The Turmoil, A Novel
by Booth Tarkington
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

To Laurel.

There is a midland city in the heart of fair, open country, a dirty and
wonderful city nesting dingily in the fog of its own smoke. The stranger
must feel the dirt before he feels the wonder, for the dirt will be upon him
instantly. It will be upon him and within him, since he must breathe it, and
he may care for no further proof that wealth is here better loved than
cleanliness; but whether he cares or not, the negligently tended streets
incessantly press home the point, and so do the flecked and grimy citizens. At
a breeze he must smother in the whirlpools of dust, and if he should decline
at any time to inhale the smoke he has the meager alternative of suicide.

The smoke is like the bad breath of a giant panting for more and more riches.
He gets them and pants the fiercer, smelling and swelling prodigiously. He
has a voice, a hoarse voice, hot and rapacious trained to one tune: "Wealth!
I will get Wealth I will make Wealth! I will sell Wealth for more Wealth! My
house shall be dirty, my garment shall be dirty, and I will foul my neighbor
so that he cannot be clean--but I will get Wealth! There shall be no clean
thing about me: my wife shall be dirty and my child shall be dirty, but I
will get Wealth!"  And yet it is not wealth that he is so greedy for: what the
giant really wants is hasty riches. To get these he squanders wealth upon the
four winds, for wealth is in the smoke.

Not so long ago as a generation, there was no panting giant here, no heaving,
grimy city;  there was but a pleasant big town of neighborly people who had
understanding of one another, being, on the whole, much of the same type. It
was a leisurely and kindly place--"homelike," it was called--and when the
visitor had been taken through the State Asylum for the Insane and made to
appreciate the view of the cemetery from a little hill, his host's duty as
Baedeker was done. The good burghers were given to jogging comfortably about
in phaetons or in surreys for a family drive on Sunday. No one was very rich;
few were very poor; the air was clean, and there was time to live.

But there was a spirit abroad in the land, and it was strong here as
elsewhere--a spirit that had moved in the depths of the American soil and
labored there, sweating, till it stirred the surface, rove the mountains, and
emerged, tangible and monstrous, the god of all good American hearts--
Bigness. And that god wrought the panting giant.

In the souls of the burghers there had always been the profound longing for
size. Year by year the longing increased until it became an accumulated
force: We must Grow! We must be Big! We must be Bigger! Bigness means
Money! And the thing began to happen;  their longing became a mighty Will. We
must be Bigger! Bigger! Bigger! Get people here! Coax them here! Bribe
them! Swindle them into coming, if you must, but get them! Shout them into
coming! Deafen them into coming! Any kind of people; all kinds of people!
We must be Bigger! Blow! Boost! Brag! Kill the fault-finder! Scream and
bellow to the Most High: Bigness is patriotism and honor! Bigness is love and
life and happiness! Bigness is Money! We want Bigness!

They got it. From all the states the people came; thinly at first, and
slowly, but faster and faster in thicker and thicker swarms as the quick years
went by. White people came, and black people and brown people and yellow
people; the negroes came from the South by the thousands and thousands,
multiplying by other thousands and thousands faster than they could die. From
the four quarters of the earth the people came, the broken and the unbroken,
the tame and the wild--Germans, Irish, Italians, Hungarians, Scotch, Welsh,
English, French, Swiss, Swedes, Norwegians, Greeks, Poles, Russian Jews,
Dalmatians, Armenians, Rumanians, Servians, Persians, Syrians, Japanese,
Chinese, Turks, and every hybrid that these could propagate. And if there
were no Eskimos nor Patagonians, what other human strain that earth might
furnish failed to swim and bubble in this crucible?

With Bigness came the new machinery and the rush; the streets began to roar
and rattle, the houses to tremble; the pavements were worn under the tread of
hurrying multitudes. The old, leisurely, quizzical look of the faces was lost
in something harder and warier; and a cockney type began to emerge
discernibly--a cynical young mongrel, barbaric of feature, muscular and
cunning; dressed in good fabrics fashioned apparently in imitation of the
sketches drawn by newspaper comedians. The female of his kind came with him
--a pale girl, shoddy and a little rouged; and they communicated in a nasal
argot, mainly insolences and elisions. Nay, the common speech of the people
showed change: in place of the old midland vernacular, irregular but clean,
and not unwholesomely drawling, a jerky dialect of coined metaphors began to
be heard, held together by GUNNAS and GOTTAS and much fostered by the public
journals.

The city piled itself high in the center, tower on tower for a nucleus, and
spread itself out over the plain, mile after mile; and in its vitals, like
benevolent bacilli contending with malevolent in the body of a man, missions
and refuges offered what resistance they might to the saloons and all the
hells that cities house and shelter. Temptation and ruin were ready
commodities on the market for purchase by the venturesome; highwaymen walked
the streets at night and sometimes killed; snatching thieves were busy
everywhere in the dusk; while house-breakers were a common apprehension and
frequent reality. Life itself was somewhat safer from intentional destruction
than it was in medieval Rome during a faction war--though the Roman murderer
was more like to pay for his deed--but death or mutilation beneath the wheels
lay in ambush at every crossing.

The politicians let the people make all the laws they liked; it did not matter
much, and the taxes went up, which is good for politicians. Law-making was a
pastime of the people; nothing pleased them more. Singular fermentation of
their humor, they even had laws forbidding dangerous speed. More marvelous
still, they had a law forbidding smoke! They forbade chimneys to smoke and
they forbade cigarettes to smoke. They made laws for all things and forgot
them immediately; though sometimes they would remember after a while, and
hurry to make new laws that the old laws should be enforced--and then forget
both new and old. Wherever enforcement threatened Money or Votes --or
wherever it was too much to bother--it became a joke. Influence was the law.

So the place grew. And it grew strong. Straightway when he came, each man
fell to the same worship:

        Give me of thyself, O Bigness:
        Power to get more power!
        Riches to get more riches!
        Give me of thy sweat that I may sweat more!
        Give me Bigness to get more Bigness to myself,
        O Bigness, for Thine is the Power and the Glory!
        And there is no end but Bigness, ever and for ever!

The Sheridan Building was the biggest skyscraper; the Sheridan Trust Company
was the biggest of its kind, and Sheridan himself had been the biggest builder
and breaker and truster and buster under the smoke. He had come from a
country cross-roads, at the beginning of the growth, and he had gone up and
down in the booms and relapses of that period; but each time he went down he
rebounded a little higher, until finally, after a year of overwork and
anxiety--the latter not decreased by a chance, remote but possible, of
recuperation from the former in the penitentiary--he found himself on top,
with solid substance under his feet; and thereafter "played it safe."  But his
hunger to get was unabated, for it was in the very bones of him and grew
fiercer.

He was the city incarnate. He loved it, calling it God's country, as he
called the smoke Prosperity, breathing the dingy cloud with relish. And when
soot fell upon his cuff he chuckled; he could have kissed it. "It's good! It's
good!" he said, and smacked his lips in gusto. "Good, clean soot; it's our
life-blood, God bless it!"  The smoke was one of his great enthusiasms; he
laughed at a committee of plaintive housewives who called to beg his aid
against it. "Smoke's what brings your husbands' money home on Saturday night,
"he told them, jovially. "Smoke may hurt your little shrubberies in the front
yard some, but it's the catarrhal climate and the adenoids that starts your
chuldern coughing. Smoke makes the climate better. Smoke means good health:
it makes the people wash more. They have to wash so much they wash off the
microbes. You go home and ask your husbands what smoke puts in their pockets
out o' the pay-roll--and you'll come around next time to get me to turn out
more smoke instead o' chokin' it off!"

It was Narcissism in him to love the city so well; he saw his reflection in
it; and, like it, he was grimy, big, careless, rich, strong, and unquenchably
optimistic. From the deepest of his inside all the way out he believed it was
the finest city in the world. "Finest" was his word. He thought of it as his
city as he thought of his family as his family; and just as profoundly
believed his city to be the finest city in the world, so did he believe his
family to be--in spite of his son Bibbs--the finest family in the world. As a
matter of fact, he knew nothing worth knowing about either.

Bibbs Sheridan was a musing sort of boy, poor in health, and considered the
failure--the "odd one"--of the family. Born during that most dangerous and
anxious of the early years, when the mother fretted and the father took his
chance, he was an ill-nourished baby, and grew meagerly, only lengthwise,
through a feeble childhood. At his christening he was committed for life to
"Bibbs" mainly through lack of imagination on his mother's part, for though it
was her maiden name, she had no strong affection for it; but it was "her turn"
to name the baby, and, as she explained later, she "couldn't think of anything
else she liked AT ALL!"  She offered this explanation one day when the sickly
boy was nine and after a long fit of brooding had demanded some reason for his
name's being Bibbs. He requested then with unwonted vehemence to be allowed
to exchange names with his older brother, Roscoe Conkling Sheridan, or with
the oldest, James Sheridan, Junior, and upon being refused went down into the
cellar and remained there the rest of that day. And the cook, descending
toward dusk, reported that he had vanished; but a search revealed that he was
in the coal-pile, completely covered and still burrowing. Removed by force and
carried upstairs, he maintained a cryptic demeanor, refusing to utter a
syllable of explanation, even under the lash. This obvious thing was wholly a
mystery to both parents; the mother was nonplussed, failed to trace and
connect; and the father regarded his son as a stubborn and mysterious fool, an
impression not effaced as the years went by.

At twenty-two, Bibbs was physically no more than the outer scaffolding of a
man, waiting for the building to begin inside--a long-shanked, long-faced,
rickety youth, sallow and hollow and haggard, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with
a peculiar expression of countenance; indeed, at first sight of Bibbs Sheridan
a stranger might well be solicitous, for he seemed upon the point of tears.
But to a slightly longer gaze, not grief, but mirth, was revealed as his
emotion; while a more searching scrutiny was proportionately more puzzling--he
seemed about to burst out crying or to burst out laughing, one or the other,
inevitably, but it was impossible to decide which. And Bibbs never, on any
occassion of his life, either laughed aloud or wept.

He was a "disappointment" to his father. At least that was the parent's word
--a confirmed and established word after his first attempt to make a "business
man" of the boy. He sent Bibbs to "begin at the bottom and learn from the
ground up" in the machine-shop of the Sheridan Automatic Pump Works, and at
the end of six months the family physician sent Bibbs to begin at the bottom
and learn from the ground up in a sanitarium.

"You needn't worry, mamma," Sheridan told his wife. "There's nothin' the
matter with Bibbs except he hates work so much it makes him sick. I put him
in the machine-shop, and I guess I know what I'm doin' about as well as the
next man. Ole Doc Gurney always was one o' them nutty alarmists. Does he
think I'd do anything 'd be bad for my own flesh and blood? He makes me
tired!"

Anything except perfectly definite health or perfectly definite disease was
incomprehensible to Sheridan. He had a genuine conviction that lack of
physical persistence in any task involving money must be due to some subtle
weakness of character itself, to some profound shiftlessness or slyness. He
understood typhoid fever, pheumonia, and appendicitis--one had them, and
either died or got over them and went back to work--but when the word
"nervous" appeared in a diagnosis he became honestly suspicious: he had the
feeling that there was something contemptible about it, that there was a
nigger in the wood-pile somewhere.

"Look at me," he said. "Look at what I did at his age! Why, when I was
twenty years old, wasn't I up every morning at four o'clock choppin' wood--
yes! and out in the dark and the snow--to build a fire in a country grocery
store? And here Bibbs has to go and have a DOCTOR because he can't--Pho! it
makes me tired! If he'd gone at it like a man he wouldn't be sick."

He paced the bedroom--the usual setting for such parental discussions--in his
nightgown, shaking his big, grizzled head and gesticulating to his bedded
spouse. "My Lord!" he said. "If a little, teeny bit o' work like this is too
much for him, why, he ain't fit for anything! It's nine-tenths imagination,
and the rest of it--well, I won't say it's deliberate, but I WOULD like to
know just how much of it's put on!"

"Bibbs didn't want the doctor," said Mrs. Sheridan. "It was when he was here
to dinner that night, and noticed how he couldn't eat anything. Honey, you
better come to bed."

"Eat!" he snorted. "Eat! It's work that makes men eat! And it's imagination
that keeps people from eatin'. Busy men don't get time for that kind of
imagination; and there's another thing you'll notice about good health, if
you'll take the trouble to look around you, Mrs. Sheridan: busy men haven't
got time to be sick and they don't GET sick. You just think it over and
you'll find that ninety-nine per cent. of the sick people you know are either
women or loafers. Yes, ma'am!"

"Honey," she said again, drowsily, "you better come to bed."

"Look at the other boys," her husband bade her. "Look at Jim and Roscoe. Look
at how THEY work! There isn't a shiftless bone in their bodies. Work never
made Jim or Roscoe sick. Jim takes half the load off my shoulders already.
Right now there isn't a harder-workin', brighter business man in this city
than Jim. I've pushed him, but he give me something to push AGAINST. You
can't push 'nervous dyspepsia'! And look at Roscoe; just LOOK at what that
boy's done for himself, and barely twenty-seven years old-- married, got a
fine wife, and ready to build for himself with his own money, when I put up
the New House for you and Edie."

"Papa, you'll catch cold in your bare feet," she murmured. "You better come
to bed."

"And I'm just as proud of Edie, for a girl," he continued, emphatically, "as I
am of Jim and Roscoe for boys. She'll make some man a mighty good wife when
the time comes. She's the prettiest and talentedest girl in the United
States! Look at that poem she wrote when she was in school and took the prize
with; it's the best poem I ever read in my life, and she'd never even tried to
write one before. It's the finest thing I ever read, and R. T. Bloss said so,
too; and I guess he's a good enough literary judge for me-- turns out more
advertisin' liter'cher than any man in the city. I tell you she's smart!
Look at the way she worked me to get me to promise the New House--and I guess
you had your finger in that, too, mamma! This old shack's good enough for me,
but you and little Edie 'll have to have your way. I'll get behind her and
push her the same as I will Jim and Roscoe. I tell you I'm mighty proud o'
them three chuldern! But Bibbs--"  He paused, shaking his head. "Honest,
mamma, when I talk to men that got ALL their boys doin' well and worth their
salt, why, I have to keep my mind on Jim and Roscoe and forget about Bibbs."

Mrs. Sheridan tossed her head fretfully upon the pillow. "You did the best
you could, papa," she said, impatiently, "so come to bed and quit reproachin'
youself for it."

He glared at her indignantly. "Reproachin' myself!" he snorted. "I ain't
doin' anything of the kind! What in the name o' goodness would I want to
reproach myself for? And it wasn't the 'best I could,' either. It was the
best ANYBODY could! I was givin' him a chance to show what was in him and
make a man of himself--and here he goes and gets 'nervous dyspepsia' on me!"

He went to the old-fashioned gas-fixture, turned out the light, and muttered
his way morosely into bed.

"What?" said his wife, crossly, bothered by a subsequent mumbling.

"More like hook-worm, I said," he explained, speaking louder. "I don't know
what to do with him!"

Beginning at the beginning and learning from the ground up was a long course
for Bibbs at the sanitarium, with milk and "zwieback" as the basis of
instruction; and the months were many and tiresome before he was considered
near enough graduation to go for a walk leaning on a nurse and a cane. These
and subsequent months saw the planning, the building, and the completion of
the New House; and it was to that abode of Bigness that Bibbs was brought when
the cane, without the nurse, was found sufficient to his support.

Edith met him at the station. "Well, well, Bibbs!" she said, as he came
slowly through the gates, the last of all the travelers from that train. She
gave his hand a brisk little shake, averting her eyes after a quick glance at
him, and turning at once toward the passage to the street. "Do you think they
ought to 've let you come? You certainly don't look well!"

"But I certainly do look better," he returned, in a voice as slow as his gait;
a drawl that was a necessity, for when Bibbs tried to speak quickly he
stammered. "Up to about a month ago it took two people to see me. They had
to get me in a line between 'em!"

Edith did not turn her eyes directly toward him again, after her first quick
glance; and her expression, in spite of her, showed a faint, troubled
distaste, the look of a healthy person pressed by some obligation of business
to visit a "bad" ward in a hospital. She was nineteen, fair and slim, with
small, unequal features, but a prettiness of color and a brilliancy of eyes
that created a total impression close upon beauty. Her movements were eager
and restless: there was something about her, as kind old ladies say, that was
very sweet; and there was something that was hurried and breathless. This was
new to Bibbs; it was a perceptible change since he had last seen her, and he
bent upon her a steady, whimsical scrutiny as they stood at the curb, waiting
for an automobile across the street to disengage itself from the traffic.

"That's the new car," she said. "Everything's new. We've got four now,
besides Jim's. Roscoe's got two."

"Edith, you look--" he began, and paused.

"Oh, WE're all well," she said, briskly; and then, as if something in his tone
had caught her as significant, "Well, HOW do I look, Bibbs?"

"You look--"  He paused again, taking in the full length of her--her trim
brown shoes, her scant, tapering, rough skirt, and her coat of brown and
green, her long green tippet and her mad little rough hat in the mad mode--
all suited to the October day.

"How do I look?" she insisted.

"You look," he answered, as his examination ended upon an incrusted watch of
platinum and enamel at her wrist, "you look--expensive!"  That was a
substitute for what he intended to say, for her constraint and preoccupation,
manifested particularly in her keeping her direct glance away from him, did
not seem to grant the privilege of impulsive intimacies.

"I expect I am!" she laughed, and sidelong caught the direction of his glance.
"Of course I oughtn't to wear it in the daytime--it's an evening thing, for
the theater--by my day wrist-watch is out of gear. Bobby Lamhorn broke it
yesterday; he's a regular rowdy sometimes. Do you want Claus to help you in?"

"Oh no," said Bibbs. "I'm alive."  And after a fit of panting subsequent to
his climbing into the car unaided, he added, "Of course, I have to TELL
people!"

"We only got your telegram this morning," she said, as they began to move
rapidly through the "wholesale district" neighboring the station. "Mother
said she'd hardly expected you this month."

"They seemed to be through with me up there in the country," he explained,
gently. "At least they said they were, and they wouldn't keep me any longer,
because so many really sick people wanted to get in. They told me to go home
--and I didn't have any place else to go. It 'll be all right, Edith; I'll
sit in the woodshed until after dark every day."

"Pshaw!"  She laughed nervously. "Of course we're all of us glad to have you
back."

"Yes?" he said. "Father?"

"Of course! Didn't he write and tell you to come home?"  She did not turn to
him with the question. All the while she rode with her face directly forward.

"No," he said; "father hasn't written."

She flushed a little. "I expect I ought to 've written sometime, or one of
the boys--"

"Oh no; that was all right."

"You can't think how busy we've all been this year, Bibbs. I often planned to
write--and then, just as I was going to, something would turn up. And I'm
sure it's been just the same way with Jim and Roscoe. Of course we knew mamma
was writing often and--"

"Of course!" he said, readily. "There's a chunk of coal fallen on your glove,
Edith. Better flick it off before it smears. My word! I'd almost forgotten
how sooty it is here."

"We've been having very bright weather this month--for us."  She blew the
flake of soot into the air, seeming relieved.

He looked up at the dingy sky, wherein hung the disconsolate sun like a cold
tin pan nailed up in a smoke-house by some lunatic, for a decoration. "Yes,"
said Bibbs. "It's very gay."  A few moments later, as they passed a corner,
"Aren't we going home?" he asked.

"Why, yes!"  Did you want to go somewhere else first?"

"No. Your new driver's taking us out of the way, isn't he?"

"No. This is right. We're going straight home."

"But we've passed the corner. We always turned--"

"Good gracious!" she cried. "Didn't you know we'd moved? Didn't you know we
were in the New House?"

"Why, no!" said Bibbs. "Are you?"

"We've been there a month! Good gracious! Didn't you know--"  She broke off,
flushing again, and then went on hastily: "Of course, mamma's never been so
busy in her life; we ALL haven't had time to do anything but keep on the hop.
Mamma couldn't even come to the station to-day. Papa's got some of his
business friends and people from around the OLD-house neighborhood coming
to-night for a big dinner and 'house-warming'--dreadful kind of people--but
mamma's got it all on her hands. She's never sat down a MINUTE; and if she
did, papa would have her up again before--"

"Of course," said Bibbs. "Do you like the new place, Edith?"

"I don't like some of the things father WOULD have in it, but it's the finest
house in town, and that ought to be good enough for me! Papa bought one thing
I like--a view of the Bay of Naples in oil that's perfectly beautiful; it's
the first thing you see as you come in the front hall, and it's eleven feet
long. But he would have that old fruit picture we had in the Murphy Street
house hung up in the new dining-room. You remember it--a table and a
watermelon sliced open, and a lot of rouged-looking apples and some shiny
lemons, with two dead prairie-chickens on a chair? He bought it at a
furniture-store years and years ago, and he claims it's a finer picture than
any they saw in the museums, that time he took mamma to Europe. But it's
horribly out of date to have those things in dining-rooms, and I caught Bobby
Lamhorn giggling at it; and Sibyl made fun of it, too, with Bobby, and then
told papa she agreed with him about its being such a fine thing, and said he
did just right to insist on having it where he wanted it. She makes me tired!
Sibyl!"

Edith's first constraint with her brother, amounting almost to awkwardness,
vanished with this theme, though she still kept her full gaze always to the
front, even in the extreme ardor of her denunciation of her sister-in-law.

"SIBYL!" she repeated, with such heat and vigor that the name seemed to strike
fire on her lips. "I'd like to know why Roscoe couldn't have married somebody
from HERE that would have done us some good! He could have got in with Bobby
Lamhorn years ago just as well as now, and Bobby 'd have introduced him to the
nicest girls in town, but instead of that he had to go and pick up this Sibyl
Rink! I met some awfully nice people from her town when mamma and I were at
Atlantic City, last spring, and not one had ever heard of the Rinks! Not even
HEARD of 'em!"

"I thought you were great friends with Sibyl," Bibbs said.

"Up to the time I found her out!" the sister returned, with continuing
vehemence. "I've found out some things about Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan lately --"

"It's only lately?"

"Well--" Edith hesitated, her lips setting primly. "Of course, I always did
see that she never cared the snap of her little finger about ROSCOE!"

"It seems," said Bibbs, in laconic protest, "that she married him."

The sister emitted a shrill cry, to be interpreted as contemptuous laughter,
and, in her emotion, spoke too impulsively:  "Why, she'd have married YOU!"

"No, no," he said; "she couldn't be that bad!"

"I didn't mean--" she began, distressed. "I only meant--I didn't mean--"

"Never mind, Edith," he consoled her. "You see, she couldn't have married me,
because I didn't know her; and besides, if she's as mercenary as all that
she'd have been too clever. The head doctor even had to lend me the money for
my ticket home."

"I didn't mean anything unpleasant about YOU," Edith babbled. "I only meant I
thought she was the kind of girl who was so simply crazy to marry somebody
she'd have married anybody that asked her."

"Yes, yes," said Bibbs, "it's all straight."  And, perceiving that his
sister's expression was that of a person whose adroitness has set matters
prefectly to rights, he chuckled silently.

"Roscoe's perfectly lovely to her," she continued, a moment later. "Too
lovely! If he'd wake up a little and lay down the law, some day, like a MAN,
I guess she'd respect him more and learn to behave herself!"

"'Behave'?"

"Oh, well, I mean she's so insincere," said Edith, characteristically evasive
when it came to stating the very point to which she had led, and in this not
unique of her sex.

Bibbs contented himself with a non-committal gesture. "Business is crawling
up the old streets," he said, his long, tremulous hand indicating a vasty
structure in course of erection. "The boarding-houses come first and then
the--"

"That isn't for shops," she informed him. "That's a new investment of papa's
--the 'Sheridan Apartments.'"

"Well, well," he murmured. "I supposed 'Sheridan' was almost well enough
known here already."

"Oh, we're well enough known ABOUT!" she said, impatiently. "I guess there
isn't a man, woman, child, or nigger baby in town that doesn't know who we
are. But we aren't in with the right people."

"No!" he exclaimed. "Who's all that?"

"Who's all what?"

"The 'right' people.'"

"You know what I mean: the best people, the old families--the people that
have the real social position in this town and that know they've got it."

Bibbs indulged in his silent chuckle again; he seemed greatly amused. "I
thought that the people who actually had the real what-you-may-call-it didn't
know it," he said. "I've always understood that it was very unsatisfactory,
because if you thought about it you didn't have it, and if you had it you
didn't know it."

"That's just bosh," she retorted. "They know it in this town, all right! I
found out a lot of things, long before we began to think of building out in
this direction. The right people in this town aren't always the
society-column ones, and they mix around with outsiders, and they don't all
belong to any one club--they're taken in all sorts into all their clubs--but
they're a clan, just the same; and they have the clan feeling and they're just
as much We, Us and Company as any crowd you read about anywhere in the world.
Most of 'em were here long before papa came, and the grandfathers of the girls
of my age knew each other, and--"

"I see," Bibbs interrupted, gravely. "Their ancestors fled together from many
a stricken field, and Crusaders' blood flows in their veins. I always
understood the first house was built by an old party of the name of Vertrees
who couldn't get along with Dan'l Boone, and hurried away to these parts
because Dan'l wanted him to give back a gun he'd lent him."

Edith gave a little ejaculation of alarm. "You mustn't repeat that story,
Bibbs, even if it's true. The Vertreeses are THE best family, and of course
the very oldest here;  they were an old family even before Mary Vertrees's
great-great-grandfather came west and founded this settlement. He came from
Lynn, Massachusetts, and they have relatives there YET--some of the best
people in Lynn!"

"No!" exclaimed Bibbs, incredulously.

"And there are other old families like the Vertreeses," she went on, not
heeding him; "the Lamhorns and the Kittersbys and the J. Palmerston Smiths--"

"Strange names to me," he interrupted. "Poor things! None of them have my
acquaintance."

"No, that's just it!" she cried. "And papa had never even heard the name of
Vertrees! Mrs. Vertrees went with some anti-smoke committee to see him, and
he told her that smoke was what made her husband bring home his wages from the
pay-roll on Saturday night! HE told us about it, and I thought I just
couldn't live through the night, I was so ashamed! Mr. Vertrees has always
lived on his income, and papa didn't know him, of course. They're the
stiffist, most elegant people in the whole town. And to crown it all, papa
went and bought the next lot to the old Vertrees country mansion--it's in the
very heart of the best new residence district now, and that's where the New
House is, right next door to them--and I must say it makes their place look
rather shabby! I met Mary Vertrees when I joined the Mission Service Helpers,
but she never did any more than just barely bow to me, and since papa's break
I doubt if she'll do that! They haven't called."

"And you think if I spread this gossip about Vertrees the First stealing Dan'l
Boone's gun, the chances that they WILL call--"

"Papa knows what a break he made with Mrs. Vertrees. I made him understand
that," said Edith, demurely, "and he's promised to try and meet Mr. Vertrees
and be nice to him. It's just this way: if we don't know THEM, it's
practically no use in our having build the New House; and if we DO know them
and they're decent to us, we're right with the right people. They can do the
whole thing for us. Bobby Lamhorn told Sibyl he was going to bring his mother
to call on her and on mamma, but it was weeks ago, and I notice he hasn't done
it; and if Mrs. Vertrees decides not to know us, I'm darn sure Mrs. Lamhorn
'll never come. That's ONE thing Sibyl didn't manage! She SAID Bobby offered
to bring his mother--"

"You say he is a friend of Roscoe's?" Bibbs asked.

"Oh, he's a friend of the whole family," she returned, with a petulance which
she made an effort to disguise. "Roscoe and he got acquainted somewhere, and
they take him to the theater about every other night. Sibyl has him to lunch,
too, and keeps--"  She broke off with an angry little jerk of the head. "We
can see the New House from the second corner ahead. Roscoe has built straight
across the street from us, you know. Honestly, Sibyl makes me think of a
snake, sometimes--the way she pulls the wool over people's eyes! She honeys
up to papa and gets anything in the world she wants out of him, and then makes
fun of him behind his back--yes, and to his face, but HE can't see it! She
got him to give her a twelve-thousand-dollar porch for their house after it
was--"

"Good heavens!" said Bibbs, staring ahead as they reached the corner and the
car swung to the right, following a bend in the street. "Is that the New
House?"

"Yes. What do you think of it?"

"Well," he drawled, "I'm pretty sure the sanitarium's about half a size
bigger; I can't be certain till I measure."

And a moment later, as they entered the driveway, he added, seriously: "But
it's beautiful!"

It was gray stone, with long roofs of thick green slate. An architect who
loved the milder "Gothic motives" had built what he liked: it was to be seen
at once that he had been left unhampered, and he had wrought a picture out of
his head into a noble and exultant reality. At the same time a
landscape-designer had played so good a second, with ready-made accessories of
screen, approach and vista, that already whatever look of newness remained
upon the place was to its advantage, as showing at least one thing yet clean
under the grimy sky. For, though the smoke was thinner in this direction, and
at this long distance from the heart of the town, it was not absent, and
under tutelage of wind and weather could be malignant even here, where cows
had wandered in the meadows and corn had been growing not ten years gone.

Altogether, the New House was a success. It was one of those architects'
successes which leave the owners veiled in privacy; it revealed nothing of the
people who lived in it save that they were rich. There are houses that cannot
be detached from their own people without protesting: every inch of mortar
seems to mourn the separation, and such a house--no matter what be done to
it--is ever murmurous with regret, whispering the old name sadly to itself
unceasingly. But the New House was of a kind to change hands without emotion.
In our swelling cities, great places of its type are useful as financial
gauges of the business tides; rich families, one after another, take title and
occupy such houses as fortunes rise and fall--they mark the high tide. It was
impossible to imagine a child's toy wagon left upon a walk or driveway of the
New House, and yet it was--as Bibbs rightly called it-- "beautiful."

What the architect thought of the "Golfo di Napoli," which hung in its vast
gold revel of rococo frame against the gray wood of the hall, is to be
conjectured--perhaps he had not seen it.

"Edith, did you say only eleven feet?" Bibbs panted, staring at it, as the
white-jacketed twin of a Pullman porter helped him to get out of his overcoat.

"Eleven without the frame," she explained. "It's splendid, don't you think?
It lightens things up so. The hall was kind of gloomy before."

"No gloom now!" said Bibbs.

"This statue in the corner is pretty, too," she remarked. "Mamma and I bought
that."  And Bibbs turned at her direction to behold, amid a grove of tubbed
palms, a "life-size," black-bearded Moor, of a plastic compositon painted with
unappeasable gloss and brilliancy. Upon his chocolate head he wore a gold
turban; in his hand he held a gold-tipped spear; and for the rest, he was red
and yellow and black and silver.

"Hallelujah!" was the sole comment of the returned wanderer, and Edith, saying
she would "find mamma," left him blinking at the Moor. Presently, after she
had disappeared, he turned to the colored man who stood waiting, Bibbs's
traveling-bag in his hand. "What do YOU think of it?" Bibbs asked, solemnly.

"Gran'!" replied the servitor. "She mightly hard to dus'. Dus' git in all
'em wrinkles. Yessuh, she mighty hard to dus'."

"I expect she must be," said Bibbs, his glance returning reflectively to the
black bull beard for a moment. "Is there a place anywhere I could lie down?"

"Yessuh. We got one nem spare rooms all fix up fo' you, suh. Right up
staihs, suh. Nice room."

He led the way, and Bibbs followed slowly, stopping at intervals to rest, and
noting a heavy increase in the staff of service since the exodus from the
"old" house. Maids and scrubwomen were at work under the patently nominal
direction of another Pullman porter, who was profoundly enjoying his own
affectation of being harassed with care.

"Ev'ything got look spick an' span fo' the big doin's to-night," Bibbs's
guide explained, chuckling. "Yessuh, we got big doin's to-night! Big
doin's!"

The room to which he conducted his lagging charge was furnished in every
particular like a room in a new hotel; and Bibbs found it pleasant-- though,
indeed, any room with a good bed would have seemed pleasant to him after his
journey. He stretched himself flat immediately, and having replied "Not now"
to the attendant's offer to unpack the bag, closed his eyes wearily.

White-jacket, racially sympathetic, lowered the window-shades and made an exit
on tiptoe, encountering the other white-jacket--the harassed overseer --in the
hall without. Said the emerging one: "He mighty shaky, Mist' Jackson. Drop
right down an' shet his eyes. Eyelids all black. Rich folks gotta go same as
anybody else. Anybody ast me if I change 'ith 'at ole boy --No, suh! Le'm
keep 'is money; I keep my black skin an' keep out the ground!"

Mr. Jackson expressed the same preference. "Yessuh, he look tuh me like
somebody awready laid out," he concluded. And upon the stairway landing, near
by, two old women, on all-fours at their work, were likewise pessimistic.

"Hech!" said one, lamenting in a whisper. "It give me a turn to see him go
by--white as wax an' bony as a dead fish! Mrs. Cronin, tell me: d'it make ye
kind o' sick to look at um?"

"Sick? No more than the face of a blessed angel already in heaven!"

"Well," said the other, "I'd a b'y o' me own come home t' die once--"  She
fell silent at a rustling of skirts in the corridor above them.

It was Mrs. Sheridan hurrying to greet her son.

She was one of those fat, pink people who fade and contract with age like
drying fruit; and her outside was a true portrait of her. Her husband and her
daughter had long ago absorbed her. What intelligence she had was given
almost wholly to comprehending and serving those two, and except in the
presence of one of them she was nearly always absent-minded. Edith lived all
day with her mother, as daughters do; and Sheridan so held his wife to her
unity with him that she had long ago become unconscious of her existence as a
thing separate from his. She invariably perceived his moods, and nursed him
through them when she did not share them; and she gave him a profound sympathy
with the inmost spirit and purpose of his being, even though she did not
comprehend it and partook of it only as a spectator. They had known but one
actual altercation in their lives, and that was thirty years past, in the
early days of Sheridan's struggle, when, in order to enhance the favorable
impression he believed himself to be making upon some capitalists, he had
thought it necessary to accompany them to a performance of "The Black Crook."
But she had not once referred to this during the last ten years.

Mrs. Sheridan's manner was hurried and inconsequent; her clothes rustled more
than other women's clothes; she seemed to wear too many at a time and to be
vaguely troubled by them, and she was patting a skirt down over some unruly
internal dissension at the moment she opened Bibbs's door.

At sight of the recumbent figure she began to close the door softly,
withdrawing, but the young man had heard the turning of the knob and the
rustling of skirts, and he opened his eyes.

"Don't go, mother," he said. "I'm not asleep."  He swung his long legs over
the side of the bed to rise, but she set a hand on his shoulder, restraining
him; and he lay flat again.

"No," she said, bending over to kiss his cheek, "I just come for a minute, but
I want to see how you seem. Edith said--"

"Poor Edith!" he murmured. "She couldn't look at me. She--"

"Nonsense!"  Mrs. Sheridan, having let in the light at a window, came back to
the bedside. "You look a great deal better than what you did before you went
to the sanitarium, anyway. It's done you good; a body can see that right
away. You need fatting up, of course, and you haven't got much color--"

"No," he said, "I haven't much color."

"But you will have when you get your strength back."

"Oh yes!" he responded, cheerfully. "THEN I will."

"You look a great deal better than what I expected."

"Edith must have a great vocabulary!" he chuckled.

"She's too sensitive," said Mrs. Sheridan, "and it makes her exaggerate a
little. What about your diet?"

"That's all right. They told me to eat anything."

"Anything at all?"

"Well--anything I could."

"That's good," she said, nodding. "They mean for you just to build up your
strength. That's what they told me the last time I went to see you at the
sanitarium. You look better than what you did then, and that's only a little
time ago. How long was it?"

"Eight months, I think."

"No, it couldn't be. I know it ain't THAT long, but maybe it was longer 'n I
thought. And this last month or so I haven't had scarcely even time to write
more than just a line to ask how you were gettin' along, but I told Edith to
write, the weeks I couldn't, and I asked Jim to, too, and they both said they
would, so I suppose you've kept up pretty well on the home news."

"Oh yes."

"What I think you need," said the mother, gravely, "is to liven up a little
and take an interest in things. That's what papa was sayin' this morning,
after we got your telegram; and that's what 'll stimilate your appetite, too.
He was talkin' over his plans for you--"

"Plans?"  Bibbs, turning on his side, shielded his eyes from the light with
his hand, so that he might see her better. "What--"  He paused. "What plans
is he making for me, mother?"

She turned away, going back to the window to draw down the shade. "Well, you
better talk it over with HIM," she said, with perceptible nervousness. "He
better tell you himself. I don't feel as if I had any call, exactly, to go
into it; and you better get to sleep now, anyway."  She came and stood by the
bedside once more. "But you must remember, Bibbs, whatever papa does is for
the best. He loves his chuldern and wants to do what's right by ALL of 'em
--and you'll always find he's right in the end."

He made a little gesture of assent, which seemed to content her; and she
rustled to the door, turning to speak again after she had opened it. "You get
a good nap, now, so as to be all rested up for to-night."

"You--you mean--he--" Bibbs stammered, having begun to speak too quickly.
Checking himself, he drew a long breath, then asked, quietly, "Does father
expect me to come down-stairs this evening?"

"Well, I think he does," she answered. "You see, it's the 'house-warming,' as
he calls it, and he said he thinks all our chuldern ought to be around us, as
well as the old friends and other folks. It's just what he thinks you
need--to take an interest and liven up. You don't feel too bad to come down,
do you?"

"Mother?"

"Well?"

"Take a good look at me," he said.

"Oh, see here!" she cried, with brusque cheerfulness. "You're not so bad off
as you think you are, Bibbs. You're on the mend; and it won't do you any harm
to please your--"

"It isn't that," he interrupted. "Honestly, I'm only afraid it might spoil
somebody's appetite. Edith--"

"I told you the child was too sensitive," she interrupted, in turn. "You're a
plenty good-lookin' enough young man for anybody! You look like you been
through a long spell and begun to get well, and that's all there is to it."

"All right. I'll come to the party. If the rest of you can stand it, I can!"

"It 'll do you good," she returned, rustling into the hall. "Now take a nap,
and I'll send one o' the help to wake you in time for you to get dressed up
before dinner. You go to sleep right away, now, Bibbs!"

Bibbs was unable to obey, though he kept his eyes closed. Something she had
said kept running in his mind, repeating itself over and over interminably.
"His plans for you--his plans for you--his plans for you--his plans for you--"
And then, taking the place of "his plans for you," after what seemed a long,
long while, her flurried voice came back to him insistently, seeming to
whisper in his ear: "He loves his chuldern--he loves his chuldern--he loves
his chuldern"--"you'll find he's always right--you'll find he's always
right--"  Until at last, as he drifted into the state of half-dreams and
distorted realities, the voice seemed to murmur from beyond a great black wing
that came out of the wall and stretched over his bed--it was a black wing
within the room, and at the same time it was a black cloud crossing the sky,
bridging the whole earth from pole to pole. It was a cloud of black smoke,
and out of the heart of it came a flurried voice whispering over and over,
"His plans for you--his plans for you--his plans for you--"  And then there
was nothing.

He woke refreshed, stretched himself gingerly--as one might have a care
against too quick or too long a pull upon a frayed elastic--and, getting to
his feet, went blinking to the window and touched the shade so that it flew
up, letting in a pale sunset.

He looked out into the lemon-colored light and smiled wanly at the next house,
as Edith's grandiose phrase came to mind, "the old Vertrees country mansion."
It stood in a broad lawn which was separated from the Sheridans' by a young
hedge; and it was a big, square, plain old box of a house with a giant
salt-cellar atop for a cupola. Paint had been spared for a long time, and no
one could have put a name to the color of it, but in spite of that the place
had no look of being out at heel, and the sward was as neatly trimmed as the
Sheridans' own.

The separating hedge ran almost beneath Bibbs's window--for this wing of the
New House extended here almost to the edge of the lot--and, directly opposite
the window, the Vertreeses' lawn had been graded so as to make a little knoll
upon which stood a small rustic "summer-house."  It was almost on a level with
Bibbs's window and not thirty feet away; and it was easy for him to imagine
the present dynasty of Vertreeses in grievous outcry when they had found this
retreat ruined by the juxtaposition of the parvenu intruder. Probably the
"summer-house" was pleasant and pretty in summer. It had the lookof a place
wherein little girls had played for a generation or so with dolls and
"housekeeping," or where a lovely old lady might come to read something dull
on warm afternoons; but now in the thin light it was desolate, the color of
dust, and hung with haggard vines which had lost their leaves.

Bibbs looked at it with grave sympathy, probably feeling some kinship with
anything so dismantled; then he turned to a cheval-glass beside the window and
paid himself the dubious tribute of a thorough inspection. He looked the
mirror up and down, slowly, repeatedly, but came in the end to a long and
earnest scrutiny of the face. Throughout this cryptic seance his manner was
profoundly impersonal; he had the air of an entomologist intent upon
classifying a specimen, but finally he appeared to become pessimistic. He
shook his head solemnly; then gazed again and shook his head again, and
continued to shake it slowly, in complete disapproval.

"You certainly are one horrible sight!" he said, aloud.

And at that he was instantly aware of an observer. Turning quickly, he was
vouchsafed the picture of a charming lady, framed in a rustic aperture of the
"summer-house" and staring full into his window--straight into his eyes, too,
for the infinitesimal fraction of a second before the flashingly censorious
withdrawal of her own. Composedly, she pulled several dead twigs from a vine,
the manner of her action conveying a message or proclamation to the effect
that she was in the summer-house for the sole purpose of such-like pruning and
tending, and that no gentleman could suppose her presence there to be due to
any other purpose whatsoever, or that, being there on that account, she had
allowed her attention to wander for one instant in the direction of things of
which she was in reality unconscious.

Having pulled enough twigs to emphasize her unconsciousness--and at the same
time her disapproval--of everything in the nature of a Sheridan or belonging
to a Sheridan, she descended the knoll with maintained composure, and
sauntered toward a side-door of the country mansion of the Vertreeses. An
elderly lady, bonneted and cloaked, opened the door and came to meet her.

"Are you ready, Mary? I've been looking for you. What were you doing?"

"Nothing. Just looking into one of Sheridans' windows," said Mary Vertrees.
"I got caught at it."

"Mary!" cried her mother. "Just as we were going to call! Good heavens!"

"We'll go, just the same," the daughter returned. "I suppose those women
would be glad to have us if we'd burned their house to the ground."

"But WHO saw you?" insisted Mrs. Vertrees.

"One of the sons, I suppose he was. I believe he's insane, or something. At
least I hear they keep him in a sanitarium somewhere, and never talk about
him. He was staring at himself in a mirror and talking to himself. Then he
looked out and caught me."

"What did he--"

"Nothing, of course."

"How did he look?"

"Like a ghost in a blue suit," said Miss Vertrees, moving toward the street
and waving a white-gloved hand in farewell to her father, who was observing
them from the window of his library. "Rather tragic and altogether
impossible. Do come on, mother, and let's get it over!"

And Mrs. Vertrees, with many misgivings, set forth with her daughter for their
gracious assault upon the New House next door.

Mr. Vertrees, having watched their departure with the air of a man who had
something at hazard upon the expedition, turned from the window and began to
pace the library thoughtfully, pending their return. He was about sixty; a
small man, withered and dry and fine, a trim little sketch of an elderly
dandy. His lambrequin mustache--relic of a forgotten Anglomania--had been
profoundly black, but now, like his smooth hair, it was approaching an equally
sheer whiteness; and though his clothes were old, they had shapeliness and a
flavor of mode. And for greater spruceness there were some jaunty touches;
gray spats, a narrow black ribbon across the gray waistcoat to the eye-glasses
in a pocket, a fleck of color from a button in the lapel of the black coat,
labeling him the descendant of patriot warriors.

The room was not like him, being cheerful and hideous, whereas Mr. Vertrees
was anxious and decorative. Under a mantel of imitation black marble a merry
little coal-fire beamed forth upon high and narrow "Eastlake" bookcases with
long glass doors, and upon comfortable, incongruous furniture, and upon
meaningless "woodwork" everywhere, and upon half a dozen Landseer engravings
which Mr. and Mrs. Vertrees sometimes mentioned to each other, after thirty
years of possession, as "very fine things."  They had been the first people in
town to possess Landseer engravings, and there, in art, they had rested, but
they still had a feeling that in all such matters they were in the van; and
when Mr. Vertrees discovered Landseers upon the walls of other people's houses
he thawed, as a chieftain to a trusted follower; and if he found an edition of
Bulwer Lytton accompanying the Landseers as a final corroboration of culture,
he would say, inevitably, "Those people know good pictures and they know good
books."

The growth of the city, which might easily have made him a millionaire,  had
ruined him because he had failed to understand it. When towns begin to grow
they have whims, and the whims of a town always ruin somebody. Mr. Vertrees
had been most strikingly the somebody in this case. At about the time he
bought the Landseers, he owned, through inheritance, an office-building and a
large house not far from it, where he spent the winter; and he had a country
place--a farm of four hundred acres--where he went for the summers to the
comfortable, ugly old house that was his home now, perforce, all the year
round. If he had known how to sit still and let things happen he would have
prospered miraculously; but, strangely enough, the dainty little man was one
of the first to fall down and worship Bigness, the which proceeded straightway
to enact the role of Juggernaut for his better education. He was a true
prophet of the prodigious growth, but he had a fatal gift for selling good and
buying bad. He should have stayed at home and looked at his Landseers and
read his Bulwer, but he took his cow to market, and the trained milkers milked
her dry and then ate her. He sold the office-building and the house in town
to buy a great tract of lots in a new suburb; then he sold the farm, except
the house and the ground about it, to pay the taxes on the suburban lots and
to "keep them up."  The lots refused to stay up; but he had to do something to
keep himself and his family up, so in despair he sold the lots (which went up
beautifully the next year) for "traction stock" that was paying dividends; and
thereafter he ceased to buy and sell. Thus he disappeared altogether from the
commercial surface at about the time James Sheridan came out securely on top;
and Sheridan, until Mrs. Vertrees called upon him with her "anti-smoke"
committee, had never heard the name.

Mr. Vertrees, pinched, retired to his Landseers, and Mrs. Vertrees "managed
somehow" on the dividends, though "managing" became more and more difficult as
the years went by and money bought less and less. But there came a day when
three servitors of Bigness in Philadelphia took greedy counsel with four
fellow-worshipers from New York, and not long after that there were no more
dividends for Mr. Vertrees. In fact, there was nothing for Mr. Vertrees,
because the "traction stock" henceforth was no stock at all, and he had
mortgaged his house long ago to help "manage somehow" according to his
conception of his "position in life"--one of his own old-fashioned phrases.
Six months before the completion of the New House next door, Mr. Vertrees had
sold his horses and the worn Victoria and "station-wagon," to pay the arrears
of his two servants and re-establish credit at the grocer's and butcher's--
and a pair of elderly carriage-horses with such accoutrements are not very
ample barter, in these days, for six months' food and fuel and service. Mr.
Vertrees had discovered, too, that there was no salary for him in all the
buzzing city--he could do nothing.

It may be said that he was at the end of his string. Such times do come in
all their bitterness, finally, to the man with no trade or craft, if his
feeble clutch on that slippery ghost, Property, shall fail.

The windows grew black while he paced the room, and smoky twilight closed
round about the house, yet not more darkly than what closed round about the
heart of the anxious little man patrolling the fan-shaped zone of firelight.
But as the mantel clock struck wheezily six there was the rattle of an outer
door, and a rich and beautiful peal of laughter went ringing through the
house. Thus cheerfully did Mary Vertrees herald her return with her mother
from their expedition among the barbarians.

She came rushing into the library and threw herself into a deep chair by the
hearth, laughing so uncontrollably that tears were in her eyes. Mrs. Vertrees
followed decorously, no mirth about her; on the contrary, she looked vaguely
disturbed, as if she had eaten something not quite certain to agree with her,
and regretted it.

"Papa! Oh, oh!"  And Miss Vertrees was fain to apply a handkerchief upon her
eyes. "I'm SO glad you made us go! I wouldn't have missed it--"

Mrs. Vertrees shook her head. "I suppose I'm very dull," she said, gently. "I
didn't see anything amusing. They're most ordinary, and the house is
altogether in bad taste, but we anticipated that, and--"

"Papa!" Mary cried, breaking in. "They asked us to DINNER!"

"What!"

"And I'm GOING!" she shouted, and was seized with fresh paroxysms. "Think of
it! Never in their house before; never met any of them but the daughter-- and
just BARELY met her--"

"What about you?" interrrupted Mr. Vertrees, turning sharply upon his wife.

She made a little face as if positive now that what she had eaten would not
agree with her. "I couldn't!" she said. "I--"

"Yes, that's just--just the way she--she looked when they asked her!" cried
Mary, choking. "And then she--she realized it, and tried to turn it into a
cough, and she didn't know how, and it sounded like--like a squeal!"

"I suppose," said Mrs. Vertrees, much injured, "that Mary will have an
uproarious time at my funeral. She makes fun of--"

Mary jumped up instantly and kissed her; then she went to the mantel and,
leaning an elbow upon it, gazed thoughtfully at the buckle of her shoe,
twinkling in the firelight.

"THEY didn't notice anything," she said. "So far as they were concerned,
mamma, it was one of the finest coughs you ever coughed."

"Who were 'they'?" asked her father. "Whom did you see?"

"Only the mother and daughter," Mary answered. "Mrs. Sheridan is dumpy and
rustly; and Miss Sheridan is pretty and pushing--dresses by the fashion
magazines and talks about New York people that have their pictures in 'em. She
tutors the mother, but not very successfully--partly because her own
foundation is too flimsy and partly because she began too late. They've got
an enormous Moor of painted plaster or something in the hall, and the girl
evidently thought it was to her credit that she selected it!"

"They have oil-paintings, too," added Mrs. Vertrees, with a glance of gentle
price at the Landseers. "I've always thought oil-paintings in a private house
the worst of taste."

"Oh, if one owned a Raphael or a Titian!" said Mr. Vertrees, finishing the
implication, not in words, but with a wave of his hand. "Go on, Mary. None
of the rest of them came in? You didn't meet Mr. Sheridan or--"  He paused
and adjusted a lump of coal in the fire delicately with the poker. "Or one of
the sons?"

Mary's glance crossed his, at that, with a flash of utter comprehension. He
turned instantly away, but she had begun to laugh again.

"No," she said, "no one except the women, but mamma inquired about the sons
thoroughly!"

"Mary!" Mrs. Vertrees protested.

"Oh, most adroitly, too!" laughed the girl. "Only she couldn't help
unconsciously turning to look at me--when she did it!"

"Mary Vertrees!"

"Never mind, mamma! Mrs. Sheridan and Miss Sheridan neither of THEM could
help unconsiously turning to look at me--speculatively--at the same time! They
all three kept looking at me and talking about the oldest son, Mr. James
Sheridan, Junior. Mrs. Sheridan said his father is very anxious 'to get Jim
to marry and settle down,' and she assured me that 'Jim is right cultivated.'
Another of the sons, the youngest one, caught me looking in the window this
afternoon; but they didn't seem to consider him quite one of themselves,
somehow, though Mrs. Sheridan mentioned that a couple of years or so ago he
had been 'right sick,' and had been to some cure or other. They seemed
relieved to bring the subject back to 'Jim' and his virtues--and to look at
me! The other brother is the middle one, Roscoe; he's the one that owns the
new house across the street, where that young black-sheep of the Lamhorns,
Robert, goes so often. I saw a short, dark young man standing on the porch
with Robert Lamhorn there the other day, so I suppose that was Roscoe. 'Jim'
still lurks in the mists, but I shall meet him to-night. Papa--"  She stepped
nearer to him so that he had to face her, and his eyes were troubled as he
did. There may have been a trouble deep within her own, but she kept their
surface merry with laughter. "Papa, Bibbs is the youngest one's name, and
Bibbs--to the best of our information--is a lunatic. Roscoe is married.
Papa, does it have to be Jim?"

"Mary!" Mrs. Vertrees cried, sharply. "You're outrageous! That's a perfectly
horrible way of talking!"

"Well, I'm close to twenty-four," said Mary, turning to her. "I haven't been
able to like anybody yet that's asked me to marry him, and maybe I never
shall. Until a year or so ago I've had everything I ever wanted in my life
--you and papa gave it all to me--and it's about time I began to pay back.
Unfortunately, I don't kow how to do anything--but something's got to be
done."

"But you needn't talk of it like THAT!" insisted the mother, plaintively.
"It's not--it's not--"

"No, it's not," said Mary. "I know that!"

"How did they happen to ask you to dinner?" Mr. Vertrees inquired, uneasily.
"'Stextrawdn'ry thing!"

"Climbers' hospitality," Mary defined it. "We were so very cordial and easy!
I think Mrs. Sheridan herself might have done it just as any kind old woman on
a farm might ask a neighbor, but it was Miss Sheridan who did it. She played
around it awhile; you could see she wanted to--she's in a dreadful hurry to
get into things--and I fancied she had an idea it might impress that Lamhorn
boy to find us there to-night. It's a sort of house-warming dinner, and they
talked about it and talked about it--and then the girl got her courage up and
blurted out the invitation. And mamma--"  Here Mary was once more a victim to
incorrigible merriment. "Mamma tried to say yes, and COULDN'T! She swallowed
and squealed--I mean you coughed, dear! And then, papa, she said that you and
she had promised to go to a lecture at the Emerson Club to-night, but that her
daughter would be delighted to come to the Big Show! So there I am, and
there's Mr. Jim Sheridan--and there's the clock. Dinner's at seven-thirty!"

And she ran out of the room, scooping up her fallen furs with a gesture of
flying grace as she sped.

When she came down, at twenty munutes after seven, her father stood in the
hall, at the foot of the stairs, waiting to be her escort through the dark. He
looked up and watched her as she descended, and his gaze was fond and
proud--and profoundly disturbed. But she smiled and nodded gaily, and, when
she reached the floor, put a hand on his shoulder.

"At least no one could suspect me to-night," she said. "I LOOK rich, don't I,
papa?"

She did. She had a look that worshipful girl friends bravely called "regal."
A head taller than her father, she was as straight and jauntily poised as a
boy athlete; and her brown hair and her brown eyes were like her mother's, but
for the rest she went back to some stronger and livelier ancestor than either
of her parents.

"Don't I look too rich to be suspected?" she insisted.

"You look everything beautiful, Mary," he said, huskily.

"And my dress?"  She threw open her dark velvet cloak, showing a splendor of
white and silver. "Anything better at Nice next winter, do you think?" She
laughed, shrouding her glittering figure in the cloak again. "Two years old,
and no one would dream it! I did it over."

"You can do anything, Mary."

There was a curious humility in his tone, and something more--a significance
not veiled and yet abysmally apologetic. It was as if he suggested something
to her and begged her forgiveness in the same breath.

And upon that, for the moment, she became as serious as he. She lifted her
hand from his shoulder and then set it back more firmly, so that he should
feel the reassurance of its pressure.

"Don't worry," she said, in a low voice and gravely. "I know exactly what you
want me to do."

It was a brave and lustrous banquet; and a noisy one, too, because there was
an orchestra among some plants at one end of the long dining-room, and after a
preliminary stiffness the guests were impelled to converse--necessarily at the
tops of their voices. The whole company of fifty sat at a great oblong table,
improvised for the occasion by carpenters; but, not betraying itself as an
improvisation, it seemed a permanent continent of damask and lace, with shores
of crystal and silver running up to spreading groves of orchids and lilies and
white roses--an inhabited continent, evidently, for there were three
marvelous, gleaming buildings: one in the center and one at each end, white
miracles wrought by some inspired craftsman in sculptural icing. They were
models in miniature, and they represented the Sheridan Building, the Sheridan
Apartments, and the Pump Works. Nearly all the guests recognized them without
having to be told what they were, and pronounced the likenesses superb.

The arrangement of the table was visably baronial. At the head sat the great
Thane, with the flower of his family and of the guests about him; then on each
side came the neighbors of the "old" house, grading down to vassals and
retainers--superintendents, cashiers, heads of departments, and the like-- at
the foot, where the Thane's lady took her place as a consolation for the less
important. Here, too, among the thralls and bondmen, sat Bibbs Sheridan, a
meek Banquo, wondering how anybody could look at him and eat.

Nevertheless, there was a vast, continuous eating, for these were wholesome
folk who understood that dinner meant something intended for introduction into
the system by means of an aperture in the face, devised by nature for that
express purpose. And besides, nobody looked at Bibbs.

He was better content to be left to himself; his voice was not strong enough
to make itself heard over the hubbub without an exhausting effort, and the
talk that went on about him was too fast and too fragmentary for his drawl to
keep pace with it. So he felt relieved when each of his neighbors in turn,
after a polite inquiry about his health, turned to seek livelier reponses in
other directions. For the talk went on with the eating, incessantly. It rose
over the throbbing of the orchestra and the clatter and clinking of silver and
china and glass, and there was a mighty babble.

"Yes, sir! Started without a dollar." . . . "Yellow flounces on the
overskirt--" . . . "I says, 'Wilkie, your department's got to go bigger this
year,' I says." . . . "Fifteen per cent. turnover in thirty-one weeks." . . .
"One of the bigest men in the bigest--" ... "The wife says she'll have to let
out my pants if my appetite--" . . . "Say, did you see that statue of a Turk
in the hall? One of the finest things I ever--"  . . . "Not a dollar, not a
nickel, not one red cent do you get out o' me,' I says, and so he ups and--" .
. . "Yes, the baby makes four,  they've lost now.". . . "Well, they got their
raise, and they went in big." . . . "Yes, sir! Not a dollar to his name, and
look at what--" . . . "You wait! The population of this town's goin' to hit
the million mark before she stops." . . . "Well, if you can show me a bigger
deal than--"

And through the interstices of this clamoring Bibbs could hear the continual
booming of his father's heavy voice, and once he caught the sentence, "Yes,
young lady, that's just what did it for me, and that's just what'll do it for
my boys--they got to make two blades o' grass grow where one grew before!"  It
was his familiar flourish, an old story to Bibbs, and now jovially declaimed
for the edification of Mary Vertrees.

It was a great night for Sheridan--the very crest of his wave. He sat there
knowing himself Thane and master by his own endeavor; and his big, smooth, red
face grew more and more radiant with good will and with the simplest,
happiest, most boy-like vanity. He was the picture of health, of good cheer,
and of power on a holiday. He had thirty teeth, none bought, and showed most
of them when he laughed; his grizzled hair was thick, and as unruly as a farm
laborer's; his chest was deep and big beneath its vast facade of starched
white linen, where little diamonds twinkled, circling three large pearls; his
hands were stubby and strong, and he used them freely in gestures of marked
picturesqueness; and, though he had grown fat at chin and waist and wrist, he
had not lost the look of readiness and activity.

He dominated the table, shouting jocular questions and railleries at every
one. His idea was that when people were having a good time they were noisy;
and his own additions to the hubbub increased his pleasure, and, of course,
met the warmest encouragement from his guests. Edith had discovered that he
had very foggy notions of the difference between a band and an orchestra, and
when it was made clear to him he had held out for a band until Edith
threatened tears; but the size of the orchestra they hired consoled him, and
he had now no regrets in the matter.

He kept time to the music continually--with his feet, or pounding on the table
with his fist, and sometimes with spoon or knife upon his plate or a glass,
without permitting these side-products to interfere with the real business of
eating and shouting.

"Tell 'em to play 'Nancy Lee'!" he would bellow down the length of the table
to his wife, while the musicians were in the midst of the "Toreador" song,
perhaps. "Ask that fellow if they don't know 'Nancy Lee'!"  And when the
leader would shake his head apologetically in answer to an obedient shriek
from Mrs. Sheridan, the "Toreador" continuing vehemently, Sheridan would roar
half-remembered fragments of "Nancy Lee," naturally mingling some Bizet with
the air of that uxorious tribute.

"Oh, there she stands and waves her hands while I'm away! "A sail-er's wife a
sail-er's star should be! Yo ho, oh, oh! "Oh, Nancy, Nancy, Nancy Lee! Oh,
Na-hancy Lee!"

"HAY, there, old lady!" he would bellow. "Tell 'em to play 'In the Gloaming.'
In the gloaming, oh, my darling, la-la-lum-tee--Well, if they don't know that,
what's the matter with 'Larboard Watch, Ahoy'? THAT'S good music! That's the
kind o' music I like! Come on, now! Mrs. Callin, get 'em singin' down in
your part o' the table. What's the matter you folks down there, anyway?
Larboard watch, ahoy!"

"What joy he feels, as--ta-tum-dum-tee-dee-dum steals. La-a-r-board watch,
ahoy!"

No external bubbling contributed to this effervescence; the Sheridans' table
had never borne wine, and, more because of timidity about it than conviction,
it bore none now; though "mineral waters" were copiously poured from bottles
wrapped, for some reason, in napkins, and proved wholly satisfactory to almost
all of the guests. And certainly no wine could have inspired more turbulent
good spirits in the host. Not even Bibbs was an alloy in this night's
happiness, for, as Mrs. Sheridan had said, he had "plans for Bibbs"--plans
which were going to straighten out some things that had gone wrong.

So he pounded the table and boomed his echoes of old songs, and then,
forgetting these, would renew his friendly railleries, or perhaps, turning to
Mary Vertrees, who sat near him, round the corner of the table at his right,
he would become autobiographical. Gentlemen less naive than he had paid her
that tribute, for she was a girl who inspired the autobiographical impulse in
every man who met her--it needed but the sight of her.

The dinner seemed, somehow, to center about Mary Vertrees and the jocund host
as a play centers about its hero and heroine; they were the rubicund king and
the starry princess of this spectacle--they paid court to each other, and
everybody paid court to them. Down near the sugar Pump Works, where Bibbs
sat, there was audible speculation and admiration. "Wonder who that lady
is--makin' such a hit with the old man."  "Must be some heiress."  "Heiress?
Golly, I guess I could stand it to marry rich, then!"

Edith and Sibyl were radiant: at first they had watched Miss Vertrees with an
almost haggard anxiety, wondering what disasterous effect Sheridan's pastoral
gaieties--and other things--would have upon her, but she seemed delighted with
everything, and with him most of all. She treated him as if he were some
delicious, foolish old joke that she understood perfectly, laughing at him
almost violently when he bragged--probably his first experience of that kind
in his life. It enchanted him.

As he proclaimed to the table, she had "a way with her."  She had, indeed, as
Roscoe Sheridan, upon her right, discovered just after the feast began. Since
his marriage three years before, no lady had bestowed upon him so protracted a
full view of brilliant eyes; and, with the look, his lovely neighbor said--and
it was her first speech to him--

"I hope you're very susceptible, Mr. Sheridan!"

Honest Roscoe was taken aback, and "Why?" was all he managed to say.

She repeated the look deliberately, which was noted, with a mystification
equal to his own, by his sister across the table. No one, reflected Edith,
could image Mary Vertrees the sort of girl who would "really flirt" with
married men--she was obviously the "opposite of all that."  Edith defined her
as a "thoroughbred," a "nice girl"; and the look given to Roscoe was
astounding. Roscoe's wife saw it, too, and she was another whom it puzzled
--though not because its recipient was married.

"Because!" said Mary Vertrees, replying to Roscoe's monosyllable. "And also
because we're next-door neighbors at table, and it's dull times ahead for both
of us if we don't get along."

Roscoe was a literal young man, all stocks and bonds, and he had been brought
up to believe that when a man married he "married and settled down."  It was
"all right," he felt, for a man as old as his father to pay florid compliments
to as pretty a girl as this Miss Vertrees, but for himself--"a young married
man"--it wouldn't do; and it wouldn't even be quite moral. He knew that young
married people might have friendships, like his wife's for Lamhorn; but Sibyl
and Lamhorn never "flirted"--they were always very matter-of-fact with each
other. Roscoe would have been troubled if Sibyl had ever told Lamhorn she
hoped he was susceptible.

"Yes--we're neighbors," he said, awkwardly.

"Next-door neighbors in houses, too," she added.

"No, not exactly. I live across the street."

"Why, no!" she exclaimed, and seemed startled. "Your mother told me this
afternoon that you lived at home."

"Yes, of course I live at home. I built that new house across the street."

"But you--"  she paused, confused, and then slowly a deep color came into her
cheek. "But I understood--"

"No," he said; "my wife and I lived with the old folks the first year, but
that's all. Edith and Jim live with them, of course."

"I--I see," she said, the deep color still deepening as she turned from him
and saw, written upon a card before the gentleman at her left the name, "Mr.
James Sheridan, Jr."  And from that moment Roscoe had little enough cause for
wondering what he ought to reply to her disturbing coquetries.

Mr. James Sheridan had been anxiously waiting for the dazzling visitor to "get
through with old Roscoe," as he thought of it, and give a bachelor a chance.
"Old Roscoe" was the younger, but he had always been the steady wheel-horse of
the family. Jim was "steady" enough, but was considered livelier than Roscoe,
which in truth is not saying much for Jim's liveliness. As their father
habitually boasted, both brothers were "capable, hard-working young business
men," and the principal difference between them was merely that which resulted
from Jim's being still a bachelor. Physically they were of the same type:
dark of eyes and of hair, fresh-colored and thick-set, and though Roscoe was
several inches taller than Jim, neither was of the height, breadth, or depth
of the father. Both wore young business men's mustaches, and either could
have sat for the tailor-shop lithographs of young business men wearing "rich
suitings in dark mixtures."

Jim, approving warmly of his neighbor's profile, perceived her access of
color, which increased his approbation. "What's that old Roscoe saying to
you, Miss Vertrees?" he asked. "These young married men are mighty  forward
nowadays, but you mustn't let 'em make you blush."

"Am I blushing?" she said. "Are you sure?"  And with that she gave him ample
opportunity to make sure, repeating with interest the look wasted upon Roscoe.
"I think you must be mistaken," she continued. "I think it's your brother who
is blushing. I've thrown him into confusion."

"How?"

She laughed, and then, leaning to him a little, said in a tone as confidential
as she could make it, under cover of the uproar. "By trying to begin with him
a courtship I meant for YOU!"

This might well be a style new to Jim; and it was. He supposed it a
nonsensical form of badinage, and yet it took his breath. He realized that he
wished what she said to be the literal truth, and he was instantly snared by
that realization.

"By George!" he said. "I guess you're the kind of girl that can say anything
--yes, and get away with it, too!"

She laughed again--in her way, so that he could not tell whether she was
laughing at him or at herself or at the nonsense she was talking; and she
said: "But you see I don't care whether I get away with it or not. I wish
you'd tell me frankly if you think I've got a change to get away with YOU?"

"More like if you've got a chance to get away FROM me!" Jim was inspired to
reply. "Not one in the world, especially after beginning by making fun of me
like that."

"I mightn't be so much in fun as you think," she said, regarding him with
sudden gravity.

"Well," said Jim, in simple honesty, "you're a funny girl!"

Her gravity continued an instant longer. "I may not turn out to be funny for
YOU."

"So long as you turn out to be anything at all for me, I expect I can manage
to be satisfied."  And with that, to his own surprise, it was his turn to
blush, whereupon she laughed again.

"Yes," he said, plaintively, not wholly lacking intuition, "I can see you're
the sort of girl that would laugh the minute you see a man really means
anything!"

"'Laugh'!" she cried, gaily. "Why, it might be a matter of life and death!
But if you want tragedy, I'd better put the question at once, considering the
mistake I made with your brother."

Jim was dazed. She seemed to be playing a little game of mockery and nonsense
with him, but he had glimpses of a flashing danger in it; he was but too
sensible of being outclassed, and had somewhere a consciousness that he could
never quite know this giddy and alluring lady, no matter how long it pleased
her to play with him. But he mightily wanted her to keep on playing with him.

"Put what question?" he said, breathlessly.

"As you are a new neighbor of mine and of my family," she returned, speaking
slowly and with a cross-examiner's severity, "I think it would be well for me
to know at once whether you are already walking out with any young lady or
not. Mr. Sheridan, think well! Are you spoken for?"

"Not yet," he gasped. "Are you?"

"NO!" she cried, and with that they both laughed again; and the pastime
proceeded, increasing both in its gaiety and in its gravity.

Observing its continuance, Mr. Robert Lamhorn, opposite, turned from a lively
conversation with Edith and remarked covertly to Sibyl that Miss Vertrees was
"starting rather picturesquely with Jim."  And he added, languidly, "Do you
suppose she WOULD?"

For the moment Sibyl gave no sign of having heard him, but seemed interested
in the clasp of a long "rope" of pearls, a loop of which she was allowing to
swing from her fingers, resting her elbow upon the table and following with
her eyes the twinkle of diamonds and platinum in the clasp at the end of the
loop. She wore many jewels. She was pretty, but hers was not the kind of
prettiness to be loaded with too sumptuous accessories, and jeweled
head-dresses are dangerous--they may emphasize the wrongness of the wearer.

"I said Miss Vertrees seems to be starting pretty strong with Jim," repeated
Mr. Lamhorn.

"I heard you."  There was a latent discontent always somewhere in her eyes, no
matter what she threw upon the surface of cover it, and just now she did not
care to cover it; she looked sullen. "Starting any stronger than you did with
Edith?" she inquired.

"Oh, keep the peace!" he said, crossly. "That's off, of course."

"You haven't been making her see it this evening--precisely," said Sibyl,
looking at him steadily. "You've talked to her for--"

"For Heaven's sake," he begged, "keep the peace!"

"Well, what have you just been doing?!"

"SH!" he said. "Listen to your father-in-law."

Sheridan was booming and braying louder than ever, the orchestra having begun
to play "The Rosary," to his vast content.

"I COUNT THEM OVER, LA-LA-TUM-TEE-DUM," he roared, beating the measures with
his fork. "EACH HOUR A PEARL, EACH PEARL TEE-DUM-TUM-DUM--What's the matter
with all you folks? Why'n't you SING? Miss Vertrees, I bet a thousand
dollars YOU sing! Why'n't--"

"Mr. Sheridan," she said, turning cheerfully from the ardent Jim, "you don't
know what you interrupted! Your son isn't used to my rough ways, and my
soldier's wooing frightens him, but I think he was about to say something
important."

"I'll say something important to him if he doesn't!" the father threatened,
more delighted with her than ever. "By gosh! if I was his age--or a widower
right NOW--"

"Oh, wait!" cried Mary. "If they'd only make less noice! I want Mrs.
Sheridan to hear."

"She'd say the same," he shouted. "She'd tell me I was mighty slow if I
couldn't get ahead o' Jim. Why, when I was his age--"

"You must listen to your father," Mary interrupted, turning to Jim, who had
grown read again. "He's going to tell us how, when he was your age, he made
those two blades of grass grow out of a teacup--and you could see for yourself
he didn't get them out of his sleeve!"

At that Sheridan pounded the table till it jumped. "Look here, young lady!"
he roared. "Some o' these days I'm either goin' to slap you--or I'm goin' to
kiss you!"

Edith looked aghast; she was afraid this was indeed "too awful," but Mary
Vertrees burst into ringing laughter.

"Both!" she cried. "Both! The one to make me forget the other!"

"But which--" he began, and then suddenly gave forth such stentorian
trumpetings of mirth that for once the whole table stopped to listen. "Jim,"
he roared, "if you don't propose to that girl to-night I'll send you back to
the machine-shop with Bibbs!"

And Bibbs--down among the retainers by the sugar Pump Works, and watching Mary
Vertrees as a ragged boy in the street might watch a rich little girl in a
garden--Bibbs heard. He heard--and he knew what his father's plans were now.

Mrs. Vertrees "sat up" for her daughter, Mr. Vertrees having retired after a
restless evening, not much soothed by the society of his Landseers. Mary had
taken a key, insisting that he should not come for her and seeming confident
that she would not lack for escort; nor did the sequel prove her confidence
unwarranted. But Mrs. Vertrees had a long vigil of it.

She was not the woman to make herself easy--no servant had ever seen her in  a
wrapper--and with her hair and dress and her shoes just what they had been
when she returned from the afternoon's call, she sat through the slow night
hours in a stiff little chair under the gaslight in her own room, which was
directly over the "front hall."  There, book in hand, she employed the time in
her own reminiscences, though it was her belief that she was reading Madame de
Remusat's.

Her thoughts went backward into her life and into her husband's; and the
deeper into the past they went, the brighter the pictures they brought her--
and there is tragedy. Like her husband, she thought backward because she did
not dare think forward definitely. What thinking forward this troubled couple
ventured took the form of a slender hope which neither of them could have
borne to hear put in words, and yet they had talked it over, day after day,
from the very hour when they heard Sheridan was to build his New House next
door. For--so quickly does any ideal of human behavior become an antique
--their youth was of the innocent old days, so dead! of "breeding" and
"gentility," and no craft had been more straitly trained upon them than that
of talking about things without mentioning them. Herein was marked the most
vital difference between Mr. and Mrs. Vertrees and their big new neighbor.
Sheridan, though his youth was of the same epoch, knew nothing of such
matters. He had been chopping wood for the morning fire in the country
grocery while they were still dancing.

It was after one o'clock when Mrs. Vertrees heard steps and the delicate
clinking of the key in the lock, and then, with the opening of the door,
Mary's laugh, and "Yes--if you aren't afraid--to-morrow!"

The door closed, and she rushed up-stairs, bringing with her a breath of cold
and bracing air into her mother's room. "Yes," she said, before Mrs. Vertrees
could speak, "he brought me home!"

She let her cloak fall upon the bed, and, drawing an old red-velvet
rocking-chair forward, sat beside her mother after giving her a light pat
upon the shoulder and a hearty kiss upon the cheek.

"Mamma!" Mary exclaimed, when Mrs. Vertrees had expressed a hope that she had
enjoyed the evening and had not caught cold. "Why don't you ask me?"

This inquiry obviously made her mother uncomfortable. "I don't--" she
faltered. "Ask you what, Mary?"

"How I got along and what he's like."

"Mary!"

"Oh, it isn't distressing!" said Mary. "And I got along so fast--"  She broke
off to laugh; continuing then, "But that's the way I went at it, of course.
We ARE in a hurry, aren't we?"

"I don't know what you mean," Mrs. Vertrees insisted, shaking her head
plaintively.

"Yes," said Mary, "I'm going out in his car with him to-morrow afternoon, and
to the theater the next night--but I stopped it there. You see, after you
give the first push, you must leave it to them while YOU pretend to run away!"

"My dear, I don't know what to--"

"What to make of anything!" Mary finished for her. "So that's all right! Now
I'll tell you all about it. It was gorgeous and deafening and tee-total. We
could have lived a year on it. I'm not good at figures, but I calculated that
if we lived six months on poor old Charlie and Ned and the station-wagon and
the Victoria, we could manage at least twice as long on the cost of the
'house-warming.'  I think the orchids alone would have lasted us a couple of
months. There they were, before me, but I couldn't steal 'em and sell 'em,
and so--well, so I did what I could!"

She leaned back and laughed reassuringly to her troubled mother. "It seemed
to be a success--what I could," she said, clasping her hands behind her neck
and stirring the rocker to motion as a rhythmic accompaniment to her
narrative. "The girl Edith and her sister-in-law, Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan, were
too anxious about the effect of things on me. The father's worth a bushel of
both of them, if they knew it. He's what he is. I like him."  She paused
reflectively, continuing, "Edith's 'interested' in that Lamhorn boy; he's
good-looking and not stupid, but I think he's--"  She interrupted herself with
a cheery outcry: "Oh! I mustn't be calling him names! If he's trying to make
Edith like him, I ought to respect him as a colleague."

"I don't understand a thing you're talking about," Mrs. Vertrees complained.

"All the better! Well, he's a bad lot, that Lamhorn boy; everybody's always
known that, but the Sheridans don't know the everybodies that know. He sat
between Edith and Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan. SHE'S like those people you wondered
about at the theater, the last time we went--dressed in ball-gowns; bound to
show their clothes and jewels SOMEwhere! She flatters the father, and so did
I, for that matter--but not that way. I treated him outrageously!"

"Mary!"

"That's what flattered him. After dinner he made the whole regiment of us
follow him all over the house, while he lectured like a guide on the Palatine.
He gave dimensions and costs, and the whole b'ilin' of 'em listened as if they
thought he intended to make them a present of the house. What he was proudest
of was the plumbing and that Bay of Naples panorama in the hall. He made us
look at all the plumbing--bath-rooms and everywhere else--and then he made us
look at the Bay of Naples. He said it was a hundred and eleven feet long, but
I think it's more. And he led us all into the  ready-made library to see a
poem Edith had taken a prize with at school.  They'd had it printed in gold
letters and framed in mother-of-pearl. But the poem itself was rather simple
and wistful and nice--he read it to us, though Edith tried to stop him. She
was modest about it, and said she'd never written anything else. And then,
after a while, Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan asked me to come across the street to her
house with them--her husband and Edith and Mr. Lamhorn and Jim Sheridan--"

Mrs. Vertrees was shocked. "'Jim'!" she exclaimed. "Mary, PLEASE--"

"Of course," said Mary. "I'll make it as easy for you as I can, mamma. Mr.
James Sheridan, Junior. We went over there, and Mrs. Roscoe explained that
'the men were all dying for a drink,' though I noticed that Mr. Lamhorn was
the only one near death's door on that account. Edith and Mrs. Roscoe said
they knew I'd been bored at the dinner. They were objectionably apologetic
about it, and they seemed to think NOW we were going to have a 'good time' to
make up for it. But I hadn't been bored at the dinner, I'd been amused; and
the 'good time' at Mrs. Roscoe's was horribly, horribly stupid."

"But, Mary," her mother began, "is--is--"  And she seemed unable to complete
the question.

"Never mind, mamma. I'll say it. Is Mr. James Sheridan, Junior, stupid? I'm
sure he's not at all stupid about business. Otherwise--Oh, what right have I
to be calling people 'stupid' because they're not exactly my kind? On the big
dinner-table they had enormous icing models of the Sheridan Building--"

"Oh, no!"  Mrs. Vertrees cried. "Surely not!"

"Yes, and two other things of that kind--I don't know what. But, after all, I
wondered if they were so bad. If I'd been at a dinner at a palace in Italy,
and a relief or inscription on one of the old silver peices had referred to
some great deed or achievement of the family, I shouldn't have felt superior;
I'd have thought it picturesque and stately--I'd have been impressed. And
what's the real difference? The icing is temporary, and that's much more
modest, isn't it? And why is it vulgar to feel important more on account of
something you've done yourself than because of something one of your ancestors
did? Besides, if we go back a few generations, we've all got such hundreds of
ancestors it seems idiotic to go picking out one or two to be proud of
ourselves about. Well, then, mamma, I managed not to feel superior to Mr.
James Sheridan, Junior, because he didn't see anything out o