VI
“The Oldbridge Industrial Exhibits opens to-morrow night,” General Adgate, tentatively, said one day. “Do you care to go? You'll find all your friends. The Light Infantry Band will play to us. It's rather jolly.”
If New England days in old New England houses are fruitful (to young women of “high faculties quiescent”), if they are fecund in long, poetic dreams,—if life in Oldbridge does offer limitless advantage for the building of castles in the air—none can deny that it has, too, its own artless way of playing up to the leading lady.
“I wouldn't be left out for all the planets,” protested Ruth. “I'm curious to know what the Oldbridge Industries are.”
“In that case——” answered her uncle.
He went off smiling, she could not conceive why.
“Miss Adgate was a sight for the gods,” vowed Rutherford. “Brown velvet, sables, to suit her brown hair with a red glint in it, and eyes!”
Miss Adgate doubtless was a sight for the gods, when (conducted by her uncle) she went the following evening to the Oldbridge Industrial Exhibits. As she was led first by young Rutherford, then by young Milman, then by young Massington, then by young Leffingwell, and then by young Wetherby—through a crowd of friends, to every stall and counter of the big illuminated hall,—as each of these young men explained, volubly, minutely, each exhibit—little was left, we may believe, of Oldbridge Industry which Ruth had not at the end fathomed, become well acquainted with. Pausing at one stall and at another, she ordered with reckless discrimination, rugs, lawnmowers, carpenter's tools, muslins, silks, furniture; and a surfeit of glass blown by a little glass-blower who had quite a local reputation for his designs; linens, too, and rugs of delicate colour dyed and woven in the neighbourhood upon a hand-loom a hundred years of age. The tools might do for Jobias. He had confided to Paolina that his stock was getting rusty; the mowers, asked the piratical salesman, are not lawnmowers forever getting out of order?
These, Ruth's purchases, she destined for the new wing. She was furnishing the old Morris House, too. The Morris House General Adgate had, to her joy, just presented her with. This had been the home of a maternal greatgrandmother. From its portals, that lady with the patient eyes (whose portrait, painted by one Jarvis, hung in the drawing-room) having taken Admiral Richard Adgate for better or for worse under the Puritan marriage service read by Parson Ebenezer Allsworthy,—that lady had tripped across the hill to come and reign at Barracks Hill.
The Morris House! Miss Adgate destined it for her Summer overflow of guests. It is is a quaint and picturesque spot, all nooks and cupboards, within; of panelled walls and broad brick fireplaces. As its gardens overlook the purling brook and the Wigwam, it was, thought she, well suited to the purpose she intended—and it is in fact deserving of far more attention that this passing word can say for it.