A bright red bug with purple stripes, round and fatherly, had climbed on his cuff. Presently, it jumped off in his palm. He held it up and as it trudged toward his finger tips, it too faced westward.
“Admire the sun, little bourgeois!” Quincy commanded.
Of a sudden, the bug hopped away. There had been no food on his palm, for it.
“You refuse to admire the sun?” said the boy, thoroughly serious. “Well, you’re a lucky little bourgeois not to have to.”
In ways like this, Quincy managed to forget himself. He was alert always, for a dialogue in the woods. But a few hundred yards beyond, in the old house, he was forever still and eaten-up with moods.
Despite the real simplicity of their house, the Burts liked it. Rhoda and her husband consented to spend a month there with them. Later, during her husband’s vacation, they were going to the mountains. Rhoda’s close presence that July was of import to Quincy. His family had several more acute impressions to inject in him before its full task was done. And what with his undigested year at college still upon him, and the vague threats of a second year to impose upon a first which had not yet retired into a spiritual composition, Quincy was in a sensitive state for new shocks and for new colors. His self-constituted idylls back of the house were not all of his summer. Life in the raw came to the country with him. Nor was it ashamed, it seemed, to grate and pound and give ruthless exhibitions, even if the flowers and trees and birds did sing outside the windows.
There was an excursion into new land. And of course, all of these things, new and old, while they seemed at first merely to make more mud of his problems, were really a solvent to help clear them. The new excursion came in the form of a girl—a friend of Adelaide—Clarice Lodge.
The Lodge family had a house, half a mile away, not nearly so splendid as the one which the Burts rented. But Mr. Lodge owned his house and they lived in it, all of the year. He was a lawyer, in New York—a real commuter. Adelaide had met Clarice in the city. They were not very close friends, at the summer’s outset. Nor were they any closer at the summer’s end. Adelaide, who was twenty-one, explained that she could never possibly grow intimate with a girl who was only seventeen. Withal, Clarice looked up to her and vigorously sought her out, when she learned that the Burts had leased the Frondham mansion.
That was the title of the house. It was owned by Miss Juliet Frondham, an ancient lady of an ancient stock. She was too poor to live in this mocking relic of her whilom glory. But she was too proud to sell it and too fond of it to live far away. So Miss Frondham with her maid lived in a suite of rooms in the more built-up section of the township. She kept her own house immaculate and rented it for as long periods as she could.
Two years later, this proud, poor lady—the last of her line—died, leaving a fortune of three hundred thousand dollars to her maid. Three brothers came like a storm out of Illinois. The will was contested and eventually broken. The faithful maid proved to be a villain who with fiendish cunning had turned her mistress against her entire kin. She ended in the penitentiary. And Josiah Burt bought the Frondham mansion.