“It's not the leather, Ben,” answered Olive, “and it's not your not going to Harvard altogether, though that has something to do with it. The trouble's in me. I was at school with all those girls Clara goes with, and I could have been in that set if I'd wanted; but I didn't really want to. I saw, at a very tender age, that it was going to be more trouble than it was worth, and I just quietly kept out of it. Of course, I couldn't have gone to Papanti's without a fuss, but mother would have let me go if I had made the fuss; and I could be hand and glove with those girls now, if I tried. They come here whenever I ask them; and when I meet them on charities, I'm awfully popular. No, if I'm not fashionable, it's my own fault. But what difference does it make to you, Ben? You don't want to marry any of those girls as long as your heart's set on that unknown charmer of yours.” Ben had once seen his charmer in the street of a little Down East town, where he met her walking with some other boarding-school girls; in a freak with his fellow-students, he had bribed the village photographer to let him have the picture of the young lady, which he had sent home to Olive, marked, “My Lost Love.”
“No, I don't want to marry anybody,” said Ben. “But I hate to live in a town where I'm not first chop in everything.”
“Pshaw!” cried his sister, “I guess it doesn't trouble you much.”
“Well, I don't know that it does,” he admitted.
Mrs. Halleck's black coachman drove her to Mrs. Nash's door on Canary Place, where she alighted and rang with as great perturbation as if it had been a palace, and these poor young people to whom she was going to be kind were princes. It was sufficient that they were strangers; but Marcia's anxiety, evident even to meekness like Mrs. Halleck's, restored her somewhat to her self-possession; and the thought that Bartley, in spite of his personal splendor, was a friend of Ben's, was a help, and she got home with her guests without any great chasms in the conversation, though she never ceased to twist the window-tassel in her embarrassment.
Mr. Halleck came to her rescue at her own door, and let them in. He shook hands with Bartley again, and viewed Marcia with a fatherly friendliness that took away half her awe of the ugly magnificence of the interior. But still she admired that Bartley could be so much at his ease. He pointed to a stick at the foot of the hat-rack, and said, “How much that looks like Halleck!” which made the old man laugh, and clap him on the shoulder, and cry: “So it does! so it does! Recognized it, did you? Well, we shall soon have him with us again, now. Seems a long time to us since he went.”
“Still limps a little?” asked Bartley.
“Yes, I guess he'll never quite get over that.”
“I don't believe I should like him to,” said Bartley. “He wouldn't seem natural without a cane in his hand, or hanging by the crook over his left elbow, while he stood and talked.”
The old man clapped Bartley on the shoulder again, and laughed again at the image suggested. “That's so! that's so! You're right, I guess!”