"And something always interesting in our neighbors. See who approaches." York, who had just come up the side steps, supplemented his sister's remark.
"Oh, that is Mrs. Stella Bahrr, the Daily Evening News. Jerry, York can always unhitch your wagon from its star. She really is his black beast, though; but you can't expect mere men to take an interest in milliners, make-overs, at that, however much interest they take in millinery and what is under it."
"And millinery bills, with or without interest," York interfered again.
"Mrs. Bahrr will want a full report of Jerry, with the blank spaces for remarks filled out," Laura went on. "Why, she has changed her course and is tacking away with the wind."
"Going over to the Lenwells', I suppose. They are in some way sort of distantly related to her. Just near enough, anyhow, to listen to all her stories, and then say: 'For goodness sake don't say I told it; I got it from Stellar, you know.' She will put into any port right now. I'm her lighthouse warning," York declared. "She never approaches when I'm present."
York had risen and was standing in the doorway, where the growing moon revealed him clearly. Mrs. Bahrr, coming up the walk toward the Macpherson drive, suddenly turned about and hurried away, her tall, angular form in relief against the sky-line in the open space that lay between the Macpherson home and the nearest buildings down the slope toward the heart of the town.
"Coming back to common things," York continued, dropping into his favorite chair. "My sister scandalizes me on every occasion. Whether or not you hitch your wagon to a star, Jerry, is not so important, after all. The real test is in just what kind of a star you hitch to. That will tell whether you are going to ride to glory or cut such a figure as the cow did that jumped over the moon."
"It is not always that lawyers give counsel for nothing, Jerry," Laura began, but the line of talk was again interrupted.
The coming of callers led to many lines of discussion during the long summer evening, in which Jerry took little part. In this new hemisphere in which she was trying to find herself, where east seemed south and her right hand her left, there was so much of the old hemisphere against which she had partly burnt her bridges. The friendly familiarity of New Eden neighbors was very different from the caste exclusiveness of the Darby-Swaim set in Philadelphia. With the Winnowoc Valley people the rich landholders had no social traffic. But the broad range of conversation to-night, token of general information, called up home memories in Jerry's mind and the long evenings when Jim Swaim's friends gathered there to discuss world topics with her father, while she listened with delight to all that was said. Her mother didn't care for these things and wondered why her artistic daughter could be so interested in them. But when the Macphersons and their guests spoke of the latest magazines and the popular fiction and the recent drama it brought up Lesa Swaim in her element to the listening young stranger. It seemed so easy for the Macphersons to entertain gracefully, to make everybody at home in the shadowy comfort of that big porch, to bring in limeade and nut-cakes in cut-glass and fine china service, to forget none of the things due to real courtesy, and yet to envelop all in the genuine, open-hearted informality of the genial, open-hearted West.
Long after the remainder of the Macpherson household was asleep Jerry Swaim lay wide awake, her mind threshed upon with the situation in which she had suddenly found herself. And over and over in the aisles of her thoughts what York Macpherson had said about unhitching from a star ran side by side with Uncle Cornie's words, "If a man went right with himself."