MRS. FARRELL

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK
Established 1817

MRS. FARRELL

A NOVEL BY
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
With an Introduction by
Mildred Howells

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON

Mrs. Farrell
Copyright, 1921, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
L-V

INTRODUCTION

This story of my father’s was first printed under the title of Private Theatricals in the Atlantic Monthly of 1875, while he was still editor of the magazine. It appeared a few years after Henry James’s Gabrielle de Bergerac, and neither of the two short novels was ever republished by their authors. My father’s must have been written in the Concord Avenue house in Cambridge which he and my mother had just built and moved into. They were very proud of the new house, even of its mansard roof such as every house of the period was obliged to have, and which is reflected in the newly added French roofs of some of the houses near the church in West Pekin; but their greatest pride was in the library. My impressions of the house are those of rather extreme youth, but I can remember that it was lined with bookshelves bordered by bands of red, scalloped leather that were meant, as I now suppose, to keep the dust from the book tops but which were then pleasantly mysterious to the infant mind. There were very satisfactory tiles of Eastlake tendencies over the fireplace, picturing the seasons in yellow and brown, and a vast flat-topped desk in the middle of the room with rows of drawers on either side that went down to the floor, leaving a dark hole between them, which was useful as a doll’s house when not occupied by my father’s feet. The room was at the back of the house, for greater quiet, and looked out into a deep, grassy yard divided down the center by a hedge of lilacs, and only invaded by birds and children.

The background of Mrs. Farrell is the New England farm boarding house, which was the only form of simple country sojourn before summer cottages were imagined, and it is interesting to compare it with the farm boarding in The Vacation of the Kelwyns, written so many years after and giving a much fuller study of the country people. The farmhouse of this story, kept by the finer type of New England farmers, must, I think, have been the sort of summer place that my parents were always seeking, and the Kelwyns’ experience a picture of what they more often found. In the latter book the country people are of much poorer stuff than the Woodwards, but one feels in his handling of them the greater tenderness and understanding that age teaches, and youth, no matter how sympathetic, cannot compass.

During the later summers, while we still lived in Cambridge, we tried many different kinds of farm board, and I wish I could remember more of them for comparison with those of Mrs. Farrell and the Kelwyns, but I can only recall one of all our landladies, a good-natured farmer’s wife, so stout that her apron strings only appeared where they were tied behind her. I made many solemn journeys around her in search of them, and I think it must have always been while she was frying doughnuts, for that act is firmly associated in my mind with her invisible apron strings. I was also vaguely conscious of a feud that raged between our hosts and their relations, over a family Bible that had reversed the squaring of the circle by having its corners worn off until it was quite round. It had been borrowed and wrongfully detained by a younger branch of the family, leaving hatred and uncharitableness behind. These reflections, I am afraid, do not throw any great light on the practical conditions of farm boarding, but they are all I have.

It is amusing to one who started life in the eighteen-seventies, to see it again from their angle in these pages written not only about them, but in them. One notes with surprise, after the feminine activity of the present, the general resignation of even faintly middle-aged ladies to headaches and invalidism, and the walks taken through woods and meadows in trailing draperies. The painting of cat-tails emerges from a very dead past, and even the more modern charcoal head of Blossom brings back the day of William Hunt’s classes, when charcoal heads prevailed, and every Boston young lady of artistic taste longed to be among his pupils. Rachel Woodward’s little red schoolhouse must be deserted to-day and quietly dropping apart on its country road, as so many others are doing now that their scholars have been concentrated in big graded schools; but her practical view of her own talent and her firmness in returning what she thought more than her drawings worth to Mrs. Gilbert are of no epoch, but still endure in the New England character, unalterable as its native granite. Coming from southern Ohio, my father could, perhaps, see the New England people more clearly than if he had been one of them, and the Woodward family gives what he felt and valued in their stern uprightness and self-restraint.

The echoes of the Civil War, in the injustice of Easton’s advancement in military rank over the head of his friend, come strangely to us who have just lived through another terrible conflict which has left this world weary and discouraged. In speaking of the two wars, my father said that a great difference lay in the spirit that came after them, for when the Civil War was done people in the North felt that all the troubles of the world were over, and that in the future everything was going to be right. Easton’s ideas about hunting and fishing, and his desire to help the helpless, are a reflection, I think, of the writer’s own feelings; and in the scene where Easton stops the rearing horse one wonders whether there survive faint traces of those early literary traditions that made my father, as he once said, feel when he began writing novels that he must have his hero do something to win the heroine, like rescuing her from a wild bull, until he observed that in real life nothing of the sort was necessary. His minute study of Easton’s emotions as a lover makes one feel the sympathetic interest of a writer who was young enough to go fully into them, and form a temptation to quote from a letter written in his later middle age, in which he says, “I do not think I can ever write of mating and marriage again.”

Mrs. Gilbert’s desire in her first talk with Mrs. Farrell of “a good stupid wooing—at least a year of it” for her, shows an early distrust of Romance as a foundation for life, but in their second talk together Mrs. Farrell’s answer, “Nothing that’s wrong can be one’s own affair, I suppose: it belongs to the whole world,” is of his latest, as well as his earliest philosophy.

Mildred Howells.

MRS. FARRELL

Chapter I

WEST PEKIN is one of those country places which have yielded to changing conditions and have ceased to be the simple farming towns of a past generation. The people are still farmers, but most of them are no longer farmers only. In the summer they give up the habitable rooms of their old square wooden houses to boarders from the cities, and lurk about in the nooks and crannies of their L’s and lean-to’s; and, whatever their guests may have to complain of, have hardly the best of the bargains they drive with them. But in this way they eke out the living grudged them by their neglected acres, and keep their houses in a repair that contrasts with the decay of their farming. Each place has its grove of maples, fantastically gnarled and misshapen from the wounds of many sugar seasons; and an apple orchard, commonly almost past bearing with age, stretches its knotted boughs over a slope near the house. Every year the men-folk plow up an area of garden ground, and plant it with those vegetables which, to the boarders still feeding in mid-July on last year’s potatoes and tough, new-butchered beef, seem so reluctant in ripening; but a furrow is hardly turned elsewhere on the farm. It yields a crop of hay about the end of June, in which the boarders’ children tumble, and a favorable season may coax from it a few tons of rowen grass. The old stone walls straggle and fall down even along the roadside; in the privacy of the wood lots and berry pastures they abandon themselves to reckless dilapidation.

Many houses in the region stand empty, absently glaring on the passer with their cold windows, as if striving in vain to recall the households, long since gone West, to whom they were once homes. By and by they will drop to ruin; or some shrewd Irishman, who has made four or five hundred dollars in a Massachusetts suburb, will buy one of them, and, stocking the farm with his stout boys and girls, will have the best-looking place about. He thrives where the son of the soil starved; and if the bitter truth must be owned, he seems to deserve his better fortune. He has enterprise and energy and industry, and to the summer boarder, used to the drive and strain of the city, the Yankee farmer often seems to have none of these qualities. It may be that the summer boarder judges him rashly; I dare say he would not be willing himself to take his landlord’s farm as a gift, if he must live on those stony hillsides the year round, and find himself at each year’s end a year older but not a day nearer the competence to which all men look forward as the just reward of long toil. I always fancied a dull discouragement in the native farming race; an effect of the terrible winter that drowns a good half of the months in drifts of snow, and of the dreary solitude of the country life. Great men have come from the rural stock in our nation before now; and perhaps the people of West Pekin have earned the right to lie fallow; but whether this is so or not, it is certain that they often evince an aptness to open the mouth and stand agape at unusual encounters, which one cannot well dissociate from ideas of a complete mental repose. If they have no thoughts, they have not the irrelevance and superfluity of words. They are a signally silent race. I have seen two of them, old neighbors, meet after an absence, and when they had hornily rattled their callous palms together, stand staring at each other, their dry, serrated lips falling apart, their jaws mutely working up and down, their pale-blue eyes vacantly winking, and their weather-beaten faces as wholly discharged of expression as the gable ends of two barns confronting each other from opposite sides of the road; no figure can portray the grotesqueness of their persons, with their feet thrust into their heavy boots, and their clothes—originally misshapen in a slop-shop after some bygone fashion, and now curiously warped, outgrown, outworn—climbing up their legs and mounting upon their stooping shoulders. But if they are silent they are not surly; give them time and they are amiable enough, and they are first and last honest. They do not ask too much for board, and they show some slow willingness to act upon a boarder’s suggestions for his greater comfort. But otherwise they remain unaffected by the contact. They learn no greater glibness of tongue, or liveliness of mind, or grace of manner; if their city guests bring with them the vices of wine or beer at dinner and tobacco after it, the farmers keep themselves uncontaminate. The only pipe you smell is that of the neighboring Irishman as he passes with his ox-team; the gypsying French Canadians, as they wander southward, tipsy by whole families, in their rickety open buggies, lend the sole bacchanal charm to the prospect that it knows. These are of a race whose indomitable light-heartedness no rigor of climate has appalled, whereas our Anglo-Saxon stock in many country neighborhoods of New England seems weather-beaten in mind as in face; and this may account for the greater quick-wittedness of the women, whose indoor life is more protected from the inclemency of our skies. It is certain that they are far readier than the men, more intelligent, gracious, and graceful, and with their able connivance the farmer stays the adversity creeping upon his class, if he does not retrieve its old prosperity. In the winter his daughters teach school, and in the summer they help their mother through her enterprise of taking boarders. The farm feeds them all, but from the women’s labor comes thrice the ready money that the land ever yields, and it is they who keep alive the sense of all higher and finer things, Heaven knows with what heroic patience and devoted endeavor. The house shines, through them, with fresh paper and paint; year by year they add to those comforts and meek aspirations toward luxury which the summer guest accepts so lightly when he comes, smiling askance at the parlor organ in the corner, and the black-walnut-framed chromo-lithographs on the walls.

Nehemiah Woodward left West Pekin in his youth, after his preparation in the academy, which still rests its classic pediment upon a pair of fluted pine pillars above the village green, and went to Andover, where he studied divinity and married his landlady’s daughter. She was a still, somewhat austere girl, and she had spread no lures for the affections of her lover, who was of tenderer years than herself; he was not her first love; perhaps he was at last rather her duty, or her importuning fate. In any case she did not deny him in the end; they were married after his ordination and went away to the parish in New York State over which he was settled, and she left behind her the grave in which the hopes of her youth were buried. The young minister knew about it; she told him everything when he first spoke to her of marriage; they went together to bid farewell to the last resting place of the dead rival whom he had never seen; and his sublime generosity touched her heart with a lifelong gratitude.

It was his only inspiration, poor soul! he was a dreadfully dull man—too dull even for the inarticulate suffering of country congregations. Parish after parish shifted him from its aching shoulders; they loved him for his goodness, but they could not endure him, they hardly knew why; it was really because his sermons were of lead, and finally none the lighter that they were beaten out so thin. He had thus worn westward, leaving a deeply striated human surface behind him, in the line of the New England emigration, as far as to the farther border of Iowa, and he was an elderly man with a half-grown family, when his father died and left the ancestral farm at West Pekin, to which none of the other sons would return from their prosperity in the neighboring towns or the new countries where they had settled. But it was not a fortune that Nehemiah could refuse; possibly he had always had his own secret yearnings for those barren pastures of his boyhood; at any rate, he gladly parted from his last willing parish and went back to the farm. Once returned, he seemed never to have been away; he looked as much a fixture of the landscape as any outbuilding of the place. He quickly shed whatever clerical dignity had belonged to his outward man, and slouched into the rusty boots and scarecrow coats and hats that costume our farmers at their work, as easily as if he had only laid them off overnight. The physical shape of the farm was favorable to his luckless gift of going downhill, but the energy of his wife now stayed his further descent as effectually as if he had been a log propped on the edge of a slope by some jutting point of granite. She had indeed always done more than her half toward keeping her family’s souls and bodies together; now, with a lasting basis to work upon, she took the share on which Nehemiah’s lax hold had faltered. The house was built with the substantial handsomeness which a farmer could afford who two generations ago sent his boys to the academy. It was large and square, with ample halls crossing each other from side to side, and dividing it into four spacious rooms below and answering chambers overhead, some of which, after a season or two of summer boarders, Mrs. Woodward was able to cut in two and still leave large enough for single beds. In time a series of very habitable chambers grew out over the one-story wing; a broad new piazza invited the breeze and shade around two sides of the house, from whose hilltop perch you could look out over a sea of rolling fields and woods, steeply shored on the south by the long flank of Scatticong Mountain. The air was a luxury, the water was delicious; the walks and drives through the white-birch groves were lovely beyond compare; and long before the summer of which I write, the fame of Mrs. Woodward’s abundant table and educated kitchen had made it a privilege to be her boarders for which people endeavored by engaging her rooms a year beforehand. Whoever abode there reported it a house flowing with unstinted cream and eggs; peas, beans, squash, and sweet corn in their season, of a flavor that the green grocery never knew; blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, after their kind; and bread with whose just praise one must hesitate to tax the credulity of one’s hearer.

Mrs. Woodward not only knew how to serve her guests well, but how to profit by serving them well. She made it her business, and mixed no sentiment of any sort with it. She abolished herself socially and none of her boarders offered her slight at the point to which she retreated from association with them. She left them perfect freedom in the house, but she kept them rigidly distinct from her own family, whom she devoted each in his or her way to the enterprise she had undertaken. The family ate at their own table, and never appeared in the guests’ quarter except upon some affair connected with their comfort; but they were all willing in serving. Even Nehemiah himself, under the discipline centering in his wife, showed a sort of stiff-jointed readiness in hitching up the horse for the ladies when the boys happened to be out of the way; and he had thus late in life discovered a genius for gardening. It was to his skill and industry that the table owed its luxury of vegetables; and he was wont to walk out at twilight, and stand, bent-kneed and motionless, among the potatoes, and look steadfastly upon the peas, in serene emulation of the simulacrum posted in a like attitude in another part of the patch. He was the most approachable member of the family, and would willingly have talked with one, no doubt, if he could have found anything in the world to say. The others were civil, but invisibly held aloof by the mother’s theory of business, or secret pride, which, whatever it was, interfered with no one’s rights or pleasures, and so was generally accepted by amiable newcomers after a few good-natured attempts to overcome it. There was only one of them who had succeeded in breaking the circle of this reserve, and her intimacy with the Woodwards seemed rather another of her oddities than anything characteristic of them.

The household of the boarders displayed that disparity between the sexes which is one of the sad problems of the New England civilization, and perhaps enforced it a little more poignantly than was just. They were not all single ladies; a good third of the fifteen were married; of the rest, some were yet too young to think or to despair of marrying, and it could not be confidently said of others that they wished to change their state. Nevertheless, one’s first sense of their condition was vaguely compassionate. It seemed a pity that for six days in the week they should have to talk to one another and dress only for their own sex. Not that their toilettes were elaborate; they all said that they liked to come to the Woodwards’ because you did not have to dress there, but could go about just as you pleased; yet, having the taste of all American women in dress, they could not forbear making themselves look charming, and were always appearing in some surprising freshness and fragrance of linen, or some gayety of flannel walking costume. The same number of men would have lapsed into unshaven chins and unblacked boots in a single week; but these devoted women had their pretty looks on their consciences, and never failed to honor them. Some of them even wore flowers in their hair at dinner— Heaven knows why; and the young girls were always coming home from the woods with nodding plumes of bracken in their hats, and walking out in the dusk with coquettish headgear on, to be seen by no one more important than some barefooted, half-grown, bashful farm boy driving home his cows. The mothers started their children out every morning in clean, whole clothes, and patiently put aside at night the grass-stained, battered, dusty, dishonored fragments. Even one or two old ladies who were there for the country air were zealous to be neatly capped. The common sentiment seemed to be that as you never knew what might happen, you ought to be prepared for it. What actually happened was the occasional arrival of the stage with an express package for one of the boarders, and a passenger for some farmhouse beyond, who at very rare and exciting intervals was a man. Once a day the young ladies went down to the village after the mail, and indulged themselves with the spectacle of gentlemen dismounting from the stage at the hotel, which at such moments poured forth on piazza and gallery a disheartening force of lady boarders. Regularly, also, at ten o’clock on Saturday night, when everybody had gone to bed, this conveyance drove up to the door of the farmhouse, and set down the five husbands of five of the married ladies, for whom it called again on Monday morning, before anybody was up. These husbands were almost as unfailing as the fish-balls at the Sunday breakfast; and when any one of them was kept in Boston it made a great talk; his wife had got word from him why he could not come; or she had not got word: it was just as exciting in either case. The ladies all made some attractive difference in their dress, which the wives when they went to their rooms asked the husbands if they had noticed, and which the husbands had not noticed, to a man. After breakfast, each husband took by the hand the child or two which his wife had scantly provided him (a family of four children was thought pitiably large, and a marvel of responsibility to the mother), and went off to the woods, whence he returned an hour before dinner, and read the evening papers which he had brought up in his pocket. In the afternoon he was reported asleep, being fatigued by the ride from town the day before, or he sat and smoked, or sometimes went driving with his family. His voice as the household heard it next morning at dawn had a gayer note than at any other time in the last thirty-eight hours, and his wife, coming down to breakfast, met the regulation jest about her renewed widowhood with a cheerfulness that was apparently sincere.

It may not have been so dull a life for the ladies as men would flatter themselves; they all seemed to like it, and not a woman among them was eager to get back to her own house and its cares. Perhaps the remembrance of these cares was the secret of her present content; perhaps women, when remanded to a comparatively natural state, are more easily satisfied then men. It is certain that they are always enduring extremes of ennui that appear intolerable to the other sex. Here at Woodward farm they had their own little world, which I dare say was all the better and kindlier for being their own. They were very kind to one another, but preferences and friendships necessarily formed themselves. Certain ladies were habitually visiting, as they called it, in one another’s rooms, and one lady on the ground floor was of a hospitable genius that invited the other boarders to make her room the common lounging and gossiping place. Whoever went in or out stopped there; and the mail, when it was brought from the post-office, was distributed and mostly read and talked over, there.

Till a bed was put into the parlor, one of the young ladies used to play a very little on the organ after breakfast on rainy days. One of the married ladies, who had no children, painted; she painted cat-tail rushes, generally; not very like, and yet plainly recognizable. Another embroidered; she sat with her work in the wide doorway, and those passing her used to stop and take up one edge of it as it hung from her fingers, and talk very seriously about it, and tell what they had seen of the kind. Some of them were always writing letters; two or three had a special gift of sleep, both before and after dinner, which distinguished them from several nervous ladies, who never could sleep in the daytime. The young girls went up the mountain a good deal whenever they could join a party; twice when one of their brothers came from the city they camped out on the mountain; it was a great thing to see their camp fire after dusk; once they came home in a rain, and that was talk for two days, and always a joke afterward. They had a lot of novels, not very new to our generation, which they read aloud to one another sometimes; they began to write a novel of their own, each contributing a chapter, but I believe they never finished it; the youngest kept a journal, but she did not write in it much. She could also drive; and her timid elders who rode out with her said they felt almost as safe with her as with a man. All the ladies said that the air was doing them a great deal of good, and, if not, that the complete rest was everything; none of them had that wornout feeling with which she had come; if any did not pick up at once, she was told that she would see the change when she got home in the fall. Two or three, in the meantime, were nearly always sick in bed, or kept from meals by headache. From time to time the well ones had themselves weighed at the village store, to know whether they had gained or lost. They all talked together a good deal about their complaints, of which, whether they were sick or well, they each had several.

These were the interests and occupations, this the life, at Woodward farm, to the entire simplicity of which I am afraid I have not done justice, when a thing happened that complicated the situation and for the moment robbed it of its characteristic repose. It appears that while Mrs. Stevenson was quietly multiplying cat-tail rushes in her cool, airy, upstairs room, one of the Woodward girls, who taught school and in vacation waited on the boarders at the table, had also been employed—somewhere in the mysterious L part, where her family bestowed itself—on a work of art, a head of the Alderney cow known to the whole household as Blossom. Whether it was ever meant to be seen or not is scarcely certain; that lady who alone had the intimacy of the Woodwards came out with it from the kitchen one morning, as by violence, and showed it to the boarders after breakfast, while they still loitered at the table, none of the artist’s kindred appearing. They all recognized Blossom in a moment, but the exhibitor let them suffer and guess awhile who did it. Then she exploded the fact upon them, and the excitement began to rise. They said that it was a real Rosa Bonheur; and Mrs. Stevenson, who was indeed in another line of art and need feel no envy, set her head on one side, held the picture at arm’s length in different lights, and pronounced it perfect, simply perfect, for a charcoal sketch. They had looked at it in a group; now they looked at it singly and from a distance, cautioning one another that the least touch would ruin it. Then they began to ask the exhibitress if she had known of Miss Woodward’s gift before, the young girls listening to her replies with something of the zeal and reverence they felt for the artist. At last they said Mrs. Gilbert must see it, and followed it in procession to the room of the public-spirited lady on the first floor. She had been having her breakfast in bed, and now sat in a beruffled, sweet-scented dishabille, which became her pale, middle-aged, invalid good looks—her French-marquise effect, one young girl called it, Mrs. Gilbert’s hair being quite gray, and her thick eyebrows dark, like those of a powdered old-regime beauty. They set the drawing on her chimney-piece, and she considered it a long while with her hands lying in her lap. “Yes,” she sighed at last, “it’s very fair indeed, poor thing.”

“Blossom or Rachel, Mrs. Gilbert?” promptly demanded the lady who had been chaperoning the picture, with a tremor of humorous appreciation at the corners of her mouth, and a quick glance of her very dark-brown eyes.

“Rachel,” answered Mrs. Gilbert. “Blossom is a blessed cow. But a woman of genius in a New England farmhouse where they take summer boarders—oh dear me! Yes, it’s quite as bad as that, I should say,” she added, thoughtfully, after another stare at the picture.

“Quite.”

The company had settled and perched and poised upon the different pieces of furniture, as if they expected Mrs. Gilbert to go on talking; but she seemed to be out of the mood, and chose rather to listen to their applauses of the picture. The sum of their kindly feeling appeared to be that something must be done to encourage Miss Woodward, but they were not certain how she ought to be encouraged, and they began to stray away from the subject before anything was concluded. When the surprise had been drained to the dregs, a natural reaction began, and they left Mrs. Gilbert somewhat sooner than usual and with signs of fatigue. Presently no one remained but the lady who had exhibited the picture; her, as she made a movement to take it from the mantel, Mrs. Gilbert stopped, and began to ask about the artistic history of Miss Woodward.

Chapter II

MRS. BELLE FARRELL, one of the summer boarders, stood waiting at the side of the road for Rachel Woodward, who presently appeared on the threshold of the red schoolhouse, with several books on her arm. It was Saturday afternoon; her school term had ended the day before, and she had returned now for some property of hers left in the schoolhouse overnight. She laid down the books while she locked the door and put the key in her pocket, and then she gathered them up and moved somewhat languidly toward Mrs. Farrell. This lady was slender enough to seem of greater height than she really was, but not slender enough to look meager, and she wore a stuff that clung to her shape, and, without defining it too statuesquely, brought out all its stylishness. Her dress was not so well suited to walking along country roads as it was to some pretty effects of pose; caught with the left hand, and drawn tightly across from behind, its plaited folds expanded about Mrs. Farrell’s feet, and as she turned her head for a sidelong glance at her skirt it made her look like a lady on a Japanese fan. The resemblance was heightened by Mrs. Farrell’s brunette coloring of dusky red and white, and very dark eyes and hair; but for the rest her features were too regular; she knitted her level brows under a forehead overhung with loose hair like a French painter’s fancy of a Roman girl of the decadence, and she was not a Buddhist half the time. This afternoon, for example, she had in the hand with which she swept her skirt forward, a very charming little English copy of Keble’s Christian Year, in mouse-colored, flexible leather, with red edges. It was a book that she had carried a good deal that summer.

She now looked up and down the road, and, seeing no one but Rachel, she undid her attitude and pinned her draperies courageously out of the way. “Let us go home through the berry pasture,” she said, and at the same time she stepped out toward the bars of the meadow with a stride that showed the elastic beauty of her ankles and the neat fit of her stout walking shoes; she mounted and was over before the country girl could let down one of the bars and creep through. In spite of Mrs. Farrell’s stylishness, the pasture and she seemed joyously to accept each other as parts of nature; as she now lounged over the tough, springy knolls and leaped from one gray-lichened rock to another, and glided in and out of the sun-shotten clumps of white birches, she suggested a well-millinered wood nymph not the least afraid of satyrs; she suffered herself to whistle fragments of opera as she stooped from time to time and examined the low bushes to see if there were any ripe berries yet. Such as she found she ate with a frank, natural, charming greed; but there were not many of them.

“We shall have to stick to custard pie for another week,” she said; “I’m glad it’s so good. Don’t let’s go home at once, Rachel. Sit down and have a talk, and I’ll help you through afterward, or get you out of the trouble somehow. Halt!” she commanded.

The girl showed a conscientious hesitation, while Mrs. Farrell sank down at the base of a bowlder on which the sunset had been shining. The day was one of that freshness which comes often enough to the New England hills even late in July; Mrs. Farrell leaned back with her hands clasped behind her head, and closed her eyes in luxury. “Oh, you nice old rock, you! How warm you are to a person’s back!”

Rachel crouched somewhat primly near her, with her books on her knee, and glanced with a slight anxiety at the freedom of Mrs. Farrell’s self-disposition, whose signal grace might well have justified its own daring.

“Rachel,” said Mrs. Farrell, subtly interpreting her expression, “you’re almost as modest as a man; I’m always putting you to the blush. There, will that do any better?” she asked, modifying her posture. She gazed into the young girl’s face with a caricatured prudery, and Rachel colored faintly and smiled.

“Perhaps I wasn’t thinking what you thought,” she said.

“Oh yes, you were, you sly thing; don’t try to deceive my youth and inexperience. I suppose you’re glad your school’s over for the summer, Rachel.”

“I don’t know. Yes, I’m glad; it’s hard work. I shall have a change, at least, helping about home.”

“What shall you do?”

“I suppose I shall wait on table.”

“Well, then, you shall not. I’ll arrange that with your mother, anyway. I’ll wait on table myself, first.”

“I don’t see what difference it makes whether I work for the boarders in the kitchen or wait on them at the table.”

“It makes a great difference: you can’t be bidden by them if you’re not in the way, and I’m not going to have a woman of genius asking common clay if it will take some more of the hash or another help of pie in my presence. Yes, I say genius, Rachel; and Mrs. Gilbert said so, too,” cried Mrs. Farrell, at some signs in the girl, who seemed a little impatient of the subject, as of something already talked over; “and I’m proud of having been in the secret of it. I never shall forget how they all looked when I came dancing out with it and stood it up at the head of the table, where they could see it! They thought I did it, and they had quite a revulsion of feeling when they found it was yours. Where are you going, Rachel? To Florence, or the Cooper Institute, or Doctor Rimmer?”

“I have no idea of going anywhere. I have no money; father couldn’t afford to send me. I don’t expect to leave home.”

“Well, then, I’ll tell you: you must. Why can’t you come and stay with me in Boston, this winter? I’ve got two rooms, and money enough to keep a couple of mice—especially if one’s a country mouse—and we’ll study art together. I might as well do that as anything—or nothing. Come, is it a bargain?”

“If I could get the money to pay for my boarding, I think I should like it very much. But I couldn’t,” answered Rachel, quietly.

“Why, Rachel, can’t you understand that you are to be my guest?”

Even the women of West Pekin are slow to melt in gratitude, and Rachel replied without effusion:

“Did you mean that? It is very good of you—but I could never think of it,” she added, firmly. “I never could pay you back in any way. It would come to a great deal in a winter—city board.”

“Do I understand you to refuse this handsome offer, Rachel?”

“I must.”

“All right. Then I shall certainly count upon your being with me, for it would be foolish not to come, and whatever you are, Rachel, you’re not foolish. I’m going to talk with your mother about it. Why, you little—chipmunk,” cried Mrs. Farrell, adding the term of endearment after some hesitation for the precise expression, “I want you to come and do me credit. When your things are on exhibition at Williams and Everett’s, and Doll and Richards’s, I’m going to gather a few small spears of glory for myself by slyly telling round that I gave you your first instruction, and kept you from blushing unseen in West Pekin. I’ve felt the want of a protégée a good while, and here you are, just made to my hand. I heard before I came away that they were going to get up a life class next winter. Perhaps we could get a chance to join that.”

“Life class?”

“Yes; to draw from the nude, you know.”

“From the—” Rachel hesitated.

“Yes, yes, yes! my wild-wood flower. From the human being, the fellow-creature, with as little on as possible,” shouted Mrs. Farrell. “How can you learn the figure any other way?”

A puzzled, painful look came into the girl’s eyes, and “Do—do—ladies go?” she asked, faintly.

“Of course they go!” said Mrs. Farrell. “It’s a regular part of art-education. The ladies have separate classes in New York; but they don’t abroad.”

Rachel seemed at a loss what to answer. She dropped her eyes under Mrs. Farrell’s scrutiny, and softly plucked at a tuft of grass. At last she said, without looking up, “It wouldn’t be necessary for me to go. I only want to paint animals.”

“Well, and aren’t men animals?” demanded Mrs. Farrell, leaning forward and trying to turn the girl about so as to look into her averted face.

“Don’t!” said the other, in a wounded tone.

“Rachel, Rachel!” cried Mrs. Farrell, tenderly, “I’ve really shocked you, haven’t I? Don’t be mad at me, my little girl: I didn’t invent the life class, and I never went to one. I don’t know whether it’s exactly nice or not. I suppose people wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t. Come, look round at me, Rachel: I’m so glad of your liking me that if you stop it for half a second you’ll break my heart!” She spoke in tones of anxious appeal, and then suddenly added, “If you’ll visit me this winter we won’t go to the life class; we’ll sleep together in the parlor and keep a cow in the back room.”

Rachel gave way to a laugh, with her face hidden in her hands, and Mrs. Farrell fell back, satisfied, against her comfortable rock again, and put her hand in her pocket. “Look here, Rachel,” she said, drawing it out. “Here’s something of yours.” She tossed a crisp, rattling ten-dollar note into the girl’s lap, and nodded as Rachel turned a face of question upon her. “I sold your Blossom for that this morning; I forgot to tell you before. No, ma’am; I didn’t buy it. Mrs. Gilbert bought it. The others praised it, Mrs. Gilbert paid for it: that’s Mrs. Gilbert. I told her something about you and how you owed everything to my instruction, and she offered ten dollars for Blossom. I tried to beat her down to five,” she continued, while Rachel stared dumbly at the money, “but it was no use. She wouldn’t fall a cent. She.... Ugh! What’s that?” cried Mrs. Farrell.

She gathered her dispersed picturesqueness hastily up, threw her head alertly round, and confronted a mild-faced cow, placidly pausing twenty paces off under the bough of a tree, through which she had advanced her visage, and softly regarding them with her gentle brown eyes. “Why, Blossom, Blossom!” complained the lady. “How could you come up in that startling way? I thought it was a man! Though of course,” she added, less dramatically, “I might have remembered that there isn’t a man within a hundred miles.”

She was about to lean back again in her lazy posture, when voices made themselves heard from the wood beside the pasture out of which Blossom had emerged. “Men’s voices, Rachel!” she whispered. “An adventure! I suppose we must run away from it!”

Mrs. Farrell struggled up from her sitting posture, and, entangling her foot in her skirt, plunged forward with graceful awkwardness, but did not fall. She caught the pins out of her drapery, and Rachel and she were well on their way to the bars which would let them into the road, when two men emerged from the birch thicket out of which Blossom had appeared. One was tall and dark, with a firm, very dark mustache branching across a full beard. The other was a fair man, with a delicate face; he was slight of frame, and of the middle stature; in his whole bearing there was an expression of tacit resolution, which had also a touch of an indefinable something that one might call fanaticism. Both were city-clad, but very simply and fitly for faring through woods and fields; the dark man wore high boots; he carried a trouting rod, and at his side was a fish basket.

They looked after the two women with eyes that clung charmed to the figure of Mrs. Farrell, as she drifted down the sloping meadow-path.

“Magnificent!” said the dark man, carelessly. “‘A daughter of the gods, divinely tall and most divinely fair!’”

A flush came over the cheek of the other, but he said nothing, while he absently advanced to the rock beside which the women had been sitting, as if that superb shape had drawn him thus far after her. A little book lay there, which he touched with his foot before he saw it. As he stooped to pick it up, Mrs. Farrell stopped fleetly, as a deer stops, and, wheeling round, went rapidly back toward the two men. When Mrs. Farrell advanced upon you, you had a sense of lustrous brown eyes growing and brightening out of space, and then you knew of the airy looseness of the overhanging hair and of the perfection of the face, and last of the sweeping, undulant grace of the divine figure. So she came onward now, fixing her unfrightened, steadfast eyes upon the young man, out of whose face went everything but worship. He took off his hat, and bent forward with a bow, offering the pretty volume, at which he had hardly glanced.

“Thanks,” she breathed, and for an instant she relaxed the severe impersonality of her regard, and flooded him with a look. He stood helpless, while she turned and swiftly rejoined her companion, and so he remained standing till she and Rachel had passed through the meadow bars and out of sight.

Then the dark man moved and said, solemnly, “Don’t laugh, Easton; you wouldn’t like to be seen through, yourself.”

“Laugh, Gilbert?” retorted Easton, with a start. “What do you mean? What is there to laugh at?” he demanded.

“Nothing. It was superbly done. It was a stroke of genius in its way.”

“I don’t understand you,” cried Easton.

“Why, you don’t suppose she left it here on purpose, and meant one of us to pick it up, so that she could come back and get it from him, and see just what manner of men we were; and—”

“No! I don’t suppose that.”

“Neither do I,” said Gilbert, nonchalantly. “I never saw anything more unconscious. Come, let’s be going; there’s nothing to call her back, now.”

He put his hand under the fish basket, and weighed it mechanically, while he used the mass of his uncoupled rod staffwise, and moved away. Easton followed with a bewildered air, at which Gilbert, when he happened to glance round at him, broke into a laugh.

Chapter III

IN the evening Gilbert walked over to Woodward farm from the hotel where he and Easton had stopped that morning, and called on his sister-in-law. He had brought word from her husband in Boston, whom he had gone out of his course to see on his journey up from New York. When she found out that he had been in West Pekin all day, he owned that he had spent the time fishing. “I didn’t suppose you’d be in any hurry to hear of Bob’s detention; and really, you know, I came for the fishing.”

“You needn’t be so explicit, William,” said Mrs. Gilbert. “I’m not vain.”

“I was merely apologizing.”

“Were you? What luck did you have?”

“The brooks are fished to death. I’ve had bad enough luck to satisfy even Easton, who had a conscience against fishing, among other things.”

“Easton! Your Easton? Is Wayne Easton with you?” demanded Mrs. Gilbert, with impetuous interest. “You don’t mean it!”

“No, but I say it,” answered Gilbert, unperturbed.

“What in the world brought him?” pursued his sister-in-law more guardedly, as if made aware by some lurking pain that an impetuous interest was not for invalids.

“The ideal of friendship. I happened to say that I was feeling a little out of sorts and was coming up here, and he jumped at the chance to disarrange himself by coming with me. He was illustrating his great principle that New York is the best place to spend the summer, and it cost him something of a struggle to give it up, but he conquered.”

“Is he really so queer?”

“He or we. I won’t make so bold as to say which.”

“Has he still got that remarkable protégé of his on his hands?”

“No; Rogers has given Easton his freedom. He’s gone on to a farm, with all Easton’s board and lodging, Latin and French, in him. His modest aspiration is finally to manage a market garden.”

“What a wicked waste of beneficence!”

“Easton looks at it differently. He says that no one else would ever have given Rogers an education, and that the learning wasn’t more thrown away on him than on many, perhaps most, people who are sent to college; learning has to be thrown away somehow. Besides, he economized by sharing his room with Rogers, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know that. Don’t you think that was rather more than Providence required of Mr. Easton?”

“I can’t say, Mrs. Gilbert.”

“But to take such a hopeless case—so hopelessly common!”

“There are some odd instances of the kind on record. The Christian religion was originally sent to rather a common lot.”

“Yes, but Latin wasn’t, and French wasn’t, and first-class board wasn’t. You needn’t try to gammon me with that sort of thing, William. I won’t stand it.”

“Well, I wouldn’t, myself. But I thought perhaps a lady might. Why did you put me on the defensive? I didn’t try to form Rogers, or reform him.”

“No, but you countenanced your Mr. Easton in it. He ought to have married and supported a wife, instead of risking his money on such a wild venture; it’s no better than gambling.”

“That’s your old hobby, Susan. A man can’t always be marrying and supporting a wife. And as for countenancing Easton, if he thought a thing was right, it’s very little of my cheek he would want to uphold him.”

“Oh, I dare say. That’s his insufferable conceit; conscientious people are always so conceited! They’re always so sure that they know just what is right and wrong. Ugh! I can’t endure ’em.”

“I don’t think Easton’s conscientiousness is of that aggravating type, exactly,” said Gilbert, with a lazy laugh.

“He has got a good many principles, ready cut and dried, but I should say life in general was something of a puzzler to him. He’s one of the wrecks of the war. Easton was peculiarly fitted to go on fighting forever in a sacred cause; he’s a born crusader; and this piping time of peace takes him at a disadvantage. He hates rest, and ease, and all the other nice things; what he wants is some good, disagreeable, lasting form of self-sacrifice: I believe it’s a real grief to him that he didn’t lose a leg; a couple of amputations would have made him perfectly happy; though of course he would choose another war of emancipation, for he wouldn’t want to be happy in such a useless way. As it is, he is a wretched castaway on the shores of the Fortunate Isles.”

“Why doesn’t he do something? Why does he idle away even the contemptible hours of peace and prosperity?”

“He does; he doesn’t. He’s at work on that book of his, all the time.”

“Oh, I don’t call that work.”

“He makes it work. Even if he went merely to literature for his material, his Contributions to the Annals of Heroism might be a serious labor; but he goes to life for it. He hunts up his heroes in the streets and in the back alleys, in domestic service, in the newspaper offices, in bank parlors, and even in the pulpits: he has a most catholic taste in heroism; he spares neither age, sex, nor condition. I suppose it isn’t an idle thing to instruct the world that all the highest dreams of self-devotion and courage and patience are daily realized in our blackguard metropolis: we leave culture and refinement to Boston. And if it were so, it must be allowed that even with a futile object in view, Easton does some incidental good: he half supports about half of his heroes, and he’s always wasting his time and substance in good deeds.”

“Well, well,” said Mrs. Gilbert, “I can’t admire such an eccentric, and you needn’t ask me.”

“I don’t. But this is just what shows the hopeless middlingness of your character. If you were a very much better or a very much worse woman, you would admire him immensely.”

“Oh, don’t talk to me, William! He’s a man’s man, and that’s the end of him. Why didn’t you bring him with you to-night?”

“He wouldn’t come.”

“Did you tell him there were fifteen ladies in the house?”

“It was that very stroke of logic which seemed to settle his mind about it. He is a man’s man, you’re right; he’s shyer of your admirable sex than any country boy; it’s no use to tell him you’re not so dangerous as you look. But even if he hadn’t been afraid of your ladies, the force of my argument might have been weakened by the fact of the twenty-five at the hotel. What are the superior inducements of your fifteen?”

“They are all very nice.”

“How many?”

“Well, three or four: and none of them are disagreeable.”

“Are you going to introduce me?”

“They’re in bed now—it’s half past eight—and they’d be asleep if it didn’t keep them awake to wonder who you are. If you’ll come to-morrow I’ll introduce you.”

“Good! Now I’ve been pretty satisfactory about Easton, I think—”

“I don’t see how you could have said less. Every word was extorted from you.”

“What I want to know,” continued Gilbert, “is whether the loveliest being in West Pekin, not to say the world, counts among your fair fifteen.”

When Mrs. Gilbert married, her husband’s youngest brother, William, had come to live with them, his father and mother being dead, and his brothers and sisters preoccupied with their own children. He was not in his teens yet, and she had taken the handsome, dark-eyed, black-headed boy under the fond protection which young married ladies sometimes like to bestow upon pretty boy brothers-in-law. This kindness, at first a little romantic, became, with the process of years that brought her no children of her own, a love more like that of mother and son between them. Her condescension had vastly flattered the handsome lad; as he grew older, she seemed to him the brightest as well as the kindest woman in the world; and now, after a score of years, when the crow was beginning to leave his footprints at the corners of her merry eyes, and she had fallen into that permanent disrepair which seems the destiny of so much youthful strength and spirit among our women, he knew no one whose company was more charming. The tacit compliment of his devotion doubtless touched a woman who was long past compliments in most things; something like health and youth he always seemed to bring back to her whenever he returned to her from absences that grew longer and longer after her husband removed to Boston—Mrs. Gilbert’s native city—and left William to follow his young man’s devices in New York. Through all changes and chances she had remained constant to this pet of her early matronhood, now a man past thirty. It was her great affliction that she could not watch over him at that distance in the dangerous and important matter of marriage, for she was both zealous and jealous that he should marry to the utmost advantage that the scant resources of her sex allowed, and it was but a partial consolation that she still had him to be anxious about.

They were sitting together in her hospitable room by the light of a kerosene lamp, with the mosquitoes, which swarm in West Pekin up to the end of July, baffled by window nettings. She rose dramatically, shut the window that opened upon the piazza, and said, “You haven’t seen her already! Where?”

“In one of the back pastures.”

“I’ll never believe it! How did she look? Dark or fair?”

“Dark; Greek; hair fluffy over the forehead; eyes that ‘stared on you silent and still, like the eyes in the house of the idols.’ I know it was she, for there can’t be two of her.” Gilbert gave a brief account of their meeting.

“It was, it was,” sighed Mrs. Gilbert, tragically. “It was Mrs. Belle Farrell!”

“Mrs?”

“A widow. The most opportunely bereft of women!”

“Susan, you interest me.”

“Oh, very likely! So will she. She must be famishing for a flirtation, and it’s you she’ll bend her devouring eyes upon, for I infer that your Mr. Easton, whatever he is, isn’t a flirt.”

“Easton? Well, no, I should think he wasn’t.”

Mrs. Gilbert leaned back, staring with a vacant smile across the room. But directly, as she began to talk of Mrs. Farrell, her eyes lighted up with the enjoyment that women feel in analyzing one of themselves for a man who likes women and knows how to make the due allowances and supply all the skipped details of the process. Gilbert had taken his place in her easy-chair when she shut the window, and she had disposed herself among the cushions and pillows of her lounge; he listened with lazy luxury and a smile of intelligence.

“Yes, she will interest you, William; she interests me, and I don’t dislike her as I might if I were a youthful beauty myself. In fact, she fascinates me, and I rather like her, on the whole. And I don’t see why I don’t approve of her. I don’t know anything against her.”

Gilbert laughed. “That’s rather a damaging thing to say of a lady.”

“Yes,” answered his sister-in-law, “I wouldn’t say it to everybody. But really, it seems odd that one doesn’t know anything against her. She’s very peculiar—for a woman; and I don’t know whether her peculiarity comes from her character or from her circumstances. It’s a trying thing to be just the kind of handsome young widow that Mrs. Farrell is in Boston.”

Gilbert did not comment audibly, but he lifted his eyebrows, and his sister-in-law went on: “Not but that we approve of youth and beauty as much as any one. In fact, if Mrs. Farrell had simply devoted herself to youth and beauty, and waited for the right man, she could have married again splendidly and been living abroad by this time. But, no! And that’s been her ruin.”

“She’s rather a picturesque ruin—to look at,” said Gilbert. “What has she done to desolate herself? What was she when in good repair?”

“Well, that isn’t quite so easy to make you understand. Originally she was something in the seafaring line. Her father was a ship’s captain, from somewhere in Maine, I believe; and when her mother died, this young lady was left at a tender age with her seafaring father on her hands, and they didn’t know what to do with each other. But the paternal pirate had a particular friend in a Mr. Farrell, the merchant who owned most of his vessel, and this Mr. Farrell had the little girl brought up and educated with his half sisters—he was a bachelor and very much their elder. One day the captain came home from a voyage, and was drowned by the capsizing of his sailboat in the bay; I believe that’s the death that old sea captains generally die; and this seemed to suggest a new idea to old Mr. Farrell. He thought he would get married, and he observed that the little girl under his charge was an extremely beautiful young woman, and he fell in love with her, and married her—to the disgust of his half sisters, who didn’t like her. He was a very respectable old party; Robert knew him quite well in the way of business, but I never saw anything of her in society; and if she liked age and respectability, it was all very well, especially as he died pretty soon afterward— I don’t know exactly how soon.”

“He left her his money, I suppose?”

“Yes, he did; and that’s the oddest part of it; there was very little of the money, and Mr. Farrell was supposed to be rich. Still, there was enough to have supported her in comfort while she quietly waited for her second husband, if she’d been content to wait quietly; and she could easily have kept Mr. Farrell’s level in society if she had remained with his family. In fact, she could have risen some notches higher; there are plenty of people who would have been glad of her as a sort of ornamental protégée, don’t you know; and if she had got a few snubs, it would have done her good. But she wouldn’t be patronized and she wouldn’t wait quietly.”

“Perhaps you’ve grown to be something of a snob, Susan.”

“I know it; I own it. Did I ever deny it? It’s the only safe ground for a woman. But Mrs. Farrell preferred to go living on in that demi-semi-Bohemian way—”

“What demi-semi-Bohemian way?”

“Oh, skirmishing round from one shabby-genteel boarding house to another, and one family hotel to another, and setting up housekeeping in rooms, and studying music at the Conservatory, and taking lessons in all the fine arts, and trying to give parlor readings, and that—and not doing it in earnest, but making a great display and spectacle of it. And so instead of keeping her little income to dress on, and getting invitations to Newport for the summer, she’s here in a farmhouse with us old fogies and decayed gentles and cultivated persons of small means. But it’s rather odd about Mrs. Farrell. I don’t believe she would enjoy herself in society; it has limitations; it doesn’t afford her the kind of scope she wants; it doesn’t respond with the sort of immediate effects that she likes—at least Boston society doesn’t. What Mrs. Belle Farrell wishes to do is something vivid, stunning; and that isn’t quite what society smiles upon—in Boston. Besides, society may be very selfish, but it really requires great self-sacrifice, and I don’t believe Mrs. Belle Farrell is quite equal to that. Don’t you see?”

“Dimly. Did she ever try the Cause of Woman, among her other experiments?”

“Well, that requires self-sacrifice, too, in its way; and Mrs. Farrell doesn’t like women very much, and she does like men very much; and she couldn’t bear to be grotesque in men’s eyes. Not that she would respect men much, or more than she does women. She’s very queer. I suppose she has streaks of genius; just enough to spoil her for human nature’s daily food.”

“We do find genius indigestible—in women,” allowed Gilbert, thoughtfully. “But isn’t life a little less responsive to her vivid intentions at Woodward farm than it would be anywhere else? Forgive the remark if there seems to be any unpleasant implication in it.”

“You’ve nothing to be forgiven, William. We know we are dull; we glory in our torpidity. But I suppose Mrs. Farrell has had the immense relief, here, of not trying to produce any effect. Consciously, I mean; unconsciously, she never can stop trying it till she’s in her grave.”

Gilbert, who had leaned forward with interest, in the course of Mrs. Gilbert’s tale, now fell back again in his chair, and said: “Oh, I see. You are prejudiced against Mrs. Belle Farrell. You have among you here a woman of extraordinary beauty, who strives in her own fashion after the ideal, who struggles to escape from the stupid round of your cares and duties and proprieties, and you want to hem her in with the same dread and misapprehension that imprison her life in your brutal Boston. She longs for a breath of free mountain air, and you stifle her with your dense social atmosphere. I see it all, plainly enough. You misinterpret that sensitive, generous, proud spirit. But no matter; I shall soon be able to make my own version.”

“She’ll give you every facility. I have no doubt she’s in her room now, preparing little hints and suggestions for your fancy to-morrow. Her dress at breakfast will tell the tale. But you needn’t flatter yourself, William, that she’ll care for you personally or individually; it’s you in the abstract that will interest her, as a handsome young man that certain effects of posture and drapery and gesture may be tried upon. I should like to know just how she stood and stared when you met her, you two, there in the berry pasture, alone. Did she look magnificently startled, splendidly frightened? The woman wouldn’t really have minded meeting a panther.”

“I didn’t say she was alone.”

“So you didn’t! Who was with her?”

“Oh, a little thrush of a girl, slim and shy-looking.”

“Well, William! You may as well take your Mr. Easton and go back to your New York at once.”

“What have I done?”

“Nothing; you have simply exhausted our resources; you have devoured with the same indiscriminate glance our Beauty and our Genius.”

“What do you mean?”

“That little thrush of a girl is the Rosa Bonheur of West Pekin.”

“Truly? Do I understand that the young lady does horse fairs for a living?”

“Not exactly, or not yet. She is the daughter of our landlady. She teaches school for a living, and last year she waited on table in vacation. I don’t know how long she may have been in the habit of doing horse fairs in secret, but she produced her first work in public this morning—or rather Mrs. Farrell did for her; the exhibition was too much for the artist’s modesty, and we no chance to congratulate her. She had done a head of Blossom, the Alderney cow, in charcoal.”

“Was it good?” asked Gilbert, indifferently.

“That was the saddest part of it: if it had been bad, I should have had some hopes of her, but it was really very promising; and it made my heart ache to think of another woman of talent struggling with the world. She would be so much happier if she had no talent. I suppose, now it’s out, she’ll be obliged by public opinion to take some sort of lessons, and go abroad, and worry commissions out of people. Honestly, don’t you think it’s a pity, William?”

“It isn’t a winning prospect,” said Gilbert. “What did you all say and do?”

Mrs. Gilbert relaxed the half seriousness of her face. “Oh, it was a very pretty scene, I can tell you. They brought the sketch into my room after breakfast, with Mrs. Belle Farrell at the head of the procession, and set it down on my mantelpiece, and all crowded round it, and praised it with that enthusiasm for genius which Boston people always feel.”

Gilbert smiled insult, and his sister-in-law went on.

“It was really very touching to hear our two youngest girls rave over it in that fresh, worshiping way young Boston girls have; and we have another artist in the house (she paints cat-tail rushes, and has her whole room looking like a swamp) who hailed it with effusion. She said that Miss Woodward’s talent was God-given, and ought to be cultivated.”

“Of course.”

“Then everybody else said so, too, and wondered that they hadn’t thought of God-given before Mrs. Stevenson did. It seemed to describe it so exactly.”

“I see,” said Gilbert. “Mrs. Stevenson embodies the average Boston art feeling. How long has she left off chromos? How does her husband like the cat-tails?”

“He thinks they’re beautiful and he attributes all sorts of sentiment to them. He’s a very good man.”

Gilbert laughed aloud. “He must be. What did the Woodward family think of Blossom’s head in charcoal?”

“Nobody knows what the Woodward family think of that or of anything else,” said Mrs. Gilbert. “I hope they don’t despise us, for I respect Mrs. Woodward very much; she has character, and she looks as if she had history; but they draw the line very strictly between themselves and the boarders, all except Mrs. Farrell.”

“Ah?” said Gilbert, who had visibly not cared to hear about the Woodwards, “and why except Mrs. Farrell?”

“Well, nobody exactly knows. She thawed their ice, I suppose, by having a typhoid fever here, summer before last, when she first came; they nursed her through it, and did her no end of kindness, and of course that made them fond of her—so perverse is human nature. Besides, I think she fascinates their straight-up-and-downness by the graceful convolutions of her circuitous character; that’s human nature, too.”

Gilbert laughed again, but did not say anything; and his sister-in-law, after waiting for him to speak, returned to what she had been saying of Rachel Woodward.

“You had better tell Mr. Easton about our artist. He may be on the lookout for another beneficiary, now Rogers is gone, and would like her for a protégée. If some one could only marry her, poor girl, and put her out of her misery in that way! As it stands, it’s a truly deplorable case.”

“I’m sorry you still think so meanly of woman, Susan,” said Gilbert, rising.

“Yes, it is sorrowful; but it’s an old story to you. I take my cue from Nature; she never loses an occasion to show her contempt for us; she knows us so well. Do you see anything hopeful in Miss Woodward’s predicament?”

“I’m a man. If I were a woman I would never go back on my sex.”

“Oh, you can’t tell; a man can have no idea how very little women think of one another. Is Robert really so very busy? I don’t blame him for finding a substitute for West Pekin when he can; but I do blame him for trying to spare my feelings now, when he hasn’t been here but twice this summer. Of course, he hates to come, and I’m going to give him his freedom for the rest of the season.”

“I think he’ll like it,” said Gilbert. He offered his hand for good night, and his sister-in-law allowed him to go, like a wise invalid who knows her own force and endurance.

Gilbert found Easton waiting for him on the upper gallery of the hotel, which overlooked a deep, broad hollow. At the bottom of this the white mist lay so dense that it filled the space of the valley like a shallow lake, and the clumps of trees stood out of it here and there like little isles. The friends sat looking at the pretty illusion in the silence which friends need not break, and Easton’s cigar flashed and darkened in the shadow like the spark of a farseen revolving light. He often lamented this habit of his in vigorous self-reproach, not chiefly as a thing harmful to himself, but as a public wrong and an oppression to many other people; if any one had asked him to give it up, he would gladly have done so; but no one did, and he clung to his cigar with a constancy which Gilbert, who did not smoke, praised as the saving virtue of his character, the one thing that kept him from being a standing rebuke to humanity.

After a while Easton drew the last shameful solace from his cigar and flung the remaining fragment over the rail. He rose to look after it and see that it set nothing on fire; then he returned to his seat and, clasping his hands outside his knees, said, “I’ve been thinking over that encounter of ours with that girl to-day, and I believe you are right. She did leave the book there that she might have an excuse to come back and see what we were like.”

“Well?”

“And I see no harm in her having done so. We shouldn’t have thought it out of the way in a man; and a woman had as much right to do it. The subterfuge is the only thing; I don’t like that, though it was a very frank artifice, and the whole relation of the sexes is a series of subterfuges: it seems to be the design of Nature, who knows what she’s about, I dare say. No doubt we should lose a great deal that’s very pleasant in life without them.”

“There could be no flirting without them,” answered Gilbert, “and no lovely Farrells, consequently.” Easton turned his face toward him, and Gilbert continued: “Farrell is her name: Mrs. Belle Farrell; she is a widow.”

“A widow?” echoed Easton, rather disappointedly.

“Yes,” said Gilbert. “I dare say she would be willing to mend the fault. She’s passing the summer at the Woodward farm; my sister-in-law has been telling me all about her,” he said. He reproduced Mrs. Gilbert’s facts and impressions, but in his version it did not seem to be much about her, after all.

Easton rose from his chair and struck a light on his match case, but he absently suffered it to burn out before lighting his cigar. When he had done this a second time he began to walk nervously up and down the gallery.

“It’s a face to die for!” he said, half musingly.

“Very well,” said Gilbert. “I think Mrs. Farrell would be much pleased to have some one die for her face, and on the whole it would be better than to live for it. But these are abstractions, my dear fellow; I’m going to bed now; there’s no use in being out of sorts if I don’t. Good night.”

“I’m not—yet awhile,” said Easton. “Good night. Are you going over to the farm again in the morning?”

“Yes. Will you go with me?”

“I don’t know; I thought I should go to church.”

“All right. Very likely the Farrell may be there. But I prefer to chance it at the farm.”

Easton did not answer. He struck a third match, and this time lit a cigar. Gilbert went his way, and left him seated on the gallery, looking over into the mist-flooded hollow.

Chapter IV

THEY were at work on the foundations of the First Church in West Pekin when tidings came of the battle of Lexington, and the masons laid down their trowels, and the carpenters their chisels, to take up their flintlocks for the long war then so bravely beginning. After the close of the struggle, it appears that a sufficient number of the parishioners survived to finish the building in all the ugliness of the original design. It stands there yet, a vast, barnlike monument of their devotion, and after the lapse of a hundred years is beginning slowly to clothe itself in the interest which we feel in the quaint where we cannot have the beautiful. Some of the neighboring houses, restored and improved for the accommodation of summer boarders, have the languishing curves of the American version of the French roof, and are here and there blistered with bay windows; and by contrast with these, the uncompromising gables and angular oblongness of the old church acquire a sort of grave merit. There is no folly of portico, or pediment, or pillars; the front and flanks of the edifice are as blank and bare as life in West Pekin, but they are also as honest. It is well built; the inhabitants have, of course, the tradition that when its timbers were exposed for some modern repairs, the oak was found so hard that you could not drive a nail into it. From time to time its weary expanses of clapboarding are freshened with a coat of white paint, under which whatever picturesque effects time might have bestowed are scrupulously smothered, so that it has not a stain or touch of decay to endear it. Every spring a colony of misguided swallows stucco the eaves with their mud-nests, placed at such regular intervals as to form a cornice of the rude material not displeasing to the eye of the summer boarder; and every spring when their broods are half fledged the sexton mounts to the roof and knocks away such of their nests as he can reach, strewing the ground with the cruel wreck and slaughter. But he is old and purblind, and a fair percentage of the swallows escape his single burst of murderous zeal, to wheel and shriek around the grim edifice all summer long, and to renew their hazardous enterprise another year.

The old church has no other grace than they give it, as it stands staring white on the border of the village green, and sends out over the valleys and uplands the wild, plangent summons of its Sabbath bell. It is not an unmusical note, but it is terrible, and seems always to warn of the judgment day, so that one lounging over the fields or through the woods, or otherwise keeping away from the sermon, must hear it with a shudder of alarm. It is a bell to bring a bird’s-nesting boy to his knees; and to the youth of West Pekin in former days I could imagine it a peculiarly awful sound, which would pursue them through life and in all their wanderings over the sea and land. It could now no longer call many youth to worship, but mostly a thinned and faltering congregation of old men and women responded to its menace, and sparsely scattered themselves among the long rows of pews. The stalwart boys and ambitious, eager girls had emigrated or married out of the town, till now the very graves beside the church received none but aged dead, and the newest stones hardly remembered any one under sixty. From time to time an octogenarian or nonagenarian wearied of his place in the census, and irreparably depopulated West Pekin, to the loud sorrow of the bell, which made haste to number his years to the parish as soon as the breath was out of his body. The few young people who remained in the town after marriage limited their offspring to the fashionable city figures, and the lingering grandsires counted their posterity in the lessening procession which would soon leave the family names entirely to the family tombs. Their frosty heads nodded to the sermon with the involuntary assents of slumber or of palsy, and on the cushions beside them sat their gray wives, ruminating with a pleasant fragrance the Sabbath spray of dill or caraway, unvexed by thoughts of boys disorderly in the back pews or the gallery, or, if tormented by vague apprehensions, awaking to find their fears and boys alike an empty dream.

Even the theology preached them was changed. It was the same faith, no doubt, but it seemed to be made no longer the personal terror it had been, nor the personal comfort; the good man who addressed them was more wont to dwell upon generalities of reward and punishment, and abstractions in morals and belief, and he could easily have been attainted of a vague liberality, if there had been vigor of faith enough left in his congregation to accuse him. But faith, like all life in West Pekin, had shrunken till one might say it rattled in its shell; and this great empty church seemed all the emptier for the diminution of fixed beliefs as to the condition of sinners in the world to come. A choir and a parlor organ rendered most of the psalms or hymns that the minister gave out, and when the congregation raised its cracked basses and trebles in song, it was doubtless an acceptable sacrifice, but it was not a joyful noise.

In West Pekin no one walks who can drive, even for a short distance; doubtless because of the mud of spring and fall, and the heavy winter snows, which make walking in New England, anywhere off the city pave, a martyrdom, three fourths of the inhospitable year; and Easton watched the church people arrive in their dusty open buggies, which they led, after dismounting, into the long sheds beside the church, hitching their horses in the stalls, there to gnaw the deeply nibbled posts and ineffectually to fight the embattled flies, and exchange faint whinnies and murmurs of disapprobation among themselves.

Easton was standing at the hotel door, dressed with whatever of New York nattiness he had been able to transport to West Pekin in the small valise he had allowed himself. He was not a man of society in any sense, but he always, upon a fixed principle, kept himself scrupulously tailored, and it would have been a disrespect of which he could not be capable, to appear before the West Pekin congregation in anything but his best. The vehicles straggled slowly up the hill; the bell began to falter in its clamor, and to toll in a dismal staccato before it should stop altogether; and now the village people issued from their doors and moved hurriedly across the green to the church. Easton went back for a moment to Gilbert’s room, and found his friend, whom he had left in bed, lazily dressing. Gilbert looked at him in the glass, and said, “I’m going over to the farm when I’ve finished. You’d better come too, after sermon.”

“I don’t know. Shall you be on the lookout for me?”

“You wouldn’t have the courage to hunt me up in that houseful of women? All right. I’ll sit on the piazza and watch. I’ll expect you.” He went on tying his cravat, while the other took his way to church, and entered as the last note of the bell was dying away.

The choir began to sing, and Easton rose with the people and faced the singers. Mrs. Belle Farrell stood singing from the same book with Rachel Woodward, and she cast her regard carelessly over the church, and let her eyes rest upon him with visible recognition.

She was a woman whose presence would have been magnificent anywhere; here her grace and style and beauty simply annulled all other aspects, and a West Pekin congregation could never have looked so old and thin and pale and awkward. Easton did not know music, and was ignorant that she sang with courageous error. She had a rich voice, from which tragedy would have come ennobled, but she had little tune or time. The subdued country girl at her side sang truer and with wiser art. Rachel was then twenty; her scarcely rounded cheeks had the delicate light and pallor of the true New England type; her hair was rather brown than golden; her eyes serenely gray; and her face, when she closed her lips, composed itself instantly into a somewhat austere quiescence. The girl glanced at Easton in sympathy with her companion—instinctively, perhaps, and perhaps because of some secret touch or push.

The sermon was of the little captive Hebrew maid who remembered the famous cures of leprosy by a prophet of her nation, and was thus a means to the healing of Naaman, her Philistine lord. From this the minister drew the moral that even a poor slave girl was not so lowly but she could do some good; he did not attempt the difficult application to West Pekin conditions. From the sandy desert of his discourse a dim mirage of Oriental fancies rose before Easton, with sterile hills, palms, gleaming lakes, cities, temples of old faith, and priestesses who had the dark still eyes, the loose overshadowing hair, the dusky bloom of Mrs. Farrell; a certain familiarity in her splendor he accounted for suddenly by remembering a figure and face he had once seen in the chorus of the opera of Nabucco. This was in his mind still when he rose and confronted the Babylonian priestess as she sang the closing hymn in the West Pekin choir.

Without, the July noon had ripened to a perfect mellow heat which the yesterday’s chill kept from excess, and over all the world was the unclouded cup of the blue heavens. The village people silently and quickly dispersed to their houses, and the farmers sought their different vehicles under the sheds, while their wives stood about the church door and in a still way talked together; as fast as the carriages came up, each mounted into her own, and drove off, passing Easton as he strolled down the hillside road winding away from the village. The weather was dry, and the dust powdered the reddening blackberries of the wayside and gave a gray tone to the foliage of the drooping elm and birch boughs, and to the branches of the apple trees thrust across the stone walls and fantastically dressed with wisps caught during the week from towering hay wagons. When the road left the open hill slopes and entered a wood, Easton yielded to an easy perch on the stone wall and sat flicking the long, slim wood-plants with his cane. Between the walls the highway was bordered all along with young white birches; some were the bigness round of a girl’s waist, and, clasped with the satiny smoothness of their bark, showed a delicate snugness of corsage to which an indwelling dryad might have given shape; they drooped everywhere about in pretty girlish attitudes; and Easton, whose fancy was at once reverent and rich, as that of an unspoiled young man may be, sat there in a sort of courtship of their beauty, which was all the fresher in him, for he was a life-long cockney, and, so far from sentimentalizing Nature, had hardly an acquaintance with her.

He had started on his stroll with the unconfessed hope that the road might somehow bring him to Woodward farm, and as he walked he had been upbraiding himself for his irresolution, without being able either to turn back or boldly to ask the driver of some passing team his way to the farm. In the joy of this coolness and silence and beauty of the woods his conscience left him at peace, and he lounged upon the broad top of the wall with no desire to do anything but remain there, when a wagon came in sight under the meeting tops of the trees at the crest of the hill, and his heart leaped at what he now knew he had been really waiting for. Yet as it came nearer and nearer he perceived that he had been waiting for it with no motive upon which he could act; and he felt awkwardly unaccounted for where he was. Mrs. Farrell was driving on the front seat, and behind her sat Rachel Woodward with her mother; they all three seemed to be concerned about some part of the equipage: they leaned forward and looked anxiously at the horse, which presently, as they came to a little slope, responded to whatever fears they had by rearing violently and dashing aside into a clump of bushes, where he stood breathing hoarsely till Easton ran up and took him by the head.

“I don’t think you need get out,” he said, as the women rose. “It’s only something the matter with the holdback.” He turned the horse again to the road and began to examine the harness. “That’s all,” he said; “one side of the holdback is broken, and lets the wagon come on him. If I had a piece of twine— Or, never mind.” He took his handkerchief out of his pocket.

“Oh no; don’t!” pleaded the eldest of the women. “We sha’n’t need it, now. It’s uphill all the rest of the way to the house.”

But Easton said, “It’ll be safer,” and went on to supply the place of the broken strap, while Mrs. Belle Farrell, turning upon Rachel, made a series of faces expressing a mock-heroical gratitude. Suddenly she gave a little shriek as the horse darted off with an ugly spring and lurch. “Oh, do stop him! stop him!” she implored, and Easton had him by the bridle again before her words were spoken.

“Well, Mrs. Woodward,” said Mrs. Farrell, excitedly, “I should whip that horse.”

“No, don’t whip him,” said the elderly woman. “I don’t believe he’s to blame; I don’t think he was hitched up just right in the first place. The boys said there was something the matter with the harness; but they guessed it would go.”

“Very well,” answered Mrs. Farrell; “he’s your horse, but if he were mine, I should whip him; that’s what I should do.”

Her eyes lightened as she stooped forward to gather up the reins, which had been twitched out of her hands, and the horse started and panted again, while Easton stood beside him in grave embarrassment. He made several efforts to clear his throat, and then said, huskily, “What do you want me to do? Shall I lead him? I don’t know much about horses.”

He addressed himself doubtfully to the whole party, but Mrs. Woodward answered: “Won’t you please get in alongside of that lady? I shouldn’t want he should think he had scared us; and he would, if we let you lead him.”

Easton obediently mounted to Mrs. Farrell’s side. She was going to offer him the reins, but Mrs. Woodward interposed. “No, you drive, Mrs. Farrell, so long as he behaves;” and the horse now moved tremulously but peaceably off. “We’re very much obliged to you for what you’ve done,” she added; and then Easton sat beside Mrs. Farrell, with nothing to do but to finger his cane and study the horse’s mood. He glanced shyly at her face; from her silks breathed those intoxicating mysterious odors of the toilette; the light wind blew him the odor of her hair; when by and by the horse began to sadden, under the long uphill strain, into a repentant walk, and she gave him a smart cut with the whip, Easton winced as if he had himself been struck. But the lady paid him very little attention for some time; then, when her anxieties about the horse seemed to have subsided somewhat, she looked him in the face and demanded, “If you know so little about horses how came you to stop him so well?”

“I don’t know,” said Easton. “It was rather sudden; I didn’t— I had no choice—”

“Oh,” exulted Mrs. Farrell, “then if you could have chosen, you’d have let him go dancing on with us. I withdraw my gratitude for your kindness. But,” she added, owning her recognition of him with a courage he found charming, “I’ll thank you again for picking up that little book of mine, yesterday. You certainly might have chosen to let it lie.”

Easton, if brought to bay in his shyness, had a desperate sort of laugh, in which he uttered his heart as freely as a child; he set his teeth hard, and while he looked at you with gleaming eyes the laughter gurgled helplessly from his throat. It had a sound that few could hear without liking. It made Mrs. Farrell laugh too, and he began to breathe more freely in the rarefied atmosphere that had at first fluttered his pulses. She spoke from time to time to Mrs. Woodward or Rachel, who, the first excitement over, appeared distinctly to relinquish him to her as part of that summer-boarding world with which they could have only business relations.

They came presently to a turn in the road which brought the farmhouse in sight, and Mrs. Farrell lifted her whip to encourage the horse for the sharper ascent now before him; but she abruptly dropped her hand, and bowed her face on the back of it.

Then very gravely, “I beg your pardon,” she said to Easton, “but I don’t know how we are going to account for you to the people in the house. What should you say you were doing here?”

“Upon my word,” said Easton, “I don’t know.”

Mrs. Farrell asked as seriously as before, “Were you going anywhere in particular? Have we taken you out of your way? This is Woodward farm.”

“Yes, I know it. I was coming here to find a friend.”

“Well, then, you have a choice this time. You can say we were passing you on the way and we gave you a lift; or you can say that you saved us all from destruction and got in to see us safe home. You’d better choose the first; nobody’ll ever believe this horse was running away.”

“We won’t say anything about it,” Easton suggested. “That will be the easiest way.”

“Oh, do you think so?” cried Mrs. Farrell. “Wait till you’re asked by each of our lady boarders.”

They now drove out of the woods and came upon a shelving green in front of the farmhouse. Here, at one side of the door, there were evidences of attempted croquet. The wickets were in the ground and the mallets were scattered about; the balls had rolled downhill into desuetude; there was not a level in West Pekin vast enough for a croquet ground. On the piazza fronting the road were most of the lady boarders; the five regular husbands were also there, and Gilbert, lounging on a step at the feet of his sister-in-law, dressed the balance disordered by the absence of the irregular sixth. He rose in visible amazement to see Easton arrive in the Woodward wagon at the side of Mrs. Farrell, and walked down to the barn near which she had chosen to stop. The other spectators, penetrated by the sense that something must have happened, ranged themselves in attitudes of expectancy along the edge of the piazza. Mrs. Woodward and Rachel, dismounting, renounced all part in the satisfaction of the public curiosity by entering the house at a side door, but Mrs. Farrell marched, with the two gentlemen beside her, up to where Mrs. Gilbert sat, and gave a succinct statement of the affair, which neither omitted to celebrate Easton’s action nor overpraised it. She ended by saying, “I wish you’d be good enough to introduce my preserver, Mrs. Gilbert.”

“I will, the very instant I have his acquaintance,” replied Mrs. Gilbert. “William!”

“It’s my friend Mr. Easton. Easton—present you to Mrs. Gilbert.”

“I’m glad to see you, Mr. Easton,” said Mrs. Gilbert, shaking hands; “you’re no stranger. This is Mrs. Farrell, whose life you have just had the pleasure of preserving. Mrs. Farrell, let me introduce Mr. Gilbert, also.”

Mrs. Farrell kept her eyes steadily on the gentlemen, and bowed gravely at their names. Then she gathered her skirt into her hand to mount the step, gave them a slight nod, smiled with radiant indifference upon the rest of the company, and disappeared indoors. Mrs. Gilbert made proclamation of the facts to the ladies next her, and casually introduced her guests to two or three who presently left them to her again, as they went to give themselves the last touches before dinner. Mrs. Gilbert then turned to Easton and said, “Mrs. Farrell ran a very fortunate risk. I don’t believe anything less would have brought you here.”

“Oh yes,” answered Easton, “I was on my way. The only difference is that I rode instead of walking.”

“Well, no matter, so you’ve come. I’ve been persuading my brother to stay to dinner, and he says he will, if Easton will. Will you?”

At every word Mrs. Gilbert kept studying Easton’s face, which the young man had a trick of half averting from any woman who spoke to him, with fugitive glances at her, from time to time. The light of frank liking for him came into Mrs. Gilbert’s eyes when he turned with a sort of hopeless appeal to Gilbert, and then said, “Yes. I shall be very glad to stay.”

“You’re ever so good to be glad,” she said, “but after saving one lady’s life, you couldn’t do less than dine with another. My brother says you and he are to be at West Pekin for a fortnight. That’s very nice; and I hope you’ll come here often. We consider any gentleman a treat; and the only painful thing about having two brilliant young New Yorkers in West Pekin is that perhaps we can never quite live up to our privileges.”

“One of us might go away,” said Easton, taking heart to return this easy banter, but speaking with a quick, embarrassed sigh. “Do you think you could live up to the other?”

Mrs. Gilbert smiled her approval of his daring and of his sigh.

“We will make an effort to deserve you both. Has your friend here told you anything about us?”

“How can you ask it, Susan? Did you ever know me to be guilty of such behavior toward you?” demanded Gilbert.

“No, William, I never did; and I must add that it’s no fault of yours if I didn’t. He means, Mr. Easton, that he’s been generous to a little foible of mine. I do like to lecture upon people when I can get a fresh, uncorrupted listener, I won’t deny it; and I should have been inconsolable if William had exploited us to you, as he certainly would have done if he had liked to expatiate and expound—which he doesn’t; and I believe men never do, however much they like being expatiated and expounded to. Well now, as I’m not going to have any partiality shown by any guests of mine, and as I’m going to introduce you to every lady at dinner recollect, you’ve promised to stay— I’m going to give you a little synopsis of each of them. Mrs. Farrell you’ve already had the pleasure of meeting; once in the berry pasture, yesterday afternoon, and once this morning when you saved her life—yes, her life; I insist upon giving the adventure a decent magnitude, and I will listen to no mannish, minifying scruples—saved her life; and so I will only say that she is young, beautiful, and singularly attractive. The absence of any perceptible husband does not necessarily imply that she is a widow; though in this case it does happen that Mrs. Farrell is a widow. Have I got the logical sequences all right, William? Yes? Well, I’m glad of that; not that I care the least for them, but I like to consult the weakness of a sex that can’t reason without them. As I was saying, she is young, beautiful, and attractive; the fact might not strike you at first, but she is. The only drawback is her extreme unconsciousness. But for all that, if I were a man, I should simply go raving distracted over Mrs. Belle Farrell.”

“I won’t speak for Easton,” said Gilbert, “but I think men generally prefer a spice of coquetry in the objects of their raving distraction. This simplicity, this excessive singleness of motive—it doesn’t wear well.”

Mrs. Gilbert owned, “It does render one forgetful and liable to accidents, but it isn’t the worst fault. You gentlemen are very exacting; I see that you’re bent upon decrying every one of our ladies, whatever I say of them, and I believe I shall leave you to form your own perverse opinions. Yes, I’ve changed my mind, Mr. Easton, and instead of lecturing you on them beforehand, I shall confine myself to satisfying any curiosity you may happen to feel about them when you’ve seen them. Isn’t that the way a man would do?”

“Perhaps,” answered Easton. “But he wouldn’t like it—in a woman.”

“I dare say. That’s his tyrannical unreasonableness. What was the sermon about this morning? Mrs. Belle Farrell?”

It was impossible not to enjoy the mock innocence with which Mrs. Gilbert put this question. Easton’s eyes responded to the fun of it, while his blushes came and went, and he kept thrusting his cane into the turf where he stood, just below the step on which she sat. She went on: “We seldom go to church from the farm; we come to the country to enjoy ourselves. Mrs. Farrell goes, and sings in the choir, I think. Some of us went to hear her sing once, and came home perfectly satisfied. She’s a great friend of young Miss Woodward’s, and is the only boarder admitted into the landlord’s family on terms of social equality. The regime at Woodward farm is very peculiar, Mr. Easton, and will form the topic of a future discourse. I shall also want to inquire your views of the best method of extinguishing talent in the industrial classes; I believe you’ve experimented in that way.” Easton lifted his downcast face and looked at Gilbert with a queer alarm that afforded Mrs. Gilbert visible joy. “Miss Woodward is the victim of a capacity, lately developed, for drawing; your friend Mrs. Farrell has fostered this abnormal condition, and it is the part of humanity to stop it. Now perhaps your experience with Mr. Rogers—”

The dinner bell sounded as Mrs. Gilbert reached forward and appealingly touched Easton’s arm with her fan; and she stopped.

“Go on,” said Gilbert; “you might as well have your say out now, if there’s anything left on your mind. Easton’s made up his mind to renounce me, and you can’t do me any more harm.”

“Stuff! Mr. Easton and I understand each other, and we know well enough that you haven’t been disloyal to him. At least we won’t believe it on the insinuation of a malicious, backbiting old woman; if Mr. Easton has any doubts of you, I’ll teach him better. Come, it’s dinner. This is a great day with us: we have our first string-beans, to-day; that’s one of the reasons why I asked you to stop.”

Chapter V

MRS. GILBERT kept her word, and presented the young men to each of the boarders; but for all that, the talk did not become general. After dinner she went off for a nap, and the young men both followed Mrs. Farrell to the piazza, where they seemed to forget that there was anyone else. She was very amiable to both, but a little meek and subdued in her manner; if she encouraged one more than the other, it was Gilbert. She was disposed to talk of serious things, and said that one could not realize the New England Sabbath in town as one could in the country; that here in these hills the stillness, the repose, seemed to have something almost holy about it. Two young girls in gay flannel walking skirts and branching shade hats passed Mrs. Farrell where she sat with her court, and she who passed nearest dropped a demure glance out of the corner of her eye, and a demurely arch “good-by” from the corner of her mouth.

“What for?” asked Mrs. Farrell, breaking abruptly from her pensive mood.

“Those brakes,” said the girl over her shoulder, having now got by.

“Oh, come! Won’t you go, too?” cried Mrs. Farrell. “It’s an old engagement. Wait, please!” she called to the girls, and ran in to get her hat, while they loitered down the path.

Gilbert walked forward to join them, and Easton stayed for Mrs. Farrell, who delayed a little, and then came out in walking-gear which had the advantage over the dresses of the young girls that foliage or plumage has over dress always—it seemed part of her.

“If you’ll be so kind—yes,” she said, giving Easton her light shawl, while she fitted her hat cord under the knot of her hair. “It’s a little coolish sometimes in the deep woods, and it’s best to bring one. Don’t you think,” she asked, dazzling him with the radiant, immortal youth of her glance and smile, “that the worst thing about growing older is that you have to be so careful about your miserable, perishable body? I hope I’ve not made you do anything against your principles, Mr. Easton, in getting you to go with me after brakes on Sunday? We don’t often do such things, ourselves.”

“No,” said Easton; “unfortunately, I have no principles on that point. I suppose it’s a thing to be regretted.”

“Oh yes, indeed!” said Mrs. Farrell, earnestly. “I think one ought always to be one thing or the other. I find nothing so wretched as this sort of betwixt-and-betweenity that most people live in nowadays; and I envy Rachel Woodward her fixed habits of religious observance. I wish she could have gone with us this afternoon; but the Woodwards never do. You must get acquainted with her, Mr. Easton. She’s a splendid girl; she has a great deal of talent and a great deal of character; more than all of us lady boarders put together—except Mrs. Gilbert, of course.”

It vaguely troubled Easton, he did not know why, to have her talk of Rachel Woodward; at that moment it vexed him that there should be any other woman in the world than herself. But he contrived to say that Mrs. Gilbert had mentioned Miss Woodward’s talent for drawing.

“Isn’t she nice—Mrs. Gilbert?” asked Mrs. Farrell, looking into Easton’s face, and no doubt seeing there a consciousness of his having heard from Mrs. Gilbert something not to her advantage. “She’s the only one of our boarders that one cares to talk with; she’s such a humorous old thing that I like to hear her even when I know she’s looking me through and through. She’s a very keen observer, and such a wonderful judge of character! Don’t you think so?”

“I hardly know; I’m scarcely acquainted with her or the people she talks about.”

“To be sure. But then, I think you can often see whether a person understands people, even if you don’t know any of them.”

“Oh yes—yes,” answered Easton.

They had crossed the road from the farmhouse and, traversing some sloping meadows, were at the border of the wood in which the tall brakes grew, with delicate shapes of fern slowly waving and swaying in the breeze. He was offering her his hand to help her over the wall into the wood, and she was throwing half her elastic weight upon his happy arm. Gilbert and the young girls were far ahead among the brakes, which their movement tossed about them with a continual, gracious rise and fall of the stately plumes, the bright colors of the girls’ dresses deepening their tint as they glimmered through the undulant greenery.

“How lovely!” cried Mrs. Farrell. She chose to sit still a moment on the wall. “And isn’t your friend superb in his white flannel and his planterish-looking hat? When I was a little girl I was traveling with my father on the Mississippi, and one night a New Orleans boat landed alongside of us. The most that I can remember is those iron baskets of burning pine-knots they stick into the shore, and the slim, dark young Southerners, in white linen from head to foot, as they came on and off the boat in the red light. I felt then that I never could marry anybody but a young Southerner in white linen. Your friend reminds me of them. But he isn’t Southern?”

“No; he was South before the war, awhile, and he tried a cotton plantation after the war; but he’s a New-Yorker.”

“How picturesque he is!” sighed Mrs. Farrell. “Was he a soldier?”

“Yes. He’s Major Gilbert, if you like.”

“Was that where you met him, in the army?”

“Yes.”

“And were you a major, too?”

“I went in as a private,” said Easton.

“But you didn’t come out a private?”

“Our regiment suffered a great deal, and the promotions were pretty rapid.”

“And so you came out a captain?”

“Not exactly.”

“A major—a colonel?”

“I couldn’t very well help it.”

“Oh, I dare say you’re not to blame!” cried Mrs. Farrell. “You and Mr.—Major Gilbert, were you in the same regiment?”

“Yes. I owed my first commission to his interest. He was my captain before I got my company.”

“Well, how was it, then, that you came out a colonel and he only came out a major?” asked Mrs. Farrell, innocently.