"I told her I wasn't going to dress that girl up and send her out to parties to be snubbed and slighted by the other girls, as she was at the dancing school ball. She said that if I let Mary go she'd see that she had a good time. For her part, she admired the way I'd stuck up for the girl in spite of everything; and if she was good enough to live with us as a daughter, it would surely not contaminate anybody else to meet her out of an evening."
Saturday night I inquired of Belle how Mary got on at the party.
"First rate. Mrs. Wade met her at the door of the drawing room and kissed her. 'How you've grown, Mary!' said she, and then she took her round and introduced her to all the girls in the room, including some of those who've been cutting her right and left, as well as to every boy she didn't know already. Of course she danced every dance, and had the best time going."
"And, of course, she put it all down to her own superior attractions?"
"Just exactly. This morning she didn't want to help me make the beds!"
Mary's Christmas present had been a beautiful silver-plated cornet, and of course she must learn to play it when she went back to the convent. Word came shortly that the music master employed there could not undertake to teach her to play the instrument, but that a "professor" could be secured to go out from Detroit twice a week—if desired. We seemed to be in for it, so the lessons were desired, and we comforted ourselves with the assurance that if Mary did not turn out to be a tiptop reciter she would surely prove a tiptop cornet player. Her unusual talent would justify my wife in her unusual step, and the society of Lake City would forgive her for attempting to thrust the girl into its midst as an equal. Many of our acquaintances seemed to take mother's view of the case,—"Matter out of place becomes dirrt!"—and Belle was put on her mettle to convince the majority that she had done exactly the right thing in thus disclassing people. Disclassing people? In a free republic!
We received glowing accounts of the cornet lessons.
"Dear girl!" said Belle enthusiastically. "She must have the real artistic temperament to be so determined to excel in one or other of the arts."
"She's dramatic, anyway," said I, and I was confirmed in my opinion along in the spring, when the cornet, and aught else, appeared to have palled upon the versatile Mary. She wrote that she had serious thoughts of taking the veil.
"Bah!" said I; "what's she after now? She wants to scare us into something."