not, from Mrs.
+Bolton, but in ten or twelve minutes she saw him emerge from the avenue
+into the street, in the carry-all, tightly curtained against the storm.
+Half an hour later he returned, and his wife set down in the library a
+shabbily dressed little girl, with her cheeks bright and her hair curling
+from the weather, and staring at Annie, and rather disposed to cry. She
+said hastily, “Bring in the cat, Mrs. Bolton; we're going to have the cat
+to dinner with us.”
+
+This inspiration seemed to decide the little girl against crying. The cat
+was equipped with a doily, and actually provided with dinner at a small
+table apart; the child did not look at it as Annie had expected she would,
+but remained with her eyes fastened on Annie herself: She did not stir from
+the spot where Mrs. Bolton had put her down, but she let Annie take her
+up and arrange her in a chair, with large books graduated to the desired
+height under her, and made no sign of satisfaction or disapproval. Once she
+looked round, when Mrs. Bolton finally went out after bringing in the last
+dish for dinner, and then fastened her eyes on Annie again, twisting her
+head shyly round to follow her in every gesture and expression as Annie
+fitted on a napkin under her chin, cut up her meat, poured her milk, and
+buttered her bread. She answered nothing to the chatter which Annie tried
+to make lively and entertaining, and made no sound but that of a broken and
+suppressed breathing. Annie had forgotten to ask her name of Mrs. Bolton,
+and she asked it in vain of the child herself, with a great variety of
+circumlocution; she was so unused to children that she was ashamed to
+invent any pet name for her; she called her, in what she felt to be a stiff
+and school-mistressly fashion, “Little Girl,” and talked on at her, growing
+more and more nervous herself without perceiving that the child's condition
+was approaching a climax. She had taken off her glasses, from the notion
+that they embarrassed her guest, and she did not see the pretty lips
+beginning to curl, nor the searching eyes clouding with tears; the storm of
+sobs that suddenly burst upon her astounded her.
+
+“Mrs. Bolton! Mrs. Bolton!” she screamed, in hysterical helplessness. Mrs.
+Bolton rushed in, and with an instant perception of the situation, caught
+the child to her bony breast, and fled with it to her own room, where Annie
+heard its wails die gradually away amid murmurs of comfort and reassurance
+from Mrs. Bolton.
+
+She felt like a great criminal and a great fool; at the same time she was
+vexed with the stupid child which she had meant so well by, and indignant
+with Mrs. Bolton, whose flight with it had somehow implied a reproach of
+her behaviour. When she could govern herself, she went out to Mrs. Bolton's
+room, where she found the little one quiet enough, and Mrs. Bolton tying on
+the long apron in which she cleared up the dinner and washed the dishes.
+
+“I guess she'll get along now,” she said, without the critical tone which
+Annie was prepared to resent. “She was scared some, and she felt kind of
+strange, I presume.”
+
+“Yes, and I behaved like a simpleton, dressing up the cat, I suppose,”
+ answered Annie. “But I thought it would amuse her.”
+
+“You can't tell how children will take a thing. I don't believe they like
+anything that's out of the common--well, not a great deal.”
+
+There was a leniency in Mrs. Bolton's manner which encouraged Annie to go
+on and accuse herself more and more, and then an unresponsive blankness
+that silenced her. She went back to her own rooms; and to get away from her
+shame, she began to write a letter.
+
+It was to a friend in Rome, and from the sense we all have that a letter
+which is to go such a great distance ought to be a long letter, and from
+finding that she had really a good deal to say, she let it grow so that
+she began apologising for its length half a dozen pages before the end.
+It took her nearly the whole afternoon, and she regained a little of her
+self-respect by ridiculing the people she had met.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+
+Toward five o'clock Annie was interrupted by a knock at her door, which
+ought to have prepared her for something unusual, for it was Mrs. Bolton's
+habit to come and go without knocking. But she called “Come in!” without
+rising from her letter, and Mrs. Bolton entered with a stranger. The little
+girl clung to his forefinger, pressing her head against his leg, and
+glancing shyly up at Annie. She sprang up, and, “This is Mr. Peck, Miss
+Kilburn,” said Mrs. Bolton.
+
+“How do you do?” said Mr. Peck, taking the hand she gave him.
+
+He was gaunt, without being tall, and his clothes hung loosely about him,
+as if he had fallen away in them since they were made. His face was almost
+the face of the caricature American: deep, slightly curved vertical lines
+enclosed his mouth in their parenthesis; a thin, dust-coloured beard fell
+from his cheeks and chin; his upper lip was shaven. But instead of the
+slight frown of challenge and self-assertion which marks this face in the
+type, his large blue eyes, set near together, gazed sadly from under a
+smooth forehead, extending itself well up toward the crown, where his dry
+hair dropped over it.
+
+“I am very glad to see you, Mr. Peck,” said Annie; “I've wanted to tell you
+how pleased I am that you found shelter in my old home when you first came
+to Hatboro'.”
+
+Mr. Peck's trousers were short and badly kneed, and his long coat hung
+formlessly from his shoulders; she involuntarily took a patronising tone
+toward him which was not habitual with her.
+
+“Thank you,” he said, with the dry, serious voice which seemed the fit
+vocal expression of his presence; “I have been afraid that it seemed like
+an intrusion to you.”
+
+“Oh, not the least,” retorted Annie. “You were very welcome. I hope you're
+comfortably placed where you are now?”
+
+“Quite so,” said the minister.
+
+“I'd heard so much of your little girl from Mrs. Bolton, and her attachment
+to the house, that I ventured to send for her to-day. But I believe I gave
+her rather a bad quarter of an hour, and that she liked the place better
+under Mrs. Bolton's _régime_.”
+
+She expected some deprecatory expression of gratitude from him, which would
+relieve her of the lingering shame she felt for having managed so badly,
+but he made none.
+
+“It was my fault. I'm not used to children, and I hadn't taken the
+precaution to ask her name--”
+
+“Her name is Idella,” said the minister.
+
+Annie thought it very ugly, but, with the intention of saying something
+kind, she said, “What a quaint name!”
+
+“It was her mother's choice,” returned the minister. “Her own name was
+Ella, and my mother's name was Ida; she combined the two.”
+
+“Oh!” said Annie. She abhorred those made-up names in which the New England
+country people sometimes indulge their fancy, and Idella struck her as a
+particularly repulsive invention; but she felt that she must not visit the
+fault upon the little creature. “Don't you think you could give me another
+trial some time, Idella?” She stooped down and took the child's unoccupied
+hand, which she let her keep, only twisting her face away to hide it in her
+father's pantaloon leg. “Come now, won't you give me a forgiving little
+kiss?” Idella looked round, and Annie made bold to gather her up.
+
+Idella broke into a laugh, and took Annie's cheeks between her hands.
+
+“Well, I declare!” said Mrs. Bolton. “You never can tell what that child
+will do next.”
+
+“I never can tell what I will do next myself,” said Annie. She liked the
+feeling of the little, warm, soft body in her arms, against her breast,
+and it was flattering to have triumphed where she had seemed to fail so
+desperately. They had all been standing, and she now said, “Won't you sit
+down, Mr. Peck?” She added, by an impulse which she instantly thought
+ill-advised, “There is something I would like to speak to you about.”
+
+“Thank you,” said Mr. Peck, seating himself beyond the stove. “We must be
+getting home before a great while. It is nearly tea-time.”
+
+“I won't detain you unduly,” said Annie.
+
+Mrs. Bolton left them at her hint of something special to say to the
+minister. Annie could not have had the face to speak of Mr. Brandreth's
+theatricals in that grim presence; and as it was, she resolved to put
+forward their serious object. She began abruptly: “Mr. Peck, I've been
+asked to interest myself for a Social Union which the ladies of South
+Hatboro' are trying to establish for the operatives. I suppose you haven't
+heard anything of the scheme?”
+
+“No, I hadn't,” said Mr. Peck.
+
+He was one of those people who sit very high, and he now seemed taller and
+more impressive than when he stood.
+
+“It is certainly a very good object,” Annie resumed; and she went on to
+explain it at second-hand from Mr. Brandreth as well as she could. The
+little girl was standing in her lap, and got between her and Mr. Peck, so
+that she had to look first around one side of her and then another to see
+how he was taking it.
+
+He nodded his head, and said gravely, “Yes,” and “Yes,” and “Yes,” at each
+significant point of her statement. At the end he asked: “And are the means
+forthcoming? Have they raised the money for renting and furnishing the
+rooms?”
+
+“Well, no, they haven't yet, or not quite, as I understand.”
+
+“Have they tried to interest the working people themselves in it? If they
+are to value its benefits, it ought to cost them something--self-denial,
+privation even.”
+
+“Yes, I know,” Annie began.
+
+“I'm not satisfied,” the minister pursued, “that it is wise to provide
+people with even harmless amusements that take them much away from
+their homes. These things are invented by well-to-do people who have no
+occupation, and think that others want pastimes as much as themselves.
+But what working people want is rest, and what they need are decent homes
+where they can take it. Besides, unless they help to support this union out
+of their own means, the better sort among them will feel wounded by its
+existence, as a sort of superfluous charity.”
+
+“Yes, I see,” said Annie. She saw this side of the affair with surprise.
+The minister seemed to have thought more about such matters than she had,
+and she insensibly receded from her first hasty generalisation of him,
+and paused to reapproach him on another level. The little girl began to
+play with her glasses, and accidentally knocked them from her nose. The
+minister's face and figure became a blur, and in the purblindness to which
+she was reduced she had a moment of clouded volition in which she was
+tempted to renounce, and even oppose, the scheme for a Social Union, in
+spite of her promise to Mr. Brandreth. But she remembered that she was
+a consistent and faithful person, and she said: “The ladies have a plan
+for raising the money, and they've applied to me to second it--to use my
+influence somehow among the villagers to get them interested; and the
+working people can help too if they choose. But I'm quite a stranger
+amongst those I'm expected to influence, and I don't at all know how they
+will take it.” The minister listened, neither prompting nor interrupting.
+“The ladies' plan is to have an entertainment at one of the cottages, and
+charge an admission, and devote the proceeds to the union.” She paused.
+Mr. Peck still remained silent, but she knew he was attentive. She pushed
+on. “They intend to have a--a representation, in the open air, of one of
+Shakespeare's plays, or scenes from one--”
+
+“Do you wish me,” interrupted the minister, “to promote the establishment
+of this union? Is that why you speak to me of it?”
+
+“Why, I don't know _why_ I speak to you of it,” she replied with a
+laugh of embarrassment, to which he was cold, apparently. “I certainly
+couldn't ask you to take part in an affair that you didn't approve.”
+
+“I don't know that I disapprove of it. Properly managed, it might be a good
+thing.”
+
+“Yes, of course. But I understand why you might not sympathise with that
+part of it, and that is why I told you of it,” said Annie.
+
+“What part?”
+
+“The--the--theatricals.”
+
+“Why not?” asked the minister.
+
+“I know--Mrs. Bolton told me you were very liberal,” Annie faltered on;
+“but I didn't expect you as a--But of course--”
+
+“I read Shakespeare a great deal,” said Mr. Peck. “I have never been in the
+theatre; but I should like to see one of his plays represented where it
+could cause no one to offend.”
+
+“Yes,” said Annie, “and this would be by amateurs, and there could be no
+_possible_ 'offence in it.' I wished to know how the general idea
+would strike you. Of course the ladies would be only too glad of your
+advice and co-operation. Their plan is to sell tickets to every one for the
+theatricals, and to a certain number of invited persons for a supper, and a
+little dance afterward on the lawn.”
+
+“I don't know if I understand exactly,” said the minister.
+
+Annie repeated her statement more definitely, and explained, from Mr.
+Brandreth, as before, that the invitations were to be given so as to
+eliminate the shop-hand element from the supper and dance.
+
+Mr. Peck listened quietly. “That would prevent my taking part in the
+affair,” he said, as quietly as he had listened.
+
+“Of course--dancing,” Annie began.
+
+“It is not that. Many people who hold strictly to the old opinions now
+allow their children to learn dancing. But I could not join at all with
+those who were willing to lay the foundations of a Social Union in a social
+disunion--in the exclusion of its beneficiaries from the society of their
+benefactors.”
+
+He was not sarcastic, but the grotesqueness of the situation as he had
+sketched it was apparent. She remembered now that she had felt something
+incongruous in it when Mr. Brandreth exposed it, but not deeply.
+
+The minister continued gently: “The ladies who are trying to get up this
+Social Union proceed upon the assumption that working people can neither
+see nor feel a slight; but it is a great mistake to do so.”
+
+Annie had the obtuseness about those she fancied below her which is one of
+the consequences of being brought up in a superior station. She believed
+that there was something to say on the other side, and she attempted to say
+it.
+
+“I don't know that you could call it a slight exactly. People can ask those
+they prefer to a social entertainment.”
+
+“Yes--if it is for their own pleasure.”
+
+“But even in a public affair like this the work-people would feel
+uncomfortable and out of place, wouldn't they, if they stayed to the supper
+and the dance? They might be exposed to greater suffering among those whose
+manners and breeding were different, and it might be very embarrassing all
+round. Isn't there that side to be regarded?”
+
+“You beg the question,” said the minister, as unsparingly as if she were
+a man. “The point is whether a Social Union beginning in social exclusion
+could ever do any good. What part do these ladies expect to take in
+maintaining it? Do they intend to spend their evenings there, to associate
+on equal terms with the shoe-shop and straw-shop hands?”
+
+“I don't suppose they do, but I don't know,” said Annie dryly; and she
+replied by helplessly quoting Mr. Brandreth: “They intend to organise a
+system of lectures, concerts, and readings. They wish to get on common
+ground with them.”
+
+“They can never get on common ground with them in that way,” said the
+minister. “No doubt they think they want to do them good; but good is from
+the heart, and there is no heart in what they propose. The working people
+would know that at once.”
+
+“Then you mean to say,” Annie asked, half alarmed and half amused, “that
+there can be no friendly intercourse with the poor and the well-to-do
+unless it is based upon social equality?”
+
+“I will answer your question by asking another. Suppose you were one of the
+poor, and the well-to-do offered to be friendly with you on such terms as
+you have mentioned, how should you feel toward them?”
+
+“If you make it a personal question--”
+
+“It makes itself a personal question,” said the minister dispassionately.
+
+“Well, then, I trust I should have the good sense to see that social
+equality between people who were better dressed, better taught, and better
+bred than myself was impossible, and that for me to force myself into their
+company was not only bad taste, but it was foolish, I have often heard my
+father say that the great superiority of the American practice of democracy
+over the French ideal was that it didn't involve any assumption of social
+equality. He said that equality before the law and in politics was sacred,
+but that the principle could never govern society, and that Americans all
+instinctively recognised it. And I believe that to try to mix the different
+classes would be un-American.”
+
+Mr. Peck smiled, and this was the first break in his seriousness. “We don't
+know what is or will be American yet. But we will suppose you are quite
+right. The question is, how would you feel toward the people whose company
+you wouldn't force yourself into?”
+
+“Why, of course,” Annie was surprised into saying, “I suppose I shouldn't
+feel very kindly toward them.”
+
+“Even if you knew that they felt kindly toward you?”
+
+“I'm afraid that would only make the matter worse,” she said, with an
+uneasy laugh.
+
+The minister was silent on his side of the stove.
+
+“But do I understand you to say,” she demanded, “that there can be no love
+at all, no kindness, between the rich and the poor? God tells us all to
+love one another.”
+
+“Surely,” said the minister. “Would you suffer such a slight as your
+friends propose, to be offered to any one you loved?”
+
+She did not answer, and he continued, thoughtfully: “I suppose that if
+a poor person could do a rich person a kindness which cost him some
+sacrifice, he might love him. In that case there could be love between
+the rich and the poor.”
+
+“And there could be no love if a rich man did the same?”
+
+“Oh yes,” the minister said--“upon the same ground. Only, the rich man
+would have to make a sacrifice first that he would really feel.”
+
+“Then you mean to say that people can't do any good at all with their
+money?” Annie asked.
+
+“Money is a palliative, but it can't cure. It can sometimes create a bond
+of gratitude perhaps, but it can't create sympathy between rich and poor.”
+
+“But _why_ can't it?”
+
+“Because sympathy--common feeling--the sense of fraternity--can spring only
+from like experiences, like hopes, like fears. And money cannot buy these.”
+
+He rose, and looked a moment about him, as if trying to recall something.
+Then, with a stiff obeisance, he said, “Good evening,” and went out,
+while she remained daunted and bewildered, with the child in her arms, as
+unconscious of having kept it as he of having left it with her.
+
+Mrs. Bolton must have reminded him of his oversight, for after being gone
+so long as it would have taken him to walk to her parlour and back, he
+returned, and said simply, “I forgot Idella.”
+
+He put out his hands to take her, but she turned perversely from him, and
+hid her face in Annie's neck, pushing his hands away with a backward reach
+of her little arm.
+
+“Come, Idella!” he said. Idella only snuggled the closer.
+
+Mrs. Bolton came in with the little girl's wraps; they were very common
+and poor, and the thought of getting her something prettier went through
+Annie's mind.
+
+At sight of Mrs. Bolton the child turned from Annie to her older friend.
+
+“I'm afraid you have a woman-child for your daughter, Mr. Peck,” said
+Annie, remotely hurt at the little one's fickleness.
+
+Neither Mr. Peck nor Mrs. Bolton smiled, and with some vague intention
+of showing him that she could meet the poor on common ground by sharing
+their labours, she knelt down and helped Mrs. Bolton tie on and button on
+Idella's things.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+
+Next morning the day broke clear after the long storm, and Annie woke in
+revolt against the sort of subjection in which she had parted from Mr.
+Peck. She felt the need of showing Mrs. Bolton that, although she had been
+civil to him, she had no sympathy with his ideas; but she could not think
+of any way to formulate her opposition, and all she could say in offence
+was, “Does Mr. Peck usually forget his child when he starts home?”
+
+“I don't know as he does,” answered Mrs. Bolton simply. “He's rather of an
+absent-minded man, and I suppose he's like other men when he gets talking.”
+
+“The child's clothes were disgracefully shabby!” said Annie, vexed that her
+attack could come to no more than this.
+
+“I presume,” said Mrs. Bolton, “that if he kept more of his money for
+himself, he could dress her better.”
+
+“Oh, that's the way with these philanthropists,” said Annie, thinking of
+Hollingsworth, in _The Blithedale Romance_, the only philanthropist
+whom she had really ever known, “They are always ready to sacrifice the
+happiness and comfort of any one to the general good.”
+
+Mrs. Bolton stood a moment, and then went out without replying; but she
+looked as offended as Annie could have wished. About ten o'clock the bell
+rang, and she came gloomily into the study, and announced that Mrs. Munger
+was in the parlour.
+
+Annie had already heard an authoritative rustling of skirts, and she was
+instinctively prepared for the large, vigorous woman who turned upon her
+from the picture she had been looking at on the wall, and came toward her
+with the confident air of one sure they must be friends. Mrs. Munger was
+dressed in a dark, firm woollen stuff, which communicated its colour,
+if not its material, to the matter-of-fact bonnet which she wore on her
+plainly dressed hair. In one of her hands, which were cased in driving
+gloves of somewhat insistent evidence, she carried a robust black silk
+sun-umbrella, and the effect of her dress otherwise might be summarised in
+the statement that where other women would have worn lace, she seemed to
+wear leather. She had not only leather gloves, and a broad leather belt at
+her waist, but a leather collar; her watch was secured by a leather cord,
+passing round her neck, and the stubby tassel of her umbrella stick was
+leather: she might be said to be in harness. She had a large, handsome
+face, no longer fresh, but with an effect of exemplary cleanness, and a
+pair of large grey eyes that suggested the notion of being newly washed,
+and that now looked at Annie with the assumption of fully understanding
+her.
+
+“Ah, Miss Kilburn!” she said, without any of the wonted preliminaries of
+introduction and greeting. “I should have come long ago to see you, but
+I've been dispersed over the four quarters of the globe ever since you
+came, my dear. I got home last night on the nine o'clock train, in the last
+agonies of that howling tempest. Did you ever know anything like it? I see
+your trees have escaped. I wonder they weren't torn to shreds.”
+
+Annie took her on her own ground of ignoring their past non-acquaintance.
+“Yes, it was awful. And your son--how did you leave him? Mr. Brandreth--”
+
+“Oh yes, poor little man! I found him waiting for me at home last night,
+and he told me he had been here. He was blowing about in the storm all day.
+Such a spirit! There was nothing serious the matter; the bridge of the nose
+was all right; merely the cartilage pushed aside by the ball.”
+
+She had passed so lightly from Mr. Brandreth's heroic spirit to her son's
+nose that Annie, woman as she was, and born to these bold bounds over
+sequence, was not sure where they had arrived, till Mrs. Munger added:
+“Jim's used to these things. I'm thankful it wasn't a finger, or an eye.
+What is _that_?” She jumped from her chair, and swooped upon the
+Spanish-Roman water-colour Annie had stood against some books on the table,
+pending its final disposition.
+
+“It's only a Guerra,” said Annie. “My things are all scattered about still;
+I have scarcely tried to get into shape yet.”
+
+Mrs. Munger would not let her interpose any idea of there being a past
+between them. She merely said: “You knew the Herricks at Rome, of course.
+I'm in hopes I shall get them here when they come back. I want you to help
+me colonise Hatboro' with the right sort of people: it's so easy to get the
+wrong sort! But, so far, I think we've succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.
+It's easy enough to get nice people together at the seaside; but inland!
+No; it's only a very few nice people who will come into the country for the
+summer; and we propose to make Hatboro' a winter colony too; that gives us
+agreeable invalids, you know; it gave us the Brandreths. He told you of our
+projected theatricals, I suppose?”
+
+“Yes,” said Annie non-committally, “he did.”
+
+“I know just how you feel about it, my dear,” said Mrs. Munger. “'Been
+there myself,' as Jim says. But it grows upon you. I'm glad you didn't
+refuse outright;” and Mrs. Munger looked at her with eyes of large
+expectance.
+
+“No, I didn't,” said Annie, obliged by this expectance to say something.
+“But to tell you the truth, Mrs. Munger, I don't see how I'm to be of any
+use to you or to Mr. Brandreth.”
+
+“Oh, take a cab and go about, like Boots and Brewer, you know, for the
+Veneerings.” She said this as if she knew about the humour rather than felt
+it. “We are placing all our hopes of bringing round the Old Hatborians in
+you.”
+
+“I'm afraid you're mistaken about my influence,” said Annie. “Mr. Brandreth
+spoke of it, and I had an opportunity of trying it last night, and seeing
+just what it amounted to.”
+
+“Yes?” Mrs. Munger prompted, with an increase of expectance in her large
+clear eyes, and of impartiality in her whole face.
+
+“Mr. Peck was here,” said Annie reluctantly, “and I tried it on him.”
+
+“Yes?” repeated Mrs. Munger, as immutably as if she were sitting for her
+photograph and keeping the expression.
+
+Annie broke from her reluctance with a sort of violence which carried
+her further than she would have gone otherwise. She ridiculed Mr. Peck's
+appearance and manner, and laughed at his ideas to Mrs. Munger. She had not
+a good conscience in it, but the perverse impulse persisted in her. There
+seemed no other way in which she could assert herself against him.
+
+Mrs. Munger listened judicially, but she seemed to take in only what Mr.
+Peck had thought of the dance and supper; at the end she said, rather
+vacantly, “What nonsense!”
+
+“Yes; but I'm afraid he thinks it's wisdom, and for all practical purposes
+it amounts to that. You see what my 'influence' has done at the outset,
+Mrs. Munger. He'll never give way on such a point.”
+
+“Oh, very well, then,” said Mrs. Munger, with the utmost lightness and
+indifference, “we'll drop the idea of the invited supper and dance.”
+
+“Do you think that would be well?” asked Annie.
+
+“Yes; why not? It's only an idea. I don't think you've made at all a bad
+beginning. It was very well to try the idea on some one who would be frank
+about it, and wouldn't go away and talk against it,” said Mrs. Munger,
+rising. “I want you to come with me, my dear.”
+
+“To see Mr. Peck? Excuse me. I don't think I could,” said Annie.
+
+“No; to see some of his parishioners,” said Mrs. Munger. “His deacons, to
+begin with, or his deacons' wives.”
+
+This seemed so much less than calling on Mr. Peck that Annie looked out at
+Mrs. Munger's basket-phaeton at her gate, and knew that she would go with
+very little more urgence.
+
+“After all, you know, you're not one of his congregation; he may yield to
+them,” said Mrs. Munger. “We must _have_ him--if only because he's
+hard to get. It'll give us an idea of what we've got to contend with.”
+
+It had a very practical sound; it was really like meeting the difficulties
+on their own ground, and it overcame the question of taste which was
+rising in Annie's mind. She demurred a little more upon the theory of her
+uselessness; but Mrs. Munger insisted, and carried her off down the village
+street.
+
+The air sparkled full of sun, and a breeze from the south-west frolicked
+with the twinkling leaves of the overarching elms, and made their shadows
+dance on the crisp roadway, packed hard by the rain, and faced with clean
+sand, which crackled pleasantly under Mrs. Munger's phaeton wheels. She
+talked incessantly. “I think we'll go first to Mrs. Gerrish's, and then to
+Mrs. Wilmington's. You know them?”
+
+“Oh yes; they were old girl friends.”
+
+“Then you know why I go to Mrs. Gerrish's first. She'll care a great deal,
+and Mrs. Wilmington won't care at all. She's a delicious creature, Mrs.
+Wilmington--don't you think? That large, indolent nature; Mr. Brandreth
+says she makes him think of 'the land in which it seemed always
+afternoon.'”
+
+Annie remembered Lyra Goodman as a long, lazy, red-haired girl who laughed
+easily; and she could not readily realise her in the character of a
+Titian-esque beauty with a gift for humorous dramatics, which she had
+filled out into during the years of her absence from Hatboro'; but she said
+“Oh yes,” in the necessity of polite acquiescence, and Mrs. Munger went on
+talking--
+
+“She's the only one of the Old Hatboro' people, so far as I know them, who
+has any breadth of view. Whoa!” She pulled up suddenly beside a stout,
+short lady in a fashionable walking dress, who was pushing an elegant
+perambulator with one hand, and shielding her complexion with a crimson
+sun-umbrella in the other.
+
+“Mrs. Gerrish!” Mrs. Munger called; and Mrs. Gerrish, who had already
+looked around at the approaching phaeton, and then looked away, so as not
+to have seemed to look, stopped abruptly, and after some exploration of the
+vicinity, discovered where the voice came from.
+
+“Oh, Mrs. Munger!” she called back, bridling with pleasure at being greeted
+in that way by the chief lady of South Hatboro', and struggling to keep up
+a dignified indifference at the same time. “Why, Annie!” she added.
+
+“Good morning, Emmeline,” said Annie; she annexed some irrelevancies about
+the weather, which Mrs. Munger swept away with business-like robustness.
+
+“We were driving down to your house to find you. I want to see the
+principal ladies of your church, and talk with them about our Social Union.
+You've heard about it?”
+
+“Well, nothing very particular,” said Mrs. Gerrish; she had probably heard
+nothing at all. After a moment she asked, “Have you seen Mrs. Wilmington
+yet?”
+
+“No, I haven't,” cried Mrs. Munger. “The fact is, I wanted to talk it over
+with you and Mr. Gerrish first.”
+
+“Oh!” said Mrs. Gerrish, brightening. “Well, I was just going right there.
+I guess he's in.”
+
+“Well, we shall meet there, then. Sorry I can't offer you a _seat_.
+But there's nothing but the rumble, and that wouldn't hold you _all_.”
+
+Mrs. Munger called this back after starting her pony. Mrs. Gerrish did not
+understand, and screamed, “_What_?”
+
+Mrs. Munger repeated her joke at the top of her voice.
+
+“Oh, I can walk!” Mrs. Gerrish yelled at the top of hers. Both the ladies
+laughed at their repartee.
+
+“She's as jealous of Mrs. Wilmington as a cat,” Mrs. Munger confided to
+Annie as they drove away; “and she's just as pleased as Punch that I've
+spoken to her first. Mrs. Wilmington won't mind. She's so delightfully
+indifferent, it really renders her almost superior; you might forget that
+she was a village person. But this has been an immense stroke. I don't
+know,” she mused, “whether I'd better let her get there first and prepare
+her husband, or do it myself. No; I'll let _her_. I'll stop here at
+Gates's.”
+
+She stopped at the pavement in front of a provision store, and a pale,
+stout man, in the long over-shirt of his business, came out to receive her
+orders. He stood, passing his hand through the top of a barrel of beans,
+and listened to Mrs. Munger with a humorous, patient smile.
+
+“Mr. Gates, I want you to send me up a leg of lamb for dinner--a large
+one.”
+
+“Last year's, then,” suggested Gates.
+
+“No; _this_ year's,” insisted Mrs. Munger; and Gates gave way with the
+air of pacifying a wilful child, which would get, after all, only what he
+chose to allow it.
+
+“All right, ma'am; a large leg of this year's lamb--grown to order. Any
+peas, spinnage, cucumbers, sparrowgrass?”
+
+“Southern, I suppose?” said Mrs. Munger.
+
+“Well, not if you want to call 'em native,” said Gates.
+
+“Yes, I'll take two bunches of asparagus, and some peas.”
+
+“Any strawberries?--natives?” suggested Gates.
+
+“Nonsense!”
+
+“Same thing; natives of Norfolk.”
+
+“You had better be honest with _me_, Mr. Gates,” said Mrs. Munger.
+“Yes, I'll take a couple of boxes.”
+
+“All right! Want 'em nice, and the biggest ones at the bottom of the box?”
+
+“Yes, I do.”
+
+“That's what I thought. Some customers wants the big ones on top; but I
+tell 'em it's all foolishness; just vanity.” Gates laughed a dry, hacking
+little laugh at his drollery, and kept his eyes on Annie. She smiled at
+last, with permissive recognition, and Gates came forward. “Used to know
+your father pretty well; but I can't keep up with the young folks any
+more.” He was really not many years older than Annie; he rubbed his right
+hand on the inside of his long shirt, and gave it her to shake. “Well, you
+haven't been about much for the last nine or ten years, that's a fact.”
+
+“Eleven,” said Annie, trying to be gay with the hand-shaking, and wondering
+if this were meeting the lower classes on common ground, and what Mr. Peck
+would think of it.
+
+“That so?” queried Gates. “Well, I declare! No wonder you've grown!” He
+hacked out another laugh, and stood on the curb-stone looking at Annie a
+moment. Then he asked, “Anything else, Mrs. Munger?”
+
+“No; that's all. Tell me, Mr. Gates, how _do_ Mr. Peck and Mr. Gerrish
+get on?” asked Mrs. Munger in a lower tone.
+
+“Well,” said Gates, “he's workin' round--the deacon's workin' round
+gradually, I guess. I guess if Mr. Peck was to put in a little more
+brimstone, the deacon'd be all right. He's a great hand for brimstone,
+you know, the deacon is.”
+
+Mrs. Munger laughed again, and then she said, with a proselyting sigh,
+“It's a pity you couldn't all find your way into the Church.”
+
+“Well, may be it _would_ be a good thing,” said Gates, as Mrs. Munger
+gathered up her reins and chirped to her pony.
+
+“He isn't a member of Mr. Peck's church,” she explained to Annie; “but
+he's one of the society, and his wife's very devout Orthodox. He's a great
+character, we think, and he'll treat you very well, if you keep on the
+right side of him. They say he cheats awfully in the weight, though.”
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+
+Mrs. Munger drove across the street, and drew up before a large, handsomely
+ugly brick dry-goods store, whose showy windows had caught Annie's eye the
+day she arrived in Hatboro'.
+
+“I see Mrs. Gerrish has got here first,” Mrs. Munger said, indicating the
+perambulator at the door, and she dismounted and fastened her pony with a
+weight, which she took from the front of the phaeton. On either door jamb
+of the store was a curved plate of polished metal, with the name GERRISH
+cut into it in black letters; the sills of the wide windows were of metal,
+and bore the same legend. At the threshold a very prim, ceremonious little
+man, spare and straight, met Mrs. Munger with a ceremonious bow, and a
+solemn “How do you do, ma'am? how do you do? I hope I see you well,” and
+he put a small dry hand into the ample clasp of Mrs. Munger's gauntlet.
+
+“Very well indeed, Mr. Gerrish. Isn't it a lovely morning? You know Miss
+Kilburn, Mr. Gerrish.”
+
+He took Annie's hand into his right and covered it with his left, lifting
+his eyes to look her in the face with an old-merchant-like cordiality.
+
+“Why, yes, indeed! Delighted to see her. Her father was one of my best
+friends. I may say that I owe everything that I am to Squire Kilburn; he
+advised me to stick to commerce when I once thought of studying law. Glad
+to welcome you back to Hatboro', Miss Kilburn. You see changes on the
+surface, no doubt, but you'll find the genuine old feeling here. Walk right
+back, ladies,” he continued, releasing Annie's hand to waft them before
+him toward the rear of the store. “You'll find Mrs. Gerrish in my room
+there--my Growlery, as I call it.” He seemed to think he had invented the
+name. “And Mrs. Gerrish tells me that you've really come back,” he said,
+leaning decorously toward Annie as they walked, “with the intention of
+taking up your residence permanently among us. You will find very few
+places like Hatboro'.”
+
+As he spoke, walking with his hands clasped behind him, he glanced to
+right and left at the shop-girls on foot behind the counter, who dropped
+their eyes under their different bangs as they caught his glance, and
+bridled nervously. He denied them the use of chewing-gum; he permitted no
+conversation, as he called it, among them; and he addressed no jokes or
+idle speeches to them himself. A system of grooves overhead brought to his
+counting-room the cash from the clerks in wooden balls, and he returned the
+change, and kept the accounts, with a pitiless eye for errors. The women
+were afraid of him, and hated him with bitterness, which exploded at crises
+in excesses of hysterical impudence.
+
+His store was an example of variety, punctuality, and quality. Upon the
+theory, for which he deserved the credit, of giving to a country place
+the advantages of one of the great city establishments, he was gradually
+gathering, in their fashion, the small commerce into his hands. He had
+already opened his bazaar through into the adjoining store, which he had
+bought out, and he kept every sort of thing desired or needed in a country
+town, with a tempting stock of articles before unknown to the shopkeepers
+of Hatboro'. Everything was of the very quality represented; the prices
+were low, but inflexible, and cash payments, except in the case of some
+rich customers of unimpeachable credit, were invariably exacted; at the
+same time every reasonable facility for the exchange or return of goods was
+afforded. Nothing could exceed the justice and fidelity of his dealing with
+the public. He had even some effects of generosity in his dealing with his
+dependants; he furnished them free seats in the churches of their different
+persuasions, and he closed every night at six o'clock, except Saturday,
+when the shop hands were paid off, and made their purchases for the coming
+week.
+
+He stepped lightly before Annie and Mrs. Munger, and pushed open the
+ground-glass door of his office for them. It was like a bank parlour,
+except for Mrs. Gerrish sitting in her husband's leather-cushioned swivel
+chair, with her last-born in her lap; she greeted the others noisily,
+without trying to rise.
+
+“You see we are quite at home here,” said Mr. Gerrish.
+
+“Yes, and very snug you are, too,” said Mrs. Munger, taking one half of the
+leather lounge, and leaving the other half to Annie. “I don't wonder Mrs.
+Gerrish likes to visit you here.”
+
+Mr. Gerrish laughed, and said to his wife, who moved provisionally in her
+chair, seeing he had none, “Sit still, my dear; I prefer my usual perch.”
+ He took a high stool beside a desk, and gathered a ruler in his hand.
+
+“Well, I may as well begin at the beginning,” said Mrs. Munger, “and I'll
+try to be short, for I know that these are business hours.”
+
+“Take all the time you want, Mrs. Munger,” said Mr. Gerrish affably. “It's
+my idea that a good business man's business can go on without him, when
+necessary.”
+
+“Of course!” Mrs. Munger sighed. “If everybody had your _system_, Mr.
+Gerrish!” She went on and succinctly expounded the scheme of the Social
+Union. “I suppose I can't deny that the idea occurred to _me_,” she
+concluded, “but we can't hope to develop it without the co-operation of the
+ladies of Old Hatboro', and I've come, first of all, to Mrs. Gerrish.”
+
+Mr. Gerrish bowed his acknowledgments of the honour done his wife, with a
+gravity which she misinterpreted.
+
+“I think,” she began, with her censorious manner and accent, “that these
+people have too much done for them _now_. They're perfectly spoiled.
+Don't you, Annie?”
+
+Mr. Gerrish did not give Annie time to answer. “I differ with you, my
+dear,” he cut in. “It is my opinion--Or I don't know but you wish to
+confine this matter entirely to the ladies?” he suggested to Mrs. Munger.
+
+“Oh, I'm only too proud and glad that you feel interested in the matter!”
+ cried Mrs. Munger. “Without the gentlemen's practical views, we ladies are
+such feeble folk--mere conies in the rocks.”
+
+“I am as much opposed as Mrs. Gerrish--or any one--to acceding to unjust
+demands on the part of my clerks or other employees,” Mr. Gerrish began.
+
+“Yes, that's what I mean,” said his wife, and broke down with a giggle.
+
+He went on, without regarding her: “I have always made it a rule, as far as
+business went, to keep my own affairs entirely in my own hands. I fix the
+hours, and I fix the wages, and I fix all the other conditions, and I say
+plainly, 'If you don't like them, 'don't come,' or 'don't stay,' and I
+never have any difficulty.”
+
+“I'm sure,” said Mrs. Munger, “that if all the employers in the country
+would take such a stand, there would soon be an end of labour troubles. I
+think we're too concessive.”
+
+“And I do too, Mrs. Munger!” cried Mrs. Gerrish, glad of the occasion to be
+censorious and of the finer lady's opinion at the same time. “That's what I
+meant. Don't you, Annie?”
+
+“I'm afraid I don't understand exactly,” Annie replied.
+
+Mr. Gerrish kept his eye on Mrs. Munger's face, now arranged for indefinite
+photography, as he went on. “That is exactly what I say to them. That is
+what I said to Mr. Marvin one year ago, when he had that trouble in his
+shoe shop. I said, 'You're too concessive.' I said, 'Mr. Marvin, if you
+give those fellows an inch, they'll take an ell. Mr. Marvin,' said I,
+'you've got to begin by being your own master, if you want to be master of
+anybody else. You've got to put your foot down, as Mr. Lincoln said; and as
+_I_ say, you've got to _keep_ it down.'”
+
+Mrs. Gerrish looked at the other ladies for admiration, and Mrs. Munger
+said, rapidly, without disarranging her face--
+
+“Oh yes. And how much _misery_ could be saved in such cases by a
+little firmness at the outset!”
+
+“Mr. Marvin differed with me,” said Mr. Gerrish sorrowfully. “He agreed
+with me on the main point, but he said that too many of his hands had
+been in his regiment, and he couldn't lock them out. He submitted to
+arbitration. And what is arbitration?” asked Mr. Gerrish, levelling his
+ruler at Mrs. Munger. “It is postponing the evil day.”
+
+“Exactly,” said Mrs. Munger, without winking.
+
+“Mr. Marvin,” Mr. Gerrish proceeded, “may be running very smoothly now,
+and sailing before the wind all--all--nicely; but I tell _you_ his
+house is built upon the _sand_,” He put his ruler by on the desk very
+softly, and resumed with impressive quiet: “I never had any trouble but
+once. I had a porter in this store who wanted his pay raised. I simply
+said that I made it a rule to propose all advances of salary myself, and I
+should submit to no dictation from any one. He told me to go to--a place
+that I will not repeat, and I told him to walk out of my store. He was
+under the influence of liquor at the time, I suppose. I understand that he
+is drinking very hard. He does nothing to support his family whatever, and
+from all that I can gather, he bids fair to fill a drunkard's grave inside
+of six months.”
+
+Mrs. Munger seized her opportunity. “Yes; and it is just such cases as this
+that the Social Union is designed to meet. If this man had some such place
+to spend his evenings--and bring his family if he chose--where he could get
+a cup of good coffee for the same price as a glass of rum--Don't you see?”
+
+She looked round at the different faces, and Mr. Gerrish slightly frowned,
+as if the vision of the Social Union interposing between his late porter
+and a drunkard's grave, with a cup of good coffee, were not to his taste
+altogether; but he said: “Precisely so! And I was about to make the remark
+that while I am very strict--and obliged to be--with those under me in
+business, _no_ one is more disposed to promote such objects as this of
+yours.”
+
+“I was _sure_ you would approve of it,” said Mrs. Munger. “That is
+why I came to you--to you and Mrs. Gerrish--first,” said Mrs. Munger. “I
+was sure you would see it in the right light.” She looked round at Annie
+for corroboration, and Annie was in the social necessity of making a
+confirmatory murmur.
+
+Mr. Gerrish ignored them both in the more interesting work of celebrating
+himself. “I may say that there is not an institution in this town which I
+have not contributed my humble efforts to--to--establish, from the drinking
+fountain in front of this store, to the soldiers' monument on the village
+green.”
+
+Annie turned red; Mrs. Munger said shamelessly, “That beautiful monument!”
+ and looked at Annie with eyes full of gratitude to Mr. Gerrish.
+
+“The schools, the sidewalks, the water-works, the free library, the
+introduction of electricity, the projected system of drainage, and
+_all_ the various religious enterprises at various times, I am
+proud--I am humbly proud--that I have been allowed to be the means of
+doing--sustaining--”
+
+He lost himself in the labyrinths of his sentence, and Mrs. Munger came to
+his rescue: “I fancy Hatboro' wouldn't be Hatboro' without _you_, Mr.
+Gerrish! And you _don't_ think that Mr. Peck's objection will be
+seriously felt by other leading citizens?”
+
+“_What_ is Mr. Peck's objection?” demanded Mr. Gerrish, perceptibly
+bristling up at the name of his pastor.
+
+“Why, he talked it over with Miss Kilburn last night, and he objected
+to an entertainment which wouldn't be open to all--to the shop hands and
+everybody.” Mrs. Munger explained the point fully. She repeated some things
+that Annie had said in ridicule of Mr. Peck's position regarding it. “If
+you _do_ think that part would be bad or impolitic,” Mrs. Munger
+concluded, “we could drop the invited supper and the dance, and simply have
+the theatricals.”
+
+She bent upon Mr. Gerrish a face of candid deference that filled him with
+self-importance almost to bursting.
+
+“No!” he said, shaking his head, and “No!” closing his lips abruptly, and
+opening them again to emit a final “No!” with an explosive force which
+alone seemed to save him. “Not at all, Mrs. Munger; not on any account! I
+am surprised at Mr. Peck, or rather I am _not_ surprised. He is not a
+practical man--not a man of the world; and I should have much preferred to
+hear that he objected to the dancing and the play; I could have understood
+that; I could have gone with him in that to a certain extent, though I can
+see no harm in such things when properly conducted. I have a great respect
+for Mr. Peck; I was largely instrumental in getting him here; but he is
+altogether wrong in this matter. We are not obliged to go out into the
+highways and the hedges until the bidden guests have--er--declined.”
+
+“Exactly,” said Mrs. Munger. “I never thought of that.”
+
+Mrs. Gerrish shifted her baby to another knee, and followed her husband
+with her eyes, as he dismounted from his stool and began to pace the room.
+
+“I came into this town a poor boy, without a penny in my pocket, and I
+have made my own way, every inch of it, unaided and alone. I am a thorough
+believer in giving every one an equal chance to rise and to--get along; I
+would not throw an obstacle in anybody's way; but I do not believe--I do
+_not_ believe--in pampering those who have not risen, or have made no
+effort to rise.”
+
+“It's their wastefulness, in nine cases out of ten, that keeps them down,”
+ said Mrs. Gerrish.
+
+“I don't care _what_ it is, I don't _ask_ what it is, that keeps
+them down. I don't expect to invite my clerks or Mrs. Gerrish's servants
+into my parlour. I will meet them at the polls, or the communion table,
+or on any proper occasion; but a man's home is _sacred_. I will not
+allow my wife or my children to associate with those whose--whose--whose
+idleness, or vice, or whatever, has kept them down in a country
+where--where everybody stands on an equality; and what I will not do
+myself, I will not ask others to do. I make it a rule to do unto others as
+I would have them do unto me. It is all nonsense to attempt to introduce
+those one-ideaed notions into--put them in practice.”
+
+“Yes,” said Mrs. Munger, with deep conviction, “that is my own feeling, Mr.
+Gerrish, and I'm glad to have it corroborated by your experience. Then you
+_wouldn't_ drop the little invited dance and supper?”
+
+“I will tell you how I feel about it, Mrs. Munger,” said Mr. Gerrish,
+pausing in his walk, and putting on a fine, patronising,
+gentleman-of-the-old-school smile. “You may put me down for any number of
+tickets--five, ten, fifteen--and you may command me in anything I can do to
+further the objects of your enterprise, if you will _keep_ the invited
+supper and dance. But I should not be prepared to do anything if they are
+dropped.”
+
+“What a comfort it is to meet a person who knows his own mind!” exclaimed
+Mrs. Munger.
+
+“Got company, Billy?” asked a voice at the door; and it added, “Glad to see
+_you_ here, Mrs. Gerrish.”
+
+“Ah, Mr. Putney! Come in. Hope I see you well, sir!” cried Mr. Gerrish.
+“Come in!” he repeated, with jovial frankness. “Nobody but friends here.”
+
+“I don't know about that,” said Mr. Putney, with whimsical perversity,
+holding the door ajar. “I see that arch-conspirator from South Hatboro',”
+ he said, looking at Mrs. Munger.
+
+He showed himself, as he stood holding the door ajar, a lank little figure,
+dressed with reckless slovenliness in a suit of old-fashioned black; a
+loose neck-cloth fell stringing down his shirt front, which his unbuttoned
+waistcoat exposed, with its stains from the tobacco upon which his thin
+little jaws worked mechanically, as he stared into the room with flamy blue
+eyes; his silk hat was pushed back from a high, clear forehead; he had
+yesterday's stubble on his beardless cheeks; a heavy moustache and imperial
+gave dash to a cast of countenance that might otherwise have seemed slight
+and effeminate.
+
+“Yes; but I'm in charge of Miss Kilburn, and you needn't be afraid of me.
+Come in. We wish to consult you,” cried Mrs. Munger. Mrs. Gerrish cackled
+some applausive incoherencies.
+
+Putney advanced into the room, and dropped his burlesque air as he
+approached Annie.
+
+“Miss Kilburn, I must apologise for not having called with Mrs. Putney to
+pay my respects. I have been away; when I got back I found she had stolen
+a march on me. But I'm going to make Ellen bring me at once. I don't think
+I've been in your house since the old Judge's time. Well, he was an able
+man, and a good man; I was awfully fond of the old Judge, in a boy's way.”
+
+“Thank you,” said Annie, touched by something gentle and honest in his
+words.
+
+“He was a Christian gentleman,” said Mr. Gerrish with authority.
+
+Putney said, without noticing Mr. Gerrish, “Well, I'm glad you've come back
+to the old place, Miss Kilburn--I almost said Annie.”
+
+“I shouldn't have minded, Ralph,” she retorted.
+
+“Shouldn't you? Well, that's right.” Putney continued, ignoring the
+laugh of the others at Annie's sally: “You'll find Hatboro' pretty
+exciting, after Rome, for a while, I suppose. But you'll get used to
+it. It's got more of the modern improvements, I'm told, and it's more
+public-spirited--more snap to it. I'm told that there's more enterprise in
+Hatboro', more real _crowd_ in South Hatboro' alone, than there is in
+the Quirinal and the Vatican put together.”
+
+“You had better come and live at South Hatboro', Mr. Putney; that would be
+just the atmosphere for you,” said Mrs. Munger, with aimless hospitality.
+She said this to every one.
+
+“Is it about coming to South Hatboro' you want to consult me?” asked
+Putney.
+
+“Well, it is, and it isn't,” she began.
+
+“Better be honest, Mrs. Munger,” said Putney. “You can't do anything for
+a client who won't be honest with his attorney. That's what I have to
+continually impress upon the reprobates who come to me. I say, 'It don't
+matter what you've done; if you expect me to get you off, you've got to
+make a clean breast of it.' They generally do; they see the sense of it.”
+
+They all laughed, and Mr. Gerrish said, “Mr. Putney is one of Hatboro's
+privileged characters, Miss Kilburn.”
+
+“Thank you, Billy,” returned the lawyer, with mock-tenderness. “Now, Mrs.
+Munger, out with it!”
+
+“You'll have to tell him sooner or later, Mrs. Munger!” said Mrs. Gerrish,
+with overweening pleasure in her acquaintance with both of these superior
+people. “He'll get it out of you anyway.” Her husband looked at her, and
+she fell silent.
+
+Mrs. Munger swept her with a tolerant smile as she looked up at Putney.
+“Why, it's really Miss Kilburn's affair,” she began; and she laid the case
+before the lawyer with a fulness that made Annie wince.
+
+Putney took a piece of tobacco from his pocket, and tore off a morsel with
+his teeth. “Excuse me, Annie! It's a beastly habit. But it's saved me from
+something worse. _You_ don't know what I've been; but anybody in
+Hatboro' can tell you. I made my shame so public that it's no use trying
+to blink the past. You don't have to be a hypocrite in a place where
+everybody's seen you in the gutter; that's the only advantage I've got over
+my fellow-citizens, and of course I abuse it; that's nature, you know. When
+I began to pull up I found that tobacco helped me; I smoked and chewed
+both; now I only chew. Well,” he said, dropping the pathetic simplicity
+with which he had spoken, and turning with a fierce jocularity from the
+shocked and pitying look in Annie's face to Mrs. Munger, “what do you
+propose to do? Brother Peck's head seems to be pretty level, in the
+abstract.”
+
+“Yes,” said Mrs. Munger, willing to put the case impartially; “and I should
+be perfectly willing to drop the invited dance and supper, if it was
+thought best, though I must say I don't at all agree with Mr. Peck in
+principle. I don't see what would become of society.”
+
+“You ought to be in politics, Mrs. Munger,” said Putney. “Your readiness to
+sacrifice principle to expediency shows what a reform will be wrought when
+you ladies get the suffrage. What does Brother Gerrish think?”
+
+“No, no,” said Mrs. Munger. “We want an impartial opinion.”
+
+“I always think as Brother Gerrish thinks,” said Putney. “I guess you
+better give up the fandango; hey, Billy?”
+
+“No, sir; no, Mr. Putney,” answered the merchant nervously. “I can't agree
+with you. And I will tell you why, sir.”
+
+He gave his reasons, with some abatement of pomp and detail, and with the
+tremulous eagerness of a solemn man who expects a sarcastic rejoinder. “It
+would be a bad precedent. This town is full now of a class of persons who
+are using every opportunity to--to abuse their privileges. And this would
+be simply adding fuel to the flame.”
+
+“Do you really think so, Billy?” asked the lawyer, with cool derision.
+“Well, we all abuse our privileges at every opportunity, of course; I was
+just saying that I abused mine; and I suppose those fellows would abuse
+theirs if you happened to hurt their wives' and daughters' feelings. And
+how are you going to manage? Aren't you afraid that they will hang around,
+after the show, indefinitely, unless you ask all those who have not
+received invitations to the dance and supper to clear the grounds, as they
+do in the circus when the minstrels are going to give a performance not
+included in the price of admission? Mind, I don't care anything about your
+Social Union.”
+
+“Oh, but _surely_!” cried Mrs. Munger, “you _must_ allow that
+it's a good object.”
+
+“Well, perhaps it is, if it will keep the men away from the rum-holes. Yes,
+I guess it is. You won't sell liquor?”
+
+“We expect to furnish coffee at cost price,” said Mrs. Munger, smiling at
+Putney's joke.
+
+“And good navy-plug too, I hope. But you see it would be rather awkward,
+don't you? You see, Annie?”
+
+“Yes, I see,” said Annie. “I hadn't thought of that part before.”
+
+“And you didn't agree with Brother Peck on general principles? There we
+see the effect of residence abroad,” said Putney. “The uncorrupted--or
+I will say the uninterrupted--Hatborian has none of those aristocratic
+predilections of yours, Annie. He grows up in a community where there is
+neither poverty nor richness, and where political economy can show by the
+figures that the profligate shop hands get nine-tenths of the profits, and
+starve on 'em, while the good little company rolls in luxury on the other
+tenth. But you've got used to something different over there, and of course
+Brother Peck's ideas startled you. Well, I suppose I should have been just
+so myself.”
+
+“Mr. Putney has never felt just right about the working-men since he lost
+the boycotters' case,” said Mr. Gerrish, with a snicker.
+
+“Oh, come now, Billy, why did you give me away?” said Putney, with mock
+suffering. “Well, I suppose I might as well own up, Mrs. Munger; it's no
+use trying to keep it from _you_; you know it already. Yes, Annie, I
+defended some poor devils here for combining to injure a non-union man--for
+doing once just what the big manufacturing Trusts do every day of the year
+with impunity; and I lost the case. I expected to. I told 'em they were
+wrong, but I did my best for 'em. 'Why, you fools,' said I--that's the way
+I talk to 'em, Annie; I call 'em pet names; they like it; they're used to
+'em; they get 'em every day in the newspapers--'you fools,' said I, 'what
+do you want to boycott for, when you can _vote_? What do you want to
+break the laws for, when you can _make_ 'em? You idiots, you,' said I,
+'what do you putter round for, persecuting non-union men, that have as good
+a right to earn their bread as you, when you might make the whole United
+States of America a Labour Union?' Of course I didn't say that in court.”
+
+“Oh, how delicious you are, Mr. Putney!” said Mrs. Munger.
+
+“Glad you like me, Mrs. Munger,” Putney replied.
+
+“Yes, you're delightful,” said the lady, recovering from the effects of
+the drollery which they had all pretended to enjoy, Mr. Gerrish, and Mrs.
+Gerrish by his leave, even more than the others. “But you're not candid.
+All this doesn't help us to a conclusion. Would you give up the invited
+dance and supper, or wouldn't you? That's the question.”
+
+“And no shirking, hey?” asked Putney.
+
+“No shirking.”
+
+Putney glanced through a little transparent space in the ground-glass
+windows framing the room, which Mr. Gerrish used for keeping an eye on his
+sales-ladies to see that they did not sit down.
+
+“Hello!” he exclaimed. “There's Dr. Morrell. Let's put the case to him.” He
+opened the door and called down the store, “Come in here, Doc!”
+
+“What?” called back an amused voice; and after a moment steps approached,
+and Dr. Morrell hesitated at the open door. He was a tall man, with a
+slight stoop; well dressed; full bearded; with kind, boyish blue eyes that
+twinkled in fascinating friendliness upon the group. “Nobody sick here, I
+hope?”
+
+“Walk right in, sir! come in, Dr. Morrell,” said Mr. Gerrish. “Mrs. Munger
+and Mrs. Gerrish you know. Present you to Miss Kilburn, who has come to
+make her home among us after a prolonged residence abroad. Dr. Morrell,
+Miss Kilburn.”
+
+“No, there's nobody sick here, in one sense,” said Putney, when the doctor
+had greeted the ladies. “But we want your advice all the same. Mrs. Munger
+is in a pretty bad way morally, Doc.”
+
+“Don't you mind Mr. Putney, doctor!” screamed Mrs. Gerrish.
+
+Putney said, with respectful recognition of the poor woman's attempt to be
+arch, “I'll try to keep within the bounds of truth in stating the case,
+Mrs. Gerrish.”
+
+He went on to state it, with so much gravity and scrupulosity, and with
+so many appeals to Mrs. Munger to correct him if he were wrong, that the
+doctor was shaking with laughter when Putney came to an end with unbroken
+seriousness. At each repetition of the facts, Annie's relation to them grew
+more intolerable; and she suspected Putney of an intention to punish her.
+“Well, what do you say?” he demanded of the doctor.
+
+“Ha, ha, ha! ah, ha, ha.” laughed the doctor, shutting his eyes and
+throwing back his head.
+
+“Seems to consider it a _laughing_ matter,” said Putney to Mrs.
+Munger.
+
+“Yes; and that is all your fault,” said Mrs. Munger, trying, with the
+ineffectiveness of a large woman, to pout.
+
+“No, no, I'm not laughing.” began the doctor.
+
+“Smiling, perhaps,” suggested Putney.
+
+The doctor went off again. Then, “I beg--I _beg_ your pardon, Mrs.
+Munger,” he resumed. “But it isn't a professional question, you know; and
+I--I really couldn't judge--have any opinion on such a matter.”
+
+“No shirking,” said Putney. “That's what Mrs. Munger said to me.”
+
+“Of course not,” gurgled the doctor. “You ladies will know what to do. I'm
+sure _I_ shouldn't,” he added.
+
+“Well, I must be going,” said Putney. “Sorry to leave you in this fix,
+Doc.” He flashed out of the door, and suddenly came back to offer Annie his
+hand. “I beg your pardon, Annie. I'm going to make Ellen bring me round.
+Good morning.” He bowed cursorily to the rest.
+
+“Wait--I'll go with you, Putney,” said the doctor.
+
+Mrs. Munger rose, and Annie with her. “We must go too,” she said. “We've
+taken up Mr. Gerrish's time most unconscionably,” and now Mr. Gerrish did
+not urge her to remain.
+
+“Well, good-bye,” said Mrs. Gerrish, with a genteel prolongation of the
+last syllable.
+
+Mr. Gerrish followed his guests down the store, and even out upon the
+sidewalk, where he presided with unheeded hospitality over the superfluous
+politeness of Putney and Dr. Morrell in putting Mrs. Munger and Annie into
+the phaeton. Mrs. Munger attempted to drive away without having taken up
+her hitching weight.
+
+“I suppose that there isn't a post in this town that my wife hasn't tried
+to pull up in that way,” said Putney gravely.
+
+The doctor doubled himself down with another fit of laughing.
+
+Annie wanted to laugh too, but she did not like his laughing. She
+questioned if it were not undignified. She felt that it might be
+disrespectful. Then she asked herself why he should respect her.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+
+“That was a great success,” said Mrs. Munger, as they drove away. Annie
+said nothing, and she added, “Don't you think so?”
+
+“Well, I confess,” said Annie, “I don't see how, exactly. Do you mean with
+regard to Mr. Gerrish?”
+
+“Oh no; I don't care anything about him,” said Mrs. Munger, touching her
+pony with the tip of her whip-lash. “He's an odious little creature, and I
+knew that he would go for the dance and supper because Mr. Peck was opposed
+to them. He's one of the anti-Peck party in his church, and that is the
+reason I spoke to him. But I meant the other gentlemen. You saw how they
+took it.”
+
+“I saw that they both made fun of it,” said Annie.
+
+“Yes; that's just the point. It's so fortunate they were frank about it. It
+throws a new light on it; and if that's the way nice people are going to
+look at it, why, we must give up the idea. I'm quite prepared to do so. But
+I want to see Mrs. Wilmington first.”
+
+“Mrs. Munger,” said Annie uneasily, “I would rather not see Mrs. Wilmington
+with you on this subject; I should be of no use.”
+
+“My dear, you would be of the _greatest_ use,” persisted Munger, and
+she laid her arm across Annie's lap, as if to prevent her jumping out of
+the phaeton. “As Mrs. Wilmington's old friend, you will have the greatest
+influence with her.”
+
+“But I don't know that I wish to influence her in favour of the supper and
+dance; I don't know that I believe in them,” said Annie, cowed and troubled
+by the affair.
+
+“That doesn't make the slightest difference,” said Mrs. Munger impartially.
+“All you will have to do is to keep still. I will put the case to her.”
+
+She checked the pony before the bar which the flagman at the railroad
+crossing had let down, while a long freight train clattered deafeningly
+by, and then drove bumping and jouncing across the tracks. “I suppose you
+remember what 'Over the Track' means in Hatboro'?”
+
+“Oh yes,” said Annie, with a smile. “Social perdition at the least. You
+don't mean that Mrs. Wilmington lives 'Over the Track'?”
+
+“Yes. It isn't so bad as it used to be, socially. Mr. Wilmington has built
+a very fine house on this side, and there are several pretty Queen Anne
+cottages going up.”
+
+They drove along under the elms which here stood somewhat at random about
+the wide, grassless street, between the high, windowy bulks of the shoe
+shops and hat shops. The dust gradually freed itself from the cinders
+about the tracks, and it hardened into a handsome, newly made road beyond
+the houses of the shop hands. They passed some open lots, and then, on a
+pleasant rise of ground, they came to a stately residence, lifted still
+higher on its underpinning of granite blocks. It was built in a Boston
+suburban taste of twenty years ago, with a lofty mansard-roof, and it was
+painted the stone-grey colour which was once esteemed for being so quiet.
+The lawn before it sloped down to the road, where it ended smoothly at the
+brink of a neat stone wall. A black asphalt path curved from the steps by
+which you mounted from the street to the steps by which you mounted to the
+heavy portico before the massive black walnut doors.
+
+The ladies were shown into the music-room, from which the notes of a piano
+were sounding when they rang, and Mrs. Wilmington rose from the instrument
+to meet them. A young man who had been standing beside her turned away.
+Mrs. Wilmington was dressed in a light morning dress with a Watteau fall,
+whose delicate russets and faded reds and yellows heightened the richness
+of her complexion and hair.
+
+“Why, Annie,” she said, “how glad I am to see you! And you too, Mrs.
+Munger. How _vurry_ nice!” Her words took value from the thick
+mellow tones of her voice, and passed for much more than they were worth
+intrinsically. She moved lazily about and got them into chairs, and was not
+resentful when Mrs. Munger broke out with “How hot you have it!” “Have we?
+We had the furnace lighted yesterday, and we've been in all the morning,
+and so we hadn't noticed. Jack, won't you shut the register?” she drawled
+over her shoulder. “This is my nephew, Mr. Jack Wilmington, Miss Kilburn.
+Mr. Wilmington and Mrs. Munger are old friends.”
+
+The young fellow bowed silently, and Annie instantly took a dislike to him,
+his heavy jaw, long eyes, and low forehead almost hidden under a thick
+bang. He sat down cornerwise on a chair, and listened, with a scornful
+thrust of his thick lips, to their talk.
+
+Mrs. Munger was not abashed by him. She opened her budget with all her
+robust authority, and once more put Annie to shame. When she came to the
+question of the invited supper and dance, and having previously committed
+Mrs. Wilmington in favour of the general scheme, asked her what she thought
+of that part, Mr. Jack Wilmington answered for her--
+
+“I should think you had a right to do what you please about it. It's none
+of the hands' business if you don't choose to ask them.”
+
+“Yes, that's what any one would think--in the abstract,” said Mrs. Munger.
+
+“Now, little boy,” said Mrs. Wilmington, with indolent amusement, putting
+out a silencing hand in the direction of the young man, “don't you be so
+fast. You let your aunty speak for herself. I don't know about not letting
+the hands stay to the dance and supper, Mrs. Munger. You know I might feel
+'put upon.' I used to be one of the hands myself. Yes, Annie, there was a
+time after you went away, and after father died, when I actually fell so
+low as to work for an honest living.”
+
+“I think I heard, Lyra,” said Annie; “but I had forgotten.” The fact, in
+connection with what had been said, made her still more uncomfortable.
+
+“Well, I didn't work very hard, and I didn't have to work long. But I was
+a hand, and there's no use trying to deny it. As Mr. Putney says, he and I
+have our record, and we don't have to make any pretences. And the question
+is, whether I ought to go back on my fellow-hands.”
+
+“Oh, but Mrs. _Wilmington_!” said Mrs. Munger, with intense
+deprecation, “that's such a very different thing. You were not brought up
+to it; it was just temporary; and besides--”
+
+“And besides, there was Mr. Wilmington, I know. He was very opportune. I
+might have been a hand at this moment if Mr. Wilmington had not come along
+and invited me to be a head--the head of his house. But I don't know,
+Annie, whether I oughtn't to remember my low beginnings.”
+
+“I suppose we all like to be consistent,” answered Annie aimlessly,
+uneasily.
+
+“Yes,” Mrs. Munger broke in; “but they were not your beginnings, Mrs.
+Wilmington; they were your incidents--your accidents.”
+
+“It's very pretty of you to say so, Mrs. Munger,” drawled Mrs. Wilmington.
+“But I guess I must oppose the little invited dance and supper, on
+principle. We all like to be consistent, as Annie says--even if we're
+inconsistent in the attempt,” she added, with a laugh.
+
+“Very well, then,” exclaimed Mrs. Munger, “we'll _drop_ them. As I
+said to Miss Kilburn on our way here, 'if Mrs. Wilmington is opposed to
+them, we'll drop them.'”
+
+“Oh, am I such an influential person?” said Mrs. Wilmington, with a shrug.
+“It's rather awful--isn't it, Annie?”
+
+“Not at all!” Mrs. Munger answered for Annie. “We've just been talking the
+matter over with Mr. Putney and Dr. Morrell, and they're both opposed.
+You're merely the straw that breaks the camel's back, Mrs. Wilmington.”
+
+“Oh, _thank_ you! That's a great relief.”
+
+“Well--and now the question is, will you take the part of the Nurse or not
+in the dramatics?” asked Mrs. Munger, returning to business.
+
+“Well, I must think about that, and I must ask Mr. Wilmington. Jack,” she
+called over her shoulder to the young man at the window, “do you think your
+uncle would approve of me as Juliet's Nurse?”
+
+“You'd better ask him,” growled the young fellow.
+
+“Well,” said Mrs. Wilmington, with another laugh, “I'll think it over, Mrs.
+Munger.”
+
+“Thank you,” said Mrs. Munger. “And now we must really be going,” she
+added, pulling out her watch by its leathern guard.
+
+“Not till you've had lunch,” said Mrs. Wilmington, rising with the ladies.
+“You must stay. Annie, I shall not excuse you.”
+
+“Well,” said Mrs. Munger, complying without regard to Annie, “all this
+diplomacy is certainly very exhausting.”
+
+“Lunch will be on the table in one moment,” returned Mrs. Wilmington, as
+the ladies sat down again provisionally. “Will you join us, Jack?”
+
+“No; I'm going to the office,” said the nephew, bowing himself out of the
+room.
+
+“Jack's learning to be superintendent,” said Mrs. Wilmington, lifting her
+teasing voice to make him hear her in the hall, “and he's been spending the
+whole morning here.”
+
+In the richly appointed dining-room--a glitter of china and glass and a
+mass of carven oak--the table was laid for two.
+
+“Put another plate, Norah,” said Mrs. Wilmington carelessly.
+
+There was bouillon in teacups, chicken cutlets in white sauce, and luscious
+strawberries.
+
+“_What_ a cook!” cried Mrs. Munger, over the cutlets.
+
+“Yes, she's a treasure; I don't deny it,” said Mrs. Wilmington.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+
+By the end of May most of the summer folk had come to their cottages in
+South Hatboro'. One after another the ladies called upon Annie. They all
+talked to her of the Social Union, and it seemed to be agreed that it was
+fully in train, though what was really in train was the entertainment to
+be given at Mrs. Munger's for the benefit of the Union; the Union always
+dropped out of the talk as soon as the theatricals were mentioned.
+
+When Annie went to return these visits she scarcely recognised even
+the shape of the country, once so familiar to her, of which the summer
+settlement had possessed itself. She found herself in a strange world--a
+world of colonial and Queen Anne architecture, where conscious lines and
+insistent colours contributed to an effect of posing which she had never
+seen off the stage. But it was not a very large world, and after the young
+trees and hedges should have grown up and helped to hide it, she felt sure
+that it would be a better world. In detail it was not so bad now, but
+the whole was a violent effect of porches, gables, chimneys, galleries,
+loggias, balconies, and jalousies, which nature had not yet had time to
+palliate.
+
+Mrs. Munger was at home, and wanted her to spend the day, to drive out with
+her, to stay to lunch. When Annie would not do any of these things, she
+invited herself to go with her to call at the Brandreths'. But first she
+ordered her to go out with her to see the place where they intended to have
+the theatricals: a pretty bit of natural boscage--white birches, pines, and
+oaks--faced by a stretch of smooth turf, where a young man in a flannel
+blazer was painting a tennis-court in the grass. Mrs. Munger introduced him
+as her Jim, and the young fellow paused from his work long enough to bow to
+her: his nose now seemed in perfect repair.
+
+Mr. Brandreth met them at the door of his mother's cottage. It was a very
+small cottage on the outside, with a good deal of stained glass _en
+évidence_ in leaded sashes; where the sashes were not leaded and the
+glass not stained, the panes were cut up into very large ones, with little
+ones round them. Everything was very old-fashioned inside. The door opened
+directly into a wainscoted square hall, which had a large fireplace with
+gleaming brass andirons, and a carved mantel carried to the ceiling. It was
+both baronial and colonial in its decoration; there was part of a suit of
+imitation armour under a pair of moose antlers on one wall, and at one side
+of the fireplace there was a spinning-wheel, with a tuft of flax ready to
+be spun. There were Japanese swords on the lowest mantel-shelf, together
+with fans and vases; a long old flint-lock musket stretched across the
+panel above. Mr. Brandreth began to show things to Annie, and to tell how
+little they cost, as soon as the ladies entered. His mother's voice called
+from above, “Now, Percy, you stop till _I_ get there!” and in a moment
+or two she appeared from behind a _portière_ in one corner. Before she
+shook hands with the ladies, or allowed any kind of greeting, she pulled
+the _portière_ aside, and made Annie admire the snug concealment of
+the staircase. Then she made her go upstairs and see the chambers, and the
+second-hand colonial bedsteads, and the andirons everywhere, and the old
+chests of drawers and their brasses; and she told her some story about
+each, and how Percy picked it up and had it repaired. When they came down,
+the son took Annie in hand again and walked her over the ground-floor,
+ending with the kitchen, which was in the taste of an old New England
+kitchen, with hard-seated high-backed chairs, and a kitchen table with
+curiously turned legs, which he had picked up in the hen-house of a
+neighbouring farmer for a song. There was an authentic crane in the
+dining-room fireplace, which he had found in a heap of scrap-iron at a
+blacksmith's shop, and had got for next to nothing. The sideboard he had
+got at an old second-hand shop in the North End; and he believed it was
+an heirloom from the house of one of the old ministers of the North End
+Church. Everything, nearly, in the Brandreth cottage was an heirloom,
+though Annie could not remember afterward any object that had been an
+heirloom in the Brandreth family.
+
+When she went back with Mr. Brandreth to the hall, which seemed to be also
+the drawing-room, she found that Mrs. Brandreth had lighted the fire on
+the hearth, though it was rather a warm day without, for the sake of the
+effect. She was sitting in the chimney-seat, and shielding her face from
+the blaze with an old-fashioned feather hand-screen.
+
+“Now don't you think we have a lovely little home?” she demanded.
+
+Mrs. Munger began to break out in its praise, but she shook the screen
+silencingly at her.
+
+“No, no! I want Miss Kilburn's unbiassed opinion. Don't you speak, Mrs.
+Munger! Now haven't we?”
+
+Mrs. Brandreth made Annie assent to the superiority of her cottage in
+detail. She recapitulated the different facts of the architecture and
+furnishing, from each of which she seemed to acquire personal merit, and
+she insisted that Percy should show some of them again. “We think it's a
+little picture,” she concluded, and once more Annie felt obliged to murmur
+her acquiescence.
+
+At last Mrs. Munger said that she must go to lunch, and was going to take
+Annie with her; Annie said she must lunch at home; and then Mrs. Brandreth
+pressed them both to stay to lunch with her. “You shall have a cup of tea
+out of a piece of real Satsuma,” she said; but they resisted. “I don't
+believe,” she added, apparently relieved by their persistence, and losing a
+little anxiety of manner, “that Percy's had any chance to consult you on a
+very important point about your theatricals, Miss Kilburn.”
+
+“Oh, that will do some other time, mother,” said Mr. Brandreth.
+
+“No, no! Now! And you can have Mrs. Munger's opinion too. You know Miss Sue
+Northwick is going to be Juliet?”
+
+“No!” shouted Mrs. Munger. “I thought she had refused positively. When did
+she change her mind?”
+
+“She's just sent Percy a note. We were talking it over when you came, and
+Percy was going over to tell you.”
+
+“Then it is _sure_ to be a success,” said Mrs. Munger, with a
+solemnity of triumph.
+
+“Yes, but Percy feels that it complicates one point more than ever--”
+
+“It's a question that always comes up in amateur dramatics,” said Mr.
+Brandreth, with reluctance, “and it always will; and of course it's
+particularly embarrassing in _Romeo and Juliet_. If they don't show
+any affection--it's very awkward and stiff; and if--”
+
+“I never approved of those liberties on the stage,” said Mrs. Brandreth.
+“I tell Percy that it's my principal objection to it. I can't make it
+seem nice. But he says that it's essential to the effect. Now _I_
+say that they might just incline their heads toward each other without
+_actually_, you know. But Percy is afraid that it won't do, especially
+in the parting scene on the balcony--so passionate, you know--it won't do
+simply to--They must _act_ like lovers. And it's such a great point to
+get Miss Sue Northwick to take the part, that he mustn't risk losing her by
+anything that might seem--”
+
+“Yes,” said Mrs. Munger, with deep concern.
+
+Mr. Brandreth looked very unhappy. “It's an embarrassing point. We can't
+change the play, and so the difficulty must be met and disposed of at
+once.”
+
+He did not look at either of the ladies, but Mrs. Munger referred the
+matter to Annie with a glance of impartiality. His mother also turned her
+eyes upon Annie. “Percy thought that you must have seen so much of amateur
+dramatics in Europe that you could tell him just how to do.”
+
+“Perhaps you could consult Miss Northwick herself,” said Annie dryly, after
+a moment of indignation, and another of amusement.
+
+“I thought of that,” said Mrs. Brandreth; “but as Percy's to be Romeo--You
+see he wishes the play to be a success artistically; but if it's to succeed
+socially, he must have Miss Northwick, and she might resign at the first
+suggestion of--”
+
+“Bessie Chapley would certainly have been better. She's so outspoken you
+could have put the case right to her,” said Mrs. Munger.
+
+“Yes,” said Mr. Brandreth gloomily.
+
+“But we shall find out a way. Why, you can settle it at rehearsal!”
+
+“Perhaps at rehearsal,” said Mr. Brandreth, with a pensive absence of mind.
+
+Mrs. Munger crushed his hand and his mother's in her leathern grasp, and
+took Annie away with her. “It isn't lunch-time yet,” she explained, when
+they were out of earshot, “but I saw she was simply killing you, and so I
+made the excuse. She has no mercy. There's time enough for you to make your
+calls before lunch, and then you can come home with me.”
+
+Annie suggested that this would not do after refusing Mrs. Brandreth.
+
+“Why, it would never have done to _accept_!” Mrs. Munger cried. “They
+didn't dream of it!” At the next place she said: “This is the Clevingers'.
+_They're_ some of our all-the-year-round people too.” She opened the
+door without ringing, and let herself noisily in. “This is the way we run
+in, without ceremony, everywhere. It's quite one family. That's the charm
+of the place. We expect to take each other as we find them.”
+
+Her freedom did not find the ladies off their guard anywhere. At all the
+houses there was a skurrying of feet and a flashing of skirts out of the
+room or up the stairs, and there was an interval for a thorough study of
+the features of the room before the hostess came in, with the effect of
+coming in just as she was. She had naturally always made some change in
+her dress, and Annie felt that she had not really liked being run in upon.
+Everywhere they talked to her about the theatricals; and they talked across
+her to Mrs. Munger, about one another, pretty freely.
+
+“Well, that's all there is of us at present,” said Mrs. Munger, coming down
+the main road with her from the last place, “and you see just what we are.
+It's a neighbourhood where everybody's just adapted to everybody else.
+It's not a mere mush of concession, as Emerson says; people are perfectly
+outspoken; but there's the greatest good feeling, and no vulgar display, or
+lavish expenditure, or--anything.”
+
+Annie walked slowly homeward. She was tired, and she was now aware of
+having been extremely bored by the South Hatboro' people. She was very
+censorious of them, as we are of other people when we have reason to be
+discontented with ourselves. They were making a pretence of simplicity
+and unconventionality; but they had brought each her full complement of
+servants with her, and each was apparently giving herself in the summer
+to the unrealities that occupied her during the winter. Everywhere Annie
+had found the affectation of intellectual interests, and the assumption
+that these were the highest interests of life: there could be no doubt
+that culture was the ideal of South Hatboro', and several of the ladies
+complained that in the summer they got behind with their reading, or their
+art, or their music. They said it was even more trouble to keep house in
+the country than it was in town; sometimes your servants would not come
+with you; or, if they did, they were always discontented, and you did not
+know what moment they would leave you.
+
+Annie asked herself how her own life was in any wise different from that of
+these people. It had received a little more light into it, but as yet it
+had not conformed itself to any ideal of duty. She too was idle and vapid,
+like the society of which her whole past had made her a part, and she owned
+to herself, groaning in spirit, that it was no easier to escape from her
+tradition at Hatboro' than it was at Rome.
+
+When she reached her own house again, Mrs. Bolton called to her from the
+kitchen threshold as she was passing the corner on her way to the front
+door: “Mis' Putney's b'en here. I guess you'll find a note from her on the
+parlour table.”
+
+Annie fired in resentment of the uncouthness. It was Mrs. Bolton's business
+to come into the parlour and give her the note, with a respectful statement
+of the facts. But she did not tell her so; it would have been useless.
+
+Mrs. Putney's note was an invitation to a family tea for the next evening.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+
+Putney met Annie at the door, and led her into the parlour beside the hall.
+He had a little crippled boy on his right arm, and he gave her his left
+hand. In the parlour he set his burden down in a chair, and the child drew
+up under his thin arms a pair of crutches that stood beside it. His white
+face had the eager purity and the waxen translucence which we see in
+sufferers from hip-disease.
+
+“This is our Winthrop,” said his father, beginning to talk at once. “We
+receive the company and do the honours while mother's looking after the
+tea. We only keep one undersized girl,” he explained more directly to
+Annie, “and Ellen has to be chief cook and bottlewasher herself. She'll
+be in directly. Just lay off your bonnet anywhere.”
+
+She was taking in the humility of the house and its belongings while she
+received the impression of an unimagined simplicity in its life from his
+easy explanations. The furniture was in green terry, the carpet a harsh,
+brilliant tapestry; on the marble-topped centre table was a big clasp Bible
+and a basket with a stereoscope and views; the marbleised iron shelf above
+the stove-pipe hole supported two glass vases and a French clock under a
+glass bell; through the open door, across the oil-cloth of the hallway, she
+saw the white-painted pine balusters of the steep, cramped stairs. It was
+clear that neither Putney nor his wife had been touched by the aesthetic
+craze; the parlour was in the tastelessness of fifteen years before; but
+after the decoration of South Hatboro', she found a delicious repose in
+it. Her eyes dwelt with relief on the wall-paper of French grey, sprigged
+with small gilt flowers, and broken by a few cold engravings and framed
+photographs.
+
+Putney himself was as little decorated as the parlour. He had put on a
+clean shirt, but the bulging bosom had broken away from its single button,
+and showed two serrated edges of ragged linen; his collar lost itself from
+time to time under the rise of his plastron scarf band, which kept escaping
+from the stud that ought to have held it down behind. His hair was brushed
+smoothly across a forehead which looked as innocent and gentle as the
+little boy's.
+
+“We don't often give these festivities,” he went on, “but you don't come
+home once in twelve years every day, Annie. I can't tell you how glad I am
+to see you in our house; and Ellen's just as excited as the rest of us; she
+was sorry to miss you when she called.”
+
+“You're very kind, Ralph. I can't tell _you_ what a pleasure it was to
+come, and I'm not going to let the trouble I'm giving spoil my pleasure.”
+
+“Well, that's right,” said Putney. “_We_ sha'n't either.” He took out
+a cigar and put it into his mouth. “It's only a dry smoke. Ellen makes
+me let up on my chewing when we have company, and I must have something
+in my mouth, so I get a cigar. It's a sort of compromise. I'm a terribly
+nervous man, Annie; you can't imagine. If it wasn't for the grace of God,
+I think I should fly to pieces sometimes. But I guess that's what holds me
+together--that and Winthy here. I dropped him on the stairs out there, when
+I was drunk, one night. I saw you looking at them; I suppose you've been
+told; it's all right. I presume the Almighty knows what He's about; but
+sometimes He appears to save at the spigot and waste at the bung-hole, like
+the rest of us. He let me cripple my boy to reform me.”
+
+“Don't, Ralph!” said Annie, with a voice of low entreaty. She turned and
+spoke to the child, and asked him if he would not come to see her.
+
+“What?” he asked, breaking with a sort of absent-minded start from his
+intentness upon his father's words.
+
+She repeated her invitation.
+
+“Thanks!” he said, in the prompt, clear little pipe which startles by
+its distinctness and decision on the lips of crippled children. “I guess
+father'll bring me some day. Don't you want I should go out and tell mother
+she's here?” he asked his father.
+
+“Well, if you want to, Winthrop,” said his father.
+
+The boy swung himself lightly out of the room on his crutches, and his
+father turned to her. “Well, how does Hatboro' strike you, anyway, Annie?
+You needn't mind being honest with me, you know.”
+
+He did not give her a chance to say, and she was willing to let him talk
+on, and tell her what he thought of Hatboro' himself. “Well, it's like
+every other place in the world, at every moment of history--it's in a
+transition state. The theory is, you know, that most places are at a
+standstill the greatest part of the time; they haven't begun to move, or
+they've stopped moving; but I guess that's a mistake; they're moving all
+the while. I suppose Rome itself was in a transition state when you left?”
+
+“Oh, very decidedly. It had ceased to be old and was becoming new.”
+
+“Well, that's just the way with Hatboro'. There is no old Hatboro' any
+more; and there never was, as your father and mine could tell us if they
+were here. They lived in a painfully transitional period, poor old fellows!
+But, for all that, there is a difference. They lived in what was really a
+New England village, and we live now in a sprawling American town; and by
+American of course I mean a town where at least one-third of the people
+are raw foreigners or rawly extracted natives. The old New England ideal
+characterises them all, up to a certain point, socially; it puts a decent
+outside on most of 'em; it makes 'em keep Sunday, and drink on the sly.
+We got in the Irish long ago, and now they're part of the conservative
+element. We got in the French Canadians, and some of them are our best
+mechanics and citizens. We're getting in the Italians, and as soon as they
+want something better than bread and vinegar to eat, they'll begin going to
+Congress and boycotting and striking and forming pools and trusts just like
+any other class of law-abiding Americans. There used to be some talk of the
+Chinese, but I guess they've pretty much blown over. We've got Ah Lee and
+Sam Lung here, just as they have everywhere, but their laundries don't seem
+to increase. The Irish are spreading out into the country and scooping in
+the farms that are not picturesque enough for the summer folks. You can buy
+a farm anywhere round Hatboro' for less than the buildings on it cost. I'd
+rather the Irish would have the land than the summer folks. They make an
+honest living off it, and the other fellows that come out to roost here
+from June till October simply keep somebody else from making a living
+off it, and corrupt all the poor people in sight by their idleness and
+luxury. That's what I tell 'em at South Hatboro'. They don't like it, but
+I guess they believe it; anyhow they have to hear it. They'll tell you in
+self-defence that J. Milton Northwick is a practical farmer, and sells his
+butter for a dollar a pound. He's done more than anybody else to improve
+the breeds of cattle and horses; and he spends fifteen thousand a year on
+his place. It can't return him five; and that's the reason he's a curse and
+a fraud.”
+
+“Who _is_ Mr. Northwick, Ralph?” Annie interposed. “Everybody at South
+Hatboro' asked me if I'd met the Northwicks.”
+
+“He's a very great and good man,” said Putney. “He's worth a million, and
+he runs a big manufacturing company at Ponkwasset Falls, and he owns a
+fancy farm just beyond South Hatboro'. He lives in Boston, but he comes out
+here early enough to dodge his tax there, and let poorer people pay it.
+He's got miles of cut stone wall round his place, and conservatories and
+gardens and villas and drives inside of it, and he keeps up the town roads
+outside at his own expense. Yes, we feel it such an honour and advantage to
+have J. Milton in Hatboro' that our assessors practically allow him to fix
+the amount of tax here himself. People who can pay only a little at the
+highest valuation are assessed to the last dollar of their property and
+income; but the assessors know that this wouldn't do with Mr. Northwick.
+They make a guess at his income, and he always pays their bills without
+asking for abatement; they think themselves wise and public-spirited men
+for doing it, and most of their fellow-citizens think so too. You see it's
+not only difficult for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven, Annie,
+but he makes it hard for other people.
+
+“Well, as I was saying, socially, the old New England element is at the top
+of the heap here. That's so everywhere. The people that are on the ground
+first, it don't matter much who they are, have to manage pretty badly not
+to leave their descendants in social ascendency over all newer comers for
+ever. Why, I can see it in my own case. I can see that I was a sort of
+fetich to the bedevilled fancy of the people here when I was seen drunk in
+the streets every day, just because I was one of the old Hatboro' Putneys;
+and when I began to hold up, there wasn't a man in the community that
+wasn't proud and flattered to help me. Curious, isn't it? It made me sick
+of myself and ashamed of them, and I just made up my mind, as soon as I got
+straight again, I'd give all my help to the men that hadn't a tradition.
+That's what I've done, Annie. There isn't any low, friendless rapscallion
+in this town that hasn't got me for his friend--and Ellen. We've been in
+all the strikes with the men, and all their fool boycottings and kicking
+over the traces generally. Anybody else would have been turned out of
+respectable society for one-half that I've done, but it tolerates me
+because I'm one of the old Hatboro' Putneys. You're one of the old Hatboro'
+Kilburns, and if you want to have a mind of your own and a heart of your
+own, all you've got to do is to have it. They'll like it; they'll think
+it's original. That's the reason South Hatboro' got after you with that
+Social Union scheme. They were right in thinking you would have a great
+deal of influence. I was sorry you had to throw it against Brother Peck.”
+
+Annie felt herself jump at this climax, as if she had been touched on
+an exposed nerve. She grew red, and tried to be angry, but she was only
+ashamed and tempted to lie out of the part she had taken. “Mrs. Munger,”
+ she said, “gave that a very unfair turn. I didn't mean to ridicule Mr.
+Peck. I think he was perfectly sincere. The scheme of the invited dance and
+supper has been entirely given up. And I don't care for the project of the
+Social Union at all.”
+
+“Well, I'm glad to hear it,” said Putney, indifferently, and he resumed his
+analysis of Hatboro'--
+
+“We've got all the modern improvements here, Annie. I suppose you'd
+find the modern improvements, most of 'em, in Sheol: electric light,
+Bell telephone, asphalt sidewalks, and city water--though I don't know
+about the water; and I presume they haven't got a public library or an
+opera-house--perhaps they _have_ got an opera-house in Sheol: you see
+I use the Revised Version, it don't sound so much like swearing. But, as
+I was saying--”
+
+Mrs. Putney came in, and he stopped with the laugh of a man who knows that
+his wife will find it necessary to account for him and apologise for him.
+
+The ladies kissed each other. Mrs. Putney was dressed in the black silk of
+a woman who has one silk; she was red from the kitchen, but all was neat
+and orderly in the hasty toilet which she must have made since leaving the
+cook-stove. A faint, mixed perfume of violet sachet and fricasseed chicken
+attended her.
+
+“Well, as you were saying, Ralph?” she suggested.
+
+“Oh, I was just tracing a little parallel between Hatboro' and Sheol,”
+ replied her husband.
+
+Mrs. Putney made a _tchk_ of humorous patience, and laughed toward
+Annie for sympathy. “Well, then, I guess you needn't go on. Tea's ready.
+Shall we wait for the doctor?”
+
+“No; doctors are too uncertain. We'll wait for him while we're eating.
+That's what fetches him the soonest. I'm hungry. Ain't you, Win?”
+
+“Not so very,” said the boy, with his queer promptness. He stood resting
+himself on his crutches at the door, and he now wheeled about, and led the
+way out to the living-room, swinging himself actively forward. It seemed
+that his haste was to get to the dumb-waiter in the little china closet
+opening off the dining-room, which was like the papered inside of a square
+box. He called to the girl below, and helped pull it up, as Annie could
+tell by the creaking of the rope, and the light jar of the finally arriving
+crockery. A half-grown girl then appeared, and put the dishes on at the
+places indicated with nods and looks by Mrs. Putney, who had taken her
+place at the table. There was a platter of stewed fowl, and a plate of
+high-piled waffles, sweltering in successive courses of butter and sugar.
+In cut-glass dishes, one at each end of the table, there were canned
+cherries and pine-apple. There was a square of old-fashioned soda biscuit,
+not broken apart, which sent up a pleasant smell; in the centre of the
+table was a shallow vase of strawberries.
+
+It was all very good and appetising; but to Annie it was pathetically
+old-fashioned, and helped her to realise how wholly out of the world was
+the life which her friends led.
+
+“Winthrop,” said Putney, and the father and mother bowed their heads.
+
+The boy dropped his over his folded hands, and piped up clearly: “Our
+Father, which art in heaven, help us to remember those who have nothing to
+eat. Amen!”
+
+“That's a grace that Win got up himself,” his father explained, beginning
+to heap a plate with chicken and mashed potato, which he then handed to
+Annie, passing her the biscuit and the butter. “We think it suits the
+Almighty about as well as anything.”
+
+“I suppose you know Ralph of old, Annie?” said Mrs. Putney. “The only way
+he keeps within bounds at all is by letting himself perfectly loose.”
+
+Putney laughed out his acquiescence, and they began to talk together about
+old times. Mrs. Putney and Annie recalled the childish plays and adventures
+they had together, and one dreadful quarrel. Putney told of the first time
+he saw Annie, when his father took him one day for a call on the old judge,
+and how the old judge put him through his paces in American history, and
+would not admit the theory that the battle of Bunker's Hill could have been
+fought on Breed's Hill. Putney said that it was years before it occurred to
+him that the judge must have been joking: he had always thought he was
+simply ignorant.
+
+“I used to set a good deal by the battle of Bunker's Hill,” he continued.
+“I thought the whole Revolution and subsequent history revolved round it,
+and that it gave us all liberty, equality, and fraternity at a clip. But
+the Lord always finds some odd jobs to look after next day, and I guess He
+didn't clear 'em all up at Bunker's Hill.”
+
+Putney's irony and piety were very much of a piece apparently, and Annie
+was not quite sure which this conclusion was. She glanced at his wife, who
+seemed satisfied with it in either case. She was waiting patiently for
+him to wake up to the fact that he had not yet given her anything to eat;
+after helping Annie and the boy, he helped himself, and pending his wife's
+pre-occupation with the tea, he forgot her.
+
+“Why didn't you throw something at me,” he roared, in grief and
+self-reproach. “There wouldn't have been a loose piece of crockery on this
+side of the table if I hadn't got my tea in time.”
+
+“Oh, I was listening to Annie's share in the conversation,” said Mrs.
+Putney; and her husband was about to say something in retort of her thrust
+when a tap on the front door was heard.
+
+“Come in, come in, Doc!” he shouted. “Mrs. Putney's just been helped, and
+the tea is going to begin.”
+
+Dr. Morrell's chuckle made answer for him, and after time enough to put
+down his hat, he came in, rubbing his hands and smiling, and making short
+nods round the table. “How d'ye do, Mrs. Putney? How d'ye do, Miss Kilburn?
+Winthrop?” He passed his hand over the boy's smooth hair and slipped into
+the chair beside him.
+
+“You see, the reason why we always wait for the doctor in this formal way,”
+ said Putney, “is that he isn't in here more than seven nights of the week,
+and he rather stands on his dignity. Hand round the doctor's plate, my
+son,” he added to the boy, and he took it from Annie, to whom the boy gave
+it, and began to heap it from the various dishes. “Think you can lift that
+much back to the doctor, Win?”
+
+“I guess so,” said the boy coolly.
+
+“What is flooring Win at present,” said his father, “and getting him down
+and rolling him over, is that problem of the robin that eats half a pint of
+grasshoppers and then doesn't weigh a bit more than he did before.”
+
+“When he gets a little older,” said the doctor, shaking over his plateful,
+“he'll be interested to trace the processes of his father's thought from a
+guest and half a peck of stewed chicken, to a robin and half a pint of--”
+
+“Don't, doctor!” pleaded Mrs. Putney. “He won't have the least trouble if
+he'll keep to the surface.”
+
+Putney laughed impartially, and said: “Well, we'll take the doctor out and
+weigh him when he gets done. We expected Brother Peck here this evening,”
+ he explained to Dr. Morrell. “You're our sober second thought--Well,”
+ he broke off, looking across the table at his wife with mock anxiety.
+“Anything wrong about that, Ellen?”
+
+“Not as far as I'm concerned, Mrs. Putney,” interposed the doctor. “I'm
+glad to be here on any terms. Go on, Putney.”
+
+“Oh, there isn't anything more. You know how Miss Kilburn here has been
+round throwing ridicule on Brother Peck, because he wants the shop-hands
+treated with common decency, and my idea was to get the two together and
+see how she would feel.”
+
+Dr. Morrell laughed at this with what Annie thought was unnecessary malice;
+but he stopped suddenly, after a glance at her, and Putney went on--
+
+“Brother Peck pleaded another engagement. Said he had to go off into
+the country to see a sick woman that wasn't expected to live. You don't
+remember the Merrifields, do you, Annie? Well, it doesn't matter. One of
+'em married West, and her husband left her, and she came home here and
+got a divorce; I got it for her. She's the one. As a consumptive, she had
+superior attractions for Brother Peck. It isn't a case that admits of
+jealousy exactly, but it wouldn't matter to Brother Peck anyway. If he saw
+a chance to do a good action, he'd wade through blood.”
+
+“Now look here, Ralph,” said Mrs. Putney, “there's such a thing as letting
+yourself _too_ loose.”
+
+“Well, _gore_, then,” said Putney, buttering himself a biscuit.
+
+The boy, who had kept quiet till now, seemed reached by this last touch,
+and broke into a high, crowing laugh, in which they all joined except his
+father.
+
+“Gore suits Winthy, anyway,” he said, beginning to eat his biscuit. “I met
+one of the deacons from Brother Peck's last parish, in Boston, yesterday.
+He asked me if we considered Brother Peck anyways peculiar in Hatboro', and
+when I said we thought he was a little too luxurious, the deacon came out
+with a lot of things. The way Brother Peck behaved toward the needy in that
+last parish of his made it simply uninhabitable to the standard Christian.
+They had to get rid of him somehow--send him away or kill him. Of course
+the deacon said they didn't want to _kill_ him.”
+
+“Where was his last parish?” asked the doctor.
+
+“Down on the Maine coast somewhere. Penobscotport, I believe.”
+
+“And was he indigenous there?”
+
+“No, I believe not; he's from Massachusetts. Farm-boy and then mill-hand,
+I understand. Self-helped to an education; divinity student with summer
+intervals of waiting at table in the mountain hotels probably. Drifted down
+Maine way on his first call and stuck; but I guess he won't stick here
+very long. Annie's friend Mr. Gerrish is going to look after Brother Peck
+before a great while.” He laughed, to see her blush, and went on. “You see,
+Brother Gerrish has got a high ideal of what a Christian minister ought to
+be; he hasn't said much about it, but I can see that Brother Peck doesn't
+come up to it. Well, Brother Gerrish has got a good many ideals. He likes
+to get anybody he can by the throat, and squeeze the difference of opinion
+out of 'em.”
+
+“There, now, Ralph,” his wife interposed, “you let Mr. Gerrish alone.
+_You_ don't like people to differ with you, either. Is your cup out,
+doctor?”
+
+“Thank you,” said the doctor, handing it up to her. “And you mean Mr.
+Gerrish doesn't like Mr. Peck's doctrine?” he asked of Putney.
+
+“Oh, I don't know that he objects to his doctrine; he can't very well; it's
+'between the leds of the Bible,' as the Hard-shell Baptist said. But he
+objects to Brother Peck's walk and conversation. He thinks he walks too
+much with the poor, and converses too much with the lowly. He says he
+thinks that the pew-owners in Mr. Peck's church and the people who pay his
+salary have some rights to his company that he's bound to respect.”
+
+The doctor relished the irony, but he asked, “Isn't there something to say
+on that side?”
+
+“Oh yes, a good deal. There's always something to say on both sides, even
+when one's a wrong side. That's what makes it all so tiresome--makes you
+wish you were dead.” He looked up, and caught his boy's eye fixed with
+melancholy intensity upon him. “I hope you'll never look at both sides when
+you grow up, Win. It's mighty uncomfortable. You take the right side, and
+stick to that. Brother Gerrish,” he resumed, to the doctor, “goes round
+taking the credit of Brother Peck's call here; but the fact is he opposed
+it. He didn't like his being so indifferent about the salary. Brother
+Gerrish held that the labourer was worthy of his hire, and if he didn't
+inquire what his wages were going to be, it was a pretty good sign that he
+wasn't going to earn them.”
+
+“Well, there was some logic in that,” said the doctor, smiling as before.
+
+“Plenty. And now it worries Brother Gerrish to see Brother Peck going round
+in the same old suit of clothes he came here in, and dressing his child
+like a shabby little Irish girl. He says that he who provideth not for
+those of his own household is worse than a heathen. That's perfectly true.
+And he would like to know what Brother Peck does with his money, anyway. He
+would like to insinuate that he loses it at poker, I guess; at any rate, he
+can't find out whom he gives it to, and he certainly doesn't spend it on
+himself.”
+
+“From your account of Mr. Peck.” said the doctor, “I should think Brother
+Gerrish might safely object to him as a certain kind of sentimentalist.”
+
+“Well, yes, he might, looking at him from the outside. But when you come
+to talk with Brother Peck, you find yourself sort of frozen out with a
+most unexpected, hard-headed cold-bloodedness. Brother Peck is plain
+common-sense itself. He seems to be a man without an illusion, without an
+emotion.”
+
+“Oh, not so bad as that!” laughed the doctor.
+
+“Ask Miss Kilburn. She's talked with him, and she hates him.”
+
+“No, I don't, Ralph,” Annie began.
+
+“Oh, well, then, perhaps he only made you hate yourself,” said Putney.
+There was something charming in his mockery, like the teasing of a brother
+with a sister; and Annie did not find the atonement to which he brought her
+altogether painful. It seemed to her really that she was getting off pretty
+easily, and she laughed with hearty consent at last.
+
+Winthrop asked solemnly, “How did he do that?”
+
+“Oh, I can't tell exactly, Winthrop,” she said, touched by the boy's simple
+interest in this abstruse point. “He made me feel that I had been rather
+mean and cruel when I thought I had only been practical. I can't explain;
+but it wasn't a comfortable feeling, my dear.”
+
+“I guess that's the trouble with Brother Peck,” said Putney. “He doesn't
+make you feel comfortable. He doesn't flatter you up worth a cent.
+There was Annie expecting him to take the most fervent interest in her
+theatricals, and her Social Union, and coo round, and tell her what a noble
+woman she was, and beg her to consider her health, and not overwork herself
+in doing good; but instead of that he simply showed her that she was a
+moral Cave-Dweller, and that she was living in a Stone Age of social
+brutalities; and of course she hated him.”
+
+“Yes, that was the way, Winthrop,” said Annie; and they all laughed with
+her.
+
+“Now you take them into the parlour, Ralph,” said his wife, rising, “and
+tell them how he made _you_ hate him.”
+
+“I shouldn't like anything better,” replied Putney. He lifted the large
+ugly kerosene lamp that had been set on the table when it grew dark during
+tea, and carried it into the parlour with him. His wife remained to speak
+with her little helper, but she sent Annie with the gentlemen.
+
+“Why, there isn't a great deal of it--more spirit than letter, so to
+speak,” said Putney, when he put down the lamp in the parlour. “You know
+how I like to go on about other people's sins, and the world's wickedness
+generally; but one day Brother Peck, in that cool, impersonal way of his,
+suggested that it was not a wholly meritorious thing to hate evil. He went
+so far as to say that perhaps we could not love them that despitefully used
+us if we hated their evil so furiously. He said it was a good deal more
+desirable to understand evil than to hate it, for then we could begin to
+cure it. Yes, Brother Peck let in a good deal of light on me. He rather
+insinuated that I must be possessed by the very evils I hated, and that was
+the reason I was so violent about them. I had always supposed that I hated
+other people's cruelty because I was merciful, and their meanness because
+I was magnanimous, and their intolerance because I was generous, and
+their conceit because I was modest, and their selfishness because I was
+disinterested; but after listening to Brother Peck a while I came to the
+conclusion that I hated these things in others because I was cruel myself,
+and mean, and bigoted, and conceited, and piggish; and that's why I've
+hated Brother Peck ever since--just like you, Annie. But he didn't reform
+me, I'm thankful to say, any more than he did you. I've gone on just
+the same, and I suppose I hate more infernal scoundrels and loathe more
+infernal idiots to-day than ever; but I perceive that I'm no part of the
+power that makes for righteousness as long as I work that racket; and now
+I sin with light and knowledge, anyway. No, Annie,” he went on, “I can
+understand why Brother Peck is not the success with women, and feminine
+temperaments like me, that his virtues entitle him to be. What we feminine
+temperaments want is a prophet, and Brother Peck doesn't prophesy worth
+a cent. He doesn't pretend to be authorised in any sort of way; he has a
+sneaking style of being no better than you are, and of being rather stumped
+by some of the truths he finds out. No, women like a good prophet about
+as well as they do a good doctor. Now if you, if you could unite the two
+functions, Doc--”
+
+“Sort of medicine-man?” suggested Morrell.
+
+“Exactly! The aborigines understood the thing. Why, I suppose that a real
+live medicine-man could go through a community like this and not leave a
+sinful soul nor a sore body in it among the ladies--perfect faith cure.”
+
+“But what did you say to Mr. Peck, Ralph?” asked Annie. “Didn't you attempt
+any defence?”
+
+“No,” said Putney. “He had the advantage of me. You can't talk back at a
+man in the pulpit.”
+
+“Oh, it was a sermon?”
+
+“I suppose the other people thought so. But I knew it was a private
+conversation that he was publicly holding with me.”
+
+Putney and the doctor began to talk of the nature and origin of evil, and
+Annie and the boy listened. Putney took high ground, and attributed it to
+Adam. “You know, Annie,” he explained, “I don't believe this; but I like to
+get a scientific man that won't quite deny Scripture or the good old Bible
+premises, and see him suffer. Hello! you up yet, Winthrop? I guess I'll go
+through the form of carrying you to bed, my son.”
+
+When Mrs. Putney rejoined them, Annie said she must go, and Mrs. Putney
+went upstairs with her, apparently to help her put on her things, but
+really to have that talk before parting which guest and hostess value above
+the whole evening's pleasure. She showed Annie the pictures of the little
+girls that had died, and talked a great deal about their sickness and their
+loveliness in death. Then they spoke of others, and Mrs. Putney asked Annie
+if she had seen Lyra Wilmington lately. Annie told of her call with Mrs.
+Munger, and Mrs. Putney said: “I _like_ Lyra, and I always did. I
+presume she isn't very happily married; he's too old; there couldn't have
+been any love on her part. But she would be a better woman than she is if
+she had children. Ralph says,” added Mrs. Putney, smiling, “that he knows
+she would be a good mother, she's such a good aunt.”
+
+Annie put her two hands impressively on the hands of her friend folded at
+her waist. “Ellen, what _does_ it mean?”
+
+“Nothing more than what you saw, Annie. She must have--or she _will_
+have--some one to amuse her; to be at her beck and call; and it's best to
+have it all in the family, Ralph says.”
+
+“But isn't it--doesn't he think it's--odd?”
+
+“It makes talk.”
+
+They moved a little toward the door, holding each other's hands. “Ellen,
+I've had a _lovely_ time!”
+
+“And so have I, Annie. I thought you'd like to meet Dr. Morrell.”
+
+“Oh yes, indeed!”
+
+“And I can't tell you what a night this has been for Ralph. He likes you so
+much, and it isn't often that he has a chance to talk to two such people as
+you and Dr. Morrell.”
+
+“How brilliant he is!” Annie sighed.
+
+“Yes, he's a very able man. It's very fortunate for Hatboro' to have such
+a doctor. He and Ralph are great cronies. I never feel uneasy now when
+Ralph's out late--I know he's been up at the doctor's office, talking. I--”
+
+Annie broke in with a laugh. “I've no doubt Dr. Morrell is all you say,
+Ellen, but I meant Ralph when I spoke of brilliancy. He has a great future,
+I'm sure.”
+
+Mrs. Putney was silent for a moment. “I'm satisfied with the present, so
+long as Ralph--” The tears suddenly gushed out of her eyes, and ran down
+over the fine wrinkles of her plump little cheeks.
+
+“Not quite so much loud talking, please,” piped a thin, high voice from a
+room across the stairs landing.
+
+“Why, dear little soul!” cried Annie. “I forgot he'd gone to bed.”
+
+“Would you like to see him?” asked his mother.
+
+She led the way into the room where the boy lay in a low bed near a larger
+one. His crutches lay beside it. “Win sleeps in our room yet. He can take
+care of himself quite well. But when he wakes in the night he likes to
+reach out and touch his father's hand.”
+
+The child looked mortified.
+
+“I wish I could reach out and touch _my_ father's hand when I wake in
+the night,” said Annie.
+
+The cloud left the boy's face. “I can't remember whether I said my prayers,
+mother, I've been thinking so.”
+
+“Well, say them over again, to me.”
+
+The men's voices sounded in the hall below, and the ladies found them
+there. Dr. Morrell had his hat in his hand.
+
+“Look here, Annie,” said Putney, “_I_ expected to walk home with you,
+but Doc Morrell says he's going to cut me out. It looks like a put-up job.
+I don't know whether you're in it or not, but there's no doubt about
+Morrell.”
+
+Mrs. Putney gave a sort of gasp, and then they all shouted with laughter,
+and Annie and the doctor went out into the night. In the imperfect light
+which the electrics of the main street flung afar into the little avenue
+where Putney lived, and the moon sent through the sidewalk trees, they
+struck against each other as they walked, and the doctor said, “Hadn't you
+better take my arm, Miss Kilburn, till we get used to the dark?”
+
+“Yes, I think I had, decidedly,” she answered; and she hurried to add: “Dr.
+Morrell, there is something I want to ask you. You're their physician,
+aren't you?”
+
+“The Putneys? Yes.”
+
+“Well, then, you can tell me--”
+
+“Oh no, I can't, if you ask me as their physician,” he interrupted.
+
+“Well, then, as their friend. Mrs. Putney said something to me that makes
+me very unhappy. I thought Mr. Putney was out of all danger of
+his--trouble. Hasn't he perfectly reformed? Does he ever--”
+
+She stopped, and Dr. Morrell did not answer at once. Then he said
+seriously: “It's a continual fight with a man of Putney's temperament, and
+sometimes he gets beaten. Yes, I guess you'd better know it.”
+
+“Poor Ellen!”
+
+“They don't allow themselves to be discouraged. As soon as he's on his feet
+they begin the fight again. But of course it prevents his success in his
+profession, and he'll always be a second-rate country lawyer.”
+
+“Poor Ralph! And so brilliant as he is! He could be anything.”
+
+“We must be glad if he can be something, as it is.”
+
+“Yes, and how happy they seem together, all three of them! That child
+worships his father; and how tender Ralph is of him! How good he is to his
+wife; and how proud she is of him! And that awful shadow over them all the
+time! I don't see how they live!”
+
+The doctor was silent for a moment, and finally said: “They have the peace
+that seems to come to people from the presence of a common peril, and they
+have the comfort of people who never blink the facts.”
+
+“I think Ralph is terrible. I wish he'd let other people blink the facts a
+little.”
+
+“Of course,” said the doctor, “it's become a habit with him now, or a
+mania. He seems to speak of his trouble as if mentioning it were a sort of
+conjuration to prevent it. I wouldn't venture to check him in his way of
+talking. He may find strength in it.”
+
+“It's all terrible!”
+
+“But it isn't by any means hopeless.”
+
+“I'm so glad to hear you say so. You see a great deal of them, I believe?”
+
+“Yes,” said the doctor, getting back from their seriousness, with apparent
+relief. “Pretty nearly every day. Putney and I consider the ways of God to
+man a good deal together. You can imagine that in a place like Hatboro' one
+would make the most of such a friend. In fact, anywhere.”
+
+“Yes, of course,” Annie assented. “Dr. Morrell,” she added, in that effect
+of continuing the subject with which one breaks away from it, “do you know
+much about South Hatboro'?”
+
+“I have some patients there.”
+
+“I was there this morning--”
+
+“I heard of you. They all take a great interest in your theatricals.”
+
+“In _my_ theatricals? Really this is too much! Who has made them my
+theatricals, I should like to know? Everybody at South Hatboro' talked as
+if I had got them up.”
+
+“And haven't you?”
+
+“No. I've had nothing to do with them. Mr. Brandreth spoke to me about
+them a week ago, and I was foolish enough to go round with Mrs. Munger
+to collect public opinion about her invited dance and supper; and now it
+appears that I have invented the whole affair.”
+
+“I certainly got that impression,” said the doctor, with a laugh lurking
+under his gravity.
+
+“Well, it's simply atrocious,” said Annie. “I've nothing at all to do with
+either. I don't even know that I approve of their object.”
+
+“Their object?”
+
+“Yes. The Social Union.”
+
+“Oh! Oh yes. I had forgot about the object,” and now the doctor laughed
+outright.
+
+“It seems to have dropped into the background with everybody,” said Annie,
+laughing too.
+
+“You like the unconventionality of South Hatboro'?” suggested the doctor,
+after a little silence.
+
+“Oh, very much,” said Annie. “I was used to the same thing abroad. It might
+be an American colony anywhere on the Continent.”
+
+“I suppose,” said the doctor musingly, “that the same conditions of sojourn
+and disoccupation _would_ produce the same social effects anywhere.
+Then you must feel quite at home in South Hatboro'!”
+
+“Quite! It's what I came back to avoid. I was sick of the life over there,
+and I wanted to be of some use here, instead of wasting all my days.”
+
+She stopped, resolved not to go on if he took this lightly, but the doctor
+answered her with sufficient gravity: “Well?”
+
+“It seemed to me that if I could be of any use in the world anywhere, I
+could in the place where I was born, and where my whole childhood was
+spent. I've been at home a month now, the most useless person in Hatboro'.
+I did catch at the first thing that offered--at Mr. Brandreth and his
+ridiculous Social Union and theatricals, and brought all this trouble on
+myself. I talked to Mr. Peck about them. You know what his views are?”
+
+“Only from Putney's talk,” said the doctor.
+
+“He didn't merely disapprove of the dance and supper, but he had some very
+peculiar notions about the relations of the different classes in general,”
+ said Annie; and this was the point she had meant circuitously to lead up
+to when she began to speak of South Hatboro', though she theoretically
+despised all sorts of feminine indirectness.
+
+“Yes?” said the doctor. “What notions?”
+
+“Well, he thinks that if you have money, you _can't_ do good with it.”
+
+“That's rather odd,” said Dr. Morrell.
+
+“I don't state it quite fairly. He meant that you can't make any kindness
+with it between yourself and the--the poor.”
+
+“That's odd too.”
+
+“Yes,” said Annie anxiously. “You can impose an obligation, he says, but
+you can't create sympathy. Of course Ralph exaggerates what I said about
+him in connection with the invited dance and supper, though I don't justify
+what I did say; and if I'd known then, as I do now, what his history had
+been, I should have been more careful in my talk with him. I should be very
+sorry to have hurt his feelings, and I suppose people who've come up in
+that way are sensitive?”
+
+She suggested this, and it was not the reassurance she was seeking to have
+Dr. Morrell say, “Naturally.”
+
+She continued with an effort: “I'm afraid I didn't respect his sincerity,
+and I ought to have done that, though I don't at all agree with him on the
+other points. It seems to me that what he said was shocking, and
+perfectly--impossible.”
+
+“Why, what was it?” asked the doctor.
+
+“He said there could be no real kindness between the rich and poor, because
+all their experiences of life were different. It amounted to saying that
+there ought not to _be_ any wealth. Don't you think so?”
+
+“Really, I've never thought about it,” returned Dr. Morrell. After a moment
+he asked, “Isn't it rather an abstraction?”
+
+“Don't say that!” said Annie nervously. “It's the _most_ concrete
+thing in the world!”
+
+The doctor laughed with enjoyment of her convulsive emphasis; but she went
+on: “I don't think life's worth living if you're to be shut up all your
+days to the intelligence merely of your own class.”
+
+“Who said you were?”
+
+“Mr. Peck.”
+
+“And what was your inference from the fact? That there oughtn't to be any
+classes?”
+
+“Of course it won't do to say that. There _must_ be social
+differences. Don't you think so?”
+
+“I don't know,” said Dr. Morrell. “I never thought of it in that light
+before. It's a very curious question.” He asked, brightening gaily after a
+moment of sober pause, “Is that the whole trouble?”
+
+“Isn't it enough?”
+
+“No; I don't think it is. Why didn't you tell him that you didn't want any
+gratitude?”.
+
+“Not _want_ any?” she demanded.
+
+“Oh!” said Dr. Morrell, “I didn't know but you thought it was enough to
+_give.”_
+
+Annie believed that he was making fun of her, and she tried to make her
+resentful silence dignified; but she only answered sadly: “No; it isn't
+enough for me. Besides, he made me see that you can't give sympathy where
+you can't receive it.”
+
+“Well, that _is_ bad,” said the doctor, and he laughed again. “Excuse
+me,” he added. “I see the point. But why don't you forget it?”
+
+“Forget it!”
+
+“Yes. If you can't help it, why need you worry about it?”
+
+She gave a kind of gasp of astonishment. “Do you really think that would be
+right?” She edged a little away from Dr. Morrell, as if with distrust.
+
+“Well, no; I can't say that I do,” he returned thoughtfully, without
+seeming to have noticed her withdrawal. “I don't suppose I was looking at
+the moral side. It's rather out of my way to do that. If a physician let
+himself get into the habit of doing that, he might regard nine-tenths of
+the diseases he has to treat as just penalties, and decline to interfere.”
+
+She fancied that he was amused again, rather than deeply concerned, and she
+determined to make him own his personal complicity in the matter if she
+could. “Then you _do_ feel sympathy with your patients? You find it
+necessary to do so?”
+
+The doctor thought a moment. “I take an interest in their diseases.”
+
+“But you want them to get well?”
+
+“Oh, certainly. I'm bound to do all I can for them as a physician.”
+
+“Nothing more?”
+
+“Yes; I'm sorry for them--for their families, if it seems to be going badly
+with them.”
+
+“And--and as--as--Don't you care at all for your work as a part of what
+every one ought to do for others--as humanity, philan--” She stopped the
+offensive word.
+
+“Well, I can't say that I've looked at it in that light exactly,” he
+answered. “I suspect I'm not very good at generalising my own relations to
+others, though I like well enough to speculate in the abstract. But don't
+you think Mr. Peck has overlooked one important fact in his theory? What
+about the people who have grown rich from being poor, as most Americans
+have? They have the same experiences, and why can't they sympathise with
+those who have remained poor?”
+
+“I never thought of that. Why didn't I ask him that?” She lamented so
+sincerely that the doctor laughed again. “I think that Mr. Peck--”
+
+“Oh no! oh no!” said the doctor, in an entreating, coaxing tone, expressive
+of a satiety with the subject that he might very well have felt; and he
+ended with another laugh, in which, after a moment of indignant
+self-question, she joined him.
+
+“Isn't that delicious?” he exclaimed; and she involuntarily slowed her pace
+with his.
+
+The spicy scent of sweet-currant blossoms hung in the dewy air that wrapped
+one of the darkened village houses. From a syringa bush before another, as
+they moved on, a denser perfume stole out with the wild song of a cat-bird
+hidden in it; the music and the odour seemed braided together. The shadows
+of the trees cast by the electrics on the walks were so thick and black
+that they looked palpable; it seemed as if she could stoop down and lift
+them from the ground. A broad bath of moonlight washed one of the house
+fronts, and the white-painted clapboards looked wet with it.
+
+They talked of these things, of themselves, and of their own traits and
+peculiarities; and at her door they ended far from Mr. Peck and all the
+perplexities he had suggested.
+
+She had told Dr. Morrell of some things she had brought home with her,
+and had said she hoped he would find time to come and see them. It would
+have been stiff not to do it, and she believed she had done it in a very
+off-hand, business-like way. But she continued to question whether she had.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+
+Miss Northwick called upon Annie during the week, with excuses for her
+delay and for coming alone. She seemed to have intentions of being polite;
+but she constantly betrayed her want of interest in Annie, and disappointed
+an expectation of refinement which her physical delicacy awakened. She
+asked her how she ever came to take up the Social Union, and answered for
+her that of course it had the attraction of the theatricals, and went on
+to talk of her sister's part in them. The relation of the Northwick family
+to the coming entertainment, and an impression of frail mottled wrists and
+high thin cheeks, and an absence of modelling under affluent drapery, was
+the main effect of Miss Northwick's visit.
+
+When Annie returned it, she met the younger sister, whom she found a great
+beauty. She seemed very cold, and of a _hauteur_ which she subdued
+with difficulty; but she was more consecutively polite than her sister,
+and Annie watched with fascination her turns of the head, her movements of
+leopard swiftness and elasticity, the changing lights of her complexion,
+the curves of her fine lips, the fluttering of her thin nostrils.
+
+A very new basket phaeton stood glittering at Annie's door when she got
+home, and Mrs. Wilmington put her head out of the open parlour window.
+
+“How d'ye do, Annie?” she drawled, in her tender voice. “Won't you come in?
+You see I'm in possession. I've just got my new phaeton, and I drove up at
+once to crush you with it. Isn't it a beauty?”
+
+“You're too late, Lyra,” said Annie. “I've just come from the Northwicks,
+and another crushing beauty has got in ahead of your phaeton.”
+
+“Oh, _poor_ Annie!” Lyra began to laugh with agreeable intelligence.
+“_Do_ come in and tell me about it!”
+
+“Why is that girl going to take part in the theatricals? She doesn't care
+to please any one, does she?”
+
+“I didn't know that people took part in theatricals for that, Annie. I
+thought they wanted to please themselves and mortify others. _I_ do.
+But then I may be different. Perhaps Miss Northwick wants to please Mr.
+Brandreth.”
+
+“Do you mean it, Lyra?” demanded Annie, arrested on her threshold by the
+charm of this improbability.
+
+“Well, I don't know; they're opposites. But, upon second thoughts, you
+needn't come in, Annie. I want you to take a drive with me, and try my new
+phaeton,” said Lyra, coming out.
+
+Annie now looked at it with that irresolution of hers, and Lyra commanded:
+“Get right in. We'll go down to the Works. You've never met my husband yet;
+have you, Annie?”
+
+“No, I haven't, Lyra. I've always just missed him somehow. He seems to have
+been perpetually just gone to town, or not got back.”
+
+“Well, he's really at home now. And I don't mean at the house, which isn't
+home to him, but the Works. You've never seen the Works either, have you?”
+
+“No, I haven't.”
+
+“Well, then, we'll just go round there, and kill two birds with one stone.
+I ought to show off my new phaeton to Mr. Wilmington first of all; he gave
+it to me. It would be kind of conjugal, or filial, or something. You know
+Mr. Wilmington and I are not exactly contemporaries, Annie?”
+
+“I heard he was somewhat your senior,” said Annie reluctantly.
+
+Lyra laughed. “Well, I always say we were born in the same century,
+_any_way.”
+
+They came round into the region of the shops, and Lyra checked her pony in
+front of her husband's factory. It was not imposingly large, but, as Mrs.
+Wilmington caused Annie to observe, it was as big as the hat shops and as
+ugly as the shoe shops.
+
+The structure trembled with the operation of its industry, and as they
+mounted the wooden steps to the open outside door, an inner door swung ajar
+for a moment, and let out a roar mingled of the hum and whirl and clash of
+machinery and fragments of voice, borne to them on a whiff of warm, greasy
+air. “Of course it doesn't smell very nice,” said Lyra.
+
+She pushed open the door of the office, and finding its first apartment
+empty, led the way with Annie to the inner room, where her husband sat
+writing at a table.
+
+“George, I want to introduce you to Miss Kilburn.”
+
+“Oh yes, yes, yes,” said her husband, scrambling to his feet, and coming
+round to greet Annie. He was a small man, very bald, with a serious and
+wrinkled forehead, and rather austere brows; but his mouth had a furtive
+curl at one corner, which, with the habit he had of touching it there with
+the tip of his tongue, made Annie think of a cat that had been at the
+cream. “I've been hoping to call with Mrs. Wilmington to pay my respects;
+but I've been away a great deal this season, and--and--We're all very happy
+to have you home again, Miss Kilburn. I've often heard my wife speak of
+your old days together at Hatboro'.”
+
+They fenced with some polite feints of interest in each other, the old man
+standing beside his writing-table, and staying himself with a shaking hand
+upon it.
+
+Lyra interrupted them. “Well, I think now that Annie is here, we'd better
+not let her get away without showing her the Works.”
+
+“Oh--oh--decidedly! I'll go with you, with great pleasure. Ah!” He bustled
+about, putting the things together on his table, and then reaching for
+the Panama hat on a hook behind it. There was something pathetic in his
+eagerness to do what Lyra bade him, and Annie fancied in him the uneasy
+consciousness which an elderly husband might feel in the presence of those
+who met him for the first time with his young wife. At the outer office
+door they encountered Jack Wilmington.
+
+“I'll show them through,” he said to his uncle; and the old man assented
+with, “Well, perhaps you'd better, Jack,” and went back to his room.
+
+The Wilmington Stocking-Mills spun their own threads, and the first room
+was like what Annie had seen before in cotton factories, with a faint
+smell of oil from the machinery, and a fine snow of fluff in the air, and
+catching to the white-washed walls and the foul window sashes. The tireless
+machines marched back and forth across the floor, and the men who watched
+them with suicidal intensity ran after them barefooted when they made
+off with a broken thread, spliced it, and then escaped from them to
+their stations again. In other rooms, where there was a stunning whir of
+spindles, girls and women were at work; they looked after Lyra and her
+nephew from under cotton-frowsed bangs; they all seemed to know her, and
+returned her easy, kindly greetings with an effect of liking. From time to
+time, at Lyra's bidding, the young fellow explained to Annie some curious
+feature of the processes; in the room where the stockings were knitted she
+tried to understand the machinery that wrought and seemed to live before
+her eyes. But her mind wandered to the men and women who were operating it,
+and who seemed no more a voluntary part of it than all the rest, except
+when Jack Wilmington curtly ordered them to do this or that in illustration
+of some point he was explaining. She wearied herself, as people do in such
+places, in expressing her wonder at the ingenuity of the machinery; it was
+a relief to get away from it all into the room, cool and quiet, where half
+a dozen neat girls were counting and stamping the stockings with different
+numbers. “Here's where _I_ used to work,” said Lyra, “and here's
+where I first met Mr. Wilmington. The place is _full_ of romantic
+associations. The stockings are all one _size_, Annie; but people like
+to wear different numbers, and so we try to gratify them. Which number do
+_you_ wear? Or don't you wear the Wilmington machine-knit? _I_
+don't. Well, they're not _dreams_ exactly, Annie, when all's said and
+done for them.”
+
+When they left the mill she asked Annie to come home to tea with her,
+saying, as if from a perception of her dislike for the young fellow, that
+Jack was going to Boston.
+
+They had a long evening together, after Mr. Wilmington took himself off
+after tea to his study, as he called it, and remained shut in there. Annie
+was uneasily aware of him from time to time, but Lyra had apparently no
+more disturbance from his absence than from his presence, which she had
+managed with a frank acceptance of everything it suggested. She talked
+freely of her marriage, not as if it were like others, but for what it was.
+She showed Annie over the house, and she ended with a display of the rich
+dresses which he was always buying her, and which she never wore, because
+she never went anywhere.
+
+Annie said she thought she would at least like to go to the seaside
+somewhere during the summer, but “No,” Lyra said; “it would be too much
+trouble, and you know, Annie, I always did hate _trouble_. I don't
+want the care of a cottage, and I don't want to be poked into a hotel, so
+I stay in Hatboro'.” She said that she had always been a village girl, and
+did not miss the interests of a larger life, as she caught glimpses of them
+in South Hatboro', or want the bother of them. She said she studied music a
+little, and confessed that she read a good deal, novels mostly, though the
+library was handsomely equipped with well-bound general literature.
+
+At moments it all seemed no harm; at others, the luxury in which this life
+was so contentedly sunk oppressed Annie like a thick, close air. Yet she
+knew that Lyra was kind to many of the poor people about her, and did
+a great deal of good, as the phrase is, with the superfluity which it
+involved no self-denial to give from. But Mr. Peck had given her a point
+of view, and though she believed she did not agree with him, she could not
+escape from it.
+
+Lyra told her much about people in Hatboro', and characterised them all so
+humorously, and she seemed so good-natured, in her ridicule which spared
+nobody.
+
+She shrieked with laughter about Mr. Brandreth when Annie told her of his
+mother's doubt whether his love-making with Miss Northwick ought to be
+tacit or explicit in the kissing and embracing between Romeo and Juliet.
+
+“Don't you think, Annie, we'd better refer him to Mr. Peck? I _should_
+like to hear Mr. Brandreth and Mr. Peek discussing it. I must tell Jack
+about it. I might get him to ask Sue Northwick, and get her ideas.”
+
+“Has Mr. Wilmington known the Northwicks long?” Annie asked.
+
+“He used to go to their Boston house when he was at Harvard.”
+
+“Oh, then,” said Annie, “perhaps _he_ accounts for her playing Juliet;
+though, as Tybalt, I don't see exactly how he--”
+
+“Oh, it's at the rehearsals, you know, that the fun is, and then it don't
+matter what part you have.”
+
+Annie lay awake a long time that night. She was sure that she ought not to
+like Lyra if she did not approve of her, and that she ought not to have
+gone home to tea with her and spent the evening with her unless she fully
+respected her. But she had to own to herself that she did like her, and
+enjoyed hearing her soft drawl. She tried to think how Jack Wilmington's
+having gone to Boston for the evening made it somehow less censurable for
+her to spend it with Lyra, even if she did not approve of her. As she
+drowsed, this became perfectly clear.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+
+In the process of that expansion from a New England village to an American
+town of which Putney spoke, Hatboro' had suffered one kind of deterioration
+which Annie could not help noticing. She remembered a distinctly
+intellectual life, which might still exist in its elements, but which
+certainly no longer had as definite expression. There used to be houses in
+which people, maiden aunts and hale grandmothers, took a keen interest in
+literature, and read the new books and discussed them, some time after they
+had ceased to be new in the publishing centres, but whilst they were still
+not old. But now the grandmothers had died out, and the maiden aunts had
+faded in, and she could not find just such houses anywhere in Hatboro'.
+The decay of the Unitarians as a sect perhaps had something to do with
+the literary lapse of the place: their highly intellectualised belief had
+favoured taste in a direction where the more ritualistic and emotional
+religions did not promote it: and it is certain that they were no longer
+the leading people.
+
+It would have been hard to say just who these leading people were. The old
+political and juristic pre-eminence which the lawyers had once enjoyed was
+a tradition; the learned professions yielded in distinction to the growing
+wealth and plutocratic influence of the prosperous manufacturers; the
+situation might be summed up in the fact that Colonel Marvin of the shoe
+interest and Mr. Wilmington now filled the place once held by Judge Kilburn
+and Squire Putney. The social life in private houses had undoubtedly
+shrunk; but it had expanded in the direction of church sociables, and it
+had become much more ecclesiastical in every way, without becoming more
+religious. As formerly, some people were acceptable, and some were not;
+but it was, as everywhere else, more a question of money; there was an
+aristocracy and a commonalty, but there was a confusion and a more ready
+convertibility in the materials of each.
+
+The social authority of such a person as Mrs. Gerrish was not the only
+change that bewildered Annie, and the effort to extend her relations with
+the village people was one from which she shrank till her consciousness had
+more perfectly adjusted itself to the new conditions. Meanwhile Dr. Morrell
+came to call the night after their tea at the Putneys', and he fell into
+the habit of coming several nights in the week, and staying late. Sometimes
+he was sent for at her house by sick people, and he must have left word at
+his office where he was to be found.
+
+He had spent part of his student life in Europe, and he looked back to his
+travel there with a fondness that the Old World inspires less and less in
+Americans. This, with his derivation from one of the unliterary Boston
+suburbs, and his unambitious residence in a place like Hatboro', gave her
+a sense of provinciality in him. On his part, he apparently found it droll
+that a woman of her acquaintance with a larger life should be willing
+to live in Hatboro' at all, and he seemed incredulous about her staying
+after summer was over. She felt that she mystified him, and sometimes she
+felt the pursuit of a curiosity which was a little too like a psychical
+diagnosis. He had a way of sitting beside her table and playing with her
+paper-cutter, while he submitted with a quizzical smile to her endeavours
+to turn him to account. She did not mind his laughing at her eagerness (a
+woman is willing enough to join a man in making fun of her femininity if
+she believes that he respects her), and she tried to make him talk about
+Hatboro', and tell her how she could be of use among the working people.
+She would have liked very much to know whether he gave his medical service
+gratis among them, and whether he found it a pleasure and a privilege to do
+so. There was one moment when she would have liked to ask him to let her be
+at the charges of his more indigent patients, but with the words behind her
+lips she perceived that it would not do. At the best, it would be taking
+his opportunity from him and making it hers. She began to see that one
+ought to have a conscience about doing good.
+
+She let the chance of proposing this impossibility go by; and after a
+little silence Dr. Morrell seemed to revert, in her interest, to the
+economical situation in Hatboro'.
+
+“You know that most of the hands in the hat-shops are from the farms
+around; and some of them own property here in the village. I know the owner
+of three small houses who's always worked in the shops. You couldn't very
+well offer help to a landed proprietor like that?”
+
+“No,” said Annie, abashed in view of him.
+
+“I suppose you ought to go to a factory town like Fall River, if you really
+wanted to deal with overwork and squalor.”
+
+“I'm beginning to think there's no such thing anywhere,” she said
+desperately.
+
+The doctor's eyes twinkled sympathetically. “I don't know whether Benson
+earned his three houses altogether in the hat-shops. He 'likes a good
+horse,' as he says; and he likes to trade it for a better; I know that from
+experience. But he's a great friend of mine. Well, then, there are more
+women than men in the shops, and they earn more. I suppose that's rather
+disappointing too.”
+
+“It is, rather.”
+
+“But, on the other hand, the work only lasts eight months of the year, and
+that cuts wages down to an average of a dollar a day.”
+
+“Ah!” cried Annie. “There's some hope in _that_! What do they do when
+the work stops?”
+
+“Oh, they go back to their country-seats.”
+
+“All?”
+
+“Perhaps not all.”
+
+“I _thought_ so!”
+
+“Well, you'd better look round among those that stay.”
+
+Even among these she looked in vain for destitution; she could find that in
+satisfactory degree only in straggling veterans of the great army of tramps
+which once overran country places in the summer.
+
+She would have preferred not to see or know the objects of her charity, and
+because she preferred this she forced herself to face their distasteful
+misery. Mrs. Bolton had orders to send no one from the door who asked for
+food or work, but to call Annie and let her judge the case. She knew that
+it was folly, and she was afraid it was worse, but she could not send the
+homeless creatures away as hungry or poor as they came. They filled her
+gentlewoman's soul with loathing; but if she kept beyond the range of the
+powerful corporeal odour that enveloped them, she could experience the
+luxury of pity for them. The filthy rags that caricatured them, their sick
+or sodden faces, always frowsed with a week's beard, represented typical
+poverty to her, and accused her comfortable state with a poignant contrast;
+and she consoled herself as far as she could with the superstition that in
+meeting them she was fulfilling a duty sacred in proportion to the disgust
+she felt in the encounter.
+
+The work at the hat-shops fell off after the spring orders, and did not
+revive till the beginning of August. If there was less money among the
+hands and their families who remained than there was in time of full work,
+the weather made less demand upon their resources. The children lived
+mostly out-of-doors, and seemed to have always what they wanted of the
+season's fruit and vegetables. They got these too late from the decaying
+lots at the provision stores, and too early from the nearest orchards; and
+Dr. Morrell admitted that there was a good deal of sickness, especially
+among the little ones, from this diet. Annie wondered whether she ought not
+to offer herself as a nurse among them; she asked him whether she could not
+be of use in that way, and had to confess that she knew nothing about the
+prevailing disease.
+
+“Then, I don't think you'd better undertake it,” he said. “There are too
+many nurses there already, such as they are. It's the dull time in most of
+the shops, you know, and the women have plenty of leisure. There are about
+five volunteer nurses for every patient, not counting the grandmothers on
+both sides. I think they would resent any outside aid.”
+
+“Ah, I'm always on the outside! But can't I send--I mean carry--them
+anything nourishing, any little dishes--”
+
+“Arrowroot is about all the convalescents can manage.” She made a note of
+it. “But jelly and chicken broth are always relished by their friends.”
+
+“Dr. Morrell, I must ask you not to turn me into ridicule, if you please. I
+cannot permit it.”
+
+“I beg your pardon--I do indeed, Miss Kilburn. I didn't mean to ridicule
+you. I began seriously, but I was led astray by remembering what becomes of
+most of the good things sent to sick people.”
+
+“I know,” she said, breaking into a laugh. “I have eaten lots of them for
+my father. And is arrowroot the only thing?”
+
+The doctor reflected gravely. “Why, no. There's a poor little life now and
+then that might be saved by the sea-air. Yes, if you care to send some of
+my patients, with a mother and a grandmother apiece, to the seaside--”
+
+“Don't say another word, doctor,” cried Annie. “You make me _so_
+happy! I will--I will send their whole families. And you won't, you
+_won't_ let a case escape, will you, doctor?” It was a break in the
+iron wall of uselessness which had closed her in; she behaved like a young
+girl with an invitation to a ball.
+
+When the first patient came back well from the seaside her rejoicing
+overflowed in exultation before the friends to whom she confessed her
+agency in the affair. Putney pretended that he could not see what pleasure
+she could reasonably take in restoring the child to the sort of life it had
+been born to; but that was a matter she would not consider, theoretically
+or practically.
+
+She began to go outside of Dr. Morrell's authority; she looked up two cases
+herself, and, upon advising with their grandmothers, sent them to the
+seaside, and she was at the station when the train came in with the young
+mother and the still younger aunt of one of the sick children. She did
+not see the baby, and the mother passed her with a stare of impassioned
+reproach, and fell sobbing on the neck of her husband, waiting for her on
+the platform. Annie felt the blood drop back upon her heart. She caught at
+the girlish aunt, who was looking about her with a sense of the interest
+which attached to herself as a party to the spectacle.
+
+“Oh, Rebecca, where is the child?”
+
+“Well, there, Miss Kilburn, I'm _ril_ sorry to tell you, but I guess
+the sea-air didn't do it a great deal of good, if any. I tell Maria she'll
+see it in the right light after a while, but of course she can't, first
+off. Well, there! _Somebody's_ got to look after it. You'll excuse
+_me_, Miss Kilburn.”
+
+Annie saw her run off to the baggage-car, from which the baggage-man was
+handing out a narrow box. The ground reeled under her feet; she got the
+public depot carriage and drove home.
+
+She sent for Dr. Morrell, and poured out the confession of her error upon
+him before he could speak. “I am a murderess,” she ended hysterically.
+“Don't deny it!”
+
+“I think you can be got off on the ground of insanity, Miss Kilburn, if you
+go on in this way,” he answered.
+
+Her desperation broke in tears. “Oh, what shall I do--what shall I do? I've
+killed the child!”
+
+“Oh no, you haven't,” he retorted. “I know the case. The only hope for it
+was the sea-air; I was going to ask you to send it--”
+
+She took down her handkerchief and gave him a piercing look. “Dr. Morrell,
+if you are lying to me--”
+
+“I'm not lying, Miss Kilburn,” he answered. “You've done a very
+unwarrantable thing in both of the cases that you sent to the seaside on
+your own responsibility. One of them I certainly shouldn't have advised
+sending, but it's turned out well. You've no more credit for it, though,
+than for this that died; and you won't think I'm lying, perhaps, when I say
+you're equally to blame in both instances.”
+
+“I--I beg your pardon,” she faltered, with dawning comfort in his severity.
+“I didn't mean--I didn't intend to say--”
+
+“I know it,” said Dr. Morrell, allowing himself to smile. “Just remember
+that you blundered into doing the only thing left to be done for Mrs.
+Savor's child; and--don't try it again. That's all.”
+
+He smiled once more, and at some permissive light in her face, he began
+even to laugh.
+
+“You--you're horrible!”
+
+“Oh no, I'm not,” he gasped. “All the tears in the world wouldn't help; and
+my laughing hurts nobody. I'm sorry for you, and I'm sorry for the mother;
+but I've told you the truth--I have indeed; and you _must_ believe
+me.”
+
+The child's father came to see her the next night. “Rebecca she seemed to
+think that you felt kind of bad, may be, because Maria wouldn't speak to
+you when she first got off the cars yesterday, and I don't say she done
+exactly right, myself. The way I look at it, and the way I tell Maria
+_she'd_ ought to, is like this: You done what you done for the best,
+and we wa'n't _obliged_ to take your advice anyway. But of course
+Maria she'd kind of set her heart on savin' it, and she can't seem to get
+over it right away.” He talked on much longer to the same effect, tilted
+back in his chair, and looking down, while he covered and uncovered one of
+his knees with his straw hat. He had the usual rustic difficulty in getting
+away, but Annie was glad to keep him, in her gratitude for his kindness.
+Besides, she could not let him go without satisfying a suspicion she had.
+
+“And Dr. Morrell--have you seen him for Mrs. Savor--have you--” She
+stopped, for shame of her hypocrisy.
+
+“No, 'm. We hain't seen him _sence_. I guess she'll get along.”
+
+It needed this stroke to complete her humiliation before the single-hearted
+fellow.
+
+“I--I suppose,” she stammered out, “that you--your wife, wouldn't like me
+to come to the--I can understand that; but oh! if there is anything I can
+do for you--flowers--or my carriage--or helping anyway--”
+
+Mr. Savor stood up. “I'm much obliged to _you_, Miss Kilburn; but we
+thought we hadn't better wait, well not a great while, and--the funeral was
+this afternoon. Well, I wish you good evening.”
+
+She met the mother, a few days after, in the street; with an impulse to
+cross over to the other side she advanced straight upon her.
+
+“Mrs. Savor! What can I say to you?”
+
+“Oh, I don't presume but what you meant for the best, Miss Kilburn. But I
+guess I shall know what to do next time. I kind of felt the whole while
+that it was a resk. But it's all right now.”
+
+Annie realised, in her resentment of the poor thing's uncouth sorrow, that
+she had spoken to her with the hope of getting, not giving, comfort.
+
+“Yes, yes,” she confessed. “I was to blame.” The bereaved mother did not
+gainsay her, and she felt that, whatever was the justice of the case, she
+had met her present deserts.
+
+She had to bear the discredit into which the seaside fell with the mothers
+of all the other sick children. She tried to bring Dr. Morrell once to the
+consideration of her culpability in the case of those who might have lived
+if the case of Mrs. Savor's baby had not frightened their mothers from
+sending them to the seaside; but he refused to grapple with the problem.
+She was obliged to believe him when he said he should not have advised
+sending any of the recent cases there; that the disease was changing its
+character, and such a course could have done no good.
+
+“Look here, Miss Kilburn,” he said, after scanning her face sharply, “I'm
+going to leave you a little tonic. I think you're rather run down.”
+
+“Well,” she said passively.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+
+It was in her revulsion from the direct beneficence which had proved so
+dangerous that Annie was able to give herself to the more general interests
+of the Social Union. She had not the courage to test her influence for
+it among the workpeople whom it was to entertain and elevate, and whose
+co-operation Mr. Peck had thought important; but she went about among the
+other classes, and found a degree of favour and deference which surprised
+her, and an ignorance of what lay so heavy on her heart which was still
+more comforting. She was nowhere treated as the guilty wretch she called
+herself; some who knew of the facts had got them wrong; and she discovered
+what must always astonish the inquirer below the pretentious surface of
+our democracy--an indifference and an incredulity concerning the feelings
+of people of lower station which could not be surpassed in another
+civilisation. Her concern for Mrs. Savor was treated as a great trial for
+Miss Kilburn; but the mother's bereavement was regarded as something those
+people were used to, and got over more easily than one could imagine.
+
+Annie's mission took her to the ministers of the various denominations, and
+she was able to overcome any scruples they might have about the theatricals
+by urging the excellence of their object. As a Unitarian, she was not
+prepared for the liberality with which the matter was considered; the
+Episcopalians of course were with her; but the Universalist minister
+himself was not more friendly than the young Methodist preacher, who
+volunteered to call with her on the pastor of the Baptist church, and
+help present the affair in the right light; she had expected a degree of
+narrow-mindedness, of bigotry, which her sect learned to attribute to
+others in the militant period before they had imbibed so much of its own
+tolerance.
+
+But the recollection of what had passed with Mr. Peck remained a reproach
+in her mind, and nothing that she accomplished for the Social Union with
+the other ministers was important. In her vivid reveries she often met him,
+and combated his peculiar ideas, while she admitted a wrong in her own
+position, and made every expression of regret, and parted from him on the
+best terms, esteemed and complimented in high degree; in reality she saw
+him seldom, and still more rarely spoke to him, and then with a distance
+and consciousness altogether different from the effects dramatised in her
+fancy. Sometimes during the period of her interest in the sick children of
+the hands, she saw him in their houses, or coming and going outside; but
+she had no chance to speak with him, or else said to herself that she had
+none, because she was ashamed before him. She thought he avoided her;
+but this was probably only a phase of the impersonality which seemed
+characteristic of him in everything. At these times she felt a strange
+pathos in the lonely man whom she knew to be at odds with many of his own
+people, and she longed to interpret herself more sympathetically to him,
+but actually confronted with him she was sensible of something cold and
+even hard in the nimbus her compassion cast about him. Yet even this added
+to the mystery that piqued her, and that loosed her fancy to play, as soon
+as they parted, in conjecture about his past life, his marriage, and the
+mad wife who had left him with the child he seemed so ill-fitted to care
+for. Then, the next time they met she was abashed with the recollection of
+having unwarrantably romanced the plain, simple, homely little man, and she
+added an embarrassment of her own to that shyness of his which kept them
+apart.
+
+Except for what she had heard Putney say, and what she learned casually
+from the people themselves, she could not have believed he ever did
+anything for them. He came and went so elusively, as far as Annie was
+concerned, that she knew of his presence in the houses of sickness and
+death usually by his little girl, whom she found playing about in the
+street before the door with the children of the hands. She seemed to hold
+her own among the others in their plays and their squabbles; if she tried
+to make up to her, Idella smiled, but she would not be approached, and
+Annie's heart went out to the little mischief in as helpless goodwill as
+toward the minister himself.
+
+She used to hear his voice through the summer-open windows when he called
+upon the Boltons, and wondered if some accident would not bring them
+together, but she had to send for Mrs. Bolton at last, and bid her tell Mr.
+Peck that she would like to see him before he went away, one night. He
+came, and then she began a parrying parley of preliminary nothings before
+she could say that she supposed he knew the ladies were going on with their
+scheme for the establishment of the Social Union; he admitted vaguely that
+he had heard something to that effect, and she added that the invited dance
+and supper had been given up.
+
+He remained apparently indifferent to the fact, and she hurried on: “And I
+ought to say, Mr. Peck, that nearly every one--every one whose opinion you
+would value--agreed with you that it would have been extremely ill-advised,
+and--and shocking. And I'm quite ashamed that I should not have seen it
+from the beginning; and I hope--I hope you will forgive me if I said things
+in my--my excitement that must have--I mean not only what I said to you,
+but what I said to others; and I assure you that I regret them, and--”
+
+She went on and repeated herself at length, and he listened patiently, but
+as if the matter had not really concerned either of them personally. She
+had to conclude that what she had said of him had not reached him, and she
+ended by confessing that she had clung to the Social Union project because
+it seemed the only thing in which her attempts to do good were not
+mischievous.
+
+Mr. Peck's thin face kindled with a friendlier interest than it had shown
+while the question at all related to himself, and a light of something that
+she took for humorous compassion came into his large, pale blue eyes. At
+least it was intelligence; and perhaps the woman nature craves this as much
+as it is supposed to crave sympathy; perhaps the two are finally one.
+
+“I want to tell you something, Mr. Peck--an experience of mine,” she said
+abruptly, and without trying to connect it obviously with what had gone
+before, she told him the story of her ill-fated beneficence to the Savors.
+He listened intently, and at the end he said: “I understand. But that is
+sorrow you have caused, not evil; and what we intend in goodwill must not
+rest a burden on the conscience, no matter how it turns out. Otherwise the
+moral world is no better than a crazy dream, without plan or sequence. You
+might as well rejoice in an evil deed because good happened to come of it.”
+
+“Oh, I _thank_ you!” she gasped. “You don't know what a load you have
+lifted from me!”
+
+Her words feebly expressed the sense of deliverance which overflowed her
+heart. Her strength failed her like that of a person suddenly relieved from
+some great physical stress or peril; but she felt that he had given her the
+truth, and she held fast by it while she went on.
+
+“If you knew, or if any one knew, how difficult it is, what a
+responsibility, to do the least thing for others! And once it seemed so
+simple! And it seems all the more difficult, the more means you have for
+doing good. The poor people seem to help one another without doing any
+harm, but if _I_ try it--”
+
+“Yes,” said the minister, “it is difficult to help others when we cease
+to need help ourselves. A man begins poor, or his father or grandfather
+before him--it doesn't matter how far back he begins--and then he is in
+accord and full understanding with all the other poor in the world; but as
+he prospers he withdraws from them and loses their point of view. Then when
+he offers help, it is not as a brother of those who need it, but a patron,
+an agent of the false state of things in which want is possible; and his
+help is not an impulse of the love that ought to bind us all together, but
+a compromise proposed by iniquitous social conditions, a peace-offering to
+his own guilty consciousness of his share in the wrong.”
+
+“Yes,” said Annie, too grateful for the comfort he had given her to
+question words whose full purport had not perhaps reached her. “And I
+assure you, Mr. Peck, I feel very differently about these things since I
+first talked with you. And I wish to tell you, in justice to myself, that
+I had no idea then that--that--you were speaking from your own experience
+when you--you said how working people looked at things. I didn't know that
+you had been--that is, that--”
+
+“Yes,” said the minister, coming to her relief, “I once worked in a
+cotton-mill. Then,” he continued, dismissing the personal concern, “it
+seems to me that I saw things in their right light, as I have never been
+able to see them since--”
+
+“And how brutal,” she broke in, “how cruel and vulgar, what I said must
+have seemed to you!”
+
+“I fancied,” he continued evasively, “that I had authority to set myself
+apart from my fellow-workmen, to be a teacher and guide to the true life.
+But it was a great error. The true life was the life of work, and no one
+ever had authority to turn from it. Christ Himself came as a labouring
+man.”
+
+“That is true,” said Annie; and his words transfigured the man who spoke
+them, so that her heart turned reverently toward him. “But if you had been
+meant to work in a mill all your life,” she pursued, “would you have been
+given the powers you have, and that you have just used to save me from
+despair?”
+
+The minister rose, and said, with a sigh: “No one was meant to work in a
+mill all his life. Good night.”
+
+She would have liked to keep him longer, but she could not think how,
+at once. As he turned to go out through the Boltons' part of the house,
+“Won't you go out through my door?” she asked, with a helpless effort at
+hospitality.
+
+“Oh, if you wish,” he answered submissively.
+
+When she had closed the door upon him she went to speak with Mrs. Bolton.
+She was in the kitchen mixing flour to make bread, and Annie traced
+her by following the lamp-light through the open door. It discovered
+Bolton sitting in the outer doorway, his back against one jamb and his
+stocking-feet resting against the base of the other.
+
+“Mrs. Bolton,” Annie began at once, making herself free of one of the hard
+kitchen chairs, “how is Mr. Peck getting on in Hatboro'?”
+
+“I d'know as I know just what you mean, Miss Kilburn,” said Mrs. Bolton, on
+the defensive.
+
+“I mean, is there a party against him in his church? Is he unpopular?”
+
+Mrs. Bolton took some flour and sprinkled it on her bread-board; then she
+lifted the mass of dough out of the trough before her, and let it sink
+softly upon the board.
+
+“I d'know as you can say he's unpoplah. He ain't poplah with some. Yes,
+there's a party--the Gerrish party.”
+
+“Is it a strong one?”
+
+“It's pretty strong.”
+
+“Do you think it will prevail?”
+
+“Well, most o' folks don't know _what_ they want; and if there's some
+folks that know what they _don't_ want, they can generally keep from
+havin' it.”
+
+Bolton made a soft husky prefatory noise of protest in his throat, which
+seemed to stimulate his wife to a more definite assertion, and she cut in
+before he could speak--
+
+“_I_ should say that unless them that stood Mr. Peck's friends first
+off, and got him here, done something to keep him, his enemies wa'n't goin'
+to take up his cause.”
+
+Annie divined a personal reproach for Bolton in the apparent abstraction.
+
+“Oh, now, you'll see it'll all come out right in the end, Pauliny,” he
+mildly opposed. “There ain't any such great feelin' about Mr. Peck; nothin'
+but what'll work itself off perfec'ly natural, give it time. It's goin' to
+come out all right.”
+
+“Yes, at the day o' jedgment,” Mrs. Bolton assented, plunging her fists
+into the dough, and beginning to work a contempt for her husband's optimism
+into it.
+
+“Yes, an' a good deal before,” he returned. “There's always somethin' to
+objec' to every minister; we ain't any of us perfect, and Mr. Peck's got
+his failin's; he hain't built up the church quite so much as some on 'em
+expected but what he would; and there's some that don't like his prayers;
+and some of 'em thinks he ain't doctrinal enough. But I guess, take it all
+round, he suits pretty well. It'll come out all right, Pauliny. You'll
+see.”
+
+A pause ensued, of which Annie felt the awfulness. It seemed to her that
+Mrs. Bolton's impatience with this intolerable hopefulness must burst
+violently. She hastened to interpose. “I think the trouble is that people
+don't fully understand Mr. Peck at first. But they do finally.”
+
+“Yes; take time,” said Bolton.
+
+“Take eternity, I guess, for some,” retorted his wife. “If you think
+William B. Gerrish is goin' to work round with time--” She stopped for want
+of some sufficiently rejectional phrase, and did not go on.
+
+“The way I look at it,” said Bolton, with incorrigible courage, “is like
+this: When it comes to anything like askin' Mr. Peck to resign, it'll
+develop his strength. You can't tell how strong he is without you try to
+git red of him. I 'most wish it would come, once, fair and square.”
+
+“I'm sure you're right, Mr. Bolton,” said Annie. “I don't believe that your
+church would let such a man go when it really came to it. Don't they all
+feel that he has great ability?”
+
+“Oh, I guess they appreciate him as far forth as ability goes. Some on 'em
+complains that he's a little _too_ intellectial, if anything. But I
+tell 'em it's a good fault; it's a thing that can be got over in time.”
+
+Mrs. Bolton had ceased to take part in the discussion. She finished
+kneading her dough, and having fitted it into two baking-pans and dusted it
+with flour, she laid a clean towel over both. But when Annie rose she took
+the lamp from the mantel-shelf, where it stood, and held it up for her to
+find her way back to her own door.
+
+Annie went to bed with a spirit lightened as well as chastened, and
+kept saying over the words of Mr. Peck, so as to keep fast hold of the
+consolation they had given her. They humbled her with, a sense of his
+wisdom and insight; the thought of them kept her awake. She remembered the
+tonic that Dr. Morrell had left with her, and after questioning whether she
+really needed it now, she made sure by getting up and taking it.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+
+The spring had filled and flushed into summer. Bolton had gone over the
+grass on the slope before the house, and it was growing thick again, dark
+green above the yellow of its stubble, and the young generation of robins
+was foraging in it for the callow grasshoppers. Some boughs of the maples
+were beginning to lose the elastic upward lift of their prime, and to hang
+looser and limper with the burden of their foliage. The elms drooped lower
+toward the grass, and swept the straggling tops left standing in their
+shade.
+
+The early part of September had been fixed for the theatricals. Annie
+refused to have anything to do with them, and the preparations remained
+altogether with Brandreth. “The minuet,” he said to her one afternoon, when
+he had come to report to her as a co-ordinate authority, “is going to be
+something exquisite, I assure you. A good many of the ladies studied it in
+the Continental times, you know, when we had all those Martha Washington
+parties--or, I forgot you were out of the country--and it will be done
+perfectly. We're going to have the ball-room scene on the tennis-court just
+in front of the evergreens, don't you know, and then the balcony scene
+in the same place. We have to cut some of the business between Romeo
+and Juliet, because it's too long, you know, and some of it's too--too
+passionate; we couldn't do it properly, and we've decided to leave it out.
+But we sketch along through the play, and we have Friar Laurence coming
+with Juliet out of his cell onto the tennis-court and meeting Romeo; so
+that tells the story of the marriage. You can't imagine what a Mercutio Mr.
+Putney makes; he throws himself into it heart and soul, especially where
+he fights with Tybalt and gets killed. I give him lines there out of other
+scenes too; the tennis-court sets that part admirably; they come out of a
+street at the side. I think the scenery will surprise you, Miss Kilburn.
+Well, and then we have the Nurse and Juliet, and the poison scene--we put
+it into the garden, on the tennis-court, and we condense the different acts
+so as to give an idea of all that's happened, with Romeo banished, and all
+that. Then he comes back from Mantua, and we have the tomb scene set at
+one side of the tennis-court just opposite the street scene; and he fights
+with Paris; and then we have Juliet come to the door of the tomb--it's a
+liberty, of course; but we couldn't arrange the light inside--and she stabs
+herself and falls on Romeo's body, and that ends the play. You see, it
+gives a notion of the whole action, and tells the story pretty well. I
+think you'll be pleased.”
+
+“I've no doubt I shall,” said Annie. “Did you make the adaptation yourself,
+Mr. Brandreth?”
+
+“Well, yes, I did,” Mr. Brandreth modestly admitted. “It's been a good deal
+of work, but it's been a pleasure too. You know how that is, Miss Kilburn,
+in your charities.”
+
+“_Don't_ speak of my charities, Mr. Brandreth. I'm not a charitable
+person.”
+
+“You won't get people to believe _that_” said Mr. Brandreth.
+“Everybody knows how much good you do. But, as I was saying, my idea was to
+give a notion of the whole play in a series of passages or tableaux. Some
+of my friends think I've succeeded so well in telling the story, don't you
+know, without a change of scene, that they're urging me to publish my
+arrangement for the use of out-of-door theatricals.”
+
+“I should think it would be a very good idea,” said Annie. “I suppose Mr.
+Chapley would do it?”
+
+“Well, I don't know--I don't know,” Mr. Brandreth answered, with a note of
+trouble in his voice. “I'm afraid not,” he added sadly. “Miss Kilburn, I've
+been put in a very unfair position by Miss Northwick's changing her mind
+about Juliet, after the part had been offered to Miss Chapley. I've been
+made the means of a seeming slight to Miss Chapley, when, if it hadn't been
+for the cause, I'd rather have thrown up the whole affair. She gave up the
+part instantly when she heard that Miss Northwick wished to change her
+mind, but all the same I know--.”
+
+He stopped, and Annie said encouragingly: “Yes, I see. But perhaps she
+doesn't really care.”
+
+“That's what she said,” returned Mr. Brandreth ruefully. “But I don't know.
+I have never spoken of it with her since I went to tell her about it, after
+I got Miss Northwick's note.”
+
+“Well, Mr. Brandreth, I think you've really been victimised; and I don't
+believe the Social Union will ever be worth what it's costing.”
+
+“I was sure you would appreciate--would understand;” and Mr. Brandreth
+pressed her hand gratefully in leave-taking.
+
+She heard him talking with some one at the gate, whose sharp, “All right,
+my son!” identified Putney.
+
+She ran to the door to welcome him.
+
+“Oh, you're _both_ here!” she rejoiced, at sight of Mrs. Putney too.
+
+“I can send Ellen home,” suggested Putney.
+
+“Oh _no_, indeed!” said Annie, with single-mindedness at which she
+laughed with Mrs. Putney. “Only it seemed too good to have you both,” she
+explained, kissing Mrs. Putney. “I'm _so_ glad to see you!”
+
+“Well, what's the reason?” Putney dropped into a chair and began to rock
+nervously. “Don't be ashamed: we're _all_ selfish. Has Brandreth been
+putting up any more jobs on you?”
+
+“No, no! Only giving me a hint of his troubles and sorrows with those
+wretched Social Union theatricals. Poor young fellow! I'm sorry for him. He
+is really very sweet and unselfish. I like him.”
+
+“Yes, Brandreth is one of the most lady-like fellows I ever saw,” said
+Putney. “That Juliet business has pretty near been the death of him. I told
+him to offer Miss Chapley some other part--Rosaline, the part of the young
+lady who was dropped; but he couldn't seem to see it. Well, and how come on
+the good works, Annie?”
+
+“The good works! Ralph, tell me: _do_ people think me a charitable
+person? Do they suppose I've done or can do any good whatever?” She looked
+from Putney to his wife, and back again with comic entreaty.
+
+“Why, aren't you a charitable person? Don't you do any good?” he asked.
+
+“No!” she shouted. “Not the least in the world!”
+
+“It is pretty rough,” said Putney, taking out a cigar for a dry smoke; “and
+nobody will believe me when I report what you say, Annie. Mrs. Munger is
+telling round that she don't see how you can live through the summer at the
+rate you're going. She's got it down pretty cold about your taking Brother
+Peck's idea of the invited dance and supper, and joining hands with him to
+save the vanity of the self-respecting poor. She says that your suppression
+of that one unpopular feature has done more than anything else to promote
+the success of the Social Union. You ought to be glad Brother Peck is
+coming to the show.”
+
+“To the theatricals?”
+
+Putney nodded his head. “That's what he says. I believe Brother Peck is
+coming to see how the upper classes amuse themselves when they really try
+to benefit the lower classes.”
+
+Annie would not laugh at his joke. “Ralph,” she asked, “is it true that Mr.
+Peck is so unpopular in his church? Is he really going to be turned
+out--dismissed?”
+
+“Oh, I don't know about that. But they'll bounce him if they can.”
+
+“And can nothing be done? Can't his friends unite?”
+
+“Oh, they're united enough now; what they're afraid of is that they're not
+numerous enough. Why don't you buy in, Annie, and help control the stock?
+That old Unitarian concern of yours isn't ever going to get into running
+order again, and if you owned a pew in Ellen's church you could have a vote
+in church meeting, after a while, and you could lend Brother Peck your
+moral support now.”
+
+“I never liked that sort of thing, Ralph. I shouldn't believe with your
+people.”
+
+“Ellen's people, please. _I_ don't believe with them either. But I
+always vote right. Now you think it over.”
+
+“No, I shall not think it over. I don't approve of it. If I should take
+a pew in your church it would be simply to hear Mr. Peck preach, and
+contribute toward his--”
+
+“Salary? Yes, that's the way to look at it in the beginning. I knew you'd
+work round. Why, Annie, in a year's time you'll be trying to _buy_
+votes for Brother Peck.”
+
+“I should _never_ vote,” she retorted. “And I shall keep myself out of
+all temptation by not going to your church.”
+
+“Ellen's church,” Putney corrected.
+
+She went the next Sunday to hear Mr. Peck preach, and Putney, who seemed to
+see her the moment she entered the church, rose, as the sexton was showing
+her up the aisle, and opened the door of his pew for her with ironical
+welcome.
+
+“You can always have a seat with us, Annie,” he mocked, on their way out of
+the church together.
+
+“Thank you, Ralph,” she answered boldly. “I'm going to speak to the sexton
+for a pew.”
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+
+A wire had been carried from the village to the scene of the play at South
+Hatboro', and electric globes fizzed and hissed overhead, flooding the open
+tennis-court with the radiance of sharper moonlight, and stamping the thick
+velvety shadows of the shrubbery and tree-tops deep into the raw green of
+the grass along its borders.
+
+The spectators were seated on the verandas and terraced turf at the rear of
+the house, and they crowded the sides of the court up to a certain point,
+where a cord stretched across it kept them from encroaching upon the space
+intended for the action. Another rope enclosed an area all round them,
+where chairs and benches were placed for those who had tickets. After the
+rejection of the exclusive feature of the original plan, Mrs. Munger had
+liberalised more and more: she caused it to be known that all who could get
+into her grounds would be welcome on the outside of that rope, even though
+they did not pay anything; but a large number of tickets had been sold to
+the hands, as well as to the other villagers, and the area within the rope
+was closely packed. Some of the boys climbed the neighbouring trees, where
+from time to time the town authorities threatened them, but did not really
+dislodge them.
+
+Annie, with other friends of Mrs. Munger, gained a reserved seat on the
+veranda through the drawing-room windows; but once there, she found herself
+in the midst of a sufficiently mixed company.
+
+“How do, Miss Kilburn? That you? Well, I declare!” said a voice that she
+seemed to know, in a key of nervous excitement. Mrs. Savor's husband
+leaned across his wife's lap and shook hands with Annie. “William thought
+I better come,” Mrs. Savor seemed called upon to explain. “I got to do
+_something_. Ain't it just too cute for anything the way they got them
+screens worked into the shrubbery down they-ar? It's like the cycloraymy to
+Boston; you can't tell where the ground ends and the paintin' commences.
+Oh, I do want 'em to _begin_!”
+
+Mr. Savor laughed at his wife's impatience, and she said playfully: “What
+you laughin' at? I guess you're full as excited as what I be, when all's
+said and done.”
+
+There were other acquaintances of Annie's from Over the Track, in the group
+about her, and upon the example of the Savors they all greeted her. The
+wives and sweethearts tittered with self-derisive expectation; the men were
+gravely jocose, like all Americans in unwonted circumstances, but they were
+respectful to the coming performance, perhaps as a tribute to Annie. She
+wondered how some of them came to have those seats, which were reserved at
+an extra price; she did not allow for that self-respect which causes the
+American workman to supply himself with the best his money can buy while
+his money lasts.
+
+She turned to see who was on her other hand. A row of three small children
+stretched from her to Mrs. Gerrish, whom she did not recognise at first.
+“Oh, Emmeline!” she said; and then, for want of something else, she added,
+“Where is Mr. Gerrish? Isn't he coming?”
+
+“He was detained at the store,” said Mrs. Gerrish, with cold importance;
+“but he will be here. May I ask, Annie,” she pursued solemnly, “how you got
+here?”
+
+“How did I get here? Why, through the windows. Didn't you?”
+
+“May I ask who had charge of the arrangements?”
+
+“I don't know, I'm sure,” said Annie. “I suppose Mrs. Munger.”
+
+A burst of music came from the dense shadow into which the group of
+evergreens at the bottom of the tennis-court deepened away from the glister
+of the electrics. There was a deeper hush; then a slight jarring and
+scraping of a chair beyond Mrs. Gerrish, who leaned across her children and
+said, “He's come, Annie--right through the parlour window!” Her voice was
+lifted to carry above the music, and all the people near were able to share
+the fact that righted Mrs. Gerrish in her own esteem.
+
+From the covert of the low pines in the middle of the scene Miss Northwick
+and Mr. Brandreth appeared hand in hand, and then the place filled with
+figures from other apertures of the little grove and through the artificial
+wings at the sides, and walked the minuet. Mr. Fellows, the painter, had
+helped with the costumes, supplying some from his own artistic properties,
+and mediævalising others; the Boston costumers had been drawn upon by the
+men; and they all moved through the stately figures with a security which
+discipline had given them. The broad solid colours which they wore took the
+light and shadow with picturesque effectiveness; the masks contributed a
+sense of mystery novel in Hatboro', and kept the friends of the dancers
+in exciting doubt of their identity; the strangeness of the audience to
+all spectacles of the sort held its judgment in suspense. The minuet
+was encored, and had to be given again, and it was some time before the
+applause of the repetition allowed the characters to be heard when the
+partners of the minuet began to move about arm in arm, and the drama
+properly began. When the applause died away it was still not easy to hear;
+a boy in one of the trees called, “Louder!” and made some of the people
+laugh, but for the rest they were very orderly throughout.
+
+Toward the end of the fourth act Annie was startled by a child dashing
+itself against her knees, and breaking into a gurgle of shy laughter as
+children do.
+
+“Why, you little witch!” she said to the uplifted face of Idella Peck.
+“Where is your father?”
+
+“Oh, somewhere,” said the child, with entire ease of mind.
+
+“And your hat?” said Annie, putting her hand on the curly bare
+head--“where's your hat?”
+
+“On the ground.”
+
+“On the ground--where?”
+
+“Oh, I don't know,” said Idella lightly, as if the pursuit bored her.
+
+Annie pulled her up on her lap. “Well, now, you stay here with me, if you
+please, till your papa or your hat comes after you.”
+
+“My--hat--can't--come--after--me!” said the child, turning back her head,
+so as to laugh her sense of the joke in Annie's face.
+
+“No matter; your papa can, and I'm going to keep you.”
+
+Idella let her head fall back against Annie's breast, and began to finger
+the rings on the hand which Annie laid across her lap to keep her.
+
+“For goodness gracious!” said Mrs. Savor, “who you got there, Miss
+Kilburn?”
+
+“Mr. Peck's little girl.”
+
+“Where'd she spring from?”
+
+Mrs. Gerrish leaned forward and spoke across the six legs of her children,
+who were all three standing up in their chairs: “You don't mean to say
+that's Idella Peck? Where's her father?”
+
+“Somewhere, she says,” said Annie, willing to answer Mrs. Gerrish with the
+child's nonchalance.
+
+“Well, that's great!” said Mrs. Gerrish. “I should think he better be
+looking after her--or some one.”
+
+The music ceased, and the last act of the play began. Before it ended,
+Idella had fallen asleep, and Annie sat still with her after the crowd
+around her began to break up. Mrs. Savor kept her seat beside Annie. She
+said, “Don't you want I should spell you a little while, Miss Kilburn?” She
+leaned over the face of the sleeping child. “Why, she ain't much more than
+a baby! William, you go and see if you can't find Mr. Peck. I'm goin' to
+stay here with Miss Kilburn.” Her husband humoured her whim, and made his
+way through the knots and clumps of people toward the rope enclosing the
+tennis-court. “Won't you let me hold her, Miss Kilburn?” she pleaded again.
+
+“No, no; she isn't heavy; I like to hold her,” replied Annie. Then
+something occurred to her, and she started in amazement at herself.
+
+“Or yes, Mrs. Savor, you _may_ take her a while;” and she put the
+child into the arms of the bereaved creature, who had fallen desolately
+back in her chair. She hugged Idella up to her breast, and hungrily mumbled
+her with kisses, and moaned out over her, “Oh dear! Oh my! Oh my!”
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+
+The people beyond the rope had nearly all gone away, and Mr. Savor was
+coming back across the court with Mr. Peck. The players appeared from the
+grove at the other end of the court in their vivid costumes, chatting and
+laughing with their friends, who went down from the piazzas and terraces to
+congratulate them. Mrs. Munger hurried about among them, saying something
+to each group. She caught sight of Mr. Peck and Mr. Savor, and she ran
+after them, arriving with them where Annie sat.
+
+“I hope you were not anxious about Idella,” Annie said, laughing.
+
+“No; I didn't miss her at once,” said the minister simply; “and then I
+thought she had merely gone off with some of the other children who were
+playing about.”
+
+“You shall talk all that over later,” said Mrs. Munger. “Now, Miss Kilburn,
+I want you and Mr. Peck and Mr. and Mrs. Savor to stay for a cup of coffee
+that I'm going to give our friends out there. Don't you think they deserve
+it? Wasn't it a wonderful success? They must be frightfully exhausted. Just
+go right out to them. I'll be with you in one moment. Oh yes, the child!
+Well, bring her into the house, Mrs. Savor; I'll find a place for her, and
+then you can go out with me.”
+
+“I guess you won't get Maria away from her very easy,” said Mr. Savor,
+laughing. His wife stood with the child's cheek pressed tight against hers.
+
+“Oh, I'll manage that,” said Mrs. Munger. “I'm counting on Mrs. Savor.”
+ She added in a hurried undertone to Annie: “I've asked a number of the
+workpeople to stay--representative workpeople, the foremen in the different
+shops and their families--and you'll find your friends of all classes
+together. It's a great day for the Social Union!” she said aloud. “I'm sure
+_you_ must feel that, Mr. Peck. Miss Kilburn and I have to thank you
+for saving us from a great mistake at the outset, and now your staying,”
+ she continued, “will give it just the appearance we want. I'm going to keep
+your little girl as a hostage, and you shall not go till I let you. Come,
+Mrs. Savor!” She bustled away with Mrs. Savor, and Mr. Peck reluctantly
+accompanied Annie down over the lawn.
+
+He was silent, but Mr. Savor was hilarious. “Well, Mr. Putney,” he said,
+when he joined the group of which Putney was the centre, “you done that in
+apple-pie order. I never see anything much better than the way you carried
+on with Mrs. Wilmington.”
+
+“Thank you, Mr. Savor,” said Putney; “I'm glad you liked it. You couldn't
+say I was trying to flatter her up much, anyway.”
+
+“No, no!” Mr. Savor assented, with delight in the joke.
+
+“Well, Annie,” said Putney. He shook hands with her, and Mrs. Putney, who
+was there with Dr. Morrell, asked her where she had sat.
+
+“We kept looking all round for you.”
+
+“Yes,” said Putney, with his hand on his boy's shoulder, “we wanted to know
+how you liked the Mercutio.”
+
+“Ralph, it was incomparable!”
+
+“Well, that will do for a beginning. It's a little cold, but it's in the
+right spirit. You mean that the Mercutio wasn't comparable to the Nurse.”
+
+“Oh, Lyra was wonderful!” said Annie. “Don't you think so, Ellen?”
+
+“She was Lyra,” said Mrs. Putney definitely.
+
+“No; she wasn't Lyra at all!” retorted Annie. “That was the marvel of it.
+She was Juliet's nurse.”
+
+“Perhaps she was a little of both,” suggested Putney. “What did you think
+of the performance, Mr. Peck? I don't want a personal tribute, but if you
+offer it, I shall not be ungrateful.”
+
+“I have been very much interested,” said the minister. “It was all very new
+to me. I realised for the first time in my life the great power that the
+theatre must be. I felt how much the drama could do--how much good.”
+
+“Well, that's what we're after,” said Putney. “We had no personal motive;
+good, right straight along, was our motto. Nobody wanted to outshine
+anybody else. I kept my Mercutio down all through, so's not to get ahead
+of Romeo or Tybalt in the public esteem. Did our friends outside the rope
+catch on to my idea?” Mr. Peck smiled at the banter, but he seemed not to
+know just what to say, and Putney went on: “That's why I made it so bad. I
+didn't want anybody to go home feeling sorry that Mercutio was killed. I
+don't suppose Winthrop could have slept.”
+
+“You won't sleep yourself to-night, I'm afraid,” said his wife.
+
+“Oh, Mrs. Munger has promised me a particularly weak cup of coffee. She has
+got us all in, it seems, for a sort of supper, in spite of everything. I
+understand it includes representatives of all the stations and conditions
+present except the outcasts beyond the rope. I don't see what you're doing
+here, Mr. Peck.”
+
+“Was Mr. Peck really outside the rope?” Annie asked Dr. Morrell, as they
+dropped apart from the others a little.
+
+“I believe he gave his chair to one of the women from the outside,” said
+the doctor.
+
+Annie moved with him toward Lyra, who was joking with some of the hands.
+
+With all her good-nature, she had the effect of patronising them, as she
+stood talking about the play with them in her drawl, which she had got
+back to again. They were admiring her, in her dress of the querulous old
+nurse, and told her how they never would have known her. But there was an
+insincerity in the effusion of some of the more nervous women, and in the
+reticence of the others, who were holding back out of self-respect.
+
+She met Annie and Morrell with eager relief. “Well, Annie?”
+
+“Perfect!”
+
+“Well, now, that's very nice; you can't go beyond perfect, you know. I
+_did_ do it pretty well, didn't I? Poor Mr. Brandreth! Have you seen
+him? You must say something comforting to him. He's really been sacrificed
+in this business. You know he wanted Miss Chapley. She would have made a
+lovely Juliet. Of course she blames him for it. She thinks he wanted to
+make up to Miss Northwick, when Miss Northwick was just flinging herself at
+Jack. Look at her!”
+
+Jack Wilmington and Miss Sue Northwick were standing together near her
+father and a party of her friends, and she was smiling and talking at
+him. Eyes, lips, gestures, attitude expressed in the proud girl a fawning
+eagerness to please the man, who received her homage rather as if it bored
+him. His indifferent manner may have been one secret of his power over her,
+and perhaps she was not capable of all the suffering she was capable of
+inflicting.
+
+Lyra turned to walk toward the house, deflecting a little in the direction
+of her nephew and Miss Northwick. “Jack!” she drawled over the shoulder
+next them as she passed, “I wish you'd bring your aunty's wrap to her on
+the piazza.”
+
+“Why, stay here!” Putney called after her. “They're going to fetch the
+refreshments out here.”
+
+“Yes, but I'm tired, Ralph, and I can't sit on the grass, at my age.”
+
+She moved on, with her sweeping, lounging pace, and Jack Wilmington, after
+a moment's hesitation, bowed to Miss Northwick and went after her.
+
+The girl remained apart from her friends, as if expecting his return.
+
+Silhouetted against the bright windows, Lyra waited till Jack Wilmington
+reappeared with a shawl and laid it on her shoulders. Then she sank into
+a chair. The young man stood beside her talking down upon her. Something
+restive and insistent expressed itself in their respective attitudes. He
+sat down at her side.
+
+Miss Northwick joined her friends carelessly.
+
+“Ah, Miss Kilburn,” said Mr. Brandreth's voice at Annie's ear, “I'm glad
+to find you. I've just run home with mother--she feels the night air--and
+I was afraid you would slip through our fingers before I got back. This
+little business of the refreshments was an afterthought of Mrs. Munger's,
+and we meant it for a surprise--we knew you'd approve of it in the form it
+took.” He looked round at the straggling workpeople, who represented the
+harmonisation of classes, keeping to themselves as if they had been there
+alone.
+
+“Yes,” Annie was obliged to say; “it's very pleasant.” She added: “You must
+all be rather hungry, Mr. Brandreth. If the Social Union ever gets on its
+feet, it will have _you_ to thank more than any one.”
+
+“Oh, don't speak of me, Miss Kilburn! Do you know, we've netted about two
+hundred dollars. Isn't that pretty good, doctor?”
+
+“Very,” said the doctor. “Hadn't we better follow Mrs. Wilmington's
+example, and get up under the piazza roof? I'm afraid you'll be the worse
+for the night air, Miss Kilburn. Putney,” he called to his friend, “we're
+going up to the house.”
+
+“All right. I guess that's a good idea.”
+
+The doctor called to the different knots and groups, telling them to come
+up to the house. Some of the workpeople slipped away through the grounds
+and did not come. The Northwicks and their friends moved toward the house.
+
+Mrs. Munger came down the lawn to meet her guests. “Ah, that's right. It's
+much better indoors. I was just coming for you.” She addressed herself more
+particularly to the Northwicks. “Coffee will be ready in a few moments.
+We've met with a little delay.”
+
+“I'm afraid we must say good night at once,” said Mr. Northwick. “We had
+arranged to have our friends and some other guests with us at home. And
+we're quite late now.”
+
+Mrs. Munger protested. “Take our Juliet from us! Oh, Miss Northwick, how
+can I thank you enough? The whole play turned upon you!”
+
+“It's just as well,” she said to Annie, as the Northwicks and their friends
+walked across the lawn to the gate, where they had carriages waiting.
+“They'd have been difficult to manage, and everybody else will feel a
+little more at home without them. Poor Mr. Brandreth, I'm sure _you_
+will! I did pity you so, with such a Juliet on your hands!”
+
+In-doors the representatives of the lower classes were less at ease than
+they were without. Some of the ministers mingled with them, and tried to
+form a bond between them and the other villagers. Mr. Peck took no part in
+this work; he stood holding his elbows with his hands, and talking with a
+perfunctory air to an old lady of his congregation.
+
+The young ladies of South Hatboro', as Mrs. Munger's assistants, went about
+impartially to high and low with trays of refreshments. Annie saw Putney,
+where he stood with his wife and boy, refuse coffee, and she watched him
+anxiously when the claret-cup came. He waved his hand over it, and said,
+“No; I'll take some of the lemonade.” As he lifted a glass of it toward his
+lips he stopped and made as if to put it down again, and his hand shook so
+that he spilled some of it. Then he dashed it off, and reached for another
+glass. “I want some more,” he said, with a laugh; “I'm thirsty.” He drank a
+second glass, and when he saw a tray coming toward Annie, where Dr. Morrell
+had joined her, he came over and exchanged his empty glass for a full one.
+
+“Not much to brag of as lemonade,” he said, “but first-rate rum punch.”
+
+“Look here, Putney,” whispered the doctor, laying his hand on his arm,
+“don't you take any more of that. Give me that glass!”
+
+“Oh, all right!” laughed Putney, dashing it off. “You're welcome to the
+tumbler, if you want it, Doc.”
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+
+Mrs. Munger's guests kept on talking and laughing. With the coffee and the
+punch there began to be a little more freedom. Some prohibitionists among
+the working people went away when they found that the lemonade was punch;
+but Mrs. Munger did not know it, and she saw the ideal of a Social Union
+figuratively accomplished in her own house. She stirred about among her
+guests till she produced a fleeting, empty good-fellowship among them. One
+of the shoe-shop hands, with an inextinguishable scent of leather and the
+character of a droll, seconded her efforts with noisy jokes. He proposed
+games, and would not be snubbed by the refusal of his boss to countenance
+him, he had the applause of so many others. Mrs. Munger approved of the
+idea.
+
+“Don't you think it would be great fun, Mrs. Gerrish?” she asked.
+
+“Well, now, if Squire Putney would lead off,” said the joker, looking
+round.
+
+Putney could not be found, nor Dr. Morrell.
+
+“They're off somewhere for a smoke,” said Mrs. Munger. “Well, that's right.
+I want everybody to feel that my house is their own to-night, and to come
+and go just as they like. Do you suppose Mr. Peck is offended?” she asked,
+under her breath, as she passed Annie. “He _couldn't_ feel that this
+is the same thing; but I can't see him anywhere. He wouldn't go without
+taking leave, you don't suppose?”
+
+Annie joined Mrs. Putney. They talked at first with those who came to ask
+where Putney and the doctor were; but finally they withdrew into a little
+alcove from the parlour, where Mrs. Munger approved of their being when she
+discovered them; they must be very tired, and ought to rest on the lounge
+there. Her theory of the exhaustion of those who had taken part in the play
+embraced their families.
+
+The time wore on toward midnight, and her guests got themselves away with
+more or less difficulty as they attempted the formality of leave-taking
+or not. Some of the hands who thought this necessary found it a serious
+affair; but most of them slipped off without saying good night to Mrs.
+Munger or expressing that rapture with the whole evening from beginning
+to end which the ladies of South Hatboro' professed. The ladies of South
+Hatboro' and Old Hatboro' had met in a general intimacy not approached
+before, and they parted with a flow of mutual esteem. The Gerrish children
+had dropped asleep in nooks and corners, from which Mr. Gerrish hunted them
+up and put them together for departure, while his wife remained with Mrs.
+Munger, unable to stop talking, and no longer amenable to the looks with
+which he governed her in public.
+
+Lyra came downstairs, hooded and wrapped for departure, with Jack
+Wilmington by her side. “Why, _Ellen_!” she said, looking into the
+little alcove from the hall. “Are you here yet? And Annie! Where in the
+world is Ralph?” At the pleading look with which Mrs. Putney replied, she
+exclaimed: “Oh, it's what I was afraid of! I don't see what the woman could
+have been about! But of course she didn't think of poor Ralph. Ellen, let
+me take you and Winthrop home! Dr. Morrell will be sure to bring Ralph.”
+
+“Well,” said Mrs. Putney passively, but without rising.
+
+“Annie can come too. There's plenty of room. Jack can walk.”
+
+Jack Wilmington joined Lyra in urging Annie to take his place. He said to
+her, apart, “Young Munger has been telling me that Putney got at the
+sideboard and carried off the rum. I'll stay and help look after him.”
+
+A crazy laugh came into the parlour from the piazza outside, and the group
+in the alcove started forward. Putney stood at a window, resting one arm
+on the bar of the long lower sash, which was raised to its full height,
+and looking ironically in upon Mrs. Munger and her remaining guests. He
+was still in his Mercutio dress, but he had lost his plumed cap, and was
+bareheaded. A pace or two behind him stood Mr. Peck, regarding the effect
+of this apparition upon the company with the same dreamy, indrawn presence
+he had in the pulpit.
+
+“Well, Mrs. Munger, I'm glad I got back in time to tell you how much I've
+enjoyed it. Brother Peck wanted me to go home, but I told him, Not till
+I've thanked Mrs. Munger, Brother Peck; not till I've drunk her health in
+her own old particular Jamaica.” He put to his lips the black bottle which
+he had been holding in his right hand behind him; then he took it away,
+looked at it, and flung it rolling-along the piazza floor. “Didn't get hold
+of the inexhaustible bottle that time; never do. But it's a good article;
+a better article than you used to sell on the sly, Bill Gerrish. You'll
+excuse my helping myself, Mrs. Munger; I knew you'd want me to. Well, it's
+been a great occasion, Mrs. Munger.” He winked at the hostess. “You've
+had your little invited supper, after all. You're a manager, Mrs. Munger.
+You've made even the wrath of Brother Peck to praise you.”
+
+The ladies involuntarily shrank backward as Putney suddenly entered through
+the window and gained the corner of the piano at a dash. He stayed himself
+against it, slightly swaying, and turned his flaming eyes from one to
+another, as if questioning whom he should attack next.
+
+Except for the wild look in them, which was not so much wilder than they
+wore in all times of excitement, and an occasional halt at a difficult
+word, he gave no sign of being drunk. The liquor had as yet merely
+intensified him.
+
+Mrs. Munger had the inspiration to treat him as one caresses a dangerous
+lunatic. “I'm sure you're very kind, Mr. Putney, to come back. Do sit
+down!”
+
+“Why?” demanded Putney. “Everybody else standing.”
+
+“That's true,” said Mrs. Munger. “I'm sure I don't know why--”
+
+“Oh yes, you do, Mrs. Munger. It's because they want to have a good view of
+a man who's made a fool of himself--”
+
+“Oh, now, Mr. _Putney_!” said Mrs. Munger, with hospitable
+deprecation. “I'm sure no one wants to do anything of the kind.” She looked
+round at the company for corroboration, but no one cared to attract
+Putney's attention by any sound or sign.
+
+“But I'll tell you what,” said Putney, with a savage burst, “that a woman
+who puts hell-fire before a poor devil who can't keep out of it when he
+sees it, is better worth looking at.”
+
+“Mr. Putney, I assure you,” said Mrs. Munger, “that it was the
+_mildest_ punch! And I really didn't think--I didn't remember--”
+
+She turned toward Mrs. Putney with her explanation, but Putney seemed to
+have forgotten her, and he turned upon Mr. Gerrish, “How's that drunkard's
+grave getting along that you've dug for your porter?” Gerrish remained
+prudently silent. “I know you, Billy. You're all right. You've got the pull
+on your conscience; we all have, one way or another. Here's Annie Kilburn,
+come back from Rome, where she couldn't seem to fix it up with hers to suit
+her, and she's trying to get round it in Hatboro' with good works. Why,
+there isn't any occasion for good works in Hatboro'. I could have told you
+that before you came,” he said, addressing Annie directly. “What we want is
+faith, and lots of it. The church is going to pieces because we haven't got
+any faith.”
+
+His hand slipped from the piano, and he dropped heavily back upon a chair
+that stood near. The concussion seemed to complete in his brain the
+transition from his normal dispositions to their opposite, which had
+already begun. “Bill Gerrish has done more for Hatboro' than any other man
+in the place. He's the only man that holds the church together, because he
+knows the value of _faith_.” He said this without a trace of irony,
+glaring at Annie with fierce defiance. “You come back here, and try to set
+up for a saint in a town where William B. Gerrish has done--has done more
+to establish the dry-goods business on a metro-me-tro-politan basis than
+any other man out of New York or Boston.”
+
+He stopped and looked round, mystified, as if this were not the point which
+he had been aiming at.
+
+Lyra broke into a spluttering laugh, and suddenly checked herself. Putney
+smiled slightly. “Pretty good, eh? Say, where was I?” he asked slyly. Lyra
+hid her face behind Annie's shoulder. “What's that dress you got on? What's
+all this about, anyway? Oh yes, I know. _Romeo and Juliet_--Social
+Union. Well,” he resumed, with a frown, “there's too much _Romeo and
+Juliet_, too much Social Union, in this town already.” He stopped, and
+seemed preparing to launch some deadly phrase at Mrs. Wilmington, but he
+only said, “You're all right, Lyra.”
+
+“Mrs. Munger,” said Mr. Gerrish, “we must be going. Good night, ma'am. Mrs.
+Gerrish, it's time the children were at home.”
+
+“Of course it is,” said Putney, watching the Gerrishes getting their
+children together. He waved his hand after them, and called out, “William
+Gerrish, you're a man; I honour you.”
+
+He laid hold of the piano and pulled himself to his feet, and seemed to
+become aware, for the first time, of his wife, where she stood with their
+boy beside her.
+
+“What you doing here with that child at this time of night?” he shouted at
+her, all that was left of the man in his eyes changing into the glare of a
+pitiless brute. “Why don't you go home? You want to show people what I did
+to him? You want to publish my shame, do you? Is that it? Look here!”
+
+He began to work himself along toward her by help of the piano. A step was
+heard on the piazza without, and Dr. Morrell entered through the open
+window.
+
+“Come now, Putney,” he said gently. The other men closed round them.
+
+Putney stopped. “What's this? Interfering in family matters? You better
+go home and look after your own wives, if you got any. Get out the way,
+'n' you mind your own business, Doc. Morrell. You meddle too much.”
+ His speech was thickening and breaking. “You think science going do
+everything--evolution! Talk me about evolution! What's evolution done
+for Hatboro'? 'Volved Gerrish's store. One day of Christianity--real
+Christianity--Where's that boy? If I get hold of him--”
+
+He lunged forward, and Jack Wilmington and young Munger stepped before him.
+
+Mrs. Putney had not moved, nor lost the look of sad, passive vigilance
+which she had worn since her husband reappeared.
+
+She pushed the men aside.
+
+“Ralph, behave yourself! _Here's_ Winthrop, and we want you to take us
+home. Come now!” She passed her arm through his, and the boy took his other
+hand. The action, so full of fearless custom and wonted affection from them
+both, seemed with her words to operate another total change in his mood.
+
+“All right; I'm going, Ellen. Got to say good night Mrs. Munger, that's
+all.” He managed to get to her, with his wife on his arm and his boy at his
+side. “Want to thank you for a pleasant evening, Mrs. Munger--want to thank
+you--”
+
+“And _I_ want to thank you _too_, Mrs. Munger,” said Mrs. Putney,
+with an intensity of bitterness no repetition of the words could give,
+“It's been a pleasant evening for _me_!”
+
+Putney wished to stop and explain, but his wife pulled him away.
+
+Dr. Morrell and Annie followed to get them safely into the carriage; he
+went with them, and when she came back Mrs. Munger was saying: “I will
+leave it to Mr. Wilmington, or any one, if I'm to blame. It had quite gone
+out of my head about Mr. Putney. There was plenty of coffee, besides, and
+if everything that could harm particular persons had to be kept out of the
+way, society couldn't go on. We ought to consider the greatest good of the
+greatest number.” She looked round from one to another for support. No one
+said anything, and Mrs. Munger, trembling on the verge of a collapse, made
+a direct appeal: “Don't you think so, Mr. Peck?”
+
+The minister broke his silence with reluctance. “It's sometimes best to
+have the effect of error unmistakable. Then we are sure it's error.”
+
+Mrs. Munger gave a sob of relief into her handkerchief. “Yes, that's just
+what I say.”
+
+Lyra bent her face on her arm, and Jack Wilmington put his head out of the
+window where he stood.
+
+Mr. Peck remained staring at Mrs. Munger, as if doubtful what to do. Then
+he said: “You seem not to have understood me, ma'am. I should be to blame
+if I left you in doubt. You have been guilty of forgetting your brother's
+weakness, and if the consequence has promptly followed in his shame, it is
+for you to realise it. I wish you a good evening.”
+
+He went out with a dignity that thrilled Annie. Lyra leaned toward her and
+said, choking with laughter, “He's left Idella asleep upstairs. We haven't
+_any_ of us got _perfect_ memories, have we?”
+
+“Run after him!” Annie said to Jack Wilmington, in undertone, “and get him
+into my carriage. I'll get the little girl. Lyra, _don't_ speak of
+it.”
+
+“Never!” said Mrs. Wilmington, with delight. “I'm solid for Mr. Peck every
+time.”
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+
+Annie made up a bed for Idella on a wide, old-fashioned lounge in her room,
+and put her away in it, swathed in a night-gown which she found among
+the survivals of her own childish clothing in that old chest of drawers.
+When she woke in the morning she looked across at the little creature,
+with a tender sense of possession and protection suffusing her troubled
+recollections of the night before. Idella stirred, stretched herself with
+a long sigh, and then sat up and stared round the strange place as if she
+were still in a dream.
+
+“Would you like to come in here with me?” Annie suggested from her bed.
+
+The child pushed back her hair with her little hands, and after waiting to
+realise the situation to the limit of her small experience, she said, with
+a smile that showed her pretty teeth, “Yes.”
+
+“Then come.”
+
+Idella tumbled out of bed, pulling up the nightgown, which was too long for
+her, and softly thumped across the carpet. Annie leaned over and lifted her
+up, and pressed the little face to her own, and felt the play of the quick,
+light breath over her cheek.
+
+“Would you like to stay with me--live with me--Idella?” she asked.
+
+The child turned her face away, and hid a roguish smile in the pillow. “I
+don't know.”
+
+“Would you like to be my little girl?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“No? Why not?”
+
+“Because--because”--she seemed to search her mind--“because your
+night-gowns are too long.”
+
+“Oh, is that all? That's no reason. Think of something else.”
+
+Idella rubbed her face hard on the pillow. “You dress up cats.”
+
+She lifted her face, and looked with eyes of laughing malice into Annie's,
+and Annie pushed her face against Idella's neck and cried, “You're a
+rogue!”
+
+The little one screamed with laughter and gurgled: “Oh, you tickle! You
+tickle!”
+
+They had a childish romp, prolonged through the details of Idella's washing
+and dressing, and Annie tried to lose, in her frolic with the child, the
+anxieties that had beset her waking; she succeeded in confusing them with
+one another in one dull, indefinite pain.
+
+She wondered when Mr. Peck would come for Idella, but they were still at
+their belated breakfast when Mrs. Bolton came in to say that Bolton had met
+the minister on his way up, and had asked him if Idella might not stay the
+week out with them.
+
+“I don' know but he done more'n he'd ought.
+
+“But she can be with us the rest part, when you've got done with her.”
+
+“I haven't begun to get done with her,” said Annie. “I'm glad Mr. Bolton
+asked.”
+
+After breakfast Bolton himself appeared, to ask if Idella might go up to
+the orchard with him. Idella ran out of the room and came back with her hat
+on, and tugging to get into her shabby little sack. Annie helped her with
+it, and Idella tucked her hand into Bolton's loose, hard fist, and gave it
+a pull toward the door.
+
+“Well, I don't see but what she's goin',” he said.
+
+“Yes; you'd better ask her the next time if _I_ can go,” said Annie.
+
+“Well, why don't you?” asked Bolton, humouring the joke. “I guess you'd
+enjoy it about as well as any. We're just goin' for a basket of wind-falls
+for pies. I guess we ain't a-goin' to be gone a great while.”
+
+Annie watched them up the lane from the library window with a queer grudge
+at heart; Bolton stiffly lumbering forward at an angle of forty-five
+degrees, the child whirling and dancing at his side, and now before and now
+after him.
+
+At the sound of wheels on the gravel before the front door, Annie turned
+away with such an imperative need of its being Dr. Morrell's buggy that it
+was almost an intolerable disappointment to find it Mrs. Munger's phaeton.
+
+Mrs. Munger burst in upon her in an excitement which somehow had an effect
+of premeditation.
+
+“Miss Kilburn, I wish to know what you think of Mr. and Mrs. Putney's
+behaviour to me, and Mr. Peck's, in my own house, last night. They are
+friends of yours, and I wish to know if you approve of it. I come to
+you _as_ their friend, and I am sure you will feel as I do that my
+hospitality has been abused. It was an outrage for Mr. Putney to get
+intoxicated in my house; and for Mr. Peck to attack me as he did before
+everybody, because Mr. Putney had taken advantage of his privileges, was
+abominable. I am not a member of his church; and even if I were, he would
+have had no right to speak so to me.”
+
+Annie felt the blood fly to her head, and she waited a moment to regain her
+coolness. “I wonder you came to ask me, Mrs. Munger, if you were so sure
+that I agreed with you. I'm certainly Mr. and Mrs. Putney's friend, and
+so far as admiring Mr. Peck's sincerity and goodness is concerned, I'm
+_his_ friend. But I'm obliged to say that you're mistaken about the
+rest.”
+
+She folded her hands at her waist, and stood up very straight, looking
+firmly at Mrs. Munger, who made a show of taking a new grip of her senses
+as she sank unbidden into a chair.
+
+“Why, what do you mean, Miss Kilburn?”
+
+“It seems to me that I needn't say.”
+
+“Why, but you must! You _must_, you know. I can't be _left_ so! I
+must know where I _stand_! I must be sure of my _ground_! I can't
+go on without understanding just how much you mean by my being mistaken.”
+
+She looked Annie in the face with eyes superficially expressive of
+indignant surprise, and Annie perceived that she wished to restore herself
+in her own esteem by browbeating some one else into the affirmation of her
+innocence.
+
+“Well, if you must know, Mrs. Munger, I mean that you ought to have
+remembered Mr. Putney's infirmity, and that it was cruel to put temptation
+in his way. Everybody knows that he can't resist it, and that he is making
+such a hard fight to keep out of it. And then, if you press me for an
+opinion, I must say that you were not justifiable in asking Mr. Peck to
+take part in a social entertainment when we had explicitly dropped that
+part of the affair.”
+
+Mrs. Munger had not pressed Annie for an opinion on this point at all; but
+in their interest in it they both ignored the fact. Mrs. Munger tacitly
+admitted her position in retorting, “He needn't have stayed.”
+
+“You made him stay--you remember how--and he couldn't have got away without
+being rude.”
+
+“And you think he wasn't rude to scold me before my guests?”
+
+“He told you the truth. He didn't wish to say anything, but you forced him
+to speak, just as you have forced me.”
+
+“Forced _you_? Miss Kilburn!”
+
+“Yes. I don't at all agree with Mr. Peck in many things, but he is a good
+man, and last night he spoke the truth. I shouldn't be speaking it if I
+didn't tell you I thought so.”
+
+“Very well, then,” said Mrs. Munger, rising.
+
+“After this you can't expect me to have anything to do with the Social
+Union; you couldn't _wish_ me to, if that's your opinion of my
+character.”
+
+“I haven't expressed any opinion of your character, Mrs. Munger, if you'll
+remember, please; and as for the Social Union, I shall have nothing further
+to do with it myself.”
+
+Annie drew herself up a little higher, and silently waited for her visitor
+to go.
+
+But Mrs. Munger remained.
+
+“I don't believe Mrs. Putney herself would say what you have said,” she
+remarked, after an embarrassing moment. “If it were really so I should be
+willing to make any reparation--to acknowledge it. Will you go with me to
+Mrs. Putney's? I have my phaeton here, and--”
+
+“I shouldn't dream of going to Mrs. Putney's with you.”
+
+Mrs. Munger urged, with the effect of invincible argument: “I've been down
+in the village, and I've talked to a good many about it--some of them
+hadn't heard of it before--and I must say, Miss Kilburn, that people
+generally take a very different view of it from what you do. They think
+that my hospitality has been shamefully abused. Mr. Gates said he should
+think I would have Mr. Putney arrested. But I don't care for all that. What
+I wish is to prove to you that I am right; and if I can go with you to call
+on Mrs. Putney, I shall not care what any one else says. Will you come?”
+
+“Certainly not,” cried Annie.
+
+They both stood a moment, and in this moment Dr. Morrell drove up, and
+dropped his hitching-weight beyond Mrs. Munger's phaeton.
+
+As he entered she said: “We will let Dr. Morrell decide. I've been asking
+Miss Kilburn to go with me to Mrs. Putney's. I think it would be a graceful
+and proper thing for me to do, to express my sympathy and interest, and to
+hear what Mrs. Putney really has to say. Don't _you_ think I ought to
+go to see her, doctor?”
+
+The doctor laughed. “I can't prescribe in matters of social duty. But what
+do you want to see Mrs. Putney for?”
+
+“What for? Why, doctor, on account of Mr. Putney--what took place last
+night.”
+
+“Yes? What was that?”
+
+“What was _that_? Why, his strange behaviour--his--his intoxication.”
+
+“Was he intoxicated? Did you think so?”
+
+“Why, you were there, doctor. Didn't you think so?”
+
+Annie looked at him with as much astonishment as Mrs. Munger.
+
+The doctor laughed again. “You can't always tell when Putney's joking; he's
+a great joker. Perhaps he was hoaxing.”
+
+“Oh doctor, do you think he _could_ have been?” said Mrs. Munger, with
+clasped hands. “It would make me the happiest woman in the world! I'd
+forgive him all he's made me suffer. But _you're_ joking _now_,
+doctor?”
+
+“You can't tell when people are joking. If I'm not, does it follow that I'm
+really intoxicated?”
+
+“Oh, but that's nonsense, Dr. Morrell. That's mere--what do you call
+it?--chop logic. But I don't mind it. I grasp at a straw.” Mrs. Munger
+grasped at a straw of the mind, to show how. “But what _do_ you mean?”
+
+“Well, Mrs. Putney wasn't intoxicated last night, but she's not well this
+morning. I'm afraid she couldn't see you.”
+
+“Just as you _say_, doctor,” cried Mrs. Munger, with mounting
+cheerfulness. “I _wish_ I knew just how much you meant, and how
+little.” She moved closer to the doctor, and bent a look of candid fondness
+upon him. “But I know you're trying to mystify me.”
+
+She pursued him with questions which he easily parried, smiling and
+laughing. At the end she left him to Annie, with adieux that were almost
+radiant. “Anyhow, I shall take the benefit of the doubt, and if Mr. Putney
+was hoaxing, I shall not give myself away. _Do_ find out what he
+means, Miss Kilburn, won't you?” She took hold of Annie's unoffered hand,
+and pressed it in a double leathern grasp, and ran out of the room with a
+lightness of spirit which her physical bulk imperfectly expressed.
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+
+“Well?” said Annie, to the change which came over Morrell's face when Mrs.
+Munger was gone.
+
+“Oh, it's a miserable business! He must go on now to the end of his
+debauch. He's got past doing any mischief, I'm thankful to say. But I had
+hoped to tide him over a while longer, and now that fool has spoiled
+everything. Well!”
+
+Annie's heart warmed to his vexation, and she postponed another emotion.
+“Yes, she _is_ a fool. I wish you had qualified the term, doctor.”
+
+They looked at each other solemnly, and then laughed. “It won't do for a
+physician to swear,” said Morrell. “I wish you'd give me a cup of coffee.
+I've been up all night.”
+
+“With Ralph?”
+
+“With Putney.”
+
+“You shall have it instantly; that is, as instantly as Mrs. Bolton can
+kindle up a fire and make it.” She went out to the kitchen, and gave the
+order with an imperiousness which she softened in Dr. Morrell's interest by
+explaining rather fully to Mrs. Bolton.
+
+When she came back she wanted to talk seriously, tragically, about Putney.
+But the doctor would not. He said that it paid to sit up with Putney, drunk
+or sober, and hear him go on. He repeated some things Putney said about Mr.
+Peck, about Gerrish, about Mrs. Munger.
+
+“But why did you try to put her off in that way--to make her believe he
+wasn't intoxicated?” asked Annie, venting her postponed emotion, which was
+of disapproval.
+
+“I don't know. It came into my head. But she knows better.”
+
+“It was rather cruel; not that she deserves any mercy. She caught so at the
+idea.”
+
+“Oh yes, I saw that. She'll humbug herself with it, and you'll see that
+before night there'll be two theories of Putney's escapade. I think the
+last will be the popular one. It will jump with the general opinion of
+Putney's ability to carry anything out. And Mrs. Munger will do all she can
+to support it.”
+
+Mrs. Bolton brought in the coffee-pot, and Annie hesitated a moment, with
+her hand on it, before pouring out a cup.
+
+“I don't like it,” she said.
+
+“I know you don't. But you can say that it wasn't Putney who hoaxed Mrs.
+Munger, but Dr. Morrell.”
+
+“Oh, you didn't either of you hoax her.”
+
+“Well, then, there's no harm done.”
+
+“I'm not so sure.”
+
+“And you won't give me any coffee?”
+
+“Oh yes, I'll give you some _coffee_,” said Annie, with a sigh of
+baffled scrupulosity that made them both laugh.
+
+He broke out again after he had begun to drink his coffee.
+
+“Well?” she demanded, from her own lapse into silence.
+
+“Oh, nothing! Only Putney. He wants Brother Peck, as he calls him, to unite
+all the religious elements of Hatboro' in a church of his own, and send
+out missionaries to the heathen of South Hatboro' to preach a practical
+Christianity. He makes South Hatboro' stand for all that's worldly and
+depraved.”
+
+“Poor Ralph! Is that the way he talks?”
+
+“Oh, not all the time. He talks a great many other ways.”
+
+“I wonder you can laugh.”
+
+“He's been very severe on Brother Peck for neglecting the discipline of
+his child. He says he ought to remember his duty to others, and save the
+community from having the child grow up into a capricious, wilful woman.
+Putney was very hard upon your sex, Miss Kilburn. He attributed nearly all
+the trouble in the world to women's wilfulness and caprice.”
+
+He looked across the table at her with his merry eyes, whose sweetness
+she felt even in her sudden preoccupation with the notion which she now
+launched upon him, leaning forward and pushing some books and magazines
+aside, as if she wished to have nothing between her need and his response.
+
+“Dr. Morrell, what should you think of my asking Mr. Peck to give me his
+little girl?”
+
+“To give you his--”
+
+“Yes. Let me take Idella--keep her--adopt her! I've nothing to do, as you
+know very well, and she'd be an occupation; and it would be far better
+for her. What Ralph says is true. She's growing up without any sort of
+training; and I think if she keeps on she will be mischievous to herself
+and every one else.”
+
+“Really?” asked the doctor. “Is it so bad as that?”
+
+“Of course not. And of course I don't want Mr. Peck to renounce all claim
+to his child; but to let me have her for the present, or indefinitely, and
+get her some decent clothes, and trim her hair properly, and give her some
+sort of instruction--”
+
+“May I come in?” drawled Mrs. Wilmington's mellow voice, and Annie turned
+and saw Lyra peering round the edge of the half-opened library door. “I've
+been discreetly hemming and scraping and hammering on the wood-work so as
+not to overhear, and I'd have gone away if I hadn't been afraid of being
+overheard.”
+
+“Oh, come in, Lyra,” said Annie; and she hoped that she had kept the spirit
+of resignation with which she spoke out of her voice.
+
+Dr. Morrell jumped up with an apparent desire to escape that wounded and
+exasperated her. She put out her hand quite haughtily to him and asked,
+“Oh, must you go?”
+
+“Yes. How do you do, Mrs. Wilmington? You'd better get Miss Kilburn to give
+you a cup of her coffee.”
+
+“Oh, I will,” said Lyra. She forbore any reference, even by a look, to the
+intimate little situation she had disturbed.
+
+Morrell added to Annie: “I like your plan. It's the best thing you could
+do.”
+
+She found she had been keeping his hand, and in the revulsion from wrath to
+joy she violently wrung it.
+
+“I'm _so_ glad!” She could not help following him to the door, in the
+hope that he would say something more, but he did not, and she could only
+repeat her rapturous gratitude in several forms of incoherency.
+
+She ran back to Mrs. Wilmington. “Lyra, what do you think of my taking Mr.
+Peck's little girl?”
+
+Mrs. Wilmington never allowed herself to seem surprised at anything; she
+was, in fact, surprised at very few things. She had got into the easiest
+chair in the room, and she answered from it, with a luxurious interest in
+the affair, “Well, you know what people will say, Annie.”
+
+“No, I don't. _What_ will they say?”
+
+“That you're after Mr. Peck pretty openly.”
+
+Annie turned scarlet. “And when they find I'm _not_?” she demanded
+with severity, that had no effect upon Lyra.
+
+“Then they'll say you couldn't get him.”
+
+“They may say what they please. What do you think of the plan?”
+
+“I think it would be the greatest blessing for the poor little thing,” said
+Lyra, with a nearer approach to seriousness than she usually made. “And the
+greatest care for you,” she added, after a moment.
+
+“I shall not care for the care. I shall be glad of it--thankful for it,”
+ cried Annie fervidly.
+
+“If you can get it,” Lyra suggested.
+
+“I believe I can get it. I believe I can make Mr. Peck see that it's a
+duty. I shall ask him to regard it as a charity to me--as a mercy.”
+
+“Well, that's a good way to work upon Mr. Peck's feelings,” said Lyra
+demurely. “Was that the plan that Dr. Morrell approved of so highly?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“I didn't know but it was some course of treatment. You pressed his hand
+so affectionately. I said to myself, Well, Annie's either an enthusiastic
+patient, or else--”
+
+“What?” demanded Annie, at the little stop Lyra made.
+
+“Well, you know what people do _say_, Annie.”
+
+“What?”
+
+“Why, that you're very much out of health, or--” Lyra made another of her
+tantalising stops.
+
+“Or what?”
+
+“Or Dr. Morrell is very much in love.”
+
+“Lyra, I can't allow you to say such things to me.”
+
+“No; that's what I've kept saying to myself all the time. But you would
+have it _out_ of me. _I_ didn't want to say it.”
+
+It was impossible to resist Lyra's pretended deprecation. Annie laughed. “I
+suppose I can't help people's talking, and I ought to be too old to care.”
+
+“You ought, but you're not,” said Lyra flatteringly. “Well, Annie, what do
+you think of our little evening at Mrs. Munger's in the dim retrospect?
+Poor Ralph! What did the doctor say about him?” She listened with so keen
+a relish for the report of Putney's sayings that Annie felt as if she had
+been turning the affair into comedy for Lyra's amusement. “Oh dear, I wish
+I could hear him! I thought I should have died last night when he came
+back, and began to scare everybody blue with his highly personal remarks.
+I wish he'd had time to get round to the Northwicks.”
+
+“Lyra,” said Annie, nerving herself to the office; “don't you think it was
+wicked to treat that poor girl as you did?”
+
+“Well, I suppose that's the way some people might look at it,” said Lyra
+dispassionately.
+
+“Then how--_how_ could you do it?”
+
+“Oh, it's easy enough to behave wickedly, Annie, when you feel like it,”
+ said Lyra, much amused by Annie's fervour, apparently. “Besides, I don't
+know that it was so _very_ wicked. What makes you think it was?”
+
+“Oh, it wasn't that merely. Lyra, may I--_may_ I speak to you plainly,
+frankly--like a sister?” Annie's heart filled with tenderness for Lyra,
+with the wish to help her, to save a person who charmed her so much.
+
+“Well, like a _step_-sister, you may,” said Lyra demurely.
+
+“It wasn't for her sake alone that I hated to see it. It was for your
+sake--for _his_ sake.”
+
+“Well, that's very kind of you, Annie,” said Lyra, without the least
+resentment. “And I know what you mean. But it really doesn't hurt
+either Jack or me. I'm not very goody-goody, Annie; I don't pretend to
+be; but I'm not very baddy-baddy either. I assure you”--Lyra laughed
+mischievously--“I'm one of the very few persons in Hatboro' who are better
+than they should be.”
+
+“I know it, Lyra--I know it. But you have no right to keep him from taking
+a fancy to some young girl--and marrying her; to keep him to yourself; to
+make people talk.”
+
+“There's something in that,” Lyra assented, with impartiality. “But I don't
+think it would be well for Jack to marry yet; and if I see him taking a
+fancy to any real nice girl, I sha'n't interfere with him. But I shall be
+very _particular_, Annie.”
+
+She looked at Annie with such a droll mock earnest, and shook her head with
+such a burlesque of grandmotherly solicitude, that Annie laughed in spite
+of herself. “Oh, Lyra, Lyra!”
+
+“And as for me,” Lyra went on, “I assure you I don't care for the little
+bit of harm it does me.”
+
+“But you ought--you ought!” cried Annie. “You ought to respect yourself
+enough to care. You ought to respect other women enough.”
+
+“Oh, I guess I'd let the balance of the sex slide, Annie,” said Lyra.
+
+“No, you mustn't; you can't. We are all bound together; we owe everything
+to each other.”
+
+“Isn't that rather Peckish?” Lyra suggested.
+
+“I don't know. But it's true, Lyra. And I shouldn't be ashamed of getting
+it from Mr. Peck.”
+
+“Oh, I didn't say you would be.”
+
+“And I hope you won't be hurt with me. I know that it's a most
+unwarrantable thing to speak to you about such a matter; but you know why
+I do it.”
+
+“Yes, I suppose it's because you like me; and I appreciate that, I assure
+you, Annie.”
+
+Lyra was soberer than she had yet been, and Annie felt that she was really
+gaining ground. “And your husband; you ought to respect _him_--”
+
+Lyra laughed out with great relish. “Oh, now, Annie, you _are_ joking!
+Why in the _world_ should I respect Mr. Wilmington? An old man like
+him marrying a young girl like me!” She jumped up and laughed at the look
+in Annie's face. “Will you go round with me to the Putneys? thought Ellen
+might like to see us.”
+
+“No, no. I can't go,” said Annie, finding it impossible to recover at once
+from the quite unanswerable blow her sense of decorum--she thought it her
+moral sense--had received.
+
+“Well, you'll be glad to have _me_ go, anyway,” said Lyra. She saw
+Annie shrinking from her, and she took hold of her, and pulled her up and
+kissed her. “You dear old thing! I wouldn't hurt your feelings for the
+world. And whichever it is, Annie, the parson or the doctor, I wish him
+joy.”
+
+That afternoon, as Annie was walking to the village, the doctor drove up to
+the sidewalk, and stopped near her. “Miss Kilburn, I've got a letter from
+home. They write me about my mother in a way that makes me rather anxious,
+and I shall run down to Chelsea this evening.”
+
+“Oh, I'm sorry for your bad news. I hope it's nothing serious.”
+
+“She's old; that's the only cause for anxiety. But of course I must go.”
+
+“Oh yes, indeed. I do hope you'll find all right with her.”
+
+“Thank you very much. I'm sorry that I must leave Putney at such a time.
+But I leave him with Mr. Peck, who's promised to be with him. I thought
+you'd like to know.”
+
+“Yes, I do; it's very kind of you--very kind indeed.”
+
+“Thank you,” said the doctor. It was not the phrase exactly, but it served
+the purpose of the cordial interest in which they parted as well as
+another.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+
+During the days that Mr. Peck had consented to leave Idella with her Annie
+took the whole charge of the child, and grew into an intimacy with her
+that was very sweet. It was not necessary to this that Idella should be
+always tractable and docile, which she was not, but only that she should
+be affectionate and dependent; Annie found that she even liked her to be
+a little baddish; it gave her something to forgive; and she experienced a
+perverse pleasure in discovering that the child of a man so self-forgetful
+as Mr. Peck was rather more covetous than most children. It also amused her
+that when some of Idella's shabby playmates from Over the Track casually
+found their way to the woods past Annie's house, and tried to tempt Idella
+to go with them, the child disowned them, and ran into the house from
+them; so soon was she alienated from her former life by her present social
+advantages. She apparently distinguished between Annie and the Boltons, or
+if not quite this, she showed a distinct preference for her company, and
+for her part of the house. She hung about Annie with a flattering curiosity
+and interest in all she did. She lost every trace of shyness with her, but
+developed an intense admiration for her in every way--for her dresses, her
+rings, her laces, for the elegancies that marked her a gentlewoman. She
+pronounced them prettier than Mrs. Warner's things, and the house prettier
+and larger.
+
+“Should you like to live with me?” Annie asked.
+
+The child seemed to reflect. Then she said, with the indirection of her age
+and sex, pushing against Annie's knee, “I don't know what your name is.”
+
+“Have you never heard my name? It's Annie. How do you like it?”
+
+“It's--it's too short,” said the child, from her readiness always to answer
+something that charmed Annie.
+
+“Well, then you can make it longer. You can call me Aunt Annie. I think
+that will be better for a little girl; don't you?”
+
+“Mothers can whip, but aunts can't,” said Idella, bringing a practical
+knowledge, acquired from her observation of life Over the Track, to a
+consideration of the proposed relation.
+
+“I know _one_ aunt who won't,” said Annie, touched by the reply.
+
+Saturday evening Idella's father came for her; and with a preamble which
+seemed to have been unnecessary when he understood it, Annie asked him to
+let her keep the child, at least till he had settled himself in a house of
+his own, or, she hinted, in some way more comfortable for Idella than he
+was now living. In her anxiety to make him believe that she was not taking
+too great a burden on her hands, she became slowly aware that no fear of
+this had apparently troubled him, and that he was looking at the whole
+matter from a point outside of questions of polite ceremonial, even of
+personal feeling.
+
+She was vexed a little with his insensibility to the favour she meant the
+child, and she could not help trying to make him realise it. “I don't
+promise always to be the best guide, philosopher, and friend that Idella
+could have”--she took this light tone because she found herself afraid of
+him--“but I think I shall be a little improvement on some of her friends
+Over the Track. At least, if she wants my cat, she shall have it without
+fighting for it.”
+
+Mr. Peck looked up with question, and she went on to tell him of a struggle
+which she had seen one day between Idella and a small Irish boy for a
+kitten; it really belonged to the boy, but Idella carried it off.
+
+The minister listened attentively. At the end: “Yes,” he said, “that lust
+of possession is something all but impossible, even with constant care,
+to root out of children. I have tried to teach Idella that nothing is
+rightfully hers except while she can use it; but it is hard to make her
+understand, and when she is with other children she forgets.”
+
+Annie could not believe at first that he was serious, and then she was
+disposed to laugh. “Really, Mr. Peck,” she began, “I can't think it's so
+important that a little thing like Idella should be kept from coveting
+a kitten as that she should be kept from using naughty words and from
+scratching and biting.”
+
+“I know,” Mr. Peck consented. “That is the usual way of looking at such
+things.”
+
+“It seems to me,” said Annie, “that it's the common-sense way.”
+
+“Perhaps. But upon the whole, I don't agree with you. It is bad for the
+child to use naughty words and to scratch and bite; that's part of the
+warfare in which we all live; but it's worse for her to covet, and to wish
+to keep others from having.”
+
+“I don't wonder you find it hard to make her understand that.”
+
+“Yes, it's hard with all of us. But if it is ever to be easier we must
+begin with the children.”
+
+He was silent, and Annie did not say anything. She was afraid that she had
+not helped her cause. “At least,” she finally ventured, “you can't object
+to giving Idella a little rest from the fray. Perhaps if she finds that she
+can get things without fighting for them, she'll not covet them so much.”
+
+“Yes,” he said, with a dim smile that left him sad again, “there is some
+truth in that. But I'm not sure that I have the right to give her
+advantages of any kind, to lift her above the lot, the chance, of the least
+fortunate--”
+
+“Surely, we are bound to provide for those of our own household,” said
+Annie.
+
+“Who are those of our own household?” asked the minister. “All mankind are
+those of our own household. These are my mother and my brother and my
+sister.”
+
+“Yes, I know,” said Annie, somewhat eagerly quitting this difficult ground.
+“But you can leave her with me at least till you get settled,” she
+faltered, “if you don't wish it to be for longer.”
+
+“Perhaps it may not be for long,” he answered, “if you mean my settlement
+in Hatboro'. I doubt,” he continued, lifting his eyes to the question in
+hers, “whether I shall remain here.”
+
+“Oh, I hope you will,” cried Annie. She thought she must make a pretence of
+misunderstanding him. “I supposed you were very much satisfied with your
+work here.”
+
+“I am not satisfied with myself in my work,” replied the minister; “and I
+know that I am far from acceptable to many others in it.”
+
+“You are acceptable to those who are best able to appreciate you, Mr.
+Peck,” she protested, “and to people of every kind. I'm sure it's only a
+question of time when you will be thoroughly acceptable to all. I want
+you to understand, Mr. Peck,” she added, “that I was shocked and ashamed
+the other night at your being tricked into countenancing a part of the
+entertainment you were promised should be dropped. I had nothing to do
+with it.”
+
+“It was very unimportant, after all,” the minister said, “as far as I was
+concerned. In fact, I was interested to see the experiment of bringing the
+different grades of society together.”
+
+“It seems to me it was an utter failure,” suggested Annie.
+
+“Quite. But it was what I expected.”
+
+There appeared an uncandour in this which Annie could not let pass even if
+it imperilled her present object to bring up the matter of past contention.
+“But when we first talked of the Social Union you opposed it because it
+wouldn't bring the different classes together.”
+
+“Did you understand that? Then I failed to make myself clear. I wished
+merely to argue that the well-meaning ladies who suggested it were not
+intending a social union at all. In fact, such a union in our present
+condition of things, with its division of classes, is impossible--as Mrs.
+Munger's experiment showed--with the best will on both sides. But, as I
+said, the experiment was interesting, though unimportant, except as it
+resulted in heart-burning and offence.”
+
+They were on the same ground, but they had reached it from starting-points
+so opposite that Annie felt it very unsafe. In her fear of getting into
+some controversy with Mr. Peck that might interfere with her designs
+regarding Idella, she had a little insincerity in saying: “Mrs. Munger's
+bad faith in that was certainly unimportant compared with her part in poor
+Mr. Putney's misfortune. That was the worst thing; that's what I
+_can't_ forgive.”
+
+Mr. Peck said nothing to this, and Annie, somewhat daunted by his silence,
+proceeded. “I've had the satisfaction of telling her what I thought on both
+points. But Ralph--Mr. Putney--I hear, has escaped this time with less than
+his usual--”
+
+She did not know what lady-like word to use for spree, and so she stopped.
+
+Mr. Peck merely said, “He has shown great self-control;” and she perceived
+that he was not going to say more. He listened patiently to the reasons she
+gave for not having offered Mrs. Putney anything more than passive sympathy
+at a time when help could only have cumbered and kindness wounded her, but
+he made no sign of thinking them either necessary or sufficient. In the
+meantime he had not formally consented to Idella's remaining with her, and
+Annie prepared to lead back to that affair as artfully as she could.
+
+“I really want you to believe, Mr. Peck, that I think very differently on
+_some_ points from what I did when we first talked about the Social
+Union, and I have you to thank for seeing things in a new light. And you
+needn't,” she added lightly, “be afraid of my contaminating Idella's mind
+with any wicked ideas. I'll do my best to keep her from coveting kittens
+or property of any kind; though I've always heard my father say that
+civilisation was founded upon the instinct of ownership, and that it was
+the only thing that had advanced the world. And if you dread the danger
+of giving her advantages, as you say, or bettering her worldly lot,” she
+continued, with a smile for his quixotic scruples, “why, I'll do my best to
+reduce her blessings to a minimum; though I don't see why the poor little
+thing shouldn't get some good from the inequalities that there always must
+be in the world.”
+
+“I am not sure there always must be inequalities in the world,” answered
+the minister.
+
+“There always have been,” cried Annie.
+
+“There always had been slavery, up to a certain time,” he replied.
+
+“Oh, but surely you don't compare the two!” Annie pleaded with what she
+really regarded as a kind of lunacy in the good man. “In the freest
+society, I've heard my father say, there is naturally an upward and
+downward tendency; a perfect level is impossible. Some must rise, and some
+must sink.”
+
+“But what do you mean by rising? If you mean in material things, in wealth
+and the power over others that it gives--”
+
+“I don't mean that altogether. But there are other ways--in cultivation,
+refinement, higher tastes and aims than the great mass of people can have.
+You have risen yourself, Mr. Peck.”
+
+“I have risen, as you call it,” he said, with a meek sufferance of the
+application of the point to himself. “Those who rise above the necessity of
+work for daily bread are in great danger of losing their right relation to
+other men, as I said when we talked of this before.”
+
+A point had remained in Annie's mind from her first talk with Dr. Morrell.
+“Yes; and you said once that there could be no sympathy between the rich
+and the poor--no real love--because they had not had the same experience of
+life. But how is it about the poor who become rich? They have had the same
+experience.”
+
+“Too often they make haste to forget that they were poor; they become hard
+masters to those they have left behind them. They are eager to identify
+themselves with those who have been rich longer than they. Some working-men
+who now see this clearly have the courage to refuse to rise. Miss Kilburn,
+why should I let you take my child out of the conditions of self-denial and
+self-help to which she was born?”
+
+“I don't know,” said Annie rather blankly. Then she added impetuously:
+“Because I love her and want her. I don't--I _won't_--pretend that
+it's for her sake. It's for _my_ sake, though I can take better care
+of her than you can. But I'm all alone in the world; I've neither kith nor
+kin; nothing but my miserable money. I've set my heart on the child; I must
+have her. At least let me keep her a while. I will be honest with you, Mr.
+Peck. If I find I'm doing her harm and not good, I'll give her up. I should
+wish you to feel that she is yours as much as ever, and if you _will_
+feel so, and come often to see her--I--I shall--be very glad, and--” she
+stopped, and Mr. Peck rose.
+
+“Where is the child?” he asked, with a troubled air; and she silently led
+the way to the kitchen, and left him at the door to Idella and the Boltons.
+When she ventured back later he was gone, but the child remained.
+
+Half exultant and half ashamed, she promised herself that she really would
+be true as far as possible to the odd notions of the minister in her
+treatment of his child. When she undressed Idella for bed she noticed again
+the shabbiness of her poor little clothes. She went through the bureau that
+held her own childish things once more, but found them all too large for
+Idella, and too hopelessly antiquated. She said to herself that on this
+point at least she must be a law to herself.
+
+She went down to see Mrs. Bolton. “Isn't there some place in the village
+where they have children's ready-made clothes for sale?” she asked.
+
+“Mr. Gerrish's,” said Mrs. Bolton briefly.
+
+Annie shook her head, drawing in her breath. “I shouldn't want to go there.
+Is there nowhere else?”
+
+“There's a Jew place. They say he cheats.”
+
+“I dare say he doesn't cheat more than most Christians,” said Annie,
+jumping from her chair. “I'll try the Jew place. I want you to come with
+me, Mrs. Bolton.”
+
+They went together, and found a dress that they both decided would fit
+Idella, and a hat that matched it.
+
+“I don't know as he'd like to have anything quite so nice,” said Mrs.
+Bolton coldly.
+
+“I don't know as he has anything to say about it,” said Annie, mimicking
+Mrs. Bolton's accent and syntax.
+
+They both meant Mr. Peck. Mrs. Bolton turned away to hide her pleasure in
+Annie's audacity and extravagance.
+
+“Want I should carry 'em?” she asked, when they were out of the store.
+
+“No, I can carry them,” said Annie.
+
+She put them where Idella must see them as soon as she woke.
+
+It was late before she slept, and Idella's voice broke upon her dreams. The
+child was sitting up in her bed, gloating upon the dress and hat hung and
+perched upon the chair-back in the middle of the room. “Oh, whose is it?
+Whose is it? Whose is it?” she screamed; and as Annie lifted herself on her
+elbow, and looked over at her: “Is it mine? Is it mine?”
+
+Annie had thought of playing some joke; of pretending not to understand; of
+delaying the child's pleasure; playing with it; teasing. But in the face of
+this rapturous longing, she could only answer, “Yes.”
+
+“Mine? My very own? To have? To keep always?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+Idella sprang from her bed, and flew upon the things with a primitive,
+greedy transport in their possession. She could scarcely be held long
+enough to be washed before the dress could be put on.
+
+“Be careful--be careful not to get it soiled now,” said Annie.
+
+“No; I won't spoil it.” She went quietly downstairs, and when Annie
+followed, she found her posing before the long pier-glass in the parlour,
+and twisting and turning for this effect and that. All the morning she
+moved about prim and anxious; the wild-wood flower was like a hot-house
+blossom wired for a bouquet. At the church door she asked Idella, “Would
+you rather sit with Mrs. Bolton?”
+
+“No, no,” gasped the child intensely; “with _you_!” and she pushed her
+hand into Annie's, and held fast to it.
+
+Annie's question had been suggested by a belated reluctance to appear
+before so much of Hatboro' in charge of the minister's child. But now she
+could not retreat, and with Idella's hand in hers she advanced blushing up
+the aisle to her pew.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+
+The farmers' carry-alls filled the long shed beside the church, and their
+leathern faces looked up, with their wives' and children's, at Mr. Peck
+where he sat high behind the pulpit; a patient expectance suggested itself
+in the men's bald or grizzled crowns, and in the fantastic hats and bonnets
+of their women folks. The village ladies were all in the perfection of
+their street costumes, and they compared well with three or four of the
+ladies from South Hatboro', but the men with them spoiled all by the
+inadequacy of their fashion. Mrs. Gates, the second of her name, was very
+stylish, but the provision-man had honestly the effect of having got for
+the day only into the black coat which he had bought ready-made for his
+first wife's funeral. Mr. Wilmington, who appeared much shorter than his
+wife as he sat beside her, was as much inferior to her in dress; he wore,
+with the carelessness of a rich man who could afford simplicity, a loose
+alpaca coat and a cambric neckcloth, over which he twisted his shrivelled
+neck to catch sight of Annie, as she rustled up the aisle. Mrs. Gerrish--so
+much as could be seen of her--was a mound of bugled velvet, topped by a
+small bonnet, which seemed to have gone much to a fat black pompon; she sat
+far within her pew, and their children stretched in a row from her side to
+that of Mr. Gerrish, next the door. He did not look round at Annie, but
+kept an attitude of fixed self-concentration, in harmony with the severe
+old-school respectability of his dress; his wife leaned well forward to
+see, and let all her censure appear in her eyes.
+
+Colonel Marvin, of the largest shoe-shop, showed the side of his large
+florid face, with the kindly smile that seemed to hang loosely upon it; and
+there was a good number of the hat-shop and shoe-shop hands of different
+ages and sexes scattered about. The gallery, commonly empty or almost so,
+showed groups and single figures dropped about here and there on its seats.
+
+The Putneys were in their pew, the little lame boy between the father and
+mother, as their custom was. They each looked up at her as she passed, and
+smiled in the slight measure of recognition which people permit themselves
+in church. Putney was sitting with his head hanging forward in pathetic
+dejection; his face, when he first lifted it to look at Annie in passing,
+was haggard, but otherwise there was no consciousness in it of what had
+passed since they had sat there the Sunday before. When his glance took in
+Idella too, in her sudden finery, a light of friendly mocking came into it,
+and seemed to comment the relation Annie had assumed to the child.
+
+Annie's pew was just in front of Lyra's, and Lyra pursed her mouth in
+burlesque surprise as Annie got into it with Idella and turned round to
+lift the child to the seat. While Mr. Peck was giving out the hymn, Lyra
+leaned forward and whispered--
+
+“Don't imagine that this turnout is _all_ on your account, Annie. He's
+going to preach against the Social Union and the social glass.”
+
+The banter echoed a mechanical expectation in Annie's heart, which was
+probably present in many others there. It was some time before she could
+cast it out, even after he had taken his text, “I am the Resurrection and
+the Life,” and she followed him with a mechanical disappointment at his
+failure to meet it.
+
+He began by saying that he wished to dissociate his text in his hearers'
+minds from the scent of the upturned earth, and the fall of clods upon
+the coffin lid, and he asked them to join him in attempting to find in it
+another meaning beside that which it usually carried. He believed that
+those words of Christ ought to speak to us of this world as well as the
+next, and enjoin upon us the example which we might all find in Him, as
+well as promise us immortality with Him. As the minister went on, Annie
+followed him with the interest which her belief that she heard between the
+words inspired, and occasionally in a discontent with what seemed a
+mystical, almost a fantastical, quality of his thought.
+
+“There is an evolution,” he continued, “in the moral as well as in the
+material world, and good unfolds in greater good; that which was once
+best ceases to be in that which is better. In the political world we have
+striven forward to liberty as to the final good, but with this achieved we
+find that liberty is only a means and not an end, and that we shall abuse
+it as a means if we do not use it, even sacrifice it, to promote equality;
+or in other words, equality is the perfect work, the evolution of liberty.
+Patriotism has been the virtue which has secured an image of brotherhood,
+rude and imperfect, to large numbers of men within certain limits, but
+nationality must perish before the universal ideal of fraternity is
+realised. Charity is the holiest of the agencies which have hitherto
+wrought to redeem the race from savagery and despair; but there is
+something holier yet than charity, something higher, something purer and
+further from selfishness, something into which charity shall willingly grow
+and cease, and that is _justice_. Not the justice of our Christless
+codes, with their penalties, but the instinct of righteous shame which,
+however dumbly, however obscurely, stirs in every honest man's heart when
+his superfluity is confronted with another's destitution, and which is
+destined to increase in power till it becomes the social as well as the
+individual conscience. Then, in the truly Christian state, there shall be
+no more asking and no more giving, no more gratitude and no more merit, no
+more charity, but only and evermore justice; all shall share alike, and
+want and luxury and killing toil and heartless indolence shall all cease
+together.
+
+“It is in the spirit of this justice that I believe Christ shall come to
+judge the world; not to condemn and punish so much as to reconcile and to
+right. We live in an age of seeming preparation for indefinite war. The
+lines are drawn harder and faster between the rich and the poor, and on
+either side the forces are embattled. The working-men are combined in vast
+organisations to withstand the strength of the capitalists, and these are
+taking the lesson and uniting in trusts. The smaller industries are gone,
+and the smaller commerce is being devoured by the larger. Where many little
+shops existed one huge factory assembles manufacture; one large store, in
+which many different branches of trade are united, swallows up the small
+dealers. Yet in the labour organisations, which have their bad side, their
+weak side, through which the forces of hell enter, I see evidence of the
+fact that the poor have at last had pity on the poor, and will no more
+betray and underbid and desert one another, but will stand and fall
+together as brothers; and the monopolies, though they are founded upon
+ruin, though they know no pity and no relenting, have a final significance
+which we must not lose sight of. They prophesy the end of competition;
+_they eliminate_ one element of strife, of rivalry, of warfare. But
+woe to them through whose evil this good comes, to any man who prospers on
+to ease and fortune, forgetful or ignorant of the ruin on which his success
+is built. For that death the resurrection and the life seem not to be.
+Whatever his creed or his religious profession, his state is more pitiable
+than that of the sceptic, whose words perhaps deny Christ, but whose works
+affirm Him. There has been much anxiety in the Church for the future of
+the world abandoned to the godlessness of science, but I cannot share it.
+If God is, nothing exists but from Him. He directs the very reason that
+questions Him, and Christ rises anew in the doubt of him that the sins of
+Christendom inspire. So far from dreading such misgiving as comes from
+contemplating the disparity between the Church's profession and her
+performance, I welcome it as another resurrection and a new life.”
+
+The minister paused and seemed about to resume, when a scuffling and
+knocking noise drew all eyes toward the pew of the Gerrish family. Mr.
+Gerrish had risen and flung open the door so sharply that it struck against
+the frame-work of the pew, and he stood pulling his children, whom Mrs.
+Gerrish urged from behind, one after another, into the aisle beside him.
+One of them had been asleep, and he now gave way to the alarm which seizes
+a small boy suddenly awakened. His mother tried to still him, stooping over
+him and twitching him by the hand, with repeated “Sh! 'sh's!” as mothers
+do, till her husband got her before him, and marched his family down the
+aisle and out of the door. The noise of their feet over the floor of the
+vestibule died away upon the stone steps outside. The minister allowed the
+pause he had made to prolong itself painfully. He wavered, after clearing
+his throat, as if to go on with his sermon, and then he said sadly, “Let us
+pray!”
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+
+Putney stopped with his wife and boy and waited for Annie at the corner
+of the street where their ways parted. She had eluded Lyra Wilmington in
+coming down the aisle, and she had hurried to escape the sensation which
+broke into eager talk among the people before they got out of church, and
+which began with question whether one of the Gerrish children was sick, and
+ended in the more satisfactory conviction that Mr. Gerrish was offended at
+something in the sermon.
+
+“Well, Annie,” said Putney, with a satirical smile.
+
+“Oh, Ralph--Ellen--what does it mean?”
+
+“It means that Brother Gerrish thought Mr. Peck was hitting at him in
+that talk about the large commerce, and it means business,” said Putney.
+“Brother Gerrish has made a beginning, and I guess it's the beginning of
+the end, unless we're all ready to take hold against him. What are you
+going to do?”
+
+“Do? Anything! Everything! It was abominable! It was atrocious!” she
+shuddered out with disgust. “How could he imagine that Mr. Peck would do
+such a thing?”
+
+“Well, he's imagined it. But he doesn't mean to stay out of church; he
+means to put Brother Peck out.”
+
+“We mustn't let him. That would be outrageous.”
+
+“That's the way Ellen and I feel about it,” said Putney; “but we don't know
+how much of a party there is with us.”
+
+“But everybody--everybody must feel the same way about Mr. Gerrish's
+behaviour? I don't see how you can be so quiet about it--you and Ellen!”
+
+Annie looked from one to another indignantly, and Putney laughed.
+
+“We're not _feeling_ quietly about it,” said Mrs. Putney.
+
+Putney took out a piece of tobacco, and bit off a large corner, and began
+to chew vehemently upon it. “Hello, Idella!” he said to the little girl,
+holding by Annie's hand and looking up intently at him, with childish
+interest in what he was eating. “What a pretty dress you've got on!”
+
+“It's mine,” said the child. “To keep.”
+
+“Is that so? Well, it's a beauty.”
+
+“I'm going to wear it all the time.”
+
+“Is that so? Well, now, you and Winthrop step on ahead a little; I want to
+see how you look in it. Splendid!” he said, as she took the boy's hand and
+looked back over her shoulder for Putney's applause. “Lyra tells us you've
+adopted her for the time being, Annie. I guess you'll have your hands full.
+But, as I was going to say, about feeling differently, my experience is
+that there's always a good-sized party for the perverse, simply because
+it seems to answer a need in human nature. There's a fascination in it;
+a man feels as if there must be something in it besides the perversity,
+and because it's so obviously wrong it must be right. Don't you believe
+but what a good half of the people in church to-day are pretty sure that
+Gerrish had a good reason for behaving indecently. The very fact that he
+did so carries conviction to some minds, and those are the minds we have
+got to deal with. When he gets up in the next Society meeting there's a
+mighty great danger that he'll have a strong party to back him.”
+
+“I can't believe it,” Annie broke out, but she was greatly troubled. “What
+do you think, Ellen; that there's any danger of his carrying the day
+against Mr. Peck?”
+
+“There's a great deal of dissatisfaction with Mr. Peck already, you know,
+and I guess Ralph's right about the rest of it.”
+
+“Well, I'm glad I've taken a pew. I'm with you for Mr. Peck, Ralph, heart
+and soul.”
+
+“As Brother Brandreth says about the Social Union. Well, that's right. I
+shall count upon you. And speaking of the Social Union, I haven't seen you,
+Annie, since that night at Mrs. Munger's. I suppose you don't expect me to
+say anything in self-defence?”
+
+“No, Ralph, and you needn't; _I've_ defended you
+sufficiently--justified you.”
+
+“That won't do,” said Putney. “Ellen and I have thought that all out, and
+we find that I--or something that stood for me--was to blame, whoever else
+was to blame, too; we won't mention the hospitable Mrs. Munger. When Dr.
+Morrell had to go away Brother Peck took hold with me, and he suggested
+good resolutions. I told him I'd tried 'em, and they never did me the least
+good; but his sort really seemed to work. I don't know whether they would
+work again; Ellen thinks they would. _I_ think we sha'n't ever need
+anything again; but that's what I always think when I come out of it--like
+a man with chills and fever.”
+
+“It was Dr. Morrell who asked Mr. Peck to come,” said Mrs. Putney; “and it
+turned out for the best. Ralph got well quicker than he ever did before. Of
+course, Annie,” she explained, “it must seem strange to you hearing us talk
+of it as if it were a disease; but that's just like what it is--a raging
+disease; and I can't feel differently about anything that happens in it,
+though I do blame people for it.” Annie followed with tender interest the
+loving pride that exonerated and idealised Putney in the words of the
+woman who had suffered so much with him, and must suffer. “I couldn't help
+speaking as I did to Mrs. Munger.”
+
+“She deserved it every word,” said Annie. “I wonder you didn't say more.”
+
+“Oh, hold on!” Putney interposed. “We'll allow that the local influences
+were malarial, but I guess we can't excuse the invalid altogether. That's
+Brother Peck's view; and I must say I found it decidedly tonic; it helped
+to brace me up.”
+
+“I think he was too severe with you altogether,” said his wife.
+
+Putney laughed. “It was all I could do to keep Ellen from getting up and
+going out of church too, when Brother Gerrish set the example. She's a
+Gerrishite at heart.”
+
+“Well, remember, Ralph,” said Annie, “that I'm with you in whatever you
+do to defeat that man. It's a good cause--a righteous cause--the cause of
+justice; and we must do everything for it,” she said fervently.
+
+“Yes, any enormity is justifiable against injustice,” he suggested, “or the
+unjust; it's the same thing.”
+
+“You know I don't mean that. I can trust you.”
+
+“I shall keep within the law, at any rate,” said Putney.
+
+“Well, Mrs. Bolton!” Annie called out, when she entered her house, and she
+pushed on into the kitchen; she had not the patience to wait for her to
+bring in the dinner before speaking about the exciting event at church. But
+Mrs. Bolton would not be led up to the subject by a tacit invitation, and
+after a suspense in which her zeal for Mr. Peck began to take a colour of
+resentment toward Mrs. Bolton, Annie demanded, “What do you think of Mr.
+Gerrish's scandalous behaviour?”
+
+Mrs. Bolton gave herself time to put a stick of wood into the stove, and to
+punch it with the stove-lid handle before answering. “I don't know as it's
+anything more than I expected.”
+
+Annie went on: “It was shameful! Do you suppose he really thought Mr. Peck
+was referring to him in his sermon?”
+
+“I presume he felt the cap fit. But if it hadn't b'en one thing, 'twould
+b'en another. Mr. Peck was bound to roil the brook for Mr. Gerrish's
+drinkin', wherever he stood, up stream or down.”
+
+“Yes. He _is_ a wolf! A wolf in sheep's clothing,” said Annie
+excitedly.
+
+“I d'know as you can call him a _wolf_, exactly,” returned Mrs. Bolton
+dryly. “He's got his good points, I presume.”
+
+Annie was astounded. “Why, Mrs. Bolton, you're surely not going to justify
+him?”
+
+Mrs. Bolton erected herself from cutting a loaf of her best bread into
+slices, and stood with the knife in her hand, like a figure of Justice.
+“Well, I _guess_ you no need to ask me a question like that, Miss
+Kilburn. I hain't obliged to make up to Mr. Peck, though, for what I done
+in the beginnin' by condemnin' everybuddy else without mercy now.” Mrs.
+Bolton's eyes did not flash fire, but they sent out an icy gleam that went
+as sharply to Annie's heart.
+
+Bolton came in from feeding the horse and cow in the barn, with a mealy tin
+pan in his hand, from which came a mild, subdued radiance like that of his
+countenance. He was not sensible of arriving upon a dramatic moment, and he
+said, without noticing the attitude of either lady: “I see you walkin' home
+with Mr. Putney, Miss Kilburn. What'd _he_ say?”
+
+“You mean about Mr. Gerrish? He thinks as we all do; that it was a
+challenge to Mr. Peck's friends, and that we must take it up.”
+
+A light of melancholy satisfaction shone from Bolton's deeply shaded eyes.
+“Well, he ain't one to lose time, not a great deal. I presume he's goin' to
+work?”
+
+“At once,” said Annie. “He says Mr. Gerrish will be sure to bring his
+grievance up at the next Society meeting, and we must be ready to meet
+him, and out-talk him and out-vote him.” She reported these phrases from
+Putney's lips.
+
+“Well, I guess if it was out-talkin', Mr. Putney wouldn't have much trouble
+about it. And as far forth as votin' goes, I don't believe but what we can
+carry the day.”
+
+“We couldn't,” said Mrs. Bolton from the pantry, where she had gone to
+put the bread away in its stone jar, “if it was left to the church.”
+ She accented the last word with the click of the jar lid, and came out.
+
+“Well, it ain't a church question. It's a Society question.”
+
+Mrs. Bolton replied, on her passage to the dining-room with the plate of
+sliced bread: “I can't make it seem right to have the minister a Society
+question. Seems to me that the church members'd ought have the say.”
+
+“Well, you can't make the discipline over to suit everybody,” said Bolton.
+“I presume it was ordered for a wise purpose.”
+
+“Why, land alive, Oliver Bolton,” his wife shouted back from the remoteness
+to which his words had followed her, “the statute provisions and rules of
+the Society wa'n't ordered by Providence.”
+
+“Well, not directly, as you may say,” said Bolton, beginning high, and
+lowering his voice as she rejoined them, “but I presume the hearts of them
+that made them was moved.”
+
+Mrs. Bolton could not combat a position of such unimpregnable piety in
+words, but she permitted herself a contemptuous sniff, and went on getting
+the things into the dining-room.
+
+“And I guess it's all goin' to work together for good. I ain't afraid
+any but what it's goin' to come out all right. But we got to be up and
+doin', as they say about 'lection times. The Lord helps them that helps
+themselves,” said Bolton, and then, as if he felt the weakness of this
+position as compared with that of entire trust in Providence, he winked his
+mild eyes, and added, “if they're on the right side, and put their faith in
+His promises.”
+
+“Well, your dinner's ready now,” Mrs. Bolton said to Annie.
+
+Idella had clung fast to Annie's hand; as Annie started toward the
+dining-room she got before her, and whispered vehemently.
+
+“What?” asked Annie, bending down; she laughed, in lifting her head, “I
+promised Idella you'd let us have some preserves to-day, Mrs. Bolton.”
+
+Mrs. Bolton smiled with grim pleasure. “I see all the while her mind was
+set on something. She ain't one to let you forget _your_ promises.
+Well, I guess if Mr. Peck had a little more of _her_ disposition there
+wouldn't be much doubt about the way it would all come out.”
+
+“Well, you don't often see pairents take after their children,” said
+Bolton, venturing a small joke.
+
+“No, nor husbands after their wives, either,” said Mrs. Bolton sharply.
+“The more's the pity.”
+
+
+
+
+XXIV.
+
+
+Dr. Morrell came to see Annie late the next Wednesday evening.
+
+“I didn't know you'd come back,” she said. She returned to the
+rocking-chair, from which she came forward to greet him, and he dropped
+into an easy seat near the table piled with books and sewing.
+
+“I didn't know it myself half an hour ago.”
+
+“Really? And is this your first visit? I must be a very interesting case.”
+
+“You are--always. How have you been?”
+
+“I? I hardly know whether I've been at all,” she answered, in mechanical
+parody of his own reply. “So many other things have been of so much more
+importance.”
+
+She let her eyes rest full upon his, with a sense of returning comfort and
+safety in his presence, and after a deep breath of satisfaction, she asked,
+“How did you leave your mother?”
+
+“Very much better--entirely out of danger.”
+
+“It's so odd to think of any one's having a family. To me it seems the
+normal condition not to have any relatives.”
+
+“Well, we can't very well dispense with mothers,” said the doctor. “We have
+to begin with them, at any rate.”
+
+“Oh, I don't object to them. I only wonder at them.”
+
+They fell into a cosy and mutually interesting talk about their separate
+past, and he gave her glimpses of the life, simple and studious, he had
+led before he went abroad. She confessed to two mistakes in which she had
+mechanically persisted concerning him; one that he came from Charlestown
+instead of Chelsea, and the other that his first name was Joseph instead
+of James. She did not own that she had always thought it odd he should
+be willing to remain in a place like Hatboro', and that it must argue a
+strangely unambitious temperament in a man of his ability. She diverted the
+impulse to a general satire of village life, and ended by saying that she
+was getting to be a perfect villager herself.
+
+He laughed, and then, “How has Hatboro' been getting along?” he asked.
+
+“Simply seething with excitement,” she answered. “But I should hardly know
+where to begin if I tried to tell you,” she added. “It seems such an age
+since I saw you.”
+
+“Thank you,” said the doctor.
+
+“I didn't mean to be _quite_ so flattering; but you have certainly
+marked an epoch. Really, I _don't_ know where to begin. I wish you'd
+seen somebody else first--Ralph and Ellen, or Mrs. Wilmington.”
+
+“I might go and see them now.”
+
+“No; stay, now you're here, though I know I shall not do justice to the
+situation.” But she was able to possess him of it with impartiality, even
+with a little humour, all the more because she was at heart intensely
+partisan and serious. “No one knows what Mr. Gerrish intends to do next.
+He has kept quietly about his business; and he told some of the ladies who
+tried to interview him that he was not prepared to talk about the course
+he had taken. He doesn't seem to be ashamed of his behaviour; and Ralph
+thinks that he's either satisfied with it, and intends to let it stand as
+a protest, or else he's going to strike another blow on the next business
+meeting. But he's even kept Mrs. Gerrish quiet, and all we can do is to
+unite Mr. Peck's friends provisionally. Ralph's devoted himself to that,
+and he says he has talked forty-eight hours to the day ever since.”
+
+Is he--”
+
+“Yes; perfectly! I could hardly believe it when I saw him at church on
+Sunday. It was like seeing one risen from the dead. What he must have
+gone through, and Ellen! She told me how Mr. Peck had helped him in the
+struggle. She attributes everything to him. But of course you think he had
+nothing to do with it.”
+
+“What makes you think that?” he asked.
+
+“Oh, I don't know. Wouldn't that naturally be the attitude of Science?”
+
+“Toward religion? Perhaps. But I'm not Science--with a large S. May be
+that's the reason why I left the case with Mr. Peck,” said the doctor,
+smiling. “Putney didn't leave off my medicine, did he?”
+
+“He never got well so soon before. They both say that. I didn't think you
+could be so narrow-minded, Dr. Morrell. But of course your scientific
+bigotry couldn't admit the effect of the moral influence. It would be too
+much like a miracle; you would have to allow for a mystery.”
+
+“I have to allow for a good many,” said the doctor. “The world is full of
+mysteries for me, if you mean things that science hasn't explored yet. But
+I hope that they'll all yield to the light, and that somewhere there'll be
+light enough to clear up even the spiritual mysteries.”
+
+“Do you really?” she demanded eagerly. “Then you believe in a life
+hereafter? You believe in a moral government of the--”
+
+He retreated, laughing, from her ardent pursuit. “Oh, I'm not going to
+commit myself. But I'll go so far as to say that I like to hear Mr. Peck
+preach, and that I want him to stay. I don't say he had nothing to do with
+Putney's straightening up. Putney had a great deal to do with it himself.
+What does he think Mr. Peck's chances are?”
+
+“If Mr. Gerrish tries to get him dismissed? He doesn't know; he's quite
+in the dark. He says the party of the perverse--the people who think Mr.
+Gerrish must have had some good reason for his behaviour, simply because
+they can't see any--is unexpectedly large; and it doesn't help matters with
+the more respectable people that the most respectable, like Mr. Wilmington
+and Colonel Marvin, are Mr. Peck's friends. They think there must be
+something wrong if such good men are opposed to Mr. Gerrish.”
+
+“And I suspect,” said Dr. Morrell soberly, “that Putney's championship
+isn't altogether an advantage. The people all concede his brilliancy, and
+they are prouder of him on account of his infirmity; but I guess they like
+to feel their superiority to him in practical matters. They admire him, but
+they don't want to follow him.”
+
+“Oh, I suppose so,” said Annie disconsolately. “And I imagine that Mr.
+Wilmington's course is attributed to Lyra, and that doesn't help Mr. Peck
+much with the husbands of the ladies who don't approve of her.”
+
+The doctor tacitly declined to touch this delicate point. He asked, after a
+pause, “You'll be at the meeting?”
+
+“I couldn't keep away. But I've no vote, that's the worst. I can only
+suffer in the cause.” The doctor smiled. “You must go, too,” she added
+eagerly.
+
+“Oh, I shall go; I couldn't keep away either. Besides, I can vote. How are
+you getting on with your little _protégée_?
+
+“Idella? Well, it isn't such a simple matter as I supposed, quite. Did you
+ever hear anything about her mother?”
+
+“Nothing more than what every one has. Why?” asked the doctor, with
+scientific curiosity. “Do you find traits that the father doesn't account
+for?”
+
+“Yes. She is very vain and greedy and quick-tempered.”
+
+“Are those traits uncommon in children?”
+
+“In such a degree I should think they were. But she's very affectionate,
+too, and you can do anything with her through her love of praise. She
+puzzles me a good deal. I wish I knew something about her mother. But Mr.
+Peck himself is a puzzle. With all my respect for him and regard and
+admiration, I can't help seeing that he's a very imperfect character.”
+
+Doctor Morrell laughed. “There's a great deal of human nature in man.”
+
+“There isn't enough in Mr. Peck,” Annie retorted. “From the very first
+he has said things that have stirred me up and put me in a fever; but he
+always seems to be cold and passive himself.”
+
+“Perhaps he _is_ cold,” said the doctor.
+
+“But has he any _right_ to be so?” retorted Annie, with certainly no
+coldness of her own.
+
+“Well, I don't know. I never thought of the right or wrong of a man's being
+what he was born. Perhaps we might justly blame his ancestors.”
+
+Annie broke into a laugh at herself: “Of course. But don't you think that
+a man who is able to put things as he does--who can make you see, for
+example, the stupidity and cruelty of things that always seemed right and
+proper before--don't you think that he's guilty of a kind of hypocrisy if
+he doesn't _feel_ as well as see?”
+
+“No, I can't say that I do,” said the doctor, with pleasure in the feminine
+excess of her demand. “And there are so many ways of feeling. We're apt to
+think that our own way is the only way, of course; but I suppose that most
+philanthropists--men who have done the most to better conditions--have been
+people of cold temperaments; and yet you can't say they are unfeeling.”
+
+“No, certainly. Do you think Mr. Peck is a real philanthropist?”
+
+“How you do get back to the personal always!” said Dr. Morrell. “What makes
+you ask?”
+
+“Because I can't understand his indifference to his child. It seems to me
+that real philanthropy would begin at home. But twice he has distinctly
+forgotten her existence, and he always seems bored with it. Or not that
+quite; but she seems no more to him than any other child.”
+
+“There's something very curious about all that,” said the doctor. “In most
+things the greater includes the less, but in philanthropy it seems to
+exclude it. If a man's heart is open to the whole world, to all men, it's
+shut sometimes against the individual, even the nearest and dearest. You
+see I'm willing to admit all you can say against a rival practitioner.”
+
+“Oh, I understand,” said Annie. “But I'm not going to gratify your spite.”
+ At the same time she tacitly consented to the slight for Mr. Peck which
+their joking about him involved. In such cases we excuse our disloyalty as
+merely temporary, and intend to turn serious again and make full amends for
+it. “He made very short work,” she continued, “of that notion of yours that
+there could be any good feeling between the poor and the rich who had once
+been poor themselves.”
+
+“Did I have any such notion as that?”
+
+She recalled the time and place of its expression to him, and he said, “Oh
+yes! Well?”
+
+“He says that rich people like that are apt to be the hardest masters, and
+are eager to forget they ever were poor, and are only anxious to identify
+themselves with the rich.”
+
+Dr. Morrell seemed to enjoy this immensely. “That does rather settle it,”
+ he said recreantly.
+
+She tried to be severe with him, but she only kept on laughing and joking;
+she was aware that he was luring her away from her seriousness.
+
+Mrs. Bolton brought in the lamp, and set it on the library table, showing
+her gaunt outline a moment against it before she left it to throw its
+softened light into the parlour where they sat. The autumn moonshine,
+almost as mellow, fell in through the open windows, which let in the
+shrilling of the crickets and grasshoppers, and wafts of the warm night
+wind.
+
+“Does life,” Annie was asking, at the end of half an hour, “seem more
+simple or more complicated as you live on? That sounds awfully abstruse,
+doesn't it? And I don't know why I'm always asking you abstruse things, but
+I am.”
+
+“Oh, I don't mind it,” said the doctor. “Perhaps I haven't lived on long
+enough to answer this particular question; I'm only thirty-six, you know.”
+
+“_Only_? I'm thirty-one, and I feel a hundred!” she broke in.
+
+“You don't look it. But I believe I rather like abstruse questions. You
+know Putney and I have discussed a great many. But just what do you mean by
+this particular abstraction?”
+
+He took from the table a large ivory paper-knife which he was in the habit
+of playing with in his visits, and laid first one side and then the other
+side of its smooth cool blade in the palm of his left hand, as he leaned
+forward, with his elbows on his knees, and bent his smiling eyes keenly
+upon her.
+
+She stopped rocking herself, and said imperatively, “Will you please put
+that back, Dr. Morrell?”
+
+“This paper-knife?”
+
+“Yes. And not look at me just in that way? When you get that knife and that
+look, I feel a little too much as if you were diagnosing me.”
+
+“Diagnosticating,” suggested the doctor.
+
+“Is it? I always supposed it was diagnosing. But it doesn't matter. It
+wasn't the name I was objecting to.”
+
+He put the knife back and changed his posture, with a smile that left
+nothing of professional scrutiny in his look. “Very well, then; you shall
+diagnose yourself.”
+
+“Diagnosticate, please.”
+
+“Oh, I thought you preferred the other.”
+
+“No, it sounds undignified, now that I know there's a larger word. Where
+was I?”
+
+“The personal bearing of the question whether life isn't more and more
+complicated?”
+
+“How did you know it had a personal bearing?”
+
+“I suspected as much.”
+
+“Yes, it has. I mean that within the last four or five months--since I've
+been in Hatboro'--I seem to have lost my old point of view; or, rather, I
+don't find it satisfactory any more. I'm ashamed to think of the simple
+plans, or dreams, that I came home with. I hardly remember what they were;
+but I must have expected to be a sort of Lady Bountiful here; and now I
+think a Lady Bountiful one of the most mischievous persons that could
+infest any community.”
+
+“You don't mean that charity is played out?” asked the doctor.
+
+“In the old-fashioned way, yes.”
+
+“But they say poverty is on the increase. What is to be done?”
+
+“Justice,” said Annie. “Those who do most of the work in the world ought to
+share in its comforts as a right, and not be put off with what we idlers
+have a mind to give them from our superfluity as a grace.”
+
+“Yes, that's all very true. But what till justice _is_ done?”
+
+“Oh, we must continue to do charity,” cried Annie, with self-contempt that
+amused him. “But don't you see how much more complicated it is? That's what
+I meant by life not being simple any more. It was easy enough to do charity
+when it used to seem the right and proper remedy for suffering; but now,
+when I can't make it appear a finality, but only something provisional,
+temporary--Don't you see?”
+
+“Yes, I see. But I don't see how you're going to help it At the same time,
+I'll allow that it makes life more difficult.”
+
+For a moment they were both serious and silent. Then she said: “Sometimes I
+think the fault is all in myself, and that if I were not so sophisticated
+and--and--selfish, I should find the old way of doing good just as
+effective and natural as ever. Then again, I think the conditions are all
+wrong, and that we ought to be fairer to people, and then we needn't be so
+good to them. I should prefer that. I hate being good to people I don't
+like, and I can't like people who don't interest me. I think I must be very
+hard-hearted.”
+
+The doctor laughed at this.
+
+“Oh, I know,” said Annie, “I know the fraudulent reputation I've got for
+good works.”
+
+“Your charity to tramps is the opprobrium of Hatboro',” the doctor
+consented.
+
+“Oh, I don't mind that. It's easy when people ask you for food or money,
+but the horrible thing is when they ask you for work. Think of me, who
+never did anything to earn a cent in my life, being humbly asked by a
+fellow-creature to let him work for something to eat and drink! It's
+hideous! It's abominable! At first I used to be flattered by it, and try
+to conjure up something for them to do, and to believe that I was helping
+the deserving poor. Now I give all of them money, and tell them that they
+needn't even pretend to work for it. _I_ don't work for my money, and
+I don't see why they should.”
+
+“They'd find that an unanswerable argument if you put it to them,” said the
+doctor. He reached out his hand for the paper-cutter, and then withdrew it
+in a way that made her laugh.
+
+“But the worst of it is,” she resumed, “that I don't love any of the people
+that I help, or hurt, whichever it is. I did feel remorseful toward Mrs.
+Savor for a while, but I didn't love her, and I knew that I only pitied
+myself through her. Don't you see?”
+
+“No, I don't,” said the doctor.
+
+“You don't, because you're too polite. The only kind of creature that I can
+have any sympathy with is some little wretch like Idella, who is perfectly
+selfish and naughty every way, but seems to want me to like her, and a
+reprobate like Lyra, or some broken creature like poor Ralph. I think
+there's something in the air, the atmosphere, that won't allow you to live
+in the old way if you've got a grain of conscience or humanity. I don't
+mean that _I_ have. But it seems to me as if the world couldn't go on
+as it has been doing. Even here in America, where I used to think we had
+the millennium because slavery was abolished, people have more liberty, but
+they seem just as far off as ever from justice. That is what paralyses me
+and mocks me and laughs in my face when I remember how I used to dream of
+doing good after I came home. I had better stayed at Rome.”
+
+The doctor said vaguely, “I'm glad you didn't,” and he let his eyes dwell
+on her with a return of the professional interest which she was too lost in
+her self reproach to be able to resent.
+
+“I blame myself for trying to excuse my own failure on the plea that things
+generally have gone wrong. At times it seems to me that I'm responsible for
+having lost my faith in what I used to think was the right thing to do; and
+then again it seems as if the world were all so bad that no real good could
+be done in the old way, and that my faith is gone because there's nothing
+for it to rest on any longer. I feel that something must be done; but I
+don't know what.”
+
+“It would be hard to say,” said the doctor.
+
+She perceived that her exaltation amused him, but she was too much in
+earnest to care. “Then we are guilty--all guilty--till we find out and
+begin to do it. If the world has come to such a pass that you can't do
+anything but harm in it--”
+
+“Oh, is it so bad as that?” he protested.
+
+“It's _quite_ as bad,” she insisted. “Just see what mischief I've done
+since I came back to Hatboro'. I took hold of that miserable Social Union
+because I was outside of all the life about me, and it seemed my only
+chance of getting into it; and I've done more harm by it in one summer than
+I could undo in a lifetime. Just think of poor Mr. Brandreth's love affair
+with Miss Chapley broken off, and Lyra's lamentable triumph over Miss
+Northwick, and Mrs. Munger's duplicity, and Ralph's escapade--all because I
+wanted to do good!”
+
+A note of exaggeration had begun to prevail in her self-upbraiding, which
+was real enough, and the time came for him to suggest, “I think you're a
+little morbid, Miss Kilburn.”
+
+“Morbid! Of course I am! But that doesn't alter the fact that everything is
+wrong, does it?”
+
+“Everything!”
+
+“Why, you don't pretend yourself, do you, that everything is right?”
+
+“A true American ought to do so, oughtn't he?” teased the doctor. “One
+mustn't be a bad citizen.”
+
+“But if you _were_ a bad citizen?” she persisted.
+
+“Oh, then I might agree with you on some points. But I shouldn't say such
+things to my patients, Miss Kilburn.”
+
+“It would be a great comfort to them if you did,” she sighed.
+
+The doctor broke out in a laugh of delight at her perfervid concentration.
+“Oh, no, no! They're mostly nervous women, and it would be the death of
+them--if they understood me. In fact, what's the use of brooding upon such
+ideas? We can't hurry any change, but we can make ourselves uncomfortable.”
+
+“Why should I be comfortable?” she asked, with a solemnity that made him
+laugh again.
+
+“Why shouldn't you be?”
+
+“Yes, that's what I often ask myself. But I can't be,” she said sadly.
+
+They had risen, and he looked at her with his professional interest now
+openly dominant, as he stood holding her hand. “I'm going to send you a
+little more of that tonic, Miss Kilburn.”
+
+She pulled her hand away. “No, I shall not take any more medicine. You
+think everything is physical. Why don't you ask at once to see my tongue?”
+
+He went out laughing, and she stood looking wistfully at the door he had
+passed through.
+
+
+
+
+XXV.
+
+
+The bell on the orthodox church called the members of Mr. Peck's society
+together for the business meeting with the same plangent, lacerant note
+that summoned them to worship on Sundays. Among those who crowded the house
+were many who had not been there before, and seldom in any place of the
+kind. There were admirers of Putney: workmen of rebellious repute and of
+advanced opinions on social and religious questions; nonsuited plaintiffs
+and defendants of shady record, for whom he had at one time or another done
+what he could. A good number of the summer folk from South Hatboro' were
+present, with the expectation of something dramatic, which every one felt,
+and every one hid with the discipline that subdues the outside of life in a
+New England town to a decorous passivity.
+
+At the appointed time Mr. Peck rose to open the meeting with prayer; then,
+as if nothing unusual were likely to come before it, he declared it ready
+to proceed to business. Some people who had been gathering in the vestibule
+during his prayer came in; and the electric globes, which had been recently
+hung above the pulpit and on the front of the gallery in substitution of
+the old gas chandelier, shed their moony glare upon a house in which few
+places were vacant. Mr. Gerrish, sitting erect and solemn beside his wife
+in their pew, shared with the minister and Putney the tacit interest of the
+audience.
+
+He permitted the transaction of several minor affairs, and Mr. Peck, as
+Moderator, conducted the business with his habitual exactness and effect
+of far-off impersonality. The people waited with exemplary patience,
+and Putney, who lounged in one corner of his pew, gave no more sign of
+excitement, with his chin sunk in his rumpled shirt-front, than his
+sad-faced wife at the other end of the seat.
+
+Mr. Gerrish rose, with the air of rising in his own good time, and said,
+with dry pomp, “Mr. Moderator, I have prepared a resolution, which I will
+ask you to read to this meeting.”
+
+He held up a paper as he spoke, and then passed it to the minister, who
+opened and read it--
+
+“_Whereas_, It is indispensable to the prosperity and well-being of
+any and every organisation, and especially of a Christian church, that the
+teachings of its minister be in accord with the convictions of a majority
+of its members upon vital questions of eternal interest, with the end and
+aim of securing the greatest efficiency of that body in the community, as
+an example and a shining light before men to guide their steps in the
+strait and narrow path; therefore,
+
+“_Resolved_, That a committee of this society be appointed to inquire
+if such is the case in the instance of the Rev. Julius W. Peck, and be
+instructed to report upon the same.”
+
+A satisfied expectation expressed itself in the silence that followed
+the reading of the paper, whatever pain and shame were mixed with the
+satisfaction. If the contempt of kindly usage shown in offering such a
+resolution without warning or private notice to the minister shocked many
+by its brutality, still it was satisfactory to find that Mr. Gerrish had
+intended to seize the first chance of airing his grievance, as everybody
+had said he would do.
+
+Mr. Peck looked up from the paper and across the intervening pews at Mr.
+Gerrish. “Do I understand that you move the adoption of this resolution?”
+
+“Why, certainly, sir,” said Mr. Gerrish, with an accent of supercilious
+surprise.
+
+“You did not say so,” said the minister gently. “Does any one second
+Brother Gerrish's motion?”
+
+A murmur of amusement followed Mr. Peck's reminder to Mr. Gerrish, and an
+ironical voice called out--
+
+“Mr. Moderator!”
+
+“Mr. Putney.”
+
+“I think it important that the sense of the meeting should be taken on
+the question the resolution raises. I therefore second the motion for its
+adoption.”
+
+Putney sat down, and the murmur now broadened into something like a general
+laugh, hushed as with a sudden sense of the impropriety.
+
+Mr. Gerrish had gradually sunk into his seat, but now he rose again, and
+when the minister formally announced the motion before the meeting, he
+called, sharply, “Mr. Moderator!”
+
+“Brother Gerrish,” responded the minister, in recognition.
+
+“I wish to offer a few remarks in support of the resolution which I have
+had the honour--the duty, I _would_ say--of laying before this
+meeting.” He jerked his head forward at the last word, and slid the fingers
+of his right hand into the breast of his coat like an orator, and stood
+very straight. “I have no desire, sir, to make this the occasion of a
+personal question between myself and my pastor. But, sir, the question has
+been forced upon me against my will and my--my consent; and I was obliged
+on the last ensuing Sabbath, when I sat in this place, to enter my public
+protest against it.
+
+“Sir, I came into this community a poor boy, without a penny in my pocket,
+and unaided and alone and by my own exertions I have built up one of the
+business interests of the place. I will not stoop to boast of the part I
+have taken in the prosperity of this place; but I will say that no public
+object has been wanting--that my support has not been wanting--from
+the first proposition to concrete the sidewalks of this village to the
+introduction of city waterworks and an improved system of drainage,
+and--er--electric lighting. So much for my standing in a public capacity!
+As for my business capacity, I would gladly let that speak for itself,
+if that capacity had not been turned in the sanctuary itself against the
+personal reputation which every man holds dearer than life itself, and
+which has had a deadly blow aimed at it through that--that very capacity.
+Sir, I have established in this town a business which I may humbly say that
+in no other place of the same numerical size throughout the commonwealth
+will you find another establishment so nearly corresponding to the wants
+and the--er--facilities of a great city. In no other establishment in a
+place of the same importance will you find the interests and the demands
+and the necessities of the whole community so carefully considered. In no
+other--”
+
+Putney got upon his feet and called out, “Mr. Moderator, will Brother
+Gerrish allow me to ask him a single question?”
+
+Mr. Peck put the request, and Mr. Gerrish involuntarily made a pause, in
+which Putney pursued--
+
+“My question is simply this: doesn't Brother Gerrish think it would help
+us to get at the business in hand sooner if he would print the rest of his
+advertisement in the Hatboro' _Register_?”
+
+A laugh broke out all over the house as Putney dropped back into his seat.
+Mr. Gerrish stood apparently undaunted.
+
+“I will attend to you presently, sir,” he said, with a schoolmasterly
+authority which made an impression in his favour with some. “And I thank
+the gentleman,” he continued, turning again to address the minister, “for
+recalling me from a side issue. As he acknowledges in the suggestion which
+he intended to wound my feelings, but I can assure him that my self-respect
+is beyond the reach of slurs and innuendoes; I care little for them; I
+care not what quarter they originate from, or have their--their origin;
+and still less when they spring from a source notoriously incompetent and
+unworthy to command the respect of this community, which has abused all its
+privileges and trampled the forbearance of its fellow-citizens under foot,
+until it has become a--a byword in this place, sir.”
+
+Putney sprang up again with, “Mr. Moderator--”
+
+“No, sir! no, sir!” pursued Gerrish; “I will not submit to your
+interruptions. I have the floor, and I intend to keep it. I intend to
+challenge a full and fearless scrutiny of my motives in this matter, and
+I intend to probe those motives in others. Why do we find, sir, on the
+one side of this question as its most active exponent a man outside of
+the church in organising a force within this society to antagonise the
+most cherished convictions of that church? We do not asperse his
+motives; but we ask if these motives coincide with the relations which a
+Christian minister should sustain to his flock as expressed in the
+resolution which I have had the privilege to offer, more in sorrow than
+in anger.”
+
+Putney made some starts to rise, but quelled himself, and finally sank back
+with an air of ironical patience. Gerrish's personalities had turned public
+sentiment in his favour. Colonel Marvin came over to Putney's pew and shook
+hands with him before sitting down by his side. He began to talk with him
+in whisper while Gerrish went on--
+
+“But on the other hand, sir, what do we see? I will not allude to myself
+in this connection, but I am well aware, sir, that I represent a large and
+growing majority of this church in the stand I have taken. We are tired,
+sir--and I say it to you openly, sir, what has been bruited about in secret
+long enough--of having what I may call a one-sided gospel preached in this
+church and from this pulpit. We enter our protest against the neglect of
+very essential elements of Christianity--not to say the essential--the
+representation of Christ as--a--a spirit as well as a life. Understand me,
+sir, we do not object, neither I nor any of those who agree with me, to the
+preaching of Christ as a life. That is all very well in its place, and it
+is the wish of every true Christian to conform and adapt his own life as
+far as--as circumstances will permit of. But when I come to this sanctuary,
+and _they_ come, Sabbath after Sabbath, and hear nothing said of my
+Redeemer as a--means of salvation, and nothing of Him crucified; and when I
+find the precious promises of the gospel ignored and neglected continually
+and--and all the time, and each discourse from yonder pulpit filled up with
+generalities--glittering generalities, as has been well said by another--in
+relation to and connection with mere conduct, I am disappointed, sir, and
+dissatisfied, and I feel to protest against that line of--of preaching.
+During the last six months, Sabbath after Sabbath, I have listened in
+vain for the ministrations of the plain gospel and the tenets under
+which we have been blessed as a church and as--a--people. Instead of
+this I have heard, as I have said--and I repeat it without fear of
+contradiction--nothing but one-idea appeals and mere moralisings upon duty
+to others, which a child and the veriest tyro could not fail therein; and I
+have culminated--or rather it has been culminated to me--in a covert attack
+upon my private affairs and my way of conducting my private business in a
+manner which I could not overlook. For that reason, and for the reasons
+which I have recapitulated--and I challenge the closest scrutiny--I felt
+it my duty to enter my public protest and to leave this sanctuary, where I
+have worshipped ever since it was erected, with my family. And I now urge
+the adoption of the foregoing resolution because I believe that your
+usefulness has come to an end to the vast majority of the constituent
+members of this church; and--and that is all.”
+
+Mr. Gerrish stopped so abruptly that Putney, who was engaged in talk with
+Colonel Marvin, looked up with a startled air, too late to secure the
+floor. Mr. Peck recognised Mr. Gates, who stood with his wrists caught in
+either hand across his middle, and looked round with a quizzical glance
+before he began to speak. Putney lifted his hand in playful threatening
+toward Colonel Marvin, who got away from him with a face of noiseless
+laughter, and went and joined Mr. Wilmington where he sat with his wife,
+who entered into the talk between the men.
+
+“Mr. Moderator,” said Gates, “I don't know as I expected to take part in
+this debate; but you can't always tell what's going to happen to you, even
+if you're only a member of the church by marriage, as you might say. I
+presume, though, that I have a right to speak in a meeting like this,
+because I _am_ a member of the society in my own right, and I've got
+its interests at heart as much as any one. I don't know but what I got the
+interests of Hatboro' at heart too, but I can't be certain; sometimes you
+can't; sometimes you think you've got the common good in view, and you
+come to look a little closer and you find it's the uncommon good; that is
+to say, it's not so much the public weal you're after as what it is the
+private weal. But that's neither here nor there. I haven't got anything to
+say against identifying yourself with things in general; I don't know but
+what it's a good way; all is, it's apt to make you think you're personally
+attacked when nobody is meant in particular. _I_ think that's what's
+partly the matter with Brother Gerrish here. I heard that sermon, and I
+didn't suppose there was anything in it to hurt any one especially; and I
+was consid'ably surprised to see that Mr. Gerrish seemed to take it to
+himself, somehow, and worry over it; but I didn't really know just what the
+trouble was till he explained here tonight. All I was thinking was when it
+come to that about large commerce devouring the small--sort of lean and fat
+kine--I wished Jordan and Marsh could hear that, or Stewart's in New York,
+or Wanamaker's in Philadelphia. I never _thought_ of Brother Gerrish
+once; and I don't presume one out of a hundred did either. I--” The
+electric light immediately over Gates's head began to hiss and sputter,
+and to suffer the sort of syncope which overtakes electric lights at such
+times, and to leave the house in darkness. Gates waited, standing, till it
+revived, and then added: “I guess I hain't got anything more to say, Mr.
+Moderator. If I had it's gone from me now. I'm more used to speaking by
+kerosene, and I always lose my breath when an electric light begins that
+way.”
+
+Putney was on his legs in good time now, and secured recognition before Mr.
+Wilmington, who made an effort to catch the moderator's eye. Gates had put
+the meeting in good-humoured expectation of what they might now have from
+Putney. They liked Gates's points very well, but they hoped from Putney
+something more cruel and unsparing, and the greater part of those present
+must have shared his impatience with Mr. Wilmington's request that he would
+give way to him for a moment. Yet they all probably felt the same curiosity
+about what was going forward, for it was plain that Mr. Wilmington and
+Colonel Marvin were conniving at the same point. Marvin had now gone to
+Mr. Gerrish, and had slipped into the pew beside him with the same sort of
+hand-shake he had given Putney.
+
+“Will my friend Mr. Putney give way to me for a moment?” asked Mr.
+Wilmington.
+
+“I don't see why I should do that,” said Putney.
+
+“I assure him that I will not abuse his courtesy, and that I will yield the
+floor to him at any moment.”
+
+Putney hesitated a moment, and then, with the contented laugh of one who
+securely bides his time, said, “Go ahead.”
+
+“It is simply this,” said Mr. Wilmington, with a certain formal neatness of
+speech: “The point has been touched by the last speaker, which I think
+suggested itself to all who heard the remarks of Brother Gerrish in support
+of his resolution, and the point is simply this--whether he has not
+misapplied the words of the discourse by which he felt himself aggrieved,
+and whether he has not given them a particular bearing foreign to the
+intention of their author. If, as I believe, this is the case, the whole
+matter can be easily settled by a private conference between the parties,
+and we can be saved the public appearance of disagreement in our society.
+And I would now ask Brother Gerrish, in behalf of many who take this view
+with me, whether he will not consent to reconsider the matter, and whether,
+in order to arrive at the end proposed, he will not, for the present at
+least, withdraw the resolution he has offered?”
+
+Mr. Wilmington sat down amidst a general sensation, which was heightened
+by Putney's failure to anticipate any action on Gerrish's part. Gerrish
+rapidly finished something he was saying to Colonel Marvin, and then half
+rose, and said, “Mr. Moderator, I withdraw my resolution--for the time
+being, and--for the present, sir,” and sat down again.
+
+“Mr. Moderator,” Putney called sharply, from his place, “this is altogether
+unparliamentary. That resolution is properly before the meeting. Its
+adoption has been moved and seconded, and it cannot be withdrawn without
+leave granted by a vote of the meeting. I wish to discuss the resolution
+in all its bearings, and I think there are a great many present who share
+with me a desire to know how far it represents the sense of this society.
+I don't mean as to the supposed personal reflections which it was intended
+to punish; that is a very small matter, and as compared with the other
+questions involved, of no consequence whatever.” Putney tossed his head
+with insolent pleasure in his contempt of Gerrish. His nostrils swelled,
+and he closed his little jaws with a firmness that made his heavy black
+moustache hang down below the corners of his chin. He went on with a wicked
+twinkle in his eye, and a look all round to see that people were waiting to
+take his next point. “I judge my old friend Brother Gerrish by myself. My
+old friend Gerrish cares no more really about personal allusions than I do.
+What he really had at heart in offering his resolution was not any supposed
+attack upon himself or his shop from the pulpit of this church. He cared no
+more for that than I should care for a reference to my notorious habits.
+These are things that we feel may be safely left to the judgment, the
+charitable judgment, of the community, which will be equally merciful to
+the man who devours widows' houses and to the man who 'puts an enemy in his
+mouth to steal away his brains.'”
+
+“Mr. Moderator,” said Colonel Marvin, getting upon his feet.
+
+“No, sir!” shouted Putney fiercely; “I can't allow you to speak. Wait till
+I get done!” He stopped, and then said gently “Excuse me, Colonel; I really
+must go on. I'm speaking now in behalf of Brother Gerrish, and he doesn't
+like to have the speaking on his side interrupted.”
+
+“Oh, all right,” said Colonel Marvin amiably; “go on.”
+
+“What my old friend William Gerrish really designed in offering that
+resolution was to bring into question the kind of Christianity which has
+been preached in this place by our pastor--the one-sided gospel, as he
+aptly called it--and what he and I want to get at is the opinion of the
+society on that question. Has the gospel preached to us here been one-sided
+or hasn't it? Brother Gerrish says it has, and Brother Gerrish, as I
+understand, doesn't change his mind on that point, if he does on any, in
+asking to withdraw his resolution. He doesn't expect Mr. Peck to convince
+him in a private conference that he has been preaching an all-round gospel.
+I don't contend that he has; but I suppose I'm not a very competent judge.
+I don't propose to give you the opinion of one very fallible and erring
+man, and I don't set myself up in judgment of others; but I think it's
+important for all parties concerned to know what the majority of this
+society think on a question involving its future. That importance must
+excuse--if anything can excuse--the apparent want of taste, of humanity,
+of decency, in proposing the inquiry at a meeting over which the person
+chiefly concerned would naturally preside, unless he were warned to absent
+himself. Nobody cares for the contemptible point, the wholly insignificant
+question, whether allusion to Mr. Gerrish's variety store was intended
+or not. What we are all anxious to know is whether he represents any
+considerable portion of this society in his general attack upon its pastor.
+I want a vote on that, and I move the previous question.”
+
+No one stopped to inquire whether this was parliamentary or not. Putney sat
+down, and Colonel Marvin rose to say that if a vote was to be taken, it
+was only right and just that Mr. Peck should somehow be heard in his own
+behalf, and half a dozen voices from all parts of the church supported him
+Mr. Peck, after a moment, said, “I think I have nothing to say;” and he
+added, “Shall I put the question?”
+
+“Question!” “Question!” came from different quarters.
+
+“It is moved and seconded that the resolution before the meeting be
+adopted,” said the minister formally. “All those in favour will say ay.” He
+waited for a distinct space, but there was no response; Mr. Gerrish himself
+did not vote. The minister proceeded, “Those opposed will say no.”
+
+The word burst forth everywhere, and it was followed by laughter and
+inarticulate expressions of triumph and mocking. “Order! order!” called the
+minister gravely, and he announced, “The noes have it.”
+
+The electric light began to suffer another syncope. When it recovered, with
+the usual fizzing and sputtering, Mr. Peck was on his feet, asking to be
+relieved from his duties as moderator, so that he might make a statement to
+the meeting. Colonel Marvin was voted into the chair, but refused formally
+to take possession of it. He stood up and said, “There is no place where we
+would rather hear you than in that pulpit, Mr. Peck.”
+
+“I thank you,” said the minister, making himself heard through the
+approving murmur; “but I stand in this place only to ask to be allowed to
+leave it. The friendly feeling which has been expressed toward me in the
+vote upon the resolution you have just rejected is all that reconciles
+me to its defeat. Its adoption might have spared me a duty which I find
+painful. But perhaps it is best that I should discharge it. As to the
+sermon which called forth that resolution it is only just to say that I
+intended no personalities in it, and I humbly entreat any one who felt
+himself aggrieved to believe me.” Every one looked at Gerrish to see how
+he took this; he must have felt it the part of self-respect not to change
+countenance. “My desire in that discourse was, as always, to present the
+truth as I had seen it, and try to make it a help to all. But I am by
+no means sure that the author of the resolution was wrong in arraigning
+me before you for neglecting a very vital part of Christianity in my
+ministrations here. I think with him, that those who have made an open
+profession of Christ have a claim to the consolation of His promises,
+and to the support which good men have found in the mysteries of faith;
+and I ask his patience and that of others who feel that I have not laid
+sufficient stress upon these. My shortcoming is something that I would not
+have you overlook in any survey of my ministry among you; and I am not here
+now to defend that ministry in any point of view. As I look back over it,
+by the light of the one ineffable ideal, it seems only a record of failure
+and defeat.” He stopped, and a sympathetic dissent ran through the meeting.
+“There have been times when I was ready to think that the fault was not in
+me, but in my office, in the church, in religion. We all have these moments
+of clouded vision, in which we ourselves loom up in illusory grandeur above
+the work we have failed to do. But it is in no such error that I stand
+before you now. Day after day it has been borne in upon me that I had
+mistaken my work here, and that I ought, if there was any truth in me, to
+turn from it for reasons which I will give at length should I be spared
+to preach in this place next Sabbath. I should have willingly acquiesced
+if our parting had come in the form of my dismissal at your hands. Yet I
+cannot wholly regret that it has not taken that form, and that in offering
+my resignation, as I shall formally do to those empowered by the rules of
+our society to receive it, I can make it a means of restoring concord among
+you. It would be affectation in me to pretend that I did not know of the
+dissension which has had my ministry for its object if not its cause; and I
+earnestly hope that with my withdrawal that dissension may cease, and that
+this church may become a symbol before the world of the peace of Christ. I
+conjure such of my friends as have been active in my behalf to unite with
+their brethren in a cause which can alone merit their devotion. Above all
+things I beseech you to be at peace one with another. Forbear, forgive,
+submit, remembering that strife for the better part can only make it the
+worse, and that for Christians there can be no rivalry but in concession
+and self-sacrifice.”
+
+Colonel Marvin forgot his office and all parliamentary proprieties in the
+tide of emotion that swept over the meeting when the minister sat down. “I
+am glad,” he said, “that no sort of action need be taken now upon Mr.
+Peck's proposed resignation, which I for one cannot believe this society
+will ever agree to accept.”
+
+Others echoed his sentiment; they spoke out, sitting and standing, and
+addressed themselves to no one, till Putney moved an adjournment, which
+Colonel Marvin sufficiently recollected himself to put to a vote, and
+declare carried.
+
+Annie walked home with the Putneys and Dr. Morrell. She was aware of
+something unwholesome in the excitement which ran so wholly in Mr. Peck's
+favour, but abandoned herself to it with feverish helplessness.
+
+“Ah-h-h!” cried Putney, when they were free of the crowd which pressed
+upon him with questions and conjectures and comments. “What a slump!--what
+a slump! That blessed, short-legged little seraph has spoilt the best
+sport that ever was. Why, he's sent that fool of a Gerrish home with the
+conviction that he was right in the part of his attack that was the most
+vilely hypocritical, and he's given that heartless scoundrel the pleasure
+of feeling like an honest man. I should like to rap Mr. Peck's head up
+against the back of his pulpit, and I should like to knock the skulls of
+Colonel Marvin and Mr. Wilmington together and see which was the thickest.
+Why, I had Gerrish fairly by the throat at last, and I was just reaching
+for the balm of Gilead with my other hand to give him a dose that would
+have done him for one while! Ah, it's too bad, too bad! Well! well!
+But--haw! haw! haw!--didn't Gerrish tangle himself up beautifully in his
+rhetoric? I guess we shall fix Brother Gerrish yet, and I don't think we
+shall let Brother Peck off without a tussle. I'm going to try print on
+Brother Gerrish. I'm going to ask him in the Hatboro' _Register_--he
+doesn't advertise, and the editor's as independent as a lion where a man
+don't advertise--”
+
+“Indeed he's not going to do anything of the kind, Annie,” said Mrs.
+Putney. “I shall not let him. I shall make him drop the whole affair now,
+and let it die out, and let us be at peace again, as Mr. Peck says.”
+
+“There seemed to be a good deal of sense in that part of it,” said Dr.
+Morrell. “I don't know but he was right to propose himself as a
+peace-offering; perhaps there's no other way out.”
+
+“Well,” said Mrs. Putney, “whether he goes or stays, I think we owe him
+that much. Don't you, Annie?”
+
+“Oh yes!” sighed Annie, from the exaltation to which the events of the
+evening had borne her. “And we mustn't let him go. It would be a loss that
+every one would feel; that--”
+
+“I'm tired of this fighting,” Mrs. Putney broke in, “and I think it's
+ruining Ralph every way. He hasn't slept the last two nights, and he's
+been all in a quiver for the last fortnight. For my part I don't care what
+happens now, I'm not going to have Ralph mixed up in it any more. I think
+we ought all to forgive and forget. I'm willing to overlook everything, and
+I believe others are the same.”
+
+“You'd better ask Mrs. Gerrish the next time she calls,” Putney interposed.
+
+Mrs. Putney stopped, and took her hand from her husband's arm. “Well, after
+what Mr. Gerrish said to-night about you, I _don't_ think Emmeline had
+better call _very_ soon!”
+
+“Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha!” shrieked Putney, and his laugh flapped back at
+them in derisive echo from the house-front they were passing. “I guess
+Brother Peck had better stay and help fight it out. It won't be _all_
+brotherly love after he goes--or sisterly either.”
+
+
+
+
+XXVI.
+
+
+Annie knew from the light in the kitchen window that Mrs. Bolton, who had
+not gone to the meeting, was there, and she inferred from the silence of
+the house that Bolton had not yet come home. She went up to her room, and
+after a glance at Idella asleep in her crib, she began to lay off her
+things. Then she sat down provisionally by the open window, and looked out
+into the still autumnal night. The air was soft and humid, with a scent of
+smoke in it from remote forest fires. The village lights showed themselves
+dimmed by the haze that thickened the moonless dark.
+
+She heard steps on the gravel of the lane, and then two men talking, one
+of whom she knew to be Bolton. In a little while the back entry door was
+opened and shut, and after a brief murmur of voices in the library Mrs.
+Bolton knocked on the door-jamb of the room where Annie sat.
+
+“What is it, Mrs. Bolton?”
+
+“You in bed yet?”
+
+“No; I'm here by the window. What is it?”
+
+“Well, I don't know but what you'll think it's pretty late for callers, but
+Mr. Peck is down in the library. I guess he wants to speak with you about
+Idella. I told him he better see _you_.”
+
+“I will come right down.”
+
+She followed Mrs. Bolton to the foot of the stairs, where she kept on to
+the kitchen, while Annie turned into the library. Mr. Peck stood beside her
+father's desk, resting one hand on it and holding his hat in the other.
+
+“Won't you be seated, Mr. Peck?”
+
+“I thank you. It's only for a moment. I am going away to-morrow, and I wish
+to speak with you about Idella.”
+
+“Yes, certainly. But surely you are not going to leave Hatboro', Mr. Peck!
+I hoped--we all did--that after what you had seen of the strong feeling in
+your favour to-night you would reconsider your determination and stay with
+us!” She went on impetuously. “You must know--you must understand now--how
+much good you can do here--more than any one else--more than you could do
+anywhere else. I don't believe that you realise how much depends upon your
+staying here. You can't stop the dissensions by going away; it will only
+make them worse. You saw how Colonel Marvin and Mr. Wilmington were with
+you; and Mr. Gates--all classes. I oughtn't to speak--to attempt to teach
+you your duty; I'm not of your church; and I can only tell you how it seems
+to me: that you never can find another place where your principles--your
+views--”
+
+He waited for her to go on; but she really had nothing more to say, and he
+began: “I am not hoping for another charge elsewhere, at least not for the
+present; but I am satisfied that my usefulness here is at an end, and I do
+not think that my going away will make matters worse. Whether I go or stay,
+the dissensions will continue. At any rate, I believe that there are those
+who need help more, and whom I can help more, in another field--”
+
+“Yes,” she broke in, with a woman's relevancy to the immediate point,
+“there is nothing to do here.”
+
+He went on as if she had not spoken: “I am going to Fall River to-morrow,
+where I have heard that there is work for me--”
+
+“In the mills!” she exclaimed, recurring in thought to what he had once
+said of his work in them. “Surely you don't mean that!” The sight, the
+smell, the tumult of the work she had seen that day in the mill with Lyra
+came upon her with all their offence. “To throw away all that you have
+learnt, all that you have become to others!”
+
+“I am less and less confident that I have become anything useful to others
+in turning aside from the life of toil and presuming to attempt the
+guidance of those who remained in it. But I don't mean work in the mills,”
+ he continued, “or not at first, or not unless it seems necessary to my work
+with those who work in them. I have a plan--or if it hardly deserves that
+name, a design--of being useful to them in such ways as my own experience
+of their life in the past shall show me in the light of what I shall see
+among them now. I needn't trouble you with it.”
+
+“Oh yes!” she interposed.
+
+“I do not expect to preach at once, but only to teach in one of the public
+schools, where I have heard of a vacancy, and--and--perhaps otherwise. With
+those whose lives are made up of hard work there must be room for willing
+and peaceful service. And if it should be necessary that I should work in
+the mills in order to render this, then I will do so; but at present I
+have another way in view--a social way that shall bring me into immediate
+relations with the people.” She still tried to argue with him, to prove him
+wrong in going away, but they both ended where they began. He would not or
+could not explain himself further. At last he said: “But I did not come to
+urge this matter. I have no wish to impose my will, my theory, upon any
+one, even my own child.”
+
+“Oh yes--Idella!” Annie broke in anxiously. “You will leave her with me,
+Mr. Peck, won't you? You don't know how much I'm attached to her. I see her
+faults, and I shall not spoil her. Leave her with me at least till you see
+your way clear to having her with you, and then I will send her to you.”
+
+A trouble showed itself in his face, ordinarily so impassive, and he seemed
+at a loss how to answer her; but he said: “I--appreciate your kindness to
+her, but I shall not ask you to be at the inconvenience longer than till
+to-morrow. I have arranged with another to take her until I am settled, and
+then bring her to me.”
+
+Annie sat intensely searching his face, with her lips parted to speak.
+“_Another!_” she said, and the wounded feeling, the resentment of his
+insensibility to her good-will, that mingled in her heart, must have made
+itself felt in her voice, for he went on reluctantly--
+
+“It is a family in which she will be brought up to work and to be helpful
+to herself. They will join me with her. You know the mother--she has lost
+her own child--Mrs. Savor.”
+
+At the name, Annie's spirit fell; the tears started from her eyes. “Yes,
+she must have her. It is just--it is the only expiation. Don't you remember
+that it was I who sent Mrs. Savor's baby to the sea-shore, where it died?”
+
+“No; I had forgotten,” said the minister, aghast. “I am sorry--”
+
+“It doesn't matter,” said Annie lifelessly; “it had to be.” After a pause,
+she asked quietly, “If Mrs. Savor is going to work in the mills, how can
+she make a home for the child?”
+
+“She is not going into the mills,” he answered. “She will keep house for
+us all, and we hope to have others who are without homes of their own join
+us in paying the expenses and doing the work, so that all may share its
+comfort without gain to any one upon their necessity of food and shelter.”
+
+She did not heed his explanation, but suddenly entreated: “Let me go with
+you. I will not be a trouble to you, and I will help as well as I can. I
+can't give the child up! Why--why”--the thought, crazy as it would have
+once seemed, was now such a happy solution of the trouble that she smiled
+hopefully--“why shouldn't I go with Mr. and Mrs. Savor, and help to make a
+home for Idella there? You will need money to begin your work; I will give
+you mine. I will give it up--I will give it all up. I will give it to any
+good object that you approve; or you may have it, to do what you think best
+with; and I will go with Idella and I will work in the mills there--or
+anything.”
+
+He shook his head, and for the first time in their acquaintance he seemed
+to feel compassion for her. “It isn't possible. I couldn't take your money;
+I shouldn't know what to do with it.”
+
+“You know what to do with your own,” she broke in. “You do good with that!”
+
+“I'm afraid I do harm with it too,” he returned. “It's only a little, but
+little as it has been, I can no longer meet the responsibility it brings.”
+
+“But if you took my money,” she urged, “you could devote your life to
+preaching the truth, to writing and publishing books, and all that; and so
+could others: don't you see?”
+
+He shook his head. “Perhaps others; but I have done with preaching for the
+present. Later I may have something to say. Now I feel sure of nothing, not
+even of what I've been saying here.”
+
+“Will you send for Idella? When she goes with the Savors I will come too!”
+
+He looked at her sorrowfully. “I think you are a good woman, and you mean
+what you say. But I am sorry you say it, if any words of mine have caused
+you to say it, for I know you cannot do it. Even for me it is hard to go
+back to those associations, and for you they would be impossible.”
+
+“You will see,” she returned, with exaltation. “I will take Idella to the
+Savors' to-morrow--or no; I'll have them come here!”
+
+He stood looking at her in perplexity. At last he asked, “Could I see the
+child?”
+
+“Certainly!” said Annie, with the lofty passion that possessed her, and she
+led him up into the chamber where Idella lay sleeping in Annie's own crib.
+
+He stood beside it, gazing long at the little one, from whose eyes he
+shaded the lamp. Then he said, “I thank you,” and turned away.
+
+She followed him down-stairs, and at the door she said: “You think I will
+not come; but I will come. Don't you believe that?”
+
+He turned sadly from her. “You might come, but you couldn't stay. You don't
+know what it is; you can't imagine it, and you couldn't bear it.”
+
+“I will come, and I will stay,” she answered; and when he was gone she
+fell into one of those intense reveries of hers--a rapture in which she
+prefigured what should happen in that new life before her. At its end
+Mr. Peck stood beside her grave, reading the lesson of her work to the
+multitude of grateful and loving poor who thronged to pay the last tribute
+to her memory. Putney was there with his wife, and Lyra regretful of her
+lightness, and Mrs. Munger repentant of her mendacities. They talked
+together in awe-stricken murmurs of the noble career just ended. She heard
+their voices, and then she began to ask herself what they would really say
+of her proposing to go to Fall River with the Savors and be a mill-hand.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII.
+
+
+Annie did not sleep. After lying a long time awake she took some of the
+tonic that Dr. Morrell had left her, upon the chance that it might quiet
+her; but it did no good. She dressed herself, and sat by the window till
+morning.
+
+The breaking day showed her purposes grotesque and monstrous. The revulsion
+that must come, came with a tide that swept before it all prepossessions,
+all affections. It seemed as if the child, still asleep in her crib, had
+heard what she said, and would help to hold her to her word.
+
+She choked down a crust of bread with the coffee she drank at breakfast,
+and instead of romping with Idella at her bath, she dressed the little one
+silently, and sent her out to Mrs. Bolton. Then she sat down again in the
+sort of daze in which she had spent the night, and as the day passed, her
+revolt from what she had pledged herself to do mounted and mounted. It was
+like the sort of woman she was, not to think of any withdrawal from her
+pledges; they were all the more sacred with her because they had been
+purely voluntary, insistent; the fact that they had been refused made them
+the more obligatory.
+
+She thought some one would come to break in upon the heavy monotony of the
+time; she expected Ralph or Ellen, or at least Lyra; but she only saw Mrs.
+Bolton, and heard her about her work. Sometimes the child stole back from
+the kitchen or the barn, and peeped in upon her with a roguish expectance
+which her gloomy stare defeated, and then it ran off again.
+
+She lay down in the afternoon and tried to sleep; but her brain was
+inexorably alert, and she lay making inventory of all the pleasant things
+she was to leave for that ugly fate she had insisted on. A swarm of fancies
+gave every detail of the parting dramatic intensity. Amidst the poignancy
+of her regrets, her shame for her recreancy was sharper still.
+
+By night she could bear it no longer. It was Dr. Morrell's custom to come
+nearly every night; but she was afraid, because he had walked home with her
+from the meeting the night before, he might not come now, and she sent for
+him. It was in quality of medicine-man, as well as physician, that she
+wished to see him; she meant to tell him all that had passed with Mr. Peck;
+and this was perfectly easy in the interview she forecast; but at the sound
+of his buggy wheels in the lane a thought came that seemed to forbid her
+even to speak of Mr. Peck to him. For the first time it occurred to her
+that the minister might have inferred a meaning from her eagerness and
+persistence infinitely more preposterous than even the preposterous letter
+of her words. A number of little proofs of the conjecture flashed upon her:
+his anxiety to get away from her, his refusal to let her believe in her own
+constancy of purpose, his moments of bewilderment and dismay. It needed
+nothing but this to add the touch of intolerable absurdity to the horror
+of the whole affair, and to snatch the last hope of help from her.
+
+She let Mrs. Bolton go to the door, and she did not rise to meet the
+doctor; she saw from his smile that he knew he had a moral rather than a
+physical trouble to deal with, but she did not relax the severity of her
+glare in sympathy, as she was tempted from some infinite remoteness to do.
+
+When he said, “You're not well,” she whispered solemnly back, “Not at all.”
+
+He did not pursue his inquiry into her condition, but said, with an
+irrelevant cheerfulness that piqued her, “I was coming here this evening
+at any rate, and I got your message on the way up from my office.”
+
+“You are very kind,” she said, a little more audibly.
+
+“I wanted to tell you,” he went on, “of what a time Putney and I have had
+to-day working up public sentiment for Mr. Peck, so as to keep him here.”
+
+Annie did not change her position, but the expression of her glance
+changed.
+
+“We've been round in the enemy's camp, everywhere; and I've committed
+Gerrish himself to an armed neutrality. That wasn't difficult. The
+difficulty was in another quarter--with Mr. Peck himself. He's more opposed
+than any one else to his stay in Hatboro'. You know he intended going away
+this morning?”
+
+“Did he?” Annie asked dishonestly. The question obliged her to say
+something.
+
+“Yes. He came to Putney before breakfast to thank him and take leave of
+him, and to tell him of the plan he had for--Imagine what!”
+
+“I don't know,” said Annie, hoarsely, after an effort, as if the untruth
+would not come easily. “I am worse than Mrs. Munger,” she thought.
+
+“For going to Fall River to teach school among the mill-hands' children!
+And to open a night-school for the hands themselves.”
+
+The doctor waited for her sensation, and in its absence he looked so
+disappointed that she was forced to say, “To teach school?”
+
+Then he went on briskly again. “Yes. Putney laboured with him on his knees,
+so to speak, and got him to postpone his going till to-morrow morning; and
+then he came to me for help. We enlisted Mrs. Wilmington in the cause, and
+we've spent the day working up the Peck sentiment to a fever-heat. It's
+been a very queer campaign; three Gentiles toiling for a saint against
+the elect, and bringing them all over at last. We've got a paper, signed
+by a large majority of the members of the church--the church, not the
+society--asking Mr. Peck to remain; and Putney's gone to him with the
+paper, and he's coming round here to report Mr. Peck's decision. We all
+agreed that it wouldn't do to say anything about his plan for the future,
+and I fancy some of his people signed our petition under the impression
+that they were keeping a valuable man out of another pulpit.”
+
+Annie accompanied the doctor's words, which she took in to the last
+syllable, with a symphony of conjecture as to how the change in Mr. Peck's
+plans, if they prevailed with him, would affect her, and the doctor had
+not ceased to speak before she perceived that it would be deliverance
+perfect and complete, however inglorious. But the tacit drama so vividly
+preoccupied her with its minor questions of how to descend to this escape
+with dignity that still she did not speak, and he took up the word again.
+
+“I confess I've had my misgivings about Mr. Peck, and about his final
+usefulness in a community like this. In spite of all that Putney can say of
+his hard-headedness, I'm afraid that he's a good deal of a dreamer. But I
+gave way to Putney, and I hope you'll appreciate what I've done for your
+favourite.”
+
+“You are very good,” she said, in mechanical acknowledgment: her mind was
+set so strenuously to break from her dishonest reticence that she did not
+know really what she was saying. “Why--why do you call him a dreamer?” She
+cast about in that direction at random.
+
+“Why? Well, for one thing, the reason he gave Putney for giving up his
+luxuries here: that as long as there was hardship and overwork for underpay
+in the world, he must share them. It seems to me that I might as well
+say that as long as there were dyspepsia and rheumatism in the world, I
+must share them. Then he has a queer notion that he can go back and find
+instruction in the working-men--that they alone have the light and the
+truth, and know the meaning of life. I don't say anything against them. My
+observation and my experience is that if others were as good as they are in
+the ratio of their advantages, Mr. Peck needn't go to them for his ideal.
+But their conditions warp and dull them; they see things askew, and they
+don't see them clearly. I might as well expose myself to the small-pox in
+hopes of treating my fellow-sufferers more intelligently.”
+
+She could not perceive where his analogies rang false; they only
+overwhelmed her with a deeper sense of her own folly.
+
+“But I don't know,” he went on, “that a dreamer is such a desperate
+character, if you can only keep him from trying to realise his dreams; and
+if Mr. Peck consents to stay in Hatboro', perhaps we can manage it.” He
+drew his chair a little toward the lounge where she reclined, and asked,
+with the kindliness that was both personal and professional, “What seems to
+be the matter?”
+
+She started up. “There is nothing--nothing that medicine can help. Why do
+you call him my favourite?” she demanded violently. “But you have wasted
+your time. If he had made up his mind to what you say, he would never give
+it up--never in the world!” she added hysterically. “If you've interfered
+between any one and his duty in this world, where it seems as if hardly
+any one had any duty, you've done a very unwarrantable thing.” She was
+aware from his stare that her words were incoherent, if not from the words
+themselves, but she hurried on: “I am going with him. He was here last
+night, and I told him I would. I will go with the Savors, and we will keep
+the child together; and if they will take me, I shall go to work in the
+mills; and I shall not care what people think, if it's right--”
+
+She stopped and weakly dropped back on the lounge, and hid her face in the
+pillow.
+
+“I really don't understand.” The doctor began, with a physician's
+carefulness, to unwind the coil she had flung down to him. “Are the Savors
+going, and the child?”
+
+“He will give her the child for the one they lost--you know how! And they
+will take it with them.”
+
+“But you--what have you--”
+
+“I must have the child too! I can't give it up, and I shall go with them.
+There's no other way. You don't know. I've given him my word, and there is
+no hope!”
+
+“He asked you,” said the doctor, to make sure he had heard aright--“he
+asked you--advised you--to go to work in a cotton-mill?”
+
+“No;” she lifted her face to confront him. “He told me _not_ to go;
+but I said I would.”
+
+They sat staring at each other in a silence which neither of them broke,
+and which promised to last indefinitely. They were still in their daze when
+Putney's voice came through the open hall door.
+
+“Hello! hello! hello! Hello, Central! _Can't_ I make you hear, any
+one?” His steps advanced into the hall, and he put his head in at the
+library doorway. “Thought you'd be here,” he said, nodding at the doctor.
+“Well, doctor, Brother Peck's beaten us again. He's going.”
+
+“Going?” the doctor echoed.
+
+“Yes. It's no use. I put the whole case before him, and I argued it with a
+force of logic that would have fetched the twelfth man with eleven stubborn
+fellows against him on a jury; but it didn't fetch Brother Peck. He was
+very appreciative and grateful, but he believes he's got a call to give up
+the ministry, for the present at least. Well, there's some consolation in
+supposing he may know best, after all. It seemed to us that he had a great
+opportunity in Hatboro', but if he turns his back on it, perhaps it's a
+sign he wasn't equal to it. The doctor told you what we've been up to,
+Annie?”
+
+“Yes,” she answered faintly, from the depths of the labyrinth in which she
+was plunged again.
+
+“I'm sorry for your news about him,” said the doctor. “I hoped he was
+going to stay. It's always a pity when such a man lets his sympathies use
+him instead of using them. But we must always judge that kind of crank
+leniently, if he doesn't involve other people in his erase.”
+
+She knew that he was shielding and trying to spare her, and she felt
+inexpressibly degraded by the terms of his forbearance. She could not
+accept, and she had not the strength to refuse it; and Putney said: “I've
+not seen anything to make me doubt his sanity; but I must say the present
+racket shakes my faith in his common-sense, and I rather held by that, you
+know. But I suppose no man, except the kind of a man that a woman would be
+if she were a man--excuse me, Annie--is ever absolutely right. I suppose
+the truth is a constitutional thing, and you can't separate it from
+the personal consciousness, and so you get it coloured and heated by
+personality when you get it fresh. That is, we can see what the absolute
+truth was, but never what it is.”
+
+Putney amused himself in speculating on these lines with more or less
+reference to Mr. Peck, and did not notice that the doctor and Annie gave
+him only a silent assent. “As to misleading any one else, Mr. Peck's
+following in his new religion seems to be confined to the Savors, as
+I understand. They are going with him to help him set up a sort of
+cooperative boarding-house. Well, I don't know where we shall get a hotter
+gospeller than Brother Peck. Poor old fellow! I hope he'll get along better
+in Fall River. It is something to be out of reach of Gerrish.”
+
+The doctor asked, “When is he going?”
+
+“Why, he's gone by this time, I suppose,” said Putney. “I tried to get him
+to think about it overnight, but he wouldn't. He's anxious to go and get
+back, so as to preach his last sermon here Sunday, and he's taken the 9.10,
+if he hasn't changed his mind.” Putney looked at his watch.
+
+“Let's hope he hasn't,” said Dr. Morrell.
+
+“Which?” asked Putney.
+
+“Changed his mind. I'm sorry he's coming back.”
+
+Annie knew that he was talking at her, though he spoke to Putney; but she
+was powerless to protest.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII.
+
+
+They went away together, leaving her to her despair, which had passed into
+a sort of torpor by the following night, when Dr. Morrell came again, out
+of what she knew must be mere humanity; he could not respect her any
+longer. He told her, as if for her comfort, that Putney had gone to the
+depot to meet Mr. Peck, who was expected back in the eight-o'clock train,
+and was to labour with him all night long if necessary to get him to
+change, or at least postpone, his purpose. The feeling in his favour was
+growing. Putney hoped to put it so strongly to him as a proof of duty that
+he could not resist it.
+
+Annie listened comfortlessly. Whatever happened, nothing could take away
+the shame of her weakness now. She even wished, feebly, vaguely, that she
+might be forced to keep her word.
+
+A sound of running on the gravel-walk outside and a sharp pull at the
+door-bell seemed to jerk them both to their feet.
+
+Some one stepped into the hall panting, and the face of William Savor
+showed itself at the door of the room where they stood. “Doc--Doctor
+Morrell, come--come quick! There's been an accident--at--the depot.
+Mr.--Peck--” He panted out the story, and Annie saw rather than heard how
+the minister tried to cross the track from his train, where it had halted
+short of the station, and the flying express from the other quarter caught
+him from his feet, and dropped the bleeding fragment that still held his
+life beside the rail a hundred yards away, and then kept on in brute
+ignorance into the night.
+
+“Where is he? Where have you got him?” the doctor demanded of Savor.
+
+“At my house.”
+
+The doctor ran out of the house, and she heard his buggy whirl away,
+followed by the fainter sound of Savor's feet as he followed running, after
+he had stopped to repeat his story to the Boltons. Annie turned to the
+farmer. “Mr. Bolton, get the carry-all. I must go.”
+
+“And me too,” said his wife.
+
+“Why, no, Pauliny; I guess you better stay. I guess it'll come out all
+right in the end,” Bolton began. “_I_ guess William has exaggerated
+some may be. Anyrate, who's goin' to look after the little girl if you
+come?”
+
+“_I_ am,” Mrs. Bolton snapped back. “She's goin' with me.”
+
+“Of course she is. Be quick, Mr. Bolton!” Annie called from the stairs,
+which she had already mounted half-way.
+
+She caught up the child, limp with sleep, from its crib, and began to dress
+it. Idella cried, and fought away the hands that tormented her, and made
+herself now very stiff and now very lax; but Annie and Mrs. Bolton together
+prevailed against her, and she was dressed, and had fallen asleep again
+in her clothes while the women were putting on their hats and sacks, and
+Bolton was driving up to the door with the carry-all.
+
+“Why, I can see,” he said, when he got out to help them in, “just how
+William's got his idee about it. His wife's an excitable kind of a woman,
+and she's sent him off lickety-split after the doctor without looking to
+see what the matter was. There hain't never been anybody hurt at our depot,
+and it don't stand to reason--”
+
+“Oliver Bolton, _will_ you hush that noise?” shrieked his wife. “If
+the world was burnin' up you'd say it was nothing but a chimbley on fire
+som'er's.”
+
+“Well, well, Pauliny, have it your own way, have it your own way,” said
+Bolton. “I ain't sayin' but what there's _some_thin' in William's
+story; but you'll see't he's exaggerated. Git up!”
+
+“Well, do hurry, and _do_ be still!” said his wife.
+
+“Yes, yes. It's all right, Pauliny; all right. Soon's I'm out the lane,
+you'll see't I'll drive _fast_ enough.”
+
+Mrs. Bolton kept a grim silence, against which her husband's babble of
+optimism played like heat-lightning on a night sky.
+
+Idella woke with the rush of cold air, and in the dark and strangeness
+began to cry, and wailed heart-breakingly between her fits of louder
+sobbing, and then fell asleep again before they reached the house where
+her father lay dying.
+
+They had put him in the best bed in Mrs. Savor's little guest-room, and
+when Annie entered, the minister was apologising to her for spoiling it.
+
+“Now don't you say one word, Mr. Peck,” she answered him. “It's all right.
+I ruthah see you layin' there just's you be than plenty of folks that--”
+ She stopped for want of an apt comparison, and at sight of Annie she said,
+as if he were a child whose mind was wandering: “Well, I declare, if here
+ain't Miss Kilburn come to see you, Mr. Peck! And Mis' Bolton! Well, the
+land!”
+
+Mrs. Savor came and shook hands with them, and in her character of hostess
+urged them forward from the door, where they had halted. “Want to see Mr.
+Peck? Well, he's real comf'table now; ain't he, Dr. Morrell? We got him all
+fixed up nicely, and he ain't in a bit o' pain. It's his spine that's hurt,
+so't he don't feel nothin'; but he's just as clear in his mind as what you
+or I be. _Ain't_ he, doctor?”
+
+“He's not suffering,” said Dr. Morrell, to whom Annie's eye wandered from
+Mrs. Savor, and there was something in his manner that made her think the
+minister was not badly hurt. She went forward with Mr. and Mrs. Bolton, and
+after they had both taken the limp hand that lay outside the covering, she
+touched it too. It returned no pressure, but his large, wan eyes looked at
+her with such gentle dignity and intelligence that she began to frame in
+her mind an excuse for what seemed almost an intrusion.
+
+“We were afraid you were hurt badly, and we thought--we thought you might
+like to see Idella--and so--we came. She is in the next room.”
+
+“Thank you,” said the minister. “I presume that I am dying; the doctor
+tells me that I have but a few hours to live.”
+
+Mrs. Savor protested, “Oh, I guess you ain't a-goin' to die _this_
+time, Mr. Peck.” Annie looked from Dr. Morrell to Putney, who stood with
+him on the other side of the bed, and experienced a shock from their
+gravity without yet being able to accept the fact it implied. “There's
+plenty of folks,” continued Mrs. Savor, “hurt worse'n what you be that's
+alive to-day and as well as ever they was.”
+
+Bolton seized his chance. “It's just what I said to Pauliny, comin' along.
+'You'll see,' said I, 'Mr. Peck'll be out as spry as any of us before a
+great while.' That's the way I felt about it from the start.”
+
+“All you got to do is to keep up courage,” said Mrs. Savor.
+
+“That's so; that's half the battle,” said Bolton.
+
+There were numbers of people in the room and at the door of the next. Annie
+saw Colonel Marvin and Jack Wilmington. She heard afterward that he was
+going to take the same train to Boston with Mr. Peck, and had helped to
+bring him to the Savors' house. The stationmaster was there, and some other
+railroad employes.
+
+The doctor leaned across the bed and lifted slightly the arm that lay
+there, taking the wrist between his thumb and finger. “I think we had
+better let Mr. Peck rest a while,” he said to the company generally, “We're
+doing him no good.”
+
+The people began to go; some of them said, “Well, good night!” as if they
+would meet again in the morning. They all made the pretence that it was a
+slight matter, and treated the wounded man as if he were a child. He did
+not humour the pretence, but said “Good-bye” in return for their “Good
+night” with a quiet patience.
+
+Mrs. Savor hastened after her retreating guests. “I ain't a-goin' to let
+you go without a sup of coffee,” she said. “I want you should all stay and
+git some, and I don't believe but what a little of it would do Mr. Peck
+good.”
+
+The surface of her lugubrious nature was broken up, and whatever was kindly
+and cheerful in its depths floated to the top; she was almost gay in the
+demand which the calamity made upon her. Annie knew that she must have seen
+and helped to soothe the horror of mutilation which she could not even let
+her fancy figure, and she followed her foolish bustle and chatter with
+respectful awe.
+
+“Rebecca'll have it right off the stove in half a minute now,” Mrs. Savor
+concluded; and from a further room came the cheerful click of cups, and
+then a wandering whiff of the coffee; life in its vulgar kindliness touched
+and made friends with death, claiming it a part of nature too.
+
+The night at Mrs. Munger's came back to Annie from the immeasurable
+remoteness into which all the past had lapsed. She looked up at Dr. Morrell
+across the bed.
+
+“Would you like to speak with Mr. Peck?” he asked officially. “Better do it
+now,” he said, with one of his short nods.
+
+Putney came and set her a chair. She would have liked to fall on her knees
+beside the bed; but she took the chair, and drew the minister's hand into
+hers, stretching her arm above his head on the pillow. He lay like some
+poor little wounded boy, like Putney's Winthrop; the mother that is in
+every woman's heart gushed out of hers in pity upon him, mixed with filial
+reverence. She had thought that she should confess her baseness to him, and
+ask his forgiveness, and offer to fulfil with the people he had chosen for
+the guardians of his child that interrupted purpose of his. But in the
+presence of death, so august, so simple, all the concerns of life seemed
+trivial, and she found herself without words. She sobbed over the poor hand
+she held. He turned his eyes upon her and tried to speak, but his lips only
+let out a moaning, shuddering sound, inarticulate of all that she hoped or
+feared he might prophesy to shape her future.
+
+Life alone has any message for life, but from the beginning of time it has
+put its ear to the cold lips that must for ever remain dumb.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX.
+
+
+The evening after the funeral Annie took Idella, with the child's clothes
+and toys in a bundle, and Bolton drove them down Over the Track to the
+Savors'. She had thought it all out, and she perceived that whatever the
+minister's final intention might have been, she was bound by the purpose
+he had expressed to her, and must give up the child. For fear she might be
+acting from the false conscientiousness of which she was beginning to have
+some notion in herself, she put the case to Mrs. Bolton. She knew what she
+must do in any event, but it was a comfort to be stayed so firmly in her
+duty by Mrs. Bolton, who did not spare some doubts of Mrs. Savor's fitness
+for the charge, and reflected a subdued censure even upon the judgment of
+Mr. Peck himself, as she bustled about and helped Annie get Idella and her
+belongings ready. The child watched the preparations with suspicion. At the
+end, when she was dressed, and Annie tried to lift her into the carriage,
+she broke out in sudden rebellion; she cried, she shrieked, she fought; the
+two good women who were obeying the dead minister's behest were obliged to
+descend to the foolish lies of the nursery; they told her she was going on
+a visit to the Savors, who would take her on the cars with them, and then
+bring her back to Aunt Annie's house. Before they could reconcile her to
+this fabled prospect they had to give it verisimilitude by taking off her
+everyday clothes and putting on her best dress.
+
+She did not like Mrs. Savor's house when she came to it, nor Mrs. Savor,
+who stopped, all blowzed and work-deranged from trying to put it in order
+after the death in it, and gave Idella a motherly welcome. Annie fancied a
+certain surprise in her manner, and her own ideal of duty was put to proof
+by Mrs. Savor's owning that she had not expected Annie to bring Idella to
+her right away.
+
+“If I had not done it at once, I never could have done it,” Annie
+explained.
+
+“Well, I presume it's a cross,” said Mrs. Savor, “and I don't feel right to
+take her. If it wa'n't for what her father--”
+
+“'Sh!” Annie said, with a significant glance.
+
+“It's an ugly house!” screamed the child. “I want to go back to my Aunt
+Annie's house. I want to go on the cars.”
+
+“Yes, yes,” answered Mrs. Savor, blindly groping to share in whatever cheat
+had been practised on the child, “just as soon as the cars starts. Here,
+William, you take her out and show her the pretty coop you be'n makin' the
+pigeons, to keep the cats out.”
+
+They got rid of her with Savor's connivance for the moment, and Annie
+hastened to escape.
+
+“We had to tell her she was going a journey, or we never could have got her
+into the carriage,” she explained, feeling like a thief.
+
+“Yes, yes. It's all right,” said Mrs. Savor. “I see you'd be'n putting up
+some kind of job on her the minute she mentioned the cars. Don't you fret
+any, Miss Kilburn. Rebecca and me'll get along with her, you needn't be
+afraid.”
+
+Annie could not look at the empty crib where it stood in its alcove when
+she went to bed; and she cried upon her own pillow with heart-sickness for
+the child, and with a humiliating doubt of her own part in hurrying to
+give it up without thought of Mrs. Savor's convenience. What had seemed so
+noble, so exemplary, began to wear another colour; and she drowsed, worn
+out at last by the swarming fears, shames, and despairs, which resolved
+themselves into a fantastic medley of dream images. There was a cat
+trying to get at the pigeons in the coop which Mr. Savor had carried
+Idella to see. It clawed and miauled at the lattice-work of lath, and its
+caterwauling became like the cry of a child, so like that it woke Annie
+from her sleep, and still kept on. She lay shuddering a moment; it seemed
+as if the dead minister's ghost flitted from the room, while the crying
+defined and located itself more and more, till she knew it a child's wail
+at the door of her house. Then she heard, “Aunt Annie! Aunt Annie!” and
+soft, faint thumps as of a little fist upon the door panels.
+
+She had no experience of more than one motion from her bed to the door,
+which the same impulse flung open and let her crush to her breast the
+little tumult of sobs and moans from the threshold.
+
+“Oh, wicked, selfish, heartless wretch!” she stormed out over the child.
+“But now I will never, never, never give you up! Oh, my poor little baby!
+my darling! God has sent you back to me, and I will keep you, I don't care
+what happens! What a cruel wretch I have been--oh, what a cruel wretch, my
+pretty!--to tear you from your home! But now you shall never leave it; no
+one shall take you away.” She gripped it in a succession of fierce hugs,
+and mumbled it--face and neck, and little cold wet hands and feet--with her
+kisses; and all the time she did not know the child was in its night-dress
+like herself, or that her own feet were bare, and her drapery as scanty as
+Idella's.
+
+A sense of the fact evanescently gleamed upon her with the appearance
+of Mrs. Bolton, lamp in hand, and the instantaneous appearance and
+disappearance of her husband at the back door through which she emerged.
+The two women spent the first moments of the lamp-light in making certain
+that Idella was sound and whole in every part, and then in making uncertain
+for ever how she came to be there. Whether she had wandered out in her
+sleep, and found her way home with dream-led feet, or whether she had
+watched till the house was quiet, and then stolen away, was what she could
+not tell them, and must always remain a mystery.
+
+“I don't believe but what Mr. Bolton had better go and wake up the Savors.
+You got to keep her for the night, I presume, but they'd ought to know
+where she is, and you can take her over there agin, come daylight.”
+
+“_Mrs_. Bolton!” shouted Annie, in a voice so deep and hoarse that
+it shook the heart of a woman who had never known fear of man. “If you
+say such a thing to me--if you ever say such a thing again--I--I--I will
+_hit_ you! Send Mr. Bolton for Idella's things--right away!”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+“Land!” said Mrs. Savor, when Bolton, after a long conciliatory preamble,
+explained that he did not believe Miss Kilburn felt a great deal like
+giving the child up again. “_I_ don't want it without it's satisfied
+to stay. I see last night it was just breakin' its heart for her, and I
+told William when we first missed her this mornin', and he was in such a
+pucker about her, I bet anything he was a mind to that the child had gone
+back to Miss Kilburn's. That's just the words I used; didn't I, Rebecca?
+I couldn't stand it to have no child _grievin'_ around.”
+
+Beyond this sentimental reluctance, Mrs. Savor later confessed to Annie
+herself that she was really accepting the charge of Idella in the same
+spirit of self-sacrifice as that in which Annie was surrendering it, and
+that she felt, when Mr. Peck first suggested it, that the child was better
+off with Miss Kilburn; only she hated to say so. Her husband seemed to
+think it would make up to her for the one they lost, but nothing could
+really do that.
+
+
+
+
+XXX.
+
+
+In a reverie of rare vividness following her recovery of the minister's
+child, Annie Kilburn dramatised an escape from all the failures and
+humiliations of her life in Hatboro'. She took Idella with her and went
+back to Rome, accomplishing the whole affair so smoothly and rapidly that
+she wondered at herself for not having thought of such a simple solution of
+her difficulties before. She even began to put some little things together
+for her flight, while she explained to old friends in the American colony
+that Idella was the orphan child of a country minister, which she had
+adopted. That old lady who had found her motives in returning to Hatboro'
+insufficient questioned her sharply _why_ she had adopted the
+minister's child, and did not find her answers satisfactory. They were such
+as also failed to pacify inquiry in Hatboro', where Annie remained, in
+spite of her reverie; but people accepted the fact, and accounted for it in
+their own way, and approved it, even though they could not quite approve
+her.
+
+The dramatic impressiveness of the minister's death won him undisputed
+favour, yet it failed to establish unity in his society. Supply after
+supply filled his pulpit, but the people found them all unsatisfactory when
+they remembered his preaching, and could not make up their minds to any
+one of them. They were more divided than ever, except upon the point of
+regretting Mr. Peck. But they distinguished, in honouring his memory. They
+revered his goodness and his wisdom, but they regarded his conduct of life
+as unpractical. They said there never was a more inspired teacher, but it
+was impossible to follow him, and he could not himself have kept the course
+he had marked out. They said, now that he was beyond recall, no one else
+could have built up the church in Hatboro' as he could, if he could only
+have let impracticable theories alone. Mr. Gerrish called many people to
+witness that this was what he had always said. He contended that it was the
+spirit of the gospel which you were to follow. He said that if Mr. Peck had
+gone to teaching among the mill hands, he would have been sick of it inside
+of six weeks; but he was a good Christian man, and no one wished less than
+Mr. Gerrish to reproach him for what was, after all, more an error of the
+head than the heart. His critics had it their own way in this, for he had
+not lived to offer that full exposition of his theory and justification of
+his purpose which he had been expected to give on the Sunday after he was
+killed; and his death was in no wise exegetic. It said no more to his
+people than it had said to Annie; it was a mere casualty; and his past
+life, broken and unfulfilled, with only its intimations and intentions of
+performance, alone remained.
+
+When people learned, as they could hardly help doing from Mrs. Savor's
+volubility, what his plan with regard to Idella had been, they instanced
+that in proof of the injuriousness of his idealism as applied to real
+life; and they held that she had been remanded in that strange way to Miss
+Kilburn's charge for some purpose which she must not attempt to cross. As
+the minister had been thwarted in another intent by death, it was a sign
+that he was wrong in this too, and that she could do better by the child
+than he had proposed.
+
+This was the sum of popular opinion; and it was further the opinion of Mrs.
+Gerrish, who gave more attention to the case than many others, that Annie
+had first taken the child because she hoped to get Mr. Peck, when she found
+she could not get Dr. Morrell; and that she would have been very glad to be
+rid of it if she had known how, but that she would have to keep it now for
+shame's sake.
+
+For shame's sake certainly, Annie would have done several other things, and
+chief of these would have been never to see Dr. Morrell again. She believed
+that he not only knew the folly she had confessed to him, but that he had
+divined the cowardice and meanness in which she had repented it, and she
+felt intolerably disgraced before the thought of him. She had imagined
+mainly because of him that escape to Rome which never has yet been
+effected, though it might have been attempted if Idella had not wakened
+ill from the sleep she sobbed herself into when she found herself safe in
+Annie's crib again.
+
+She had taken a heavy cold, and she moped lifelessly about during the day,
+and drowsed early again in the troubled cough-broken slumber.
+
+“That child ought to have the doctor,” said Mrs. Bolton, with the grim
+impartiality in which she masked her interference.
+
+“Well,” said Annie helplessly.
+
+At the end of the lung fever which followed, “It was a narrow chance,” said
+the doctor one morning; “but now I needn't come any more unless you send
+for me.”
+
+Annie stood at the door, where he spoke with his hand on the dash-board of
+his buggy before getting into it.
+
+She answered with one of those impulses that come from something deeper
+than intention. “I will send for you, then--to tell you how generous you
+are,” and in the look with which she spoke she uttered the full meaning
+that her words withheld.
+
+He flushed for pleasure of conscious desert, but he had to laugh and turn
+it off lightly. “I don't think I could come for that. But I'll look in to
+see Idella unprofessionally.”
+
+He drove away, and she remained at her door looking up at the summer blue
+sky that held a few soft white clouds, such as might have overhung the same
+place at the same hour thousands of years before, and such as would lazily
+drift over it in a thousand years to come. The morning had an immeasurable
+vastness, through which some crows flying across the pasture above the
+house sent their voices on the spacious stillness. A perception of the
+unity of all things under the sun flashed and faded upon her, as such
+glimpses do. Of her high intentions, nothing had resulted. An inexorable
+centrifugality had thrown her off at every point where she tried to cling.
+Nothing of what was established and regulated had desired her intervention;
+a few accidents and irregularities had alone accepted it. But now she felt
+that nothing withal had been lost; a magnitude, a serenity, a tolerance,
+intimated itself in the universal frame of things, where her failure, her
+recreancy, her folly, seemed for the moment to come into true perspective,
+and to show venial and unimportant, to be limited to itself, and to be even
+good in its effect of humbling her to patience with all imperfection and
+shortcoming, even her own. She was aware of the cessation of a struggle
+that has never since renewed itself with the old intensity; her wishes, her
+propensities, ceased in that degree to represent evil in conflict with the
+portion of good in her; they seemed so mixed and interwoven with the good
+that they could no longer be antagonised; for the moment they seemed in
+their way even wiser and better, and ever after to be the nature out of
+which good as well as evil might come.
+
+As she remained standing there, Mr. Brandreth came round the corner of the
+house, looking very bright and happy.
+
+“Miss Kilburn,” he said abruptly, “I want you to congratulate me. I'm
+engaged to Miss Chapley.”
+
+“Are you indeed, Mr. Brandreth? I do congratulate you with all my heart.
+She is a lovely girl.”
+
+“Yes, it's all right now,” said Mr. Brandreth. “I've come to tell you the
+first one, because you seemed to take an interest in it when I told you of
+the trouble about the Juliet. We hadn't come to any understanding before
+that, but that seemed to bring us both to the point, and--and we're
+engaged. Mother and I are going to New York for the winter; we think she
+can risk it; and at any rate she won't be separated from me; and we shall
+be back in our little home next May. You know that I'm to be with Mr.
+Chapley in his business?”
+
+“Why, no! This is _great_ news, Mr. Brandreth! I don't know what to
+say.”
+
+“You're very kind,” said the young man, and for the third or fourth time he
+wrung her hand. “It isn't a partnership, of course; but he thinks I can be
+of use to him.”
+
+“I know you can!” Annie adventured.
+
+“We are very busy getting ready--nearly everybody else is gone--and mother
+sent her kindest regards--you know she don't make calls--and I just ran up
+to tell you. Well, _good_-bye!”
+
+“_Good_-bye! Give my love to your mother, and to your-to Miss
+Chapley.”
+
+“I will.” He hurried off, and then came running back. “Oh, I forgot! About
+the Social Union fund. You know we've got about two hundred dollars from
+the theatricals, but the matter seems to have stopped there, and some of us
+think there'd better be some other disposition of the money. Have you any
+suggestion to make?”
+
+“No, none.”
+
+“Then I'll tell you. It's proposed to devote the money to beautifying the
+grounds around the soldiers' monument. They ought to be fenced and planted
+with flowers--turned into a little public garden. Everybody appreciates the
+interest you took in the Union, and we hoped you'd be pleased with that
+disposition of the money.”
+
+“It is very kind,” said Annie, with a meek submission that must have made
+him believe she was deeply touched.
+
+“As I'm not to be here this winter,” he continued, “we thought we had
+better leave the whole matter in your hands, and the money has been
+deposited in the bank subject to your order. It was Mrs. Munger's idea. I
+don't think she's ever felt just right about that evening of the dramatics,
+don't you know. _Good_-bye!”
+
+He ran off to escape her thanks for this proof of confidence in her taste
+and judgment, and he was gone beyond her protest before she emerged from
+her daze into a full sense of the absurdity of the situation.
+
+“Well, it's a very simple matter to let the money lie in the bank,” said
+Dr. Morrell, who came that evening to make his first unprofessional visit,
+and received with pure amusement the account of the affair, which she gave
+him with a strong infusion of vexation.
+
+“The way I was involved in this odious Social Union business from the
+first, and now have it left on my hands in the end, is maddening. Why, I
+can't get rid of it!” she replied.
+
+“Then, perhaps,” he comfortably suggested, “it's a sign you're not intended
+to get rid of it.”
+
+“What _do_ you mean?”
+
+“Why don't you go on,” he irresponsibly adventured further, “and establish
+a Social Union?”
+
+“Do you _mean_ it?”
+
+“What was that notion of his”--they usually spoke of the minister
+pronominally--“about getting the Savors going in a co-operative
+boarding-house at Fall River? Putney said something about it.”
+
+Annie explained, as she had heard it from him, and from the Savors since
+his death, the minister's scheme for a club, in which the members should
+contribute the labour and the provisions, and should live cheaply and
+wholesomely under the management of the Savors at first, and afterward
+should continue them in charge, or not, as they chose. “He seemed to
+have thought it out very carefully. But I supposed, of course, it was
+unpractical.”
+
+“Was that why you were going in for it?” asked the doctor; and then he
+spared her confusion in adding: “I don't see why it was unpractical. It
+seems to me a very good notion for a Social Union. Why not try it here?
+There isn't the same pressing necessity that there is in a big factory
+town; but you have the money, and you have the Savors to make a beginning.”
+
+His tone was still half bantering; but it had become more and more serious,
+so that she could say in earnest: “But the money is one of the drawbacks.
+It was Mr. Peck's idea that the working people ought to do it all
+themselves.”
+
+“Well, I should say that two-thirds of that money in the bank had come from
+them. They turned out in great force to Mr. Brandreth's theatricals. And
+wouldn't it be rather high-handed to use their money for anything but the
+Union?”
+
+“You don't suppose,” said Annie hotly, “that I would spend a cent of it
+on the grounds of that idiotic monument? I would pay for having it blown
+up with dynamite! No, I can't have anything more to do with the wretched
+affair. My touch is fatal.” The doctor laughed, and she added: “Besides, I
+believe most heartily with Mr. Peck that no person of means and leisure can
+meet working people except in the odious character of a patron, and if I
+didn't respect them, I respect myself too much for that. If I were ready to
+go in with them and start the Social Union on his basis, by helping do
+house-work--_scullion_-work--for it, and eating and living with them,
+I might try; but I know from experience I'm not. I haven't the need, and to
+pretend that I have, to forego my comforts and luxuries in a make-believe
+that I haven't them, would be too ghastly a farce, and I won't.”
+
+“Well, then, don't,” said the doctor, bent more perhaps on carrying his
+point in argument than on promoting the actual establishment of the Social
+Union. “But my idea is this: Take two-thirds or one-half of that money,
+and go to Savor, and say: 'Here! This is what Mr. Brandreth's theatricals
+swindled the shop-hands out of. It's honestly theirs, at least to control;
+and if you want to try that experiment of Mr. Peck's here in Hatboro', it's
+yours. We people of leisure, or comparative leisure, have really nothing
+in common with you people who work with your hands for a living; and as we
+really can't be friends with you, we won't patronise you. We won't advise
+you, and we won't help you; but here's the money. If you fail, you fail;
+and if you succeed, you won't succeed by our aid and comfort.'”
+
+The plan that Annie and Doctor Morrell talked over half in joke took a more
+and more serious character in her sense of duty to the minister's memory
+and the wish to be of use, which was not extinct in her, however she mocked
+and defied it. It was part of the irony of her fate that the people who
+were best able to counsel with her in regard to it were Lyra, whom she
+could not approve, and Jack Wilmington, whom she had always disliked. He
+was able to contribute some facts about the working of the Thayer Club
+at the Harvard Memorial Hall in Cambridge, and Lyra because she had been
+herself a hand, and would not forget it, was of use in bringing the scheme
+into favour with the hands. They felt easy with her, as they did with
+Putney, and for much the same reason: it is one of the pleasing facts of
+our conditions that people who are socially inferior like best those above
+them who are morally anomalous. It was really through Lyra that Annie got
+at the working people, and when it came to a formal conference, there
+was no one who could command their confidence like Putney, whom they saw
+mad-drunk two or three times a year, but always pulling up and fighting
+back to sanity against the enemy whose power some of them had felt too.
+
+No theory is so perfect as not to be subject to exceptions in the
+experiment, and in spite of her conviction of the truth of Mr. Peck's
+social philosophy, Annie is aware, through her simple and frank relations
+with the hands in a business matter, of mutual kindness which it does
+not account for. But perhaps the philosophy and the experiment were not
+contradictory; perhaps it was intended to cover only the cases in which
+they had no common interest. At anyrate, when the Peck Social Union, as its
+members voted to call it, at the suggestion of one of their own number, got
+in working order, she was as cordially welcomed to the charge of its funds
+and accounts as if she had been a hat-shop hand or a shoe-binder. She is
+really of use, for its working is by no means ideal, and with her wider
+knowledge she has suggested improvements and expedients for making both
+ends meet which were sometimes so reluctant to meet. She has kept a
+conscience against subsidising the Union from her own means; and she even
+accepts for her services a small salary, which its members think they
+ought to pay her. She owns this ridiculous, like all the make-believe work
+of rich people; a travesty which has no reality except the little sum it
+added to the greater sum of her superabundance. She is aware that she is
+a pensioner upon the real members of the Social Union for a chance to be
+useful, and that the work they let her do is the right of some one who
+needs it. She has thought of doing the work and giving the pay to another;
+but she sees that this would be pauperising and degrading another. So she
+dwells in a vicious circle, and waits, and mostly forgets, and is mostly
+happy.
+
+The Social Union itself, though not a brilliant success in all points, is
+still not a failure; and the promise of its future is in the fact that it
+continues to have a present. The people of Hatboro' are rather proud of
+it, and strangers visit it as one of the possible solutions of one of the
+social problems. It is predicted that it cannot go on; that it must either
+do better or do worse; but it goes on the same.
+
+Putney studies its existence in the light of his own infirmity, to which he
+still yields from time to time, as he has always done. He professes to find
+there a law which would account for a great many facts of human experience
+otherwise inexplicable. He does not attempt to define this occult
+preservative principle, but he offers himself and the Social Union as
+proofs of its existence; and he argues that if they can only last long
+enough they will finally be established in a virtue and prosperity as great
+as those of Mr. Gerrish and his store.
+
+Annie sometimes feels that nothing else can explain the maintenance of Lyra
+Wilmington's peculiar domestic relations at the point which perpetually
+invites comment and never justifies scandal. The situation seems to her as
+lamentable as ever. She grieves over Lyra, and likes her, and laughs with
+her; she no longer detests Jack Wilmington so much since he showed himself
+so willing and helpful about the Social Union; she thinks there must be a
+great deal of good in him, and sometimes she is sorry for him, and longs to
+speak again to Lyra about the wrong she is doing him. One of the dangers
+of having a very definite point of view is the temptation of abusing it to
+read the whole riddle of the painful earth. Annie has permitted herself to
+think of Lyra's position as one which would be impossible in a state of
+things where there was neither poverty nor riches, and there was neither
+luxury on one hand to allure, nor the fear of want to constrain on the
+other.
+
+When her recoil from the fulfilment of her volunteer pledge to Mr. Peck
+brought her face to face with her own weakness, there were two ways back
+to self-respect, either of which she might take. She might revert to her
+first opinion of him, and fortify herself in that contempt and rejection of
+his ideas, or she might abandon herself to them, with a vague intention of
+reparation to him, and accept them to the last insinuation of their logic.
+This was what she did, and while her life remained the same outwardly, it
+was inwardly all changed. She never could tell by what steps she reached
+her agreement with the minister's philosophy; perhaps, as a woman, it
+was not possible she should; but she had a faith concerning it to which
+she bore unswerving allegiance, and it was Putney's delight to witness
+its revolutionary effect on an old Hatboro' Kilburn, the daughter of a
+shrewd lawyer and canny politician like her father, and the heir of an
+aristocratic tradition, a gentlewoman born and bred. He declared himself
+a reactionary in comparison with her, and had the habit of taking the
+conservative side against her. She was in the joke of this; but it was a
+real trouble to her for a time that Dr. Morrell, after admitting the force
+of her reasons, should be content to rest in a comfortable inconclusion
+as to his conduct, till one day she reflected that this was what she was
+herself doing, and that she differed from him only in the openness with
+which she proclaimed her opinions. Being a woman, her opinions were treated
+by the magnates of Hatboro' as a good joke, the harmless fantasies of an
+old maid, which she would get rid of if she could get anybody to marry her;
+being a lady, and very well off, they were received with deference, and
+she was left to their uninterrupted enjoyment. Putney amused himself by
+saying that she was the fiercest apostle of labour that never did a stroke
+of work; but no one cared half so much for all that as for the question
+whether her affair with Dr. Morrell was a friendship or a courtship. They
+saw an activity of attention on his part which would justify the most
+devout belief in the latter, and yet they were confronted with the fact
+that it so long remained eventless. The two theories, one that she was
+amusing herself with him, and the other that he was just playing with her,
+divided public opinion, but they did not molest either of the parties to
+the mystery; and the village, after a season of acute conjecture, quiesced
+into that sarcastic sufferance of the anomaly into which it may have been
+noticed that small communities are apt to subside from such occasions.
+Except for some such irreconcilable as Mrs. Gerrish, it was a good joke
+that if you could not find Dr. Morrell in his office after tea, you could
+always find him at Miss Kilburn's. Perhaps it might have helped solve the
+mystery if it had been known that she could not accept the situation,
+whatever it really was, without satisfying herself upon two points, which
+resolved themselves into one in the process of the inquiry.
+
+She asked, apparently as preliminary to answering a question of his, “Have
+you heard that gossip about my--being in--caring for the poor man?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“And did you--what did you think?”
+
+“That it wasn't true. I knew if there were anything in it, you couldn't
+have talked him over with me.”
+
+She was silent. Then she said, in a low voice: “No, there couldn't have
+been. But not for that reason alone, though it's very delicate and generous
+of you to think of it, very large-minded; but because it _couldn't_
+have been. I could have worshipped him, but I couldn't have loved him--any
+more,” she added, with an implication that entirely satisfied him, “than I
+could have worshipped _you_.”
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Annie Kilburn, by William Dean Howells
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