“I think they run from fifteen dollars up to twenty or thirty thousand.”
“I shouldn’t get a thirty thousand dollar one, at all events. Then I must have a complete new riding outfit for myself. This comes of going to Newport. Before that I thought my riding-skirt, saddle, and bridle quite good enough, but now I yearn for a tailor made habit and all the etceteras. How much do you think that will cost? However, it’s not worth while to ask you, for you wouldn’t be likely to know. And if you knew, you wouldn’t tell me the truth.”
“Again—thanks.”
“And of course I want some clothes—swell gowns like those I saw at Newport. And my mother’s watch is past repairing any more, and my piano is on its last legs, and I promised to bring dear Mrs. Cary, our next neighbor, an easy-chair for a present, and of course I shall have to carry Dad Davy and all the other servants something nice, and I must make a little gift to Aunt Jemima, and, and—I’m afraid my money won’t hold out.”
“Don’t give up,” said Farebrother, encouragingly. “Leave out the swell gowns, and the watch, and the piano, and the riding habit, and I daresay you’ll have enough left for the rest.”
“What do you take me for? To get nothing for myself? Please understand I am not so foolish as I look. But, perhaps, after all, I won’t buy any of those things, and I will lay it all out in a pair of pearl bracelets to match my mother’s necklace, and trust to luck to get another windfall at some time during my sojourn in this vale of tears.”
But Farebrother, who professed to be deeply interested in this scheme for squandering a fortune, would not let the subject drop. He drew Miss Maywood into the conversation, and although the two girls cordially disliked each other, they were too ladylike to show it, and they had in mind the prospect of spending some months in a lonely country neighborhood, when each might find the other a resource.
“I should think, dear,” said the literal Ethel, in her sweet, slow English voice, “that it would be impossible to buy half the things you are thinking of out of that much money, and everything is so ruinously dear in New York, I understand.”
“Oh,” answered Letty, airily, “it’s not the impossibility of the thing that puzzles me; it is the making up of my mind as to which one of the impossibilities I shall finally conclude to achieve.”
Miss Maywood thought this a very flippant way of talking, but all American girls were distressingly flippant, except the sham English ones that she met at Newport, who were distressingly serious. And then in a moment or two more a genuine sensation occurred. Sir Archy appeared, red but triumphant, followed by his man, and both of them loaded down with gun-cases, hat-boxes, fishing-reels, packing-cases, mackintoshes, sticks, umbrellas, traveling-rugs and pillows, guide-books and all the vast impedimenta with which an Englishman prepares for a twelve hours’ trip as if he were going to the antarctic circle.