V
Miss Adgate had Miranda's approbation for inoculating Oldbridge with levity. She consulted General Adgate:
“Anything you like, Ruth. Anything you like to keep you here contented.” And he was not in the least fired by her schemes and had nothing further to say. But Miss Adgate sat down at this and scribbled fifty notes, selecting her first guests from all the worlds held in the one London World—the men, the women she liked, whose work she liked; the people who could be irrelevant at a pinch, amused, amusing. She invited them to visit her at Barracks Hill during the coming Summer, and in time she received effusive acceptances to her invitations.
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!”