“Are you a good judge of tea?” asked Lucia. “Mamma has not been quite herself since one of papa’s clerks went to Pennsylvania to take charge of a rolling-mill. The good man used to spend hours in the tea-importers’ warehouses, down near the office, searching for the kind of tea that mamma dotes on.”
“You children are not to worry Phil with any of your trifling affairs,” said the head of the house. “I want you all to understand that, besides having a desk in my office, he is a large operator in real estate,—a capitalist,—a sort of monopolist, in fact, for he is secretary and a director of the Haynton Bay Improvement Company, which monopolizes one of the finest bits of shore front on the Atlantic Coast.”
“Haynton Bay!” said Lucia, in wonder. “Why, that is where Hayn Farm is.”
“Wise child!” said her father; “and that fine bluff portion of the farm that overlooks the bay is the company’s property. You’ll never again cut your shoes to pieces on the oat stubble on that bluff, for when next you see the place it will be covered by fine villas, the handsomest of which you probably will some day see mentioned in the newspapers as the country-seat of the well-known merchant prince, Edgar Tramlay, Esq., father of the charming——”
“Edgar! Edgar!” said Mrs. Tramlay.
“And, as I was saying,” continued Tramlay, “no purchaser’s title will be good without the signature and official seal of Mr. Philip Hayn. Candy and postage-stamps, indeed! Why, such a man’s time ought to be valued at about a dollar a minute.”
Then Phil was rich, Lucia said to herself. She did not much care, and she knew even less, about business-details; a fortune on paper was as good as any other kind, so far as she knew; but what she did very distinctly understand was that no one, not even her mother, would again have occasion to speak of Phil as a poor man, or even a countryman. Some young men who were accounted great catches were only secretaries and even assistant secretaries of one thing or other; she knew it, because she had seen their names in dividend notices and other advertisements in newspapers. How would the change in his fortunes affect her mother, she wondered. Mrs. Tramlay certainly was more affable to the young man than she ever had been before, and after dinner she even took Phil’s arm in returning to the parlor: the act signified nothing to Phil, but it set Lucia’s little heart dancing gayly. When Phil departed, soon after dinner, to accompany his father, by request, to a meeting of the “Society for the Amelioration of the Spiritual Condition of Savage Tribes,” Lucia lost very little time in signalling Margie with her eyes and going up to her room. A moment later Margie bounced in, closed the door, and exclaimed,—
“Lucia Tramlay! I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. The idea of mamma, with the blood of a dozen High Dutch and Mayflower families in her veins, taking the arm of a countryman!”
“When there was no call for her to take any one’s arm,” added Lucia, “the affair being only an every-day family dinner.”
“ ‘Twas simply paralyzing,” said Margie; “but ’twas a sign that everything will be all right from this time forward. Dear me! I can imagine just how your new visiting-cards will look: ‘Mrs. Philip Hayn.’ ”