"No; no house-parties till the middle of July. Dear knows, what with a string of big dinners, my two little dances, and those tiresome Thursdays in January and February when everybody came, I have done all that could be expected by society from paupers like ourselves," said Mrs. Henry Gervase, settling herself in a wicker chair, on the veranda of her country home, and looking approvingly at her water-view.
"Paupers!" said a lady from a neighboring cottage, who had dropped in to call. Mrs. Gervase's friends rarely liked to commit themselves to positive comment upon her statements until certain which way the cat was meant to jump. Mrs. Luther Prettyman, the wife of the dry-goods magnate, whose good fortune it was to own the land adjoining the Gervase property at Sheepshead Point,—a recently famous resort for summer visitors on our far eastern coast,—now contented herself with a little deprecatory giggle that might mean anything, and waited for Mrs. Gervase to go on.
"Oh, well! everything is comparative; and on the scale by which people measure things in New York, to-day, we are simply grovelling in poverty. John,"—to her gardener,—"you have got that row of myosotis entirely out of line; and, remember, nothing but salvia behind the heliotropes. I like a blaze of scarlet and purple against a blue sea-line like this. Heavens! what a perfect afternoon! The atmosphere has been clarified, and those birches in the ravine 'twinkle with a million lights.' My dear woman, I make no apologies. Any one who wants me at this season of the year must take me as I am. After eight months of bricks and mortar, dirty streets, and stupid drives in the Park, I am fairly maudlin over Nature when I get her back in June.
"I went to a concert where Paderewski played a night or two before he left America; and I give you my word that while the music was going on I put up my fan and plainly heard the babble of this little brook of mine, and the lap of the waves over the rocks at high tide, with, now and then, the notes of the song-sparrow that comes back every year and perches on my Norway pine. Somebody said of me afterwards, at supper, that I had been having a little nap. They may say anything of me, I believe, and some idiot will be found to credit it. But please don't accept the newspaper report that I am to have Mr. and Mrs. This, or Mr. That and Mrs. T'other, stopping with me at Stoneacres during June. I am much too busy with my granger-work, and my husband too industrious doing nothing, to play host and hostess now."
"I did not know; I only thought—" ventured Mrs. Prettyman. "You see, everything is so dull here, socially, till August. And when one has a guest coming who is accustomed to a great deal of fashionable gaiety,—a young lady, a distinguished belle,—one naturally grasps at the idea of such pleasant house-parties as yours are known to be, dear Mrs. Gervase."
"We shall be dull as ditch-water," answered relentless Mrs. Gervase, turning around to survey the struggle of a fat-breasted robin to extract from the turf a worm that continued to emerge in apparently unending length. "And if you will have a girl out of season, why, put her on bread and milk and beauty-sleep, give her plenty of trashy novels and a horse to ride, and she'll do well enough."
"But—perhaps I am wrong—surely Mr. Gervase told Mr. Prettyman, when they were smoking on our veranda last Sunday, that you are expecting your nephew, Mr. Alan Grove."
"That's just like Mr. Gervase,—a perfect sieve for secrets," quoth Mrs. Gervase, contemptuously; "when I particularly requested him to mention Alan's visit to nobody. The poor boy is completely used up with work, and has engaged to get a paper ready to read before some scientific congress next month, and finds himself unable to write a line of it in town. Here, I have promised him, he may have absolute quiet—not be called on to play civility or squire-of-dames for any one; and, I may as well warn you now, he's not to be expected to do a hand's turn of entertainment for your girl. Besides, I happen to know that he can't abide 'society' young women. He is plunged up to the neck in electricity, is poor, ambitious, clever, on the way to sure success; and I'm going to back him all I can, not put stumbling-blocks in his path."
"How plunged up to his neck in electricity?" asked puzzled Mrs. Prettyman.
"Electric law, my good soul; did you think it a new kind of capital punishment? The lucrative law of the future, I've heard wise men say. Simpkins!" hailing, with irresistible command, a butcher's cart that seemed possessed of a strong desire to drive away in a hurry from a side entrance to the house. "Simpkins! Oh! there you are; I meant to leave orders with the cook not to let you get away again to-day without a word from me. I noticed, on the book, that you had the effrontery to charge sixty cents a pound for spring chickens here in June. Now, don't tell me! The way all you natives do; you have a short season, and must make the most of it. This is not your season, or my season, either. Wait till August before you put on the screws. And your sweetbreads, eighty cents a pair, when you know that when Mr. Gervase and I first came here to live, you were throwing sweetbreads away, till we taught you the use of them! Now, mind, I shall get tired of sending friends to you to be fleeced in August, if this is what you do to me in June."