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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne
+by Kathleen Norris
+(#3 in our series by Kathleen Norris)
+
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+Title: The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne
+
+Author: Kathleen Norris
+
+Release Date: July, 2003  [Etext #4288]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on December 30, 2001]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne
+by Kathleen Norris
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+Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+THE RICH MRS. BURGOYNE
+
+
+KATHLEEN NORRIS
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TO KATHLEEN MARY THOMPSON
+
+      Lover of books, who never fails to find
+      Some good in every book, your namesake sends
+      This book to you, knowing you always kind
+      To small things, timid and in need of friends.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+      O friend! I know not which way I must look
+        For comfort, being, as I am, opprest,
+        To think that now our life is only drest
+      For show; mean handy-work of craftsman, cook,
+      Or groom!--We must run glittering like a brook
+        In the open sunshine, or we are unblest;
+        The wealthiest man among us is the best:
+      No grandeur now in nature or in book
+      Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense,
+        This is idolatry; and these we adore:
+        Plain living and high thinking are no more:
+        The homely beauty of the good old cause
+      Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence.
+        And pure religion breathing household laws.
+                           --WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+"Annie, what are you doing? Polishing the ramekins? Oh, that's
+right. Did the extra ramekins come from Mrs. Brown? Didn't! Then as
+soon as the children come back I'll send for them; I wish you'd
+remind me. Did Mrs. Binney come? and Lizzie? Oh, that's good. Where
+are they? Down in the cellar! Oh, did the extra ice come? Will you
+find out, Annie? Those can wait. If it didn't, the mousse is ruined,
+that's all! No, wait, Annie, I'll go out and see Celia myself."
+
+Little Mrs. George Carew, flushed and excited, crossed the pantry as
+she spoke, and pushed open the swinging door that connected it with
+the kitchen. She was a pretty woman, even now when her hair, already
+dressed, was hidden under snugly pinned veils and her trim little
+figure lost under a flying kimono. Mrs. Carew was expecting the
+twenty-eight members of the Santa Paloma Bridge Club on this
+particular evening, and now, at three o'clock on a beautiful April
+afternoon, she was almost frantic with fatigue and nervousness. The
+house had been cleaned thoroughly the day before, rugs shaken,
+mirrors polished, floors oiled; the grand piano had been closed, and
+pushed against the wall; the reading-table had been cleared, and
+wheeled out under the turn of the stairway; the pretty drawing-room
+and square big entrance hall had been emptied to make room for the
+seven little card-tables that were already set up, and for the
+twenty-eight straight-back chairs that Mrs. Carew had collected from
+the dining-room, the bedrooms, the halls, and even the nursery, for
+the occasion. All this had been done the day before, and Mrs. Carew,
+awakening early in the morning to uneasy anticipations of a full
+day, had yet felt that the main work of preparation was out of the
+way.
+
+But now, in mid-afternoon, nothing seemed done. There were flowers
+still to arrange; there was the mild punch that Santa Paloma
+affected at card parties to be finished; there was candy to be put
+about on the tables, in little silver dishes; and new packs of
+cards, and pencils and score-cards to be scattered about. And in the
+kitchen--But Mrs. Carew's heart failed at the thought. True, her own
+two maids were being helped out to-day by Mrs. Binney from the
+village, a tower of strength in an emergency, and by Lizzie Binney,
+a worthy daughter of her mother; but there had been so many stupid
+delays. And plates, and glasses, and punch-cups, and silver, and
+napkins for twenty-eight meant such a lot of counting and sorting
+and polishing! And somehow George and the children must have dinner,
+and the Binneys and Celia and Annie must eat, too.
+
+"Well," thought Mrs. Carew, with a desperate glance at the kitchen
+clock, "it will all be over pretty soon, thank goodness!"
+
+A pleasant stir of preparation pervaded the kitchen. Mrs. Binney,
+enormous, good-natured, capable, was opening crabs at one end of the
+table, her sleeves rolled up, and her gingham dress, in the last
+stage of age and thinness, protected by a new stiff white apron;
+Celia, Mrs. Carew's cook, was sitting opposite her, dismembering two
+cold roasted fowls; Lizzie Binney, as trim and pretty as her mother
+was shapeless and plain, was filling silver bonbon-dishes with
+salted nuts.
+
+"How is everything going, Celia?" said Mrs. Carew, sampling a nut.
+
+"Fine," said Celia placidly. "He didn't bring but two bunches of
+sullery, so I don't know will I have enough for the salad. They sent
+the cherries. And Mrs. Binney wants you should taste the punch."
+
+"It's sweet now," said Mrs. Binney, as Mrs. Carew picked up the big
+mixing-spoon, "but there's the ice to go in."
+
+"Delicious! not one bit too sweet," Mrs. Carew pronounced. "You know
+that's to be passed around in the little glasses, Lizzie, while
+we're playing; and a cherry and a piece of pineapple in every glass.
+Did Annie find the doilies for the big trays? Yes. I got the bowl
+down; Annie's going to wash it. Oh, the cakes came, didn't they?
+That's good. And the cream for coffee; that ought to go right on
+ice. I'll telephone for more celery."
+
+"There's some of these napkins so mussed, laying in the drawer,"
+said Lizzie, "I thought I'd put a couple of irons on and press them
+out."
+
+"If you have time, I wish you would," Mrs. Carew said, touching the
+frosted top of an angel-cake with a tentative finger. "I may have to
+play to-night, Celia," she went on, to her own cook, "but you girls
+can manage everything, can't you? Dinner really doesn't matter--
+scrambled eggs and baked potatoes, something like that, and you'll
+have to serve it on the side porch."
+
+"Oh, yes'm, we'll manage!" Celia assured her confidently. "We'll
+clear up here pretty soon, and then there's nothing but the
+sandwiches to do."
+
+Mrs. Carew went on her way comforted. Celia was not a fancy cook,
+she reflected, passing through the darkened dining-room, where the
+long table had been already set with a shining cloth, and where
+silver and glass gleamed in the darkness, but Celia was reliable.
+And for a woman with three children, a large house, and but one
+other maid, Celia was a treasure.
+
+She telephoned the grocer, her eyes roving critically over the hall
+as she did so. The buttercups, in a great bowl on the table, were
+already dropping their varnished yellow leaves; Annie must brush
+those up the very last thing.
+
+"So far, so good!" said Mrs. Carew, straightening the rug at the
+door with a small heel and dropping wearily into a porch rocker.
+"There must be one thousand things I ought to be doing," she said,
+resting her head and shutting her eyes.
+
+It was a warm, delicious afternoon. The little California town lay
+asleep under a haze of golden sunshine. The Carews' pretty house,
+with its lawn and garden, was almost the last on River Street, and
+stood on the slope of a hill that commanded all Santa Paloma Valley.
+Below it, the wide tree-shaded street descended between other
+unfenced lawns and other handsome homes.
+
+This was the aristocratic part of the town. The Willard Whites'
+immense colonial mansion was here; and the Whites, rich, handsome,
+childless, clever, and nearing the forties, were quite the most
+prominent people of Santa Paloma. The Wayne Adamses, charming,
+extravagant young people, lived near; and the Parker Lloyds, who
+were suspected of hiding rather serious money troubles under their
+reckless hospitality and unfailing gaiety, were just across the
+street. On River Street, too, lived dignified, aristocratic old Mrs.
+Apostleman and nervous, timid Anne Pratt and her brother Walter,
+whose gloomy, stately old mansion was one of the finest in town. Up
+at the end of the street were the Carews, and the shabby comfortable
+home of Dr. and Mrs. Brown, and the neglected white cottage where
+Barry Valentine and his little son Billy and a studious young
+Japanese servant led a rather shiftless existence. And although
+there were other pretty streets in town, and other pleasant well-to-
+do women who were members of church and club, River Street was
+unquestionably THE street, and its residents unquestionably THE
+people of Santa Paloma.
+
+Beyond these homes lay the business part of the town, the railway
+station, and post-office, the library, and the women's clubhouse,
+with its red geraniums, red-tiled roof, and plaster arches.
+
+And beyond again were blocks of business buildings, handsome and
+modern, with metal-sheathed elevators, and tiled vestibules, and
+heavy, plate-glass windows on the street. There was a drug store
+quite modern enough to be facing upon Forty-second Street and
+Broadway, instead of the tree-shaded peace of Santa Paloma's main
+street. At its cool and glittering fountain indeed, a hundred drinks
+could be mixed of which Broadway never even heard. And on Broadway,
+three thousand miles away, the women who shopped were buying the
+same boxed powders, the same bottled toilet waters, the same
+patented soaps and brushes and candies that were to be found here.
+And in the immense grocery store nearby there were beautifully
+spacious departments worthy of any great city, devoted to rare
+fruits, and coffees and teas, and every pickle that ever came in a
+glass bottle, and every little spiced fish that ever came in a gay
+tin. A white-clad young man "demonstrated" a cake-mixer, a blue-clad
+young woman "demonstrated" jelly-powders.
+
+Nearby were the one or two big dry-goods stores, with lovely gowns
+in their windows, and milliners' shops, with French hats in their
+smart Paris boxes--there was even a very tiny, very elegant little
+shop where pastes and powders and shampooing were the attraction; a
+shop that had a French name "et Cie" over the door.
+
+In short, there were modern women, and rich women, in Santa Paloma,
+as these things unmistakably indicated. Where sixty years ago there
+had been but a lonely outpost on a Spanish sheep-ranch, and where
+thirty years after that there was only a "general store" at a
+crossroads, now every luxury in the world might be had for the
+asking.
+
+All this part of the town lay northeast of the sleepy little Lobos
+River, which cut Santa Paloma in two. It was a pretty river, a
+boiling yellow torrent in winter, but low enough in the summer-time
+for the children to wade across the shallows, and shaded all along
+its course by overhanging maples, and willows, and oaktrees, and an
+undergrowth of wild currant and hazel bushes and blackberry vines.
+Across the river was Old Paloma, where dust from the cannery
+chimneys and soot from the railway sheds powdered an ugly shabby
+settlement of shanties and cheap lodging-houses. Old Paloma was
+peppered thick with saloons, and flavored by them, and by the odor
+of frying grease, and by an ashy waste known as the "dump." Over all
+other odors lay the sweet, cloying smell of crushed grapes from the
+winery and the pungent odor from the tannery of White & Company. The
+men, and boys, and girls of the settlement all worked in one or
+another of these places, and the women gossiped in their untidy
+doorways.  Above the Carew house and Doctor Brown's, opposite, River
+Street came perforce to an end, for it was crossed at this point by
+an old-fashioned wooden fence of slender, rounded pickets. In the
+middle of the fence was a wide carriage gate, with a smaller gate
+for foot passengers at each side, and beyond it the shabby,
+neglected garden and the tangle of pepper, and eucalyptus, and
+weeping willow trees that half hid the old Holly mansion. Once this
+had been the great house of the village, but now it was empty and
+forlorn. Captain Holly had been dead for five or six years, and the
+last of the sons and daughters had gone away into the world. The
+house, furnished just as they had left it, was for sale, but the
+years went by, and no buyer appeared; and meantime the garden
+flowers ran wild, the lawns were dry and brown, and the fence was
+smothered in coarse rose vines and rampant wild blackberry vines.
+Dry grass and yarrow and hollow milkweed grew high in the gateways,
+and when the village children went through them to prowl, as
+children love to prowl, about the neglected house and orchard, they
+left long, dusty wakes in the crushed weeds. Further up than the
+children usually ventured, there was an old bridge across the Lobos,
+Captain Holly's private road to the mill town; but it was boarded
+across now, and hundreds of chipmunks nested in it, and whisked
+about it undisturbed. The great stables and barns stood empty; the
+fountains were long gone dry. Only the orchard continued to bear
+heavily.
+
+The Holly estate ran up into the hill behind it, one of the wooded
+foothills that encircled all Santa Paloma, as they encircle so many
+California towns. Already turning brown, and crowned with dense, low
+groves of oak, and bay, and madrona trees, they shut off the world
+outside; although sometimes on a still day the solemn booming of the
+ocean could be heard beyond them, and a hundred times a year the
+Pacific fogs came creeping over them long before dawn, and Santa
+Paloma awakened in an enveloping cloud of soft mist. Here and there
+the slopes of these hills were checkered with the sharp oblongs and
+angles of young vineyards, and hidden by the thickening green of
+peach and apple orchards. A few low, brown dairy ranch-houses were
+perched high on the ridges; the red-brown moving stream of the
+cattle home-coming in mid-afternoon could be seen from the village
+on a clear day. And over hill and valley, on this wonderful
+afternoon in late spring, the most generous sunlight in the world
+lay warm and golden, and across them the shadows of high clouds--for
+there had been rain in the night--traveled slowly.
+
+"I declare," said little Mrs. Carew lazily, "I could go to sleep!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A moment later when a tall man came up the path and dropped on the
+top porch step with an air of being entirely at home, Mrs. Carew was
+still dreaming, half-awake and half-asleep.
+
+"Hello, Jeanette!" said the newcomer. "What's new with thee, coz?"
+
+"Don't smoke there, Barry, and get things mussy!" said Mrs. Carew in
+return, smiling to soften the command, and to show Barry Valentine
+that he was welcome.
+
+Barry was usually welcome everywhere, although not at all approved
+in many cases, and criticised even by the people who liked him best.
+He was a sort of fourth cousin of Mrs. Carew, who sometimes felt
+herself called to the difficult task of defending him because of the
+distant kinship. He was very handsome, lean, and dark, with a sleepy
+smile and with eyes that all children loved; and he was clever, or,
+at least, everyone believed him to be so; and he had charm--a charm
+of sheer sweetness, for he never seemed to be particularly anxious
+to please. Barry was very gallant, in an impersonal sort of way: he
+took a keen, elder-brotherly sort of interest in every pretty girl
+in the village, and liked to discuss their own love affairs with
+them, with a seriousness quite paternal. He never singled any girl
+out for particular attention, or escorted one unless asked, but he
+was flatteringly attentive to all the middle-aged people of his
+acquaintance and his big helpful hand was always ready for stumbling
+old women on the church steps, or tearful waifs in the street--he
+always had time to listen to other people's troubles. Barry--
+everyone admitted--had his points. But after all--
+
+After all, he was lazy, and shiftless, and unambitious: he was
+content to be assistant editor of the Mail; content to be bullied
+and belittled by old Rogers; content to go on his own idle, sunny
+way, playing with his small, chubby son, foraging the woods with a
+dozen small boys at his heels, working patiently over a broken
+gopher-trap or a rusty shotgun, for some small admirer. Worst of
+all, Barry had been intemperate, years ago, and there were people
+who believed that his occasional visits to San Francisco, now, were
+merely excuses for revels with his old newspaper friends there.
+
+And yet, he had been such a brilliant, such a fiery and ambitious
+boy! All Santa Paloma had taken pride in the fact that Barry
+Valentine, only twenty, had been offered the editorship of the one
+newspaper of Plumas, a little town some twelve miles away, and had
+prophesied a triumphant progress for him, to the newspapers of San
+Francisco, of Chicago, of New York! But Barry had not been long in
+Plumas when he suddenly married Miss Hetty Scott of that town, and
+in the twelve years that had passed since then the golden dreams for
+his future had vanished one by one, until to-day found him with no
+one to believe in him--not even himself.
+
+Hetty Scott was but seventeen when Barry met her, and already the
+winner in two village contests for beauty and popularity. After
+their marriage she and Barry went to San Francisco, and shrewd,
+little, beautiful Hetty found herself more admired than ever, and
+began to talk of the stage. After that, Santa Paloma heard only
+occasional rumors: Barry had a position on a New York paper, and
+Hetty was studying in a dramatic school; there was a baby; there
+were financial troubles, and Barry was drinking again; then Hetty
+was dead, and Barry, fearing the severe eastern winters for the
+delicate baby, was coming back to Santa Paloma. So back they came,
+and there had been no indication since, that the restless, ambitious
+Barry of years ago was not dead forever.
+
+"No smoking?" said Barry now, good-naturedly. "That's so; you've got
+some sort of 'High Jinks' on for to-night, haven't you? I brought up
+those hinges for your mixing table, Jen," he went on, "but any time
+will do. I suppose the kitchen is right on the fault, as it were."
+
+"The kitchen DOES look earthquakey," admitted Mrs. Carew with a
+laugh, "but the girls would be glad to have the extra table; so go
+right ahead. I'll take you out in a second. I have been on the GO,"
+she added wearily, "since seven this morning: my feet are like balls
+of fire. You don't know what the details are. Why, just tying up the
+prizes takes a good HOUR!"
+
+"Anything go wrong?" asked the man sympathetically.
+
+"Oh, no; nothing particular. But you know how a house has to LOOK!
+Even the bathrooms, and our room, and the spare room--the children
+do get things so mussed. It all sounds so simple; but it takes such
+a time."
+
+"Well, Annie--doesn't she do these things?"
+
+"Oh, ordinarily she does! But she was sweeping all morning, we moved
+things about so last night, and there was china, and glasses to get
+down, and the porches--"
+
+"But, Jeanette," said Barry Valentine patiently, "don't you keep
+this house clean enough ordinarily without these orgies of cleaning
+the minute anybody comes in? I never knew such a house for women to
+open windows, and tie up curtains, and put towels over their hair,
+and run around with buckets of cold suds. Why this extra fuss?"
+
+"Well, it's not all cleaning," said Mrs. Carew, a little annoyed.
+"It's largely supper; and I'm not giving anything LIKE the suppers
+Mrs. White and Mrs. Adams give."
+
+"Why don't they eat at home?" said Mr. Valentine hospitably. "What
+do they come for anyway? To see the house or each other's clothes,
+or to eat? Women are funny at a card party," he went on, always
+ready to expand an argument comfortably. "It takes them an hour to
+settle down and see how everyone else looks, and whether there
+happens to be a streak of dust under the piano; and then when the
+game is just well started, a maid is nudging you in the elbow to
+take a plate of hot chicken, and another, on the other side, is
+holding out sandwiches, and all the women are running to look at the
+prizes. Now when men play cards--
+
+"Oh, Barry, don't get started!" his cousin impatiently implored.
+"I'm too tired to listen. Come out and fix the table."
+
+"Wish I could really help you," said Barry, as they crossed the
+hall; and as a further attempt to soothe her ruffled feelings, he
+added amiably, "The place looks fine. The buttercups came up, didn't
+they?"
+
+"Beautifully! You were a dear to get them," said Mrs. Carew, quite
+mollified.
+
+Welcomed openly by all four maids, Barry was soon contentedly busy
+with screws and molding-board, in a corner of the sunny kitchen. He
+and Mrs. Binney immediately entered upon a spirited discussion of
+equal suffrage, to the intense amusement of the others, who kept him
+supplied with sandwiches, cake and various other dainties. The
+little piece of work was presently finished to the entire
+satisfaction of everyone, and Barry had pocketed his tools, and was
+ready to go, when Mrs. Carew returned to the kitchen wide-eyed with
+news.
+
+"Barry," said she, closing the door behind her, "George is here!"
+
+"Well, George has a right here," said Barry, as the lady cast a
+cautious glance over her shoulder.
+
+"But listen," his cousin said excitedly; "he thinks he has sold the
+Holly house!"
+
+"Gee whiz!" said Barry simply.
+
+"To a Mrs. Burgoyne," rushed on Mrs. Carew. "She's out there with
+George on the porch now; a widow, with two children, and she looks
+so sweet. She knows the Hollys. Oh, Barry, if she only takes it;
+such a dandy commission for George! He's terribly excited himself. I
+can tell by the calm, bored way she's talking about it."
+
+"Who is she? Where'd she come from?" demanded Barry.
+
+"From New York. Her father died last year, in Washington, I think
+she said, and she wants to live quietly somewhere with the children.
+Barry, will you be an angel?"
+
+"Eventually, I hope to," said Mr. Valentine, grinning, but she did
+not hear him.
+
+"Could you, WOULD you, take her over the place this afternoon,
+Barry? She seems sure she wants it, and George feels he must get
+back to the office to see Tilden. You know he's going to sign for a
+whole floor of the Pratt Building to-day. George can't keep Tilden
+waiting, and it won't be a bit hard for you, Barry. George says to
+promise her anything. She just wants to see about bathrooms, and so
+on. Will you, Barry?"
+
+"Sure I will," said the obliging Barry. And when Mrs. Carew asked
+him if he would like to go upstairs and brush up a little, he
+accepted the delicate reflection upon the state of his hair and
+hands, and said "sure" again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+Mrs. Burgoyne was a sweet-faced, fresh-looking woman about thirty-
+two or-three years old, with a quick smile, like a child's, and blue
+eyes, set far apart, with a little lift at the corners, that, under
+level heavy brows, gave a suggestion of something almost Oriental to
+her face. She was dressed simply in black, and a transparent black
+veil, falling from her wide hat and flung back, framed her face most
+becomingly in square crisp folds.
+
+She and Barry presently walked up River Street in the mellow
+afternoon sunlight, and through the old wooden gates of the Holly
+grounds. On every side were great high-flung sprays of overgrown
+roses, dusty and choked with weeds, ragged pepper tassels dragged in
+the grass, and where the path lay under the eucalyptus trees it was
+slippery with the dry, crescent-shaped leaves. Bees hummed over rank
+poppies and tangled honeysuckle; once or twice a hummingbird came
+through the garden on some swift, whizzing journey, and there were
+other birds in the trees, little shy brown birds, silent but busy in
+the late afternoon. Close to the house an old garden faucet dripped
+and dripped, and a noisy, changing group of the brown birds were
+bathing and flashing about it. The old Hall stood on a rise of
+ground, clear of the trees, and bathed in sunshine. It was an ugly
+house, following as it did the fashion of the late seventies; but it
+was not undignified, with its big door flanked by bay-windows and
+its narrow porch bounded by a fat wooden balustrade and heavy
+columns. The porch and steps were weather-stained and faded, and
+littered now with fallen leaves and twigs.
+
+Barry opened the front door with some difficulty, and they stepped
+into the musty emptiness of the big main hall. There was a stairway
+at the back of the house with a colored glass window on the landing,
+and through it the sunlight streamed, showing the old velvet carpet
+in the hall below, and the carved heavy walnut chairs and tables,
+and the old engravings in their frames of oak and walnut mosaic. The
+visitors peeped into the old library, odorous of unopened books, and
+with great curtains of green rep shutting out the light, and into
+the music room behind it, cold even on this warm day, with a muffled
+grand piano drawn free of the walls, and near it two piano-stools,
+upholstered in blue-fringed rep, to match the curtains and chairs.
+They went across the hall to the long, dim drawing room, where there
+was another velvet carpet, dulled to a red pink by time, and muffled
+pompous sofas and chairs, and great mirrors, and "sets" of
+candlesticks and vases on the mantels and what-nots. The windows
+were shuttered here, the air lifeless. Barry, in George Carew's
+interest, felt bound to say that "they would clear all this up, you
+know; a lot of this stuff could be stored."
+
+"Oh, why store it? It's perfectly good," the lady answered absently.
+
+Presently they went out to the more cheerful dining-room, which ran
+straight across the house, and was low-ceiled, with pleasant square-
+paned windows on two sides.
+
+"This was the old house," explained Barry; "they added on the front
+part. You could do a lot with this room."
+
+"Do you still smell spice, and apples, and cider here?" said Mrs.
+Burgoyne, turning from an investigation of the china-closet, with a
+radiant face. A moment later she caught her breath suddenly, and
+walked across the room to stand, resting her hands on a chair back,
+before a large portrait that hung above the fireplace. She stood so,
+gazing at the picture--the portrait of a woman--for a full minute,
+and when she turned again to Barry, her eyes were bright with tears.
+
+"That's Mrs. Holly," said she. "Emily said that picture was here."
+And turning back to the canvas, she added under her breath, "You
+darling!"
+
+"Did you know her?" Barry asked, surprised.
+
+"Did I know her!" Mrs. Burgoyne echoed softly, without turning.
+"Yes, I knew her," she added, almost musingly. And then suddenly she
+said, "Come, let's look upstairs," and led the way by the twisted
+sunny back stairway, which had a window on every landing and Crimson
+Rambler roses pressing against every window. They looked into
+several bedrooms, all dusty, close, sunshiny. In the largest of
+these, a big front corner room, carpeted in dark red, with a black
+marble fireplace and an immense walnut bed, Mrs. Burgoyne, looking
+through a window that she had opened upon the lovely panorama of
+river and woods, said suddenly:
+
+"This must be my room, it was hers. She was the best friend, in one
+way, that I ever had--Mrs. Holly. How happy I was here!"
+
+"Here?" Barry echoed.
+
+At his tone she turned, and looked keenly at him, a little smile
+playing about her lips. Then her face suddenly brightened.
+
+"Barry, of course!" she exclaimed. "I KNEW I knew you, but the 'Mr.
+Valentine' confused me." And facing him radiantly, she demanded,
+"Who am I?"
+
+Barry shook his head slowly, his puzzled, smiling eyes on hers. For
+a moment they faced each other; then his look cleared as hers had
+done, and their hands met as he said boyishly:
+
+"Well, I will be hanged! Jappy Frothingham!"
+
+"Jappy Frothingham!" she echoed joyously. "But I haven't heard that
+name for twenty years. And you're the boy whose father was a doctor,
+and who helped us build our Indian camp, and who had the frog, and
+fell off the roof, and killed the rattlesnake."
+
+"And you're the girl from Washington who could speak French, and who
+put that stuff on my freckles and wouldn't let 'em drown the
+kittens."
+
+"Oh, yes, yes!" she said, and, their hands still joined, they
+laughed like happy children together.
+
+Presently, more gravely, she told him a little of herself, of the
+early marriage, and the diplomat husband whose career was so cruelly
+cut short by years of hopeless invalidism. Then had come her
+father's illness, and years of travel with him, and now she and the
+little girls were alone. And in return Barry sketched his own life,
+told her a little of Hetty, and his unhappy days in New York, and of
+the boy, and finally of the Mail. Her absorbed attention followed
+him from point to point.
+
+"And you say that this Rogers owns the newspaper?" she asked
+thoughtfully, when the Mail was under discussion.
+
+"Rogers owns it; that's the trouble. Nothing goes into it without
+the old man's consent." Barry tested the spring of a roller shade,
+with a scowl. "Barnes, the assistant editor he had before me, threw
+up his job because he wouldn't stand having his stuff cut all to
+pieces and changed to suit Rogers' policies," he went on, as Mrs.
+Burgoyne's eyes demanded more detail. "And that's what I'll do some
+day. In the six years since the old man bought it, the circulation
+has fallen off about half; we don't get any 'ads'; we're not paying
+expenses. It's a crime too, for it's a good paper. Even Rogers is
+sick of it now; he'd sell for a song. I'd borrow the money and buy
+it if it weren't for the presses; I'd have to have new presses.
+Everything here is in pretty good shape," he finished, with an air
+of changing the subject.
+
+"And what would new presses cost?" Sidney Burgoyne persisted,
+pausing on the big main stairway, as they were leaving the house a
+few minutes later.
+
+"Oh, I don't know." Barry opened the front door again, and they
+stepped out to the porch. "Altogether," he said vaguely, snapping
+dead twigs from the heavy unpruned growth of the rose vines,
+"altogether, I wouldn't go into it without ten thousand. Five for
+the new presses, say, and four to Rogers for the business and good-
+will, and something to run on--although," Barry interrupted himself
+with a vehemence that surprised her, "although I'll bet that the old
+Mail would be paying her own rent and salaries within two months.
+The Dispatch doesn't amount to much, and the Star is a regular back
+number!" He stood staring gloomily down at the roofs of the village;
+
+Mrs. Burgoyne, a little tired, had seated herself on the top step.
+
+"I wish, in all seriousness, you'd tell me about it," she said. "I
+am really interested. If I buy this place, it will mean that we come
+here to stay for years perhaps, and I have some money I want to
+invest here. I had thought of real estate, but it needn't
+necessarily be that. It sounds to me as if you really ought to make
+an effort to buy the paper, Barry, Have you thought of getting
+anyone to go into it with you?"
+
+The man laughed, perhaps a little embarrassed.
+
+"Never here, really. I went to Walter Pratt about it once," he
+admitted, "but he said he was all tied up. Some of the fellows down
+in San Francisco might have come in--but Lord! I don't want to
+settle here; I hate this place."
+
+"But why do you hate it?" Her honest eyes met his in surprise and
+reproof. "I can't understand it, perhaps because I've thought of
+Santa Paloma as a sort of Mecca for so many years myself. My visit
+here was the sweetest and simplest experience I ever had in my life.
+You see I had a wretchedly artificial childhood; I used to read of
+country homes and big families and good times in books, but I was an
+only child, and even then my life was spoiled by senseless
+formalities and conventions. I've remembered all these years the
+simple gowns Mrs. Holly used to wear here, and the way she played
+with us, and the village women coming in for tea and sewing; it was
+all so sane and so sweet!"
+
+"Our coming here was the merest chance. My father and I were on our
+way home from Japan, you know, and he suddenly remembered that the
+Hollys were near San Francisco, and we came up here for a night.
+That," said Mrs. Burgoyne in a lower tone, as if half to herself,
+"that was twenty years ago; I was only twelve, but I've never
+forgotten it. Fred and Oliver and Emily and I had our supper on the
+side porch; and afterward they played in the garden, but I was shy--
+I had never played--and Mrs. Holly kept me beside her on the porch,
+and talked to me now and then, and finally she asked me if I would
+like to spend the summer with her. Like to!--I wonder my heart
+didn't burst with joy! Father said no; but after we children had
+gone to bed, they discussed it again. How Emily and I PRAYED! And
+after a while Fred tiptoed down to the landing, and came up
+jubilant. 'I heard mother say that what clothes Sidney needed could
+be bought right here,' he said. Emily began to laugh, and I to cry--!"
+She turned her back on Barry, and he, catching a glimpse of her
+wet eyes, took up the conversation himself.
+
+"I don't remember her very well," he said; "a boy wouldn't. She died
+soon after that summer, and the boys went off to school."
+
+"Yes, I know," the lady said thoughtfully. "I had the news in Rome--
+a hot, bright, glaring day. It was nearly a month after her death,
+then. And even then, I said to myself that I'd come back here, some
+day. But it's not been possible until now; and now," her voice was
+bright and steady again, "here I am. And I don't like to hear an old
+friend abusing Santa Paloma."
+
+"It's a nice enough place," Barry admitted, "but the people are--
+well, you wait until you meet the women! Perhaps they're not much
+worse than women everywhere else, but sometimes it doesn't seem as
+if the women here had good sense. I don't mean the nice quiet ones
+who live out on the ranches and are bringing up a houseful of
+children, but this River Street crowd."
+
+"Why, what's the matter with them?" asked Mrs. Burgoyne with
+vivacity.
+
+"Oh, I mean this business of playing bridge four afternoons a week,
+and running to the club, and tearing around in motor-cars all day
+Sunday, and entertaining the way they think people do it in New
+York, and getting their dresses in San Francisco instead of up
+here," Barry explained disgustedly. "Some of them would be nice
+enough if they weren't trying to go each other one better all the
+time; when one gets a thing the others have all got to have it, or
+have something nicer. Take the Browns, now, your neighbors there--"
+
+"In the shingled house, with the babies swinging on the gate as we
+came by?"
+
+"Yes, that's it. They've got four little boys. Doctor Brown is a
+king; everybody worships him, and she's a sweet little woman; but of
+course she's got to strain and struggle like the rest of them.
+There's a Mrs. Willard White in this town--that big gray-shingled
+place down there is their garage--and she runs the whole place.
+She's always letting the others know that hobbles are out, and
+everything's got to hang from the shoulder--"
+
+"Very good!" laughed Mrs. Burgoyne, "you've got that very nearly
+right."
+
+"Willard White's a nice fellow," Barry went on, "except that he's a
+little cracked about his Packard. They give motoring parties, and of
+course they stop at hotels way up the country for lunch, and the
+women have got to have veils and special hats and coats, and so on.
+Wayne Adams told me it stood him in about thirty dollars every time
+he went out with the Whites. Wayne's got his own car now; his wife
+kept at him day and night to get it. But he can't run it, so it's in
+the garage half the time."
+
+"That's the worst of motoring," said the lady with a thoughtful nod,
+"the people who sell them think they've answered you when they say,
+'But you don't run it economically. If you understood it, it
+wouldn't cost you half so much!' And the alternative is, 'Get a man
+at seventy-five dollars a month and save repairing and replacing
+bills.' Nice for business, Barry, but very much overdone for
+pleasure, I think. I myself hate those days spent with five people
+you hardly know," she went on, "rushing over beautiful roads that
+you hardly see, eating too much in strange hotels, and paying too
+much for it. I sha'n't have a car. But tell me more about the
+people. Who are the Adamses? Didn't you say Adams?"
+
+"Wayne Adams; nice people, with two nice boys," he supplied; "but
+she's like the rest. Wayne lies awake nights worrying about bills,
+and she gives silver photograph-frames for bridge prizes. That white
+stucco house where they're putting in an Italian garden, is the
+Parker Lloyds. Mrs. Lloyd's a clever woman, and pretty too; but she
+doesn't seem to have any sense. They've got a little girl, and
+she'll tell you that Mabel never wore a stitch that wasn't hand-made
+in her life. Lloyd had a nervous breakdown a few months ago--we all
+knew it was nothing but money worry--but yesterday his wife said to
+me in all good faith that he was too unselfish, he was wearing
+himself out. She was trying to persuade him to put Mabel in school
+and go abroad for a good rest."
+
+Mrs. Burgoyne laughed.
+
+"That's like Jeanette Carew showing me her birthday present," Barry
+went on with a grin. "It seems that George gave her a complete set
+of bureau ivory--two or three dozen pieces in all, I guess. When I
+asked her she admitted that she had silver, but she said she wanted
+ivory, everybody has ivory now. Present!" he repeated with scorn,
+"why, she just told George what she wanted, and went down and
+charged it to him! She's worried to death about bills now, but she
+started right in talking motor-cars; and they'll have one yet. I'd
+give a good deal," he finished disgustedly, "to know what they get
+out of it."
+
+"I don't believe they're as bad as all that," said the lady. "There
+used to be some lovely people here, and there was a whist club too,
+and it was very nice. They played for a silver fork and spoon every
+fortnight, and I remember that Mrs. Holly had nearly a dozen of the
+forks. There was a darling Mrs. Apostleman, and Mrs. Pratt with two
+shy pretty daughters--"
+
+"Mrs. Apostleman's still here," he told her. "She's a fine old lady.
+When a woman gets to be sixty, it doesn't seem to matter if she
+wastes time. Mrs. Pratt is dead, and Lizzie is married and lives in
+San Francisco, but Anne's still here. She and her brother live in
+that vault of a gray house; you can see the chimneys. Anne's
+another, "his tone was cynical again, "a shy, nervous woman, always
+getting new dresses, and always on club reception committees, with
+white gloves and a ribbon in her hair, frightened to death for fear
+she's not doing the correct thing. They've just had a frieze of
+English tapestries put in the drawing-room and hall,--English
+TAPESTRIES!"
+
+"Perhaps you don't appreciate tapestries," said Mrs. Burgoyne, with
+her twinkling smile. "You know there is a popular theory that such
+things keep money in circulation."
+
+"You know there's hardly any form of foolishness or vice of which
+you can't say that," he reminded her soberly; and Mrs. Burgoyne,
+serious in turn, answered quickly:
+
+"Yes, you're quite right. It's too bad; we American women seem
+somehow to have let go of everything real, in the last few
+generations. But things are coming around again." She rose from the
+steps, still facing the village. "Tell me, who is my nearest
+neighbor there, in the white cottage?" she demanded.
+
+"I am," Barry said unexpectedly. "So if you need--yeast is it, that
+women always borrow?"
+
+"Yeast," she assented laughing. "I will remember. And now tell me
+about trains and things. Listen!" Her voice and look changed
+suddenly: softened, brightened. "Is that children?" she asked,
+eagerly.
+
+And a moment later four children, tired, happy and laden with
+orchard spoils, came around the corner of the house. Barry presented
+them as the Carews--George and Jeanette, a bashful fourteen and a
+self-possessed twelve, and Dick, who was seven--and his own small
+dusty son, Billy Valentine, who put a fat confiding hand in the
+strange lady's as they all went down to the gate together.
+
+"You are my Joanna's age, Jeanette," said Mrs. Burgoyne, easily. "I
+hope you will be friends."
+
+"Who will I be friends with?" said little Billy, raising blue
+expectant eyes. "And who will George?"
+
+"Why, I hope you will be friends with me," she answered laughing;
+"and I will be so relieved if George will come up sometimes and help
+me with bonfires and about what ought to be done in the stable. You
+see, I don't know much about those things." At this moment George,
+hoarsely muttering that he wasn't much good, he guessed, but he had
+some good tools, fell deeply a victim to her charms.
+
+Mrs. Carew came out of her own gate as they came up, and there was
+time for a little talk, and promises, and goodbyes. Then Barry took
+Mrs. Burgoyne to the station, and lifted his hat to the bright face
+at the window as the train pulled out in the dusk. He went slowly to
+his office from the train and attacked the litter of papers and
+clippings on his desk absent-mindedly. Once he said half aloud, his
+big scissors arrested, his forehead furrowed by an unaccustomed
+frown, "We were only kids then; and they all thought I was the one
+who was going to do something big."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+Barry appeared at Mrs. Carew's house a little after midnight to find
+the card-players enjoying a successful supper, and the one topic of
+conversation the possible sale of Holly Hall. Barry, suspected of
+having news of it, was warmly welcomed by the tired, bright-eyed
+women and the men in their somewhat rumpled evening clothes, and
+supplied with salad and coffee.
+
+"Is she really coming, Barry?" demanded Mrs. Lloyd eagerly. "And how
+soon? We have been saying what WONDERS could be done for the Hall
+with a little money."
+
+"The price didn't seem to worry her," said George Carew.
+
+"Oh, she's coming," Barry assured them; "you can consider it
+settled."
+
+"Good!" said old Mrs. Apostleman in her deep, emphatic voice.
+"She'll have to make the house over, of course; but the stable ought
+to make a very decent garage. Mark my words, me dears, ye'll see
+some very startling changes up there, before the summer's out."
+
+"The house could be made colonial," submitted Mrs. Adams, "or
+mission, for that matter."
+
+"No, you couldn't make it mission," Mrs. Willard White decided, and
+several voices murmured, "No, you couldn't do that." "But colonial--
+it would be charming," the authority went on. "Personally, I'd tear
+the whole thing down and rebuild," said Mrs. White further; "but
+with hardwood floors throughout, tapestry papers, or the new grass
+papers--like Amy's library, Will--white paint on all the woodwork,
+white and cream outside, some really good furniture, and the garden
+made over--you wouldn't know the place."
+
+"But that would take months," said Mrs. Carew ruefully.
+
+"And cost like sixty," added Dr. Brown, at which there was a laugh.
+
+"Well, she won't wait any six months, or six weeks either," Barry
+predicted. "And don't you worry about the expense, Doctor. Do you
+know who she IS?"
+
+They all looked at him. "Who?" said ten voices together.
+
+"Why, her father was Frothingham--Paul Frothingham, the inventor.
+Her husband was Colonel John Burgoyne;--you all know the name. He
+was quite a big man, too--a diplomat. Their wedding was one of those
+big Washington affairs. A few years later Burgoyne had an accident,
+and he was an invalid for about six years after that--until his
+death, in fact. She traveled with him everywhere."
+
+"Sidney Frothingham!" said Mrs. Carew. "I remember Emily Holly used
+to have letters from her. She was presented at the English court
+when she was quite young, I remember, and she used to visit at the
+White House, too. So THAT'S who she is!"
+
+"I remember the child's visit here perfectly," Mrs. Apostleman said,
+"tall, lanky girl with very charming manners. Her husband was at St.
+Petersburg for a while; then in London--was it? You ought to know,
+Clara, me dear--I'm not sure--Even after his accident they went on
+some sort of diplomatic mission to Madrid, or Stockholm, or
+somewhere, remember it perfectly."
+
+"Colonel Burgoyne must have had money," said Mrs. White,
+tentatively.
+
+"Some, I think," Barry answered; "but it was her father who was
+rich, of course--"
+
+"Certainly!" approved Mrs. Apostleman, fanning herself majestically.
+"Rich as Croesus; multi-millionaire."
+
+"Heavens alive!" said Mrs. Lloyd unaffectedly.
+
+"Yes," Willard White eyed the tip of a cigar thoughtfully, "yes, I
+remember he worked his own patents; had his own factories. Paul
+Frothingham must have left something in the neighborhood of--well,
+two or three millions--"
+
+"Two or three!" echoed Mrs. Apostleman in regal scorn. "Make it
+eight!"
+
+"Eight!" said Mrs. Brown faintly.
+
+"Well, that would be about my estimate," Barry agreed.
+
+"He was a big man, Frothingham," Dr. Brown said reflectively. "Well,
+well, ladies, here's a chance for Santa Paloma to put her best foot
+forward."
+
+"What WON'T she do to the Hall!" Mrs. Adams remarked; Mrs. Carew
+sighed.
+
+"It--it rather staggers one to think of trying to entertain a woman
+worth eight millions, doesn't it?" said she.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+From the moment of her arrival in Santa Paloma, when she stood on
+the station platform with a brisk spring wind blowing her veil about
+her face, and a small and chattering girl on each side of her, Mrs.
+Burgoyne seemed inclined to meet the friendly overtures of her new
+neighbors more than half-way. She remembered the baggage-agent's
+name from her visit two weeks before--"thank Mr. Roberts for his
+trouble, Ellen"--and met the aged driver of the one available
+carriage with a ready "Good afternoon, Mr. Rivers!" Within a week
+she had her pew in church, her box at the post-office, her
+membership in the library, and a definite rumor was afloat to the
+effect that she had invested several thousand dollars in the Mail,
+and that Barry Valentine had bought the paper from old Rogers
+outright; and had ordered new rotary presses, and was at last to
+have a free hand as managing editor. The pretty young mistress of
+Holly Hall, with her two children dancing beside her, and her ready
+pleased flush and greeting for new friends, became a familiar figure
+in Santa Paloma's streets. She was even seen once or twice across
+the river, in the mill colony, having, for some mysterious reason,
+immediately opened the bridge that led from her own grounds to that
+unsavory region.
+
+She was not formal, not unapproachable, as it had been feared she
+might be. On the contrary, she was curiously democratic. And, for a
+woman straight from the shops of Paris and New York, her clothes
+seemed to the women of Santa Paloma to be surprising, too. She and
+her daughters wore plain ginghams for every day, with plain wide
+hats and trim serge coats for foggy mornings. And on Sundays it was
+certainly extraordinary to meet the Burgoynes, bound for church,
+wearing the simplest of dimity or cross-barred muslin wash dresses,
+with black stockings and shoes, and hats as plain--far plainer!--as
+those of the smallest children. Except for the amazing emeralds that
+blazed beside her wedding ring, and the diamonds she sometimes wore,
+Mrs. Burgoyne might have been a trained nurse in uniform.
+
+"It is a pose," said Mrs. Willard White, at the club, to a few
+intimate friends. "She's probably imitating some English countess.
+Englishwomen affect simplicity in the country. But wait until we see
+her evening frocks."
+
+It was felt that any formal calling upon Mrs. Burgoyne must wait
+until the supposedly inevitable session with carpenters, painters,
+paper-hangers, carpet-layers, upholsterers, decorators, furniture
+dealers, and gardeners was over at the Hall. But although the old
+house had been painted and the plumbing overhauled before the new
+owner's arrival, and although all day long and every day two or
+three Portuguese day-laborers chopped and pruned and shouted in the
+garden, a week and then two weeks slipped by, and no further
+evidences of renovation were to be seen.
+
+So presently callers began to go up to the Hall; first Mrs.
+Apostleman and Mrs. White, as was fitting, and then a score of other
+women. Mrs. Apostleman had been the social leader in Santa Paloma
+when Mrs. White was little Clara Peck, a pretty girl in the High
+School, whose rich widowed mother dressed her exquisitely, and who
+was studying French, and could play the violin. But Mrs. Apostleman
+was an old woman now, and had been playing the game a long time, and
+she was glad to put the sceptre into younger hands. And she could
+have put it into none more competent than those of Mrs. Willard
+White.
+
+Mrs. White was a handsome, clever woman, of perhaps six-or seven-
+and-thirty. She had been married now for seventeen years, and for
+all that time, and even before her marriage, she had been the most
+envied, the most admired, and the most copied woman in the village.
+Her mother, an insipid, spoiled, ambitious little woman, whose
+fondest hope was realized when her dashing daughter made a
+financially brilliant match, had lost no time in warning the bride
+that the agonies of motherhood, and the long ensuing slavery, were
+avoidable, and Clara had entirely agreed with her mother's ideas,
+and used to laughingly assure the few old friends who touched upon
+this delicate topic, that she herself "was baby enough for Will!"
+Robbed in this way of her natural estate, and robbed by the size of
+her husband's income from the exhilarating interest of making
+financial ends meet, Mrs. White, for seventeen years, had led what
+she honestly considered an enviable and carefree existence. She
+bought beautiful clothes for herself, and beautiful things for her
+house, she gave her husband and her mother very handsome gifts. She
+was a perfect hostess, although it must be admitted that she never
+extended the hospitalities of her handsome home to anyone who did
+not amuse her, who was not "worth while". She ruled her servants
+well, made a fine president for the local Women's Club, ran her own
+motor-car very skillfully, and played an exceptionally good game of
+bridge. She was an authority upon table-linens, fancy needlework,
+fashions in dress, new salads, new methods in serving the table.
+
+Willard White, as perfect a type in his own way as she was in hers,
+was very proud of her, when he thought of her at all, which was
+really much less often than their acquaintances supposed. He liked
+his house to be nicely managed, spent his money freely upon it,
+wanted his friends handsomely entertained, and his wine-cellar
+stocked with every conceivable variety of liquid refreshment. If
+Clara wanted more servants, let her have them, if she wanted
+corkscrews by the gross, why, buy those, too. Only let a man feel
+that there was a maid around to bring him a glass when he came in
+from golfing or motoring, and a corkscrew with the glass!
+
+As a matter of fact, his club and his office, and above all, his
+motor-cars, absorbed him. His natural paternal instinct had been
+diverted toward these latter, and, quite without his knowing it, his
+cars were his nursery. Willard White had owned the first electric
+car ever seen in Santa Paloma. Later, there had been half-a-dozen
+machines, and he loved them all, and spoke of them as separate
+entities. He spoke of the runs they had made, of the strains they
+had triumphantly sustained, and he and his chauffeur held low-toned
+conferences over any small breakage, with the same seriousness that
+he might have used had Willard Junior--supposing there to have been
+such a little person--developed croup, and made the presence of a
+physician necessary. He liked to glance across his lawn at night to
+the commodious garage, visible in the moonlight, and think of his
+treasures, locked up, guarded, perfect in every detail, and safe.
+
+He and Mrs. White always spoke of Santa Paloma as a "jay" town, and
+compared it, to its unutterable disadvantage, to other and larger
+cities, but still, business reasons would always keep them there for
+the greater part of the year, and they were both glad to hear that a
+fabulously wealthy widow, and a woman prominent in every other
+respect as well, had come to live in Santa Paloma. Mrs. White
+determined to play her game very carefully with Mrs. Burgoyne; there
+should be no indecent hurry, there should be no sudden overtures at
+friendship. "But, poor thing! She will certainly find our house an
+oasis in the desert!" Mrs. White comfortably decided, putting on the
+very handsomest of her afternoon gowns to go and call formally at
+the Hall.
+
+Mrs. Burgoyne and the little girls were always most cordial to
+visitors. They spent these first days deep in gardening, great heaps
+of fragrant dying weeds about them, and raw vistas through the
+pruned trees already beginning to show the gracious slopes of the
+land, and the sleepy Lobos down beneath the willows. The Carew
+children and the little Browns were often there, fascinated by the
+outdoor work, as children always are, and little Billy Valentine
+squirmed daily through his own particular gap in the hedge, and took
+his share of the fun with a deep and silent happiness. Billy gave
+Mrs. Burgoyne many a heartache, with his shock of bright, unbrushed
+hair, his neglected grimed little hands, his boyish little face that
+was washed daily according to his own small lights, with surrounding
+areas of neck and ears wholly overlooked, and his deep eyes, sad
+when he was sad, and somehow infinitely more pathetic when he was
+happy. Sometimes she stealthily supplied Billy with new garters, or
+fastened the buttons on his blue overalls, or even gave him a
+spoonful of "meddy" out of a big bottle, at the mere sight of which
+Ellen shuddered sympathetically; a dose which was always followed by
+two marshmallows, out of a tin box, by way of consolation. But
+further than this she dared not go, except in the matter of mugs of
+milk, gingerbread, saucer-pies, and motherly kisses for any bump or
+bruise.
+
+The village women, coming up to the Hall, in the pleasant summer
+afternoons, were puzzled to find the old place almost unchanged. Why
+any woman in her senses wanted to live among those early-Victorian
+horrors, the women of Santa Paloma could not imagine. But Mrs.
+Burgoyne never apologized for the old walnut chairs and tables, and
+the old velvet carpets, and the hopelessly old-fashioned white lace
+curtains and gilt-framed mirrors. Even Captain Holly's big clock--
+"an impossibly hideous thing," Mrs. White called the frantic bronze
+horses and the clinging tiger, on their onyx hillside--was serenely
+ticking, and the pink china vases were filled with flowers. And
+there was an air of such homely comfort, after all, about the big
+rooms, such a fragrance of flowers, and flood of sunny fresh air,
+that the whole effect was not half as bad as it might be imagined;
+indeed, when Mammy Curry, the magnificent old negress who was
+supreme in the kitchen and respected in the nursery as well, came in
+with her stiff white apron and silver tea-tray, she seemed to fit
+into the picture, and add a completing touch to the whole.
+
+Very simply, very unpretentiously, the new mistress of Holly Hall
+entered upon her new life. She was a woman of very quiet tastes,
+devoted to her little girls, her music, her garden and her books.
+With the negress, she had one other servant, a quiet little New
+England girl, with terrified, childish eyes, and a passionate
+devotion to her mistress and all that concerned her mistress. Fanny
+had in charge a splendid, tawny-headed little boy of three, who
+played happily by himself, about the kitchen door, and chased
+chickens and kittens with shrieks of delight. Mrs. Burgoyne spoke of
+him as "Fanny's little brother," and if the two had a history of any
+sort, it was one at which she never hinted. She met an embarrassing
+question with a readiness which rather amused Mrs. Brown, on a day
+when the two younger ladies were having tea with Mrs. Apostleman,
+and the conversation turned to the subject of maids.
+
+"--but if your little girl Fanny has had her lesson, you'll have no
+trouble keepin' her," said Mrs. Apostleman.
+
+"Oh, I hope I shall keep Fanny," said Mrs. Burgoyne, "she comes of
+such nice people, and she's such a sweet, good girl."
+
+"Why, Lord save us!" said the old lady, repentantly, "and I was
+almost ready to believe the child was hers!"
+
+"If Peter was hers, she couldn't be fonder of him!" Mrs. Burgoyne
+said mildly, and Mrs. Brown choked on her tea, and had to wipe her
+eyes.
+
+In the matter of Fanny, and in a dozen other small matters, the
+independence of the great lady was not slow in showing itself in
+Mrs. Burgoyne. Santa Paloma might be annoyed at her, and puzzled by
+her, but it had perforce to accept her as she stood, or ignore her,
+and she was obviously not a person to ignore. She declined all
+invitations for daytime festivities; she was "always busy in the
+daytime," she said. No cards, no luncheons, no tea-parties could
+lure her away from the Hall, although, if she and the small girls
+walked in for mail or were down in the village for any other reason,
+they were very apt to stop somewhere for a chat on their way home.
+But the children were allowed to go nowhere alone, and not the
+smartest of children's parties could boast of the presence of Joanna
+and Ellen Burgoyne.
+
+Santa Paloma children were much given to parties, or rather their
+parents were; and every separate party was a separate great event.
+The little girls wore exquisite hand-made garments, silken hose and
+white shoes. Professional entertainers, in fashionably darkened
+rooms, kept the little people amused, and professional caterers
+supplied the supper they ate, or perhaps the affair took the shape
+of a box-party for a matinee, and a supper at the town's one really
+pretty tea-room followed. These affairs were duly chronicled in the
+daily and weekly papers, and perhaps more than one matron would have
+liked the distinction of having Mrs. Burgoyne's little daughters
+listed among her own child's guests. Joanna and Ellen were pretty
+children, in a well-groomed, bright-eyed sort of way, and would have
+been popular even without the added distinction of their ready
+French and German and Italian, their charming manners, their naive
+references to other countries and peoples, and their beautiful and
+distinguished mother.
+
+But in answer to all invitations, there came only polite, stilted
+little letters of regret, in the children's round script. "Mother
+would d'rather we shouldn't go to a sin-gul party until we are young
+ladies!" Ellen would say cheerfully, if cross-examined on the
+subject, leaving it to the more tactful Joanna to add, "But Mother
+thanks you JUST as much." They were always close to their mother
+when it was possible, and she only banished them from her side when
+the conversation grew undeniably too old in tone for Joanna and
+Ellen, and then liked to keep them in sight, have them come in with
+the tea-tray, or wave to her occasionally from the river bank.
+
+"We've been wondering what you would do with this magnificent
+drawing-room," said Mrs. White, on her first visit. "The house ought
+to take a colonial treatment wonderfully--there's a remarkable man
+in San Francisco who simply made our house over for us last year!"
+
+"It must have been a fearful upheaval," said Mrs. Burgoyne,
+sympathetically.
+
+"Oh, we went away! Mr. White and I went east, and when we came back
+it was all done."
+
+"Well, fortunately," said the mistress of Holly Hall cheerfully, as
+she sugared Mrs. Apostleman's cup of tea, "fortunately all these
+things of Mrs. Holly's were in splendid condition, except for a
+little cleaning and polishing. They used to make things so much more
+solid, don't you think so? Why, there are years of wear left in
+these carpets, and the chairs and tables are like rocks! Captain
+Holly apparently got the very best of everything when he furnished
+this place, and I reap the benefit. It's so nice to feel that one
+needn't buy a chair or a bed for ten years or more, if one doesn't
+want to!"
+
+"Dear, sweet people, the Hollys," said Mrs. White, pleasantly,
+utterly at a loss. Did people of the nicer class speak of furniture
+as if it were made merely to be useful? "But what a distinct period
+these things belong to, don't they?" she asked, feeling her way.
+"So--so solid!"
+
+"Yes, in a way it was an ugly period," said Mrs. Burgoyne, placidly.
+"But very comfortable, fortunately. Fancy if he had selected Louis
+Quinze chairs, for example!"
+
+Mrs. White gave her a puzzled look, and smiled.
+
+"Come now, Mrs. Burgoyne," said she, good-naturedly, "Confess that
+you are going to give us all a surprise some day, and change all
+this. One sees," said Mrs. White, elegantly, "such lovely effects in
+New York"
+
+"In those upper Fifth Avenue shops--ah, but don't you see lovely
+things!" the other woman assented warmly. "Of course, one could be
+always changing," she went on. "But I like associations with things-
+-and changing takes so much time! Some day we may think all this
+quite pretty," she finished, with a contented glance at the
+comfortable ugliness of the drawing-room.
+
+"Oh, do you suppose we shall REALLY!" Mrs. White gave a little
+incredulous laugh. She was going pretty far, and she knew it, but as
+a matter of fact, she was entirely unable to believe that there was
+a woman in the world who could afford to have what was fashionable
+and expensive in household furnishings or apparel, and who
+deliberately preferred not to have it. That her own pretty things
+were no sooner established than they began to lose their charm for
+her, never occurred to Mrs. White: she was a woman of conventional
+type, perfectly satisfied to spend her whole life in acquiring
+things essentially invaluable, and to use a naturally shrewd and
+quick intelligence in copying fashions of all sorts, small and
+large, as fast as advanced merchants and magazines presented them to
+her. She was one of the great army of women who help to send the
+sale of an immoral book well up into the hundreds of thousands; she
+liked to spend long afternoons with a box of chocolates and a book
+unfit for the touch of any woman; a book that she would review for
+the benefit of her friends later, with a shocked wonder that "they
+dare print such things!" She liked to tell a man's story, and the
+other women could not but laugh at her, for she was undeniably good
+company, and nobody ever questioned the taste of anything she ever
+said or did. She was a famous gossip, for like all women, she found
+the private affairs of other people full of fascination, and, having
+no legitimate occupation, she was always at liberty to discuss them.
+
+Yet Mrs. White was not at all an unusual woman, and, like her
+associates, she tacitly assumed herself to be the very flower of
+American womanhood. She quoted her distinguished relatives on all
+occasions, the White family, in all its ramifications, supplied the
+correct precedent for all the world; there was no social emergency
+to which some cousin or aunt of Mrs. White's had not been more than
+equal. Having no children of her own, she still could silence and
+shame many a good mother with references to Cousin Ethel
+Langstroth's "kiddies", or to Aunt Grace Thurston's wonderful
+governess.
+
+Personally, Mrs. White vaguely felt that there was something
+innately indecent about children anyway, the smaller they were the
+less mentionable she found them. The little emergencies, of nose-
+bleeds and torn garments and spilled porridge, that were constantly
+arising in the neighborhood of children, made her genuinely sick and
+faint. And she had so humorous and so assured an air of saying
+"Disgusting!" or "Disgraceful!" when the family of some other woman
+began to present itself with reasonable promptness, that other women
+found themselves laughing and saying "Disgusting!" too.
+
+Mrs. Burgoyne, like Mrs. White, was a born leader. Whether she made
+any particular effort to influence her neighbors or not, they could
+not but feel the difference in her attitude toward all the various
+tangible things that make a woman's life. She was essentially
+maternal, wanted to mother all the little living and growing things
+in the world, wanted to be with children, and talk of them and study
+them. And she was simple and honest in her tastes, and entirely
+without affectation in her manner, and she was too great a lady to
+be either laughed at or ignored. So Santa Paloma began to ask itself
+why she did this or that, and finding her ways all made for economy
+and comfort and simplicity, almost unconsciously copied them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+When Mrs. Apostleman invited several of her friends to a formal
+dinner given especially for Mrs. Burgoyne everyone realized that the
+newcomer was accepted, and the event was one of several in which the
+women of Santa Paloma tried with more than ordinary eagerness to
+outshine each other. Mrs. Apostleman herself never entered into
+competition with the younger matrons, nor did they expect it of her.
+She gave heavy, rich, old-fashioned dinners in her own way, in which
+her servants were perfectly trained. It was a standing joke among
+her friends that they always ate too much at Mrs. Apostleman's
+house, there were always seven or eight substantial courses, and she
+liked to have the plates come back for more lobster salad or roast
+turkey. In this, as in all things, she was a law unto herself.
+
+But for the other women, Mrs. White set the pace, and difficult to
+keep they often found it. But they never questioned it. They admired
+the richer woman's perfect house-furnishing, and struggled blindly
+to accumulate the same number and variety of napkins and
+fingerbowls, ramekins and glasses and candlesticks and special forks
+and special knives. The first of the month with its bills, became a
+horror to them, and they were continually promising their husbands,
+in all good faith, that expenses should positively be cut down.
+
+But what use were good resolves; when one might find, the very next
+day, that there were no more cherries for the grapefruit, that one
+had not a pair of presentable white gloves for the club, or that the
+motor-picnic that the children were planning was to cost them five
+dollars apiece? To serve grapefruit without cherries, to wear
+colored gloves, or no gloves at all to the club, and to substitute
+some inexpensive pleasure for the ride was a course that never
+occurred to Mrs. Carew, that never occurred to any of her friends.
+Mrs. Carew might have a very vague idea of her daughter's spiritual
+needs, she might be an entire stranger to the delicately adjusted
+and exquisitely susceptible entity that was the real Jeanette, but
+she would have gone hungry rather than have Jeanette unable to wear
+white shoes to Sunday School, rather than tie Jeanette's braids with
+ribbons that were not stiff and new. She was so entirely absorbed in
+pursuit of the "correct thing," so anxious to read what was "being
+read," to own what was "right", that she never stopped to seriously
+consider her own or her daughter's place in the universe. She was
+glad, of course when the children "liked their teacher," just as she
+had been glad years before when they "liked their nurse." The
+reasons for such likings or dislikings she never investigated; she
+had taken care of the children herself during the nurse's regular
+days "off", but she always regarded these occasions as so much lost
+time. Mrs. Carew kept her children, as she kept her house, well-
+groomed, and she gave about as much thought to the spiritual needs
+of the one as the other. She had been brought up to believe that the
+best things in life are to be had for money, and that earthly
+happiness or unhappiness falls in exact ratio with the possession or
+non-possession of money. She met the growing demands of her family
+as well as she could, and practised all sorts of harassing private
+economies so that, in the eyes of the world, the family might seem
+to be spending a great deal more money than was actually the case.
+Mrs. Carew's was not an analytical mind, but sometimes she found
+herself genuinely puzzled by the financial state of affairs.
+
+"I don't know where the money GOES to!" she said, in a confidential
+moment, to Mrs. Lloyd. They had met in the market, where Mrs. Carew
+was consulting a long list of necessary groceries.
+
+"Oh, don't speak of it!" said Mrs. Lloyd, feelingly. "That's so,
+your dinner is tomorrow night, isn't it?" she added with interest.
+"Are you going to have Lizzie?"
+
+"Oh, dear me, yes! For eight, you know. Shan't you have her?" For
+Mrs. Lloyd's turn to entertain Mrs. Burgoyne followed Mrs. Carew's
+by only a few days.
+
+"Lizzie and her mother, too," said the other woman. "I don't know
+what's the matter with maids in these days," she went on, "they
+simply can't do things, as my mother's maids used to, for example.
+Now the four of them will be working all day over Thursday's dinner,
+and, dear me! it's a simple enough dinner."
+
+"Well, you have to serve so much with a dinner, nowadays," Mrs.
+Carew said, in a mildly martyred tone. "Crackers and everything else
+with oysters--I'm going to have cucumber sandwiches with the soup--"
+
+"Delicious!" said Mrs. Lloyd.
+
+"'Cucumbers, olives, salted nuts, currant jelly'", Mrs. Carew was
+reading her list, "'ginger chutney, saltines, bar-le-duc, cream
+cheese', those are for the salad, you know, 'dinner rolls, sandwich
+bread, fancy cakes, Maraschino cherries, maple sugar,' that's to go
+hot on the ice, I'm going to serve it in melons, and 'candy'--just
+pink and green wafers, I think. All that before it comes to the
+actual dinner at all, and it's all so fussy!"
+
+"Don't say one word!" said Mrs. Lloyd, sympathetically. "But it
+sounds dee-licious!" she added consolingly, and little Mrs. Carew
+went contentedly home to a hot and furious session in her kitchen;
+hours of baking, boiling and frying, chopping and whipping and
+frosting, creaming and seasoning, freezing and straining.
+
+"I don't mind the work, if only everything goes right!" Mrs. Carew
+would say gallantly to herself, and it must be said to her credit
+that usually everything did "go right" at her house, although even
+the maids in the kitchen, heroically attacking pyramids of sticky
+plates, were not so tired as she was, when the dinner was well over.
+
+But there was a certain stimulus in the mere thought of entertaining
+Mrs. Burgoyne, and there was the exhilarating consciousness that one
+of these days she would entertain in turn; so the Santa Paloma
+housewives exerted themselves to the utmost of their endurance, and
+one delightful dinner party followed another.
+
+But a dispassionate onlooker from another planet might have found it
+curious to notice, in contrast to this uniformity, that no two women
+dressed alike on these occasions, and no woman who could help it
+wore the same gown twice. Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Carew, to be sure,
+wore their "little old silks" more than once, but each was secretly
+consoled by the thought that a really "smart" new gown awaited Mrs.
+White's dinner; which was naturally the climax of all the affairs.
+Only the wearers and their dress-makers knew what hours had been
+spent upon these costumes, what discouraged debates attended their
+making, what muscular agonies their fitting. Only they could have
+estimated, and they never did estimate--the time lost over pattern
+books, the nervous strain of placing this bit of spangled net or
+that square inch of lace, the hurried trips downtown for samples and
+linings, for fringes and embroideries and braids and ribbons. The
+gown that she wore to her own dinner, Mrs. White had had fitted in
+the Maison Dernier Mot, in Paris;--it was an enchanting frock of
+embroidered white illusion, over pink illusion, over black illusion,
+under a short heavy tunic of silver spangles and threads. The yoke
+was of wonderful old lace, and there was a girdle of heavy pink
+cords, and silver clasps, to match the aigrette that was held by
+pink and silver cords in Mrs. White's beautifully arranged hair.
+
+Mrs. Burgoyne's gowns, or rather gown, for she wore exactly the same
+costume to every dinner, could hardly have been more startling than
+Santa Paloma found it, had it gone to any unbecoming extreme. Yet it
+was the simplest of black summer silks, soft and full in the skirt,
+short-sleeved, and with a touch of lace at the square-cut neck. She
+arranged her hair in a becoming loose knot, and somehow managed to
+look noticeably lovely and distinguished, in the gay assemblies. To
+brighten the black gown she wore a rope of pearls, looped twice
+about her white throat, and hanging far below her waist; pearls, as
+Mrs. Adams remarked in discouragement later, that "just made you
+feel what's the use! She could wear a kitchen apron with those
+pearls if she wanted to, everyone would know she could afford cloth
+of gold and ermine!"
+
+With this erratic and inexplicable simplicity of dress she combined
+the finish of manner, the poise, the ready sympathies of a truly
+cultivated and intelligent woman. She could talk, not only of her
+own personal experiences, but of the political, and literary, and
+scientific movements of the day. Certain proposed state legislation
+happened to be interesting the men of Santa Paloma at this time, and
+she seemed to understand it, and spoke readily of it.
+
+"But, George," said Mrs. Carew, walking home in the summer night,
+after the Adams dinner, "you have often said you hated women to talk
+about things they didn't understand."
+
+"But she does understand, dearie. That's just the point."
+
+"Yes; but you differed with her, George!"
+
+"Well, but that's different, Jen. She knew what she was talking
+about."
+
+"I suppose she has friends in Washington who keep her informed,"
+said Mrs. Carew, a little discontentedly, after a silence. And there
+was another pause before she said, "Where do men get their
+information, George?"
+
+"Papers, dear. And talking, I suppose. They're interested, you
+know."
+
+"Yes, but--" little Mrs. Carew burst out resentfully, "I never can
+make head or tail of the papers! They say 'Aldrich Resigns,' or
+'Heavy Blow to Interests,' or 'Tammany Scores Triumph,' and _I_
+don't know what it's about!"
+
+George Carew's big laugh rang out in the night, and he put his arm
+about her, and said, "You're great, Jen!"
+
+Shortly after Mrs. White's dinner a certain distinguished old artist
+from New York, and his son, came to stay a night or two at Holly
+Hall, on their way home from the Orient, and Mrs. Burgoyne took this
+occasion to invite a score of her new friends to two small dinners,
+planned for the two nights of the great Karl von Praag's stay in
+Santa Paloma.
+
+"I don't see how she's going to handle two dinners for ten people
+each, with just that colored cook of hers and one waitress," said
+Mrs. Willard White, late one evening, when Mr. White was finishing a
+book and a cigar in their handsome bedroom, and she was at her
+dressing-table.
+
+"Caterers," submitted Mr. White, turning a page.
+
+"I suppose so," his wife agreed. After a thoughtful silence she
+added, "Sue Adams says that she supposes that when a woman has as
+much money as that she loses all interest in spending it!
+Personally, I don't see how she can entertain a great big man like
+Von Praag in that old-fashioned house. She never seems to think of
+it at all, she never apologizes for it, and she talks as if nobody
+ever bought new things until the old were worn out!"
+
+Her eyes went about her own big bedroom as she spoke. Nothing old-
+fashioned here! Even eighteen years ago, when the Whites were
+married, their home had been furnished in a manner to make the Holly
+Hall of to-day look out of date. Mrs. White shuddered now at the
+mere memory of what she as a bride had thought so beautiful: the
+pale green carpet, the green satin curtains, the white-and-gold
+chairs and tables and bed, the easels, the gilded frames! Seven or
+eight years later she had changed all this for a heavy brass
+bedstead, and dark rugs on a polished floor, and bird's-eye maple
+chests and chairs, and all feminine Santa Paloma talked of the
+Whites' new things. Six or seven years after that again, two
+mahogany beds replaced the brass one, and heavy mahogany bureaus
+with glass knobs had their day, with plain net curtains and old-
+fashioned woven rugs. But all these were in the guest-rooms now, and
+in her own bedroom Mrs. White had a complete set of Circassian
+walnut, heavily carved, and ornamented with cunningly inset panels
+of rattan. On the beds were covers of Oriental cottons, and the
+window-curtains showed the same elementary designs in pinks and
+blues.
+
+"She dresses very prettily, I thought," observed Mr. White, apropos
+of his wife's last remark.
+
+"Dresses!" echoed his wife. "She dresses as your mother might!"
+
+"Very pretty, very pretty!" said the man absently, over his book.
+
+There was a silence. Then:
+
+"That just shows how much men notice," Mrs. White confided to her
+ivory-backed brush. "I believe they LIKE women to look like frumps!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+These were busy days in the once quiet and sleepy office of the
+Santa Paloma Morning Mail. A wave of energy and vigor swept over the
+place, affecting everybody from the fat, spoiled office cat, who
+found himself pushed out of chairs, and bounced off of folded coats
+with small courtesy, to the new editor-manager and the lady whose
+timely investment had brought this pleasant change about. Old Kelly,
+the proof-reader, night clerk, Associated Press manager, and
+assistant editor, shouted and swore with a vim unknown of late
+years; Miss Watson, who "covered" social events, clubs, public
+dinners, "dramatic," and "hotels," cleaned out her desk, and took
+her fancy-work home, and "Fergy," a freckled youth who delighted in
+calling himself a "cub," although he did little more than run
+errands and carry copy to the press-room, might even be seen batting
+madly at an unused typewriter when actual duties failed, so
+inspiring was the new atmosphere.
+
+Mrs. Burgoyne had a desk and a corner of her own, where her trim
+figure might be seen daily for an hour or two, from ten o'clock
+until the small girls came in to pick her up on their way home from
+school for luncheon. Barry found her brimming with ideas. She
+instituted the "Women's Page," the old familiar page of answered
+questions, and formulas for ginger-bread, and brief romances, and
+scraps of poetry, and she offered through its columns a weekly cash
+prize for contributions on household topics. An exquisite doll
+appeared in the window of the Mail office, a doll with a flower-
+wreathed hat, and a ruffled dress, and a little parasol to match the
+dress, and loitering little girls, drawn from all over the village
+to study this dream of beauty, learned that they had only to enter a
+loaf of bread of their own making in the Mail contest, to stand a
+chance of carrying the little lady home. Beside the doll stood a
+rifle, no toy, but a genuine twenty-two Marlin. for the boy whose
+plans for a vegetable garden seemed the best and most practical,
+Mrs. Burgoyne herself talked to the children when they came shyly in
+to investigate. "She seems to want to know every child in the
+county, the darling!" said Miss Watson to Fergy.
+
+The Valentines, father and son, came into the Mail office one warm
+June morning, to find the editor of the "Women's Page" busy at her
+desk, with the sunlight lying in a bright bar across her uncovered
+hair, and a vista of waving green boughs showing through the open
+window behind her.
+
+"What are you two doing here at this hour?" said Sidney, laying down
+her pen and leaning back in her chair as if glad of a moment's rest.
+"Why, Billy!" she added in admiring tones, "let me see you! How
+very, VERY nice you look!"
+
+For the little fellow was dressed in a new sailor suit that was a
+full size too large for him, his wild mop had been cut far too
+close, and a large new hat and new shoes were much in evidence.
+
+"D'you think he looks all right?" said Barry with an anxious
+wistfulness that went straight to her heart. "He looks better,
+doesn't he? I've been fixing him up."
+
+"And free sailor waists, and stockings, and nighties," supplemented
+Billy, also anxious for her approval.
+
+"He looks lovely!" said Sidney, enthusiastically, even while she was
+mentally raising the collar of his waist, and taking an inch or two
+off the trousers. She lifted the child up to sit on his father's
+desk, and kissed the top of his little cropped head.
+
+"We may not express ourselves very fluently," said Barry, who was
+seated in his own revolving chair and busily opening and shutting
+the drawers of his desk, "but we appreciate the interest beautiful
+ladies take in our manners and morals, and the new tooth-brushes
+they buy us--"
+
+"My dear!" protested Mrs. Burgoyne, between laughter and tears,
+"Ellen used his old one up, cleaning out their paint-boxes!" And she
+put her warm hand on his shoulder, and said, "Don't be a goose,
+Barry!" as unselfconsciously as a sister might. "Where are you two
+boys going, Billy?" she asked, going back to her own desk.
+
+"'Cool," Billy said.
+
+"He's going over to the kindergarten. I've got some work I ought to
+finish here," Barry supplemented." I'll take you across the street,
+Infant, I'll be right back, Sidney."
+
+"But, Barry, why are you working now?" asked the lady a few minutes
+later when he took his place at his desk.
+
+"Oh, don't you worry," he answered, smiling; "I love it. The thought
+of old Rogers' face when he opens his paper every morning does me
+good, I'm writing this appeal for the new reservoir now, and I've
+got to play up the Flower Festival."
+
+"I'm not interested in the Flower Festival," said Mrs. Burgoyne
+good-naturedly, "and the minute it's over I'm going to start a
+crusade for a girls' clubhouse in Old Paloma. Conditions over there
+for the girls are something hideous. But I suppose we'll have to go
+on with the Festival for the present. It's a great occasion, I
+suppose?"
+
+"Oh, tremendous! The Governor's coming, and thousands of visitors
+always pour into town. We'll have nearly a hundred carriages in the
+parade, simply covered with flowers, you know. It's lovely! You wait
+until things get fairly started!"
+
+"That'll be Fourth of July," Sidney said thoughtfully, turning back
+to her exchanges, "I'll begin my clubhouse crusade on the fifth!"
+she added firmly.
+
+For a long time there was silence in the office, except for the
+rustling of paper and the scratch of pens. From the sunny world out-
+of-doors came a pleasant blending of many noises, passing wagons,
+the low talk of chickens, the slamming of gates, and now and then
+the not unmusical note of a fish-horn. Footsteps and laughing voices
+went by, and died into silence. The clock from Town Hall Square
+struck eleven slowly.
+
+"This is darned pleasant," said Barry presently, over his work.
+
+"Isn't it?" said the editor of the "Women's Page," and again there
+was silence.
+
+After a while Barry said "Finished!" with a great breath, and,
+leaning back in his chair, wheeled about to find the lady quietly
+watching him.
+
+"Barry, are you working too hard?" said she, quite unembarrassed.
+
+"Am I? Lord, not I wish the days were twice as long. I"--Barry
+rumpled his thick hair with a gesture that was familiar to Sidney
+now--"I guess work agrees with me. By George, I hate to eat, and I
+hate to sleep; I want to be down here all the time, or else rustling
+up subscriptions and 'ads.',"
+
+"And I thought you were lazy," said Sidney, finding herself, for the
+first time in their friendship, curiously inclined to keep the
+conversation personal, this warm June morning. It was a thing
+extremely difficult to do, with Barry. "You certainly gave me that
+impression," she said.
+
+"Yes; but that was two months ago," said Barry, off guard. A second
+later he changed the topic abruptly by asking, "Did your roses
+come?"
+
+"All of them," answered Sidney pleasantly. And vaguely conscious of
+mischief in the air, but led on by some inexplicable whim, she
+pursued, "Do you mean that it makes such a difference to you, Rogers
+being gone?"
+
+Barry trimmed the four sides of a clipping with four clips of his
+shears.
+
+"Exactly," said he briefly. He banged a drawer shut, closed a book
+and laid it aside, and stuck the brush into his glue-pot. "Getting
+enough of dinner parties?" he asked then, cheerfully.
+
+"Too much," said Sidney, wondering why she felt like a reprimanded
+child. "And that reminds me: I am giving two dinners for the Von
+Praags, you know. I can't manage everybody at once; I hate more than
+ten people at a dinner. And you are asked to the first."
+
+"I don't go much to dinners," Barry said.
+
+"I know you don't; but I want you to come to this one," said Sidney.
+"You'll love old Mr. von Praag. And Richard, the son, is a dear! I
+really want you."
+
+"He's an artist, too, isn't he?" said Barry without enthusiasm.
+
+"Who, Richard?" she asked, something in his manner putting her a
+little at a loss. "Yes; and he's very clever, and so nice! He's like
+a brother to me."
+
+Barry did not answer, but after a moment he said, scowling a little,
+and not looking up:
+
+"A fellow like that has pretty smooth sailing. Rich, the son of a
+big man, traveling all he wants to, studio in New York, clubs--"
+
+"Oh, Richard has his troubles," Sidney said. "His wife is very
+delicate, and they lost their little girl... Are you angry with me
+about anything, Barry?" she broke off, puzzled and distressed, for
+this unresponsive almost sullen manner was unlike anything she had
+ever seen in him.
+
+But a moment later he turned toward her with his familiar sunny
+smile.
+
+"Why didn't you say so before?" he said sheepishly.
+
+"Say--?" she echoed bewilderedly. Then, with a sudden rush of
+enlightenment, "Why, Barry, you're not JEALOUS?"
+
+A second later she would have given much to have the words unsaid.
+They faced each other in silence, the color mounting steadily in
+Sidney's face.
+
+"I didn't mean of ME," she stammered uncomfortably; "I meant of
+everything. I thought--but it was a silly thing to say. It sounded--
+I didn't think--"
+
+"I don't know why you shouldn't have thought it, since I was fool
+enough to show it," said Barry after a moment, coming over to her
+desk and facing her squarely. Sidney stood up, opposite him, her
+heart beating wildly. "And I don't know why I shouldn't be jealous,"
+he went on steadily, "at the idea that some old friend might come in
+here and take you away from Santa Paloma. You asked me if it was old
+Rogers' going that made a difference to me--"
+
+"I know," interrupted Sidney, scarlet-cheeked. "PLEASE"--
+
+"But you know better than that," Barry went on, his voice rising a
+little. "You know what you have done for me. If ever I try to speak
+of it, you say, as you said about the kid just now, 'My dear boy, I
+like to do it.' But I'm going to say what I mean now, once and for
+all. You loaned me money, and it was through your lending it that I
+got credit to borrow more; you gave me a chance to be my own master;
+you showed you had faith in me; you reminded me of the ambition I
+had as a kid, before Hetty and all that trouble had crushed it out
+of me; you came down here to the office and talked and planned, and
+took it for granted that I was going to pull myself together and
+stop idling, and kicking, and fooling away my time; and all through
+these six weeks of rough sailing, you've let me go up there to the
+Hall and tell you everything--and then you wonder if I could ever be
+jealous!" His tone, which had risen almost to violence, fell
+suddenly. He went back to his desk and began to straighten the
+papers there, not seeing what he did. "I never can say anything more
+to you, Sidney, I've said too much now," he said a little huskily;
+"but I'm glad to have you know how I feel."
+
+Sidney stood quite still, her breath coming and going quickly. She
+was fundamentally too honest a woman to meet the situation with one
+of the hundred insincerities that suggested themselves to her. She
+knew she was to blame, and she longed to undo the mischief, and put
+their friendship back where it had been only an hour ago. But the
+right words did not suggest themselves, and she could only stand
+silently watching him. Barry had opened a book, and, holding it in
+both hands, was apparently absorbed in its contents.
+
+Neither had spoken or moved, and Sidney was meditating a sudden,
+wordless departure, when Ellen Burgoyne burst noisily into the room.
+Ellen was a square, splendid child, always conversationally
+inclined, and never at a loss for a subject.
+
+"You look as if you wanted to cry, Mother," said she. "Perhaps you
+didn't hear the whistle; school's out. We've been waiting ever so
+long. Mother, I know you said you hoped Heaven would not send any
+more dogs our way for a long while, but Jo and Jeanette and I found
+one by the school fence. Mother, you will say it has the most
+pathetic face you ever saw when you see it. Its ear was bloody, and
+it licked Jo's hand so GENTLY, and it's such a lit-tul dog! Jo has
+it wrapped up in her coat. Mother, may we have it? Please, PLEASE--"
+
+Barry wheeled about with his hearty laugh, and Mrs. Burgoyne,
+laughing too, stopped the eager little mouth with a kiss.
+
+"It sounds as if we must certainly have him, Baby!" said she.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+The new mistress of the Hall, in her vigorous young interest in all
+things, included naturally a keen enjoyment of the village love
+affairs, she liked to hear the histories of the old families all
+about, she wanted to know the occupants of every shabby old surrey
+that drew up at the post-office while the mail was being "sorted."
+But if the conversation turned to mere idle talk and speculation,
+she was conspicuously silent. And upon an occasion when Mrs. Adams
+casually referred to a favorite little piece of scandal, Mrs.
+Burgoyne gave the conversation a sudden twist that, as Mrs. White,
+who was present, said later, "made you afraid to call your soul your
+own."
+
+"Do you tell me that that pretty little Thorne girl is actually
+meeting this young man, whoever he is, while her mother thinks she
+is taking a music lesson?" demanded Mrs. Burgoyne, suddenly entering
+into the conversation. "There's nothing against him, I suppose? She
+COULD see him at home."
+
+"Oh, no, he's a nice enough little fellow," Mrs. White said, "but
+she's a silly little thing, and I imagine her people are very severe
+with her; she never goes to dances or seems to have any fun."
+
+"I wonder if we couldn't go see the mother, and hint that there is
+beginning to be a little talk about Katherine," mused Mrs. Burgoyne.
+"Don't you think so, Mrs. Adams?"
+
+"Oh, my goodness!" Mrs. Adams said nervously, "I don't KNOW anything
+about it! I wouldn't for the world--I never dreamed--one would hate
+to start trouble--Mr. Adams is very fond of the Thornes--"
+
+"But we ought to save her if we can, we married women who know how
+mischievous that sort of thing is," Mrs. Burgoyne urged.
+
+"Why, probably they've not met but once or twice!" Mrs. White said,
+annoyed, but with a comfortable air of closing the subject, and no
+more was said at the time. But both she and Mrs. Adams were a little
+uneasy two or three days later, when, returning from a motor trip,
+they saw Mrs. Burgoyne standing at the Thornes' gate, in laughing
+conversation with pretty little Katherine and her angular, tall
+mother.
+
+"And there is nothing in that story at all," said Mrs. Burgoyne
+later, to Mrs. Carew.
+
+"I suppose you walked up and said, 'If you are Miss Thorne, you are
+clandestinely meeting Joe Turner down by the old mill every week!'"
+laughed Mrs. Carew,
+
+"I managed it very nicely," Mrs. Burgoyne said, "I admired their
+yellow rose one day, as I passed the gate. Mrs. Thorne was standing
+there, and I asked if it wasn't a Banksia. Then the little girl came
+out of the house, and she happened to know who I am--"
+
+"Astonishingly bright child!" said Mrs. Carew.
+
+"Well, and then we talked roses, and the father came home--a nice
+old man. And I asked him if he'd lend me Miss Thorne now and then to
+play duets--and he agreed. So the child's been up to the Hall once
+or twice, and she's a nice little thing. She doesn't care tuppence
+for the Turner boy, but he's musical, and she's quite music-mad, and
+now and then they 'accidentally' meet. Her father won't let anyone
+see her at the house. She wants to study abroad, but they can't
+afford it, I imagine, so I've written to see if I can interest a
+friend of mine in Berlin--But why do you smile?" she broke off to
+ask innocently.
+
+"At the thought of your friend in Berlin!" said Mrs. Carew
+audaciously. For she was not at all awed by Mrs. Burgoyne now.
+
+Indeed, she and Mrs. Brown were growing genuinely fond of their new
+neighbor, and the occupants of the Hall supplied them with constant
+amusement and interest. Great lady and great heiress Sidney Burgoyne
+might be, but she lived a life far simpler than their own, and loved
+to have them come in for a few minutes' talk even if she were
+cutting out cookies, with Joanna and Ellen leaning on the table, or
+feeding the chickens whose individual careers interested her so
+deeply. She walked with the little girls to school every morning,
+and met them near the school at one o'clock. In the meantime she
+made a visit to the Mail office, and perhaps spent an hour or two
+there, or in the markets; but at least three times a week she
+wandered over to Old Paloma, and spent the forenoon in the dingy
+streets across the river. What she did there, perhaps no one but
+Doctor Brown, who came to have a real affection and respect for her,
+fully appreciated. Mrs. Burgoyne would tell him, when they met in
+some hour of life or death, that she was "making friends." It was
+quite true. She was the type of woman who cannot pass a small child
+in the street. She must stop, and ask questions, decide disputes and
+give advice. And through the children she won the big brothers and
+sisters and fathers and mothers of Old Paloma. Even a deep-rooted
+prejudice against the women of her class and their method of dealing
+with the less fortunate could not prevail against her disarming,
+friendly manner, her simple gown and hat, her eagerness to get the
+new baby into her arms; all these told in her favor, and she became
+very popular in the shabby little settlement across the bridge. She
+would sit at a sewing-machine and show old Mrs. Goodspeed how to
+turn a certain hem, she would prescribe barley-water and whey for
+the Barnes baby, she would explain to Mrs. Ryan the French manner of
+cooking tough meat, it is true; but, on the other hand, she let pale
+little discouraged Mrs. Weber, of the Bakery, show her how to make a
+German potato pie, and when Mrs. Ryan's mother, old Mrs. Lynch,
+knitted her a shawl, with clean, thin old work-worn hands, the tears
+came into her bright eyes as she accepted the gift. So it was no
+more than a neighborly give-and-take after all. Mrs. Burgoyne would
+fall into step beside a factory girl, walking home at sunset. "How
+was it today, Nellie? Did you speak to the foreman about an opening
+for your sister?" the rich, interested voice would ask. Or perhaps
+some factory lad would find her facing him in a lane. "Tell me, Joe,
+what's all this talk of trouble between you and the Lacy boys at the
+rink?"
+
+"I'm a widow, too," she reminded poor little Mrs. Peevy, one day, "I
+understand." "Do let me send you the port wine I used to take after
+Ellen was born," she begged one little sickly mother, and when she
+loaned George Manning four hundred dollars to finish his new house,
+and get his wife and babies up from San Francisco, the transaction
+was made palatable to George by her encouraging: "Everyone borrows
+money for building, I assure you. I know my father did repeatedly."
+
+When more subtle means were required, she was still equal to the
+occasion. It was while Viola Peet was in the hospital for a burned
+wrist that Mrs. Burgoyne made a final and effective attempt to move
+poor little Mrs. Peet out of the bedroom where she had lain
+complaining, ever since the accident that had crippled her and
+killed her husband five years before. Mrs. Burgoyne put it as a
+"surprise for Viola," and Mrs. Peet, whose one surviving spark of
+interest in life centred in her three children, finally permitted
+carpenters to come and build a porch outside her dining-room, and
+was actually transferred, one warm June afternoon, to the wide,
+delicious hammock-bed that Mrs. Burgoyne had hung there. Her eyes,
+dulled with staring at a chocolate wall-paper, and a closet door,
+for five years, roved almost angrily over the stretch of village
+street visible from the porch; the perspective of tree-smothered
+roofs and feathery elm and locust trees.
+
+"'Tisn't a bit more than I'd do for you if I was rich and you poor,"
+said Mrs. Peet, rebelliously.
+
+"Oh, I know that!" said Mrs. Burgoyne, busily punching pillows.
+
+"An', as you say, Viola deserves all I c'n do for her," pursued the
+invalid. "But remember, every cent of this you git back."
+
+"Every cent, just as soon as Lyman is old enough to take a job,"
+agreed Mrs. Burgoyne. "There, how's that? That's the way Colonel
+Burgoyne liked to be fixed."
+
+"You're to make a note of just what it costs," persisted Mrs. Peet,
+"this wrapper, and the pillers, and all."
+
+"Oh, let the wrapper be my present to you, Mrs. Peet!"
+
+"No, MA'AM!" said Mrs. Peet, firmly. And she told the neighbors,
+later, in the delightfully exciting afternoon and evening that
+followed her installation on the porch, that she wasn't an object of
+charity, and she and Mrs. Burgoyne both knew it. Mrs. Burgoyne would
+not stay to see Viola's face, when she came home from the hospital
+to find her mother watching the summer stars prick through the warm
+darkness, but Viola came up to the Hall that same evening, and tried
+to thank Mrs. Burgoyne, and laughed and cried at once, and had to be
+consoled with cookies and milk until the smiles had the upper hand,
+and she could go home, with occasional reminiscent sobs still
+shaking her bony little chest.
+
+"What are you trying to do over there?" asked Dr. Brown, coming in
+with his wife for a rubber of bridge, as Viola departed. "Whereever
+I go, I come across your trail. Are we nursing a socialist in our
+bosom?"
+
+"No-o-o, I don't think I'm that," said Sidney laughing, and pushing
+the porch-chairs into comfortable relation. "Let's sit out here
+until Mr. Valentine comes. No, I'm not a socialist. But I can't help
+feeling that there's SOME solution for a wretched problem like that
+over there," a wave of the hand indicated Old Paloma, "and perhaps,
+dabbling aimlessly about in all sorts of places, one of us may hit
+upon it."
+
+"But I thought the modern theory was against dabbling," said Mrs.
+Brown, a little timidly, for she held a theory that she was not
+"smart." "I thought everything was being done by institutions, and
+by laws--by legislation."
+
+"Nothing will ever be done by legislation, to my thinking at least,"
+Mrs. Burgoyne said. "A few years ago we legislated some thousands of
+new babies into magnificent institutions. Nurses mixed their
+bottles, doctors inspected them, nurses turned them and washed them
+and watched them. Do you know what percentage survived?"
+
+"Doesn't work very well," said the doctor, shaking a thoughtful head
+over his pipe.
+
+"Just one hundred per cent didn't survive!" said Mrs. Burgoyne. "Now
+they take a foundling or an otherwise unfortunate baby, and give it
+to a real live mother. She nurses it if she can, she keeps near to
+it and cuddles it, and loves it. And so it lives. In all the
+asylums, it's the same way. Groups are getting smaller and smaller,
+a dozen girls with a matron in a cottage, and hundreds of girls
+'farmed out' with good, responsible women, instead of enormous
+refectories and dormitories and schoolrooms. And the ideal solution
+will be when every individual woman in the world extends her
+mothering to include every young thing she comes in contact with;
+one doll for her own child and another doll for the ashman's little
+girl, one dimity for her own debutante, and another just as dainty
+for the seventeen-year-old who brings home the laundry every week."
+
+"Yes, but that's puttering here and there," asserted Mrs. Brown,
+"wouldn't laws for a working wage do all that, and more, too?"
+
+"In the first place, a working wage doesn't solve it," Mrs. Burgoyne
+answered vigorously, "because in fully half the mismanaged and dirty
+homes, the working people HAVE a working wage, have an amount of
+money that would amaze you! Who buys the willow plumes, and the
+phonographs, and the enlarged pictures, and the hair combs and the
+white shoes that are sold by the million every year? The poor
+people, girls in shops, and women whose babies are always dirty, and
+always broken out with skin trouble, and whose homes are hot and
+dirty and miserable and mismanaged."
+
+"Well, make some laws to educate 'em then, if it's education they
+all need," suggested the doctor, who had been auditing every clause
+of the last remark with a thoughtful nod.
+
+"No, wages aren't the question," Mrs. Burgoyne reiterated. "Why, I
+knew a little Swedish woman once, who raised three children on three
+hundred dollars a year."
+
+"She COULDN'T!" ejaculated Mrs. Brown.
+
+"Oh, but she did! She paid one dollar a week for rent, too. One son
+is a civil engineer, now, and the daughter is a nurse. The youngest
+is studying medicine."
+
+"But what did they EAT, do you suppose?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. Potatoes, I suppose, and oatmeal and baked
+cabbage, and soup. I know she got a quart of buttermilk every day,
+for three cents. They were beautiful children. They went to free
+schools, and lectures, and galleries, and park concerts, and free
+dispensaries, when they needed them. Laws could do no more for her,
+she knew her business."
+
+"Well, education WOULD solve it then," concluded Mrs. Brown.
+
+"I don't know." Mrs. Burgoyne answered, reflectively, "Book
+education won't certainly. But example might, I believe example
+would."
+
+"You mean for people of a better class to go and live among them?"
+suggested the doctor.
+
+"No, but I mean for people of a better class to show them that what
+they are striving for isn't vital, after all. I mean for us to so
+order our lives that they will begin to value cleanliness, and
+simplicity, and the comforts they can afford. You know, Mary Brown,"
+said Mrs. Burgoyne, turning suddenly to the doctor's wife, with her
+gay, characteristic vehemence, "it's all our fault, all the misery
+and suffering and sin of it, everywhere!"
+
+"Our fault! You and me!" cried Mrs. Brown, aghast.
+
+"No, all the fault of women, I mean!" Mrs. Burgoyne laughed too as
+Mrs. Brown settled back in her chair with a relieved sigh. "We
+women," she went on vigorously, "have mismanaged every separate work
+that was ever put into our hands! We ought to be ashamed to live. We
+cumber--"
+
+"Here!" said the doctor, smiling in lazy comfort over his pipe,
+"that's heresy! I refuse to listen to it. My wife is a woman, my
+mother, unless I am misinformed, was another--"
+
+"Don't mind him!" said Mrs. Brown, "but go on! What have we all
+done? We manage our houses, and dress our children, and feed our
+husbands, it seems to me."
+
+"Well, there's the big business of motherhood," began Mrs. Burgoyne,
+"the holiest and highest thing God ever let a mortal do. We evade it
+and ignore it to such an extent that the nation--and other nations--
+grows actually alarmed, and men begin to frame laws to coax us back
+to the bearing of children. Then, if we have them, we turn the
+entire responsibility over to other people. A raw little foreigner
+of some sort answers the first questions our boys and girls ask,
+until they are old enough to be put under some nice, inexperienced
+young girl just out of normal school, who has fifty or sixty of them
+to manage, and of whose ideas upon the big questions of life we know
+absolutely nothing. We say lightheartedly that 'girls always go
+through a trying age,' and that we suppose boys 'have to come in
+contact with things,' and we let it go at that! We 'suppose there
+has always been vice, and always will be,' but we never stop to
+think that we ourselves are setting the poor girls of the other
+world such an example in the clothes we wear, and the pleasures we
+take, that they will sell even themselves for pretty gowns and
+theatre suppers. We regret sweat-shops, even while we patronize the
+stores that support them, and we bemoan child-labor, although I
+suppose the simplest thing in the world would be to find out where
+the cotton goes that is worked by babies, and refuse to buy those
+brands of cotton, and make our merchants tell us where they DO get
+their supply! We have managed our household problem so badly that we
+simply can't get help--"
+
+"You CANNOT do your own work, with children," said Mrs. Brown
+firmly.
+
+"Of course you can't. But why is it that our nice young American
+girls won't come into our homes? Why do we have to depend upon the
+most ignorant and untrained of our foreign people? Our girls pour
+into the factories, although our husbands don't have any trouble in
+getting their brothers for office positions. There is always a line
+of boys waiting for a possible job at five dollars a week."
+
+"Because they can sleep at home," submitted the doctor.
+
+"You know that, other things being equal, young people would much
+rather not sleep at home," said Mrs. Burgoyne, "it's the migrating
+age. They love the novelty of being away at night."
+
+"Well, when a boy comes into my office," the doctor reasoned slowly,
+"he knows that he has certain unimportant things to do, but he sees
+me taking all the real responsibility, he knows that I work harder
+than he does."
+
+"Exactly," said Mrs. Burgoyne. "Men do their own work, with help. We
+don't do ours. Not only that, but every improvement that comes to
+ours comes from men. They invent our conveniences, they design our
+stoves and arrange our sinks. Not because they know anything about
+it, but because we're not interested."
+
+"One would think you had done your own work for twenty years!" said
+Mrs. Brown.
+
+"I never did it," Mrs. Burgoyne answered smiling, "but I sometimes
+wish I could. I sometimes envy those busy women who have small
+houses, new babies, money cares--it must be glorious to rise to
+fresh emergencies every hour of your life. A person like myself is
+handicapped. I can't demonstrate that I believe what I say. Everyone
+thinks me merely a little affected about it. If I were such a woman,
+I'd glory in clipping my life of everything but the things I needed,
+and living like one of my own children, as simply as a lot of
+peasants!"
+
+"And no one would ever be any the wiser," said Mrs. Brown.
+
+"I don't know. Quiet little isolated lives have a funny way of
+getting out into the light. There was that little peasant girl at
+Domremy, for instance; there was that gentle saint who preached
+poverty to the birds; there was Eugenie Guerin, and the Cure of Ars,
+and the few obscure little English weavers--and there was the
+President who split--"
+
+"I thought we'd come to him!" chuckled the doctor.
+
+"Well," Mrs. Burgoyne smiled, a little confused at having betrayed
+hero-worship. "Well, and there was one more, the greatest of all,
+who didn't found any asylums, or lead any crusade--" She paused.
+
+"Surely," said the doctor, quietly. "Surely. I suppose that curing
+the lame here, and the blind there, and giving the people their fill
+of wine one day, and of bread and fishes the next, might be called
+'dabbling' in these days. But the love that went with those things
+is warming the world yet!"
+
+"Well, but what can we DO?" demanded Mrs. Brown after a short
+silence.
+
+"That's for us to find out," said Mrs. Burgoyne, cheerfully.
+
+"A correct diagnosis is half a cure," ended the doctor, hopefully.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+Barry was the last guest to reach Holly Hall on the evening of Mrs.
+Burgoyne's first dinner-party, and came in to find the great painter
+who was her guest the centre of a laughing and talking group in the
+long drawing-room. Mrs. Apostleman, with an open book of
+reproductions from Whistler on her broad, brocade lap, had the
+armchair next to the guest of honor, and Barry's quick look for his
+hostess discovered her on a low hassock at the painter's knee,
+looking very young and fresh, in her white frock, with a LaMarque
+rose at her belt and another in her dark hair. She greeted him very
+gravely, almost timidly, and in the new self-consciousness that had
+suddenly come to them both it was with difficulty that even the
+commonplace words of greeting were accomplished, and it was with
+evident relief that she turned from him to ask her guests to come
+into the dining-room.
+
+Warm daylight was still pouring into the drawing-room at seven
+o'clock, and in the pleasant dining-room, too, there was no other
+light. The windows here were wide open, and garden scents drifted in
+from the recently watered flower-beds. The long table, simply set,
+was ornamented only by low bowls of the lovely San Rafael roses.
+
+Guided and stimulated by the hostess, the conversation ran in a gay,
+unbroken stream, for the painter liked to talk, and Santa Paloma
+enjoyed him. But under it all the women guests were aware of an
+almost resentful amazement at the simplicity of the dinner. When,
+after nine o'clock, the ladies went into the drawing-room and
+settled about a snapping wood fire, Mrs. Lloyd could not resist
+whispering to Mrs. Apostleman, "For a COMPANY dinner!" Mrs. Adams
+was entirely absorbed in deciding just what position she would take
+when Mrs. White alluded to the affair the next day; but Mrs. White
+had come primed for special business this evening, and she took
+immediate advantage of the absence of the men to speak to Mrs.
+Burgoyne.
+
+"As president of our little club," said she, when they were all
+seated, "I am authorized to ask you if I may put your name up for
+membership, Mrs. Burgoyne. We are all members here, and in this
+quiet place our meetings are a real pleasure, and I hope an
+education as well."
+
+"Oh, really--!" Mrs. Burgoyne began, but the other went on serenely:
+
+"I brought one of our yearly programs, we have just got them out,
+and I'm going to leave it with you. I think Mr. White left it here
+on the table. Yes; here it is. You see," she opened a dainty little
+book and flattened it with a white, jeweled hand, "our work is all
+laid out, up to the president's breakfast in March. I go out then,
+and a week later we inaugurate the new president. Let me just run
+over this for you, for I KNOW it will interest you. Now here,
+Tuesdays. Tuesday is our regular meeting day. We have a program,
+music, and books suggested for the week, reports, business, and one
+good paper--the topics vary; here's 'Old Thanksgiving Customs,' in
+November, then a debate, 'What is Friendship,' then 'Christmas
+Spirit,' and then our regular Christmas Tree and Jinks. Once a
+month, on Tuesday, we have some really fine speaker from the city,
+and we often have fine singers, and so on. Then we have a monthly
+reception for our visitors, and a supper; usually we just have tea
+and bread-and-butter after the meetings. Then, first Monday,
+Directors' Meeting; that doesn't matter. Every other Wednesday the
+Literary Section meets, they are doing wonderful work; Miss Foster
+has that; she makes it very interesting. 'What English Literature
+Owes to Meredith,' 'Rossetti, the Man,'--you see I'm just skimming,
+to give you some idea. Then the Dramatic Section, every other
+Thursday; they give a play once a year; that's great fun! 'Ibsen--
+Did he Understand Women?' 'Please Explain--Mr. Shaw?'--Mrs. Moore
+makes that very amusing. Then alternate Thursdays the Civic and
+Political Section--"
+
+"Ah! What does that do?" said Mrs. Burgoyne.
+
+"Why," said Mrs. White hesitating, "I haven't been--however, I think
+they took up the sanitation of the schools; Miss Jewett, from
+Sacramento, read a splendid paper about it. There's a committee to
+look into that, and then last year that section planted a hundred
+trees. And then there's parliamentary drill."
+
+"Which we all need," said Mrs. Adams, and there was laughter.
+
+"Then there's the Art Department once a month," resumed Mrs. White,
+"Founders' Day, Old-Timers' Day, and, in February, we think Judge
+Lindsey may address us--"
+
+"Oh, are you doing any juvenile-court work?" said the hostess.
+
+"We wanted his suggestions about it," Mrs. White said. "We feel that
+if we COULD get some of the ladies interested--! Then here's the
+French class once a week; German, Spanish, and the bridge club on
+Fridays."
+
+"Gracious! You use your clubhouse," said Mrs. Burgoyne.
+
+"Nearly every day. So come on Tuesday," said the president
+winningly, "and be our guest. A Miss Carroll is to sing, and
+Professor Noyesmith, of Berkeley, will read a paper on: 'The City
+Beautiful.' Keep that year-book; I butchered it, running through it
+so fast."
+
+"Well, just now," Mrs. Burgoyne began a little hesitatingly, "I'm
+rather busy. I am at the Mail office while the girls are in school,
+you know, and we have laid out an enormous lot of gardening for
+afternoons. They never tire of gardening if I'm with them, but, of
+course, no children will do that sort of thing alone; and it's doing
+them both so much good that I don't want to stop it. Then they study
+German and Italian with me, and on Saturday have a cooking lesson.
+You see, my time is pretty full."
+
+"But a good governess would take every bit of that off your hands,
+me dear," said Mrs. Apostleman.
+
+"Oh, but I love to do it!" protested Mrs. Burgoyne with her wide-
+eyed, childish look. "You can't really buy for them what you can do
+yourself, do you think so? And now the other children are beginning
+to come in, and it's such fun! But that isn't all. I have editorial
+work to do, besides the Mail, you know. I manage the 'Answers to
+Mothers' column in a little eastern magazine. I daresay you've never
+seen it; it is quite unpretentious, but it has a large circulation.
+And these mothers write me, some of them factory-workers, or mothers
+of child-workers even, or lonely women on some isolated ranch;
+you've no idea how interesting it is! Of course they don't know who
+I am, but we become good friends, just the same. I have the best
+reference books about babies and sickness, and I give them the best
+advice I can. Sometimes it's a boy's text-book that is wanted, or a
+second-hand crib, or some dear old mother to get into a home, and
+they are so self-respecting about it, and so afraid they aren't
+paying fair--I love that work! But, of course, it takes time. Then
+I've been hunting up a music-teacher for the girls. I can't teach
+them that--"
+
+"I meant to speak to you of that," Mrs. White said. "There's a
+Monsieur Posti, Emil Posti, he studied with Leschetizky, you know,
+who comes up from San Francisco every other week, and we all take
+from him. In between times--"
+
+"Oh, but I've engaged a nice little Miss Davids from Old Paloma,"
+said Mrs. Burgoyne.
+
+"From Old Paloma!" echoed three women together. And Mrs. Apostleman
+added heavily, "Never heard of her!"
+
+"I got a good little Swedish sewing-woman over there," the hostess
+explained, "and she told me of this girl. She's a sweet girl; no
+mother, and a little sister to bring up. She was quite pleased."
+
+"But, good heavens! What does she know? What's her method?" demanded
+Mrs. White in puzzled disapproval.
+
+"She has a pretty touch," Mrs. Burgoyne said mildly, "and she's
+bristling with ambition and ideas. She's not a genius, perhaps; but,
+then, neither is either of the girls. I just want them to play for
+their own pleasure, read accompaniments; something of that sort.
+Don't you know how popular the girl who can play college songs
+always is at a house-party?"
+
+"Well, really--" Mrs. White began, almost annoyed; but she broke her
+sentence off abruptly, and Mrs. Apostleman filled the pause.
+
+"Whatever made ye go over there for a dress-maker?" she demanded.
+"We never think of going there. There's a very good woman here, in
+the Bank Building--"
+
+"Madame Sorrel," supplemented Mrs. Adams.
+
+"She's fearfully independent," Mrs. Lloyd contributed; "but she's
+good. She made your pink, didn't she, Sue? Wayne said she did."
+
+Mrs. Adams turned pink herself; the others laughed suddenly.
+
+"Oh, you naughty girl!" Mrs. White said. "Did you tell Wayne you got
+that frock in Santa Paloma?"
+
+"What Wayne doesn't know won't hurt him," said his wife. "Sh! Here
+they come!" And the conversation terminated abruptly, with much
+laughter.
+
+Mrs. Burgoyne's dinner-party dispersed shortly after ten o'clock, so
+much earlier than was the custom in Santa Paloma that none of the
+ordered motor-cars were in waiting. The guests walked home together,
+absorbed in an animated conversation; for the gentlemen, who were
+delighted to be getting home early, delighted with a dinner that, as
+Wayne Adams remarked, "really stood for something to eat, not just
+things passed to you, or put down in dabs before you," and delighted
+with the pleasant informality of sitting down in daylight, were
+enthusiastic in their praise of Mrs. Burgoyne. The ladies differed
+with them.
+
+"She knows how to do things," said Parker Lloyd. "Old Von Praag
+himself said that she was a famous dinner-giver."
+
+"I don't know what you'd say, Wayne," said Mrs. Adams patiently, "if
+_I_ asked people to sit down to the dinner we had to-night! Of
+course we haven't eight millions, but I would be ashamed to serve a
+cocktail, a soup--I frankly admit it was delicious--steaks, plain
+lettuce salad, and fruit. I don't count coffee and cheese. No wines,
+no entrees; I think it was decidedly QUEER."
+
+"I wish some of you others would try it," said Willard White
+unexpectedly. "I never get dinners like that, except at the club,
+down in town. The cocktail was a rare sherry, the steaks were
+broiled to a turn, and the salad dressing was a wonder. She had her
+cheese just ripe enough, and samovar coffee to wind up with--what
+more do you want? I serve wine myself, but champagne keeps you
+thirsty all night, and other wines put me to sleep. I don't miss
+wine! I call it a bang-up dinner, don't you, Parker?"
+
+Parker Lloyd, with his wife on his arm, felt discretion his part.
+
+"Well," he said innocently selecting the one argument most
+distasteful to the ladies, "it was a man's dinner, Will. It was just
+what a man likes, served the way he likes it. But if the girls like
+flummery and fuss, I don't see why they shouldn't have it."
+
+"Really!" said Mrs. White with a laugh that showed a trace of
+something not hilarious, "really, you are all too absurd! We are a
+long way from the authorities here, but I think we will find out
+pretty soon that simple dinners have become the fad in Washington,
+or Paris, and that your marvelous Mrs. Burgoyne is simply following
+the fashion like all the rest of us."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+Barry had murmured something about "rush of work at the office" when
+he came in a few minutes late for Mrs. Burgoyne's dinner, but as the
+evening wore on, he seemed in no hurry to depart. Sidney was
+delighted to see him really in his element with the Von Praags,
+father and son, the awakened expression that was so becoming to him
+on his face, and his curiously complex arguments stirring the old
+man over and over again to laughter. She had been vexed at herself
+for feeling a little shyness when he first came in; the unfamiliar
+evening dress and the gravity of his handsome face had made him seem
+almost a stranger, but this wore off, and after the other guests had
+gone these four still sat laughing and talking like the best of old
+friends together.
+
+When the Von Praags had gone upstairs, she walked with him to the
+porch, and they stood at the top of the steps for a moment, the rich
+scent of the climbing LaMarque and Banksia roses heavy about them,
+and the dark starry arch of the sky above. Sidney, a little tired,
+but pleased with her dinner and her guests, and ready for a breath
+of the sweet summer night before going upstairs, was confused by
+having her heart suddenly begin to thump again. She looked at Barry,
+his figure lost in the shadow, only his face dimly visible in the
+starlight, and some feeling, new, young, terrifying, and yet
+infinitely delicious, rushed over her. She might have been a girl of
+seventeen instead of a sober woman fifteen years older, with
+wifehood, and motherhood, and widowhood all behind her.
+
+"A wonderful night!" said Barry, looking down at the dark mass of
+tree-tops that almost hid the town, and at the rising circle of
+shadows that was the hills.
+
+"And a good place to be, Santa Paloma," Sidney added, contentedly.
+"It's my captured dream, my own home and garden!" With her head
+resting against one of the pillars of the porch, her eyes dreamily
+moving from the hills to the sky and over the quiet woods, she went
+on thoughtfully: "You know I never had a home, Barry; and when I
+visited here, I began to realize what I was missing. How I longed
+for Santa Paloma, the creek, and the woods, and my little sunny room
+after I went away! But even when I was eighteen, and we took a house
+in Washington, what could I do? I 'came out,' you know. I loved
+gowns and parties then, as I hope the girls will some day; but I
+knew all the while it wasn't living." She paused, but Barry did not
+speak. "And, then, before I was twenty, I was married," Sidney went
+on presently, "and we started off for St. Petersburg. And after
+that, for years and years, I posed for dressmakers; I went the round
+of jewelers, and milliners, and manicures; I wrote notes and paid
+calls. I let one strange woman come in every day and wash my hands
+for me, and another wash my hair, and a third dress me! I let men--
+who were in the business simply to make money, and who knew how to
+do it!--tell me that my furs must be recut, or changed, and my
+jewels reset, and my wardrobe restocked and my furniture carried
+away and replaced. And in the cities we lived in it's horrifying to
+see how women slave, and toil, and worry to keep up. Half the women
+I knew were sick over debts and the necessity for more debts. I felt
+like saying, with Carlyle, 'Your chaos-ships must excuse me'; I'm
+going back to Santa Paloma, to wear my things as long as they are
+whole and comfortable, and do what I want to do with my spare time!"
+
+"You missed your playtime," Barry said; "now you make the most of
+it."
+
+"Oh, no!" she answered, giving him a glimpse of serious eyes in the
+half-dark, "playtime doesn't come back. But, at least, I know what I
+want to do, and it will be more fun than any play. One of the wisest
+men I ever knew set me thinking of these things. He's a sculptor, a
+great sculptor, and he lives in an olive garden in Italy, and eats
+what his peasants eat, and befriends them, and stands for their
+babies in baptism, and sits with them when they're dying. My father
+and I visited him about two years ago, and one day when he and I
+were taking a tramp, I suddenly burst out that I envied him. I
+wanted to live in an olive garden, too, and wear faded blue clothes,
+and eat grapes, and tramp about the hills. He said very simply that
+he had worked for twenty years to do it. 'You see, I'm a rich man,'
+he said, 'and it seems that one must be rich in this world before
+one dare be poor from choice. I couldn't do this if people didn't
+know that I could have an apartment in Paris, and servants, and
+motor-cars, and all the rest of it. It would hurt my daughters and
+distress my friends. There are hundreds and thousands of unhappy
+people in the world who can't afford to be poor, and if ever you get
+a chance, you try it. You'll never be rich again.' So I wrote him
+about a month ago that I had found MY olive garden," finished Sidney
+contentedly, "and was enjoying it."
+
+"Captain Burgoyne was older than you, Sid?" Barry questioned.
+"Wouldn't he have loved this sort of life?"
+
+"Twenty years older, yes; but he wouldn't have lived here for one
+DAY!" she answered vivaciously. "He was a diplomat, a courtier to
+his finger-tips. He was born to the atmosphere of hothouse flowers,
+and salons, and delightful little drawing-room plots and gossip. He
+loved politics, and power, and women in full dress, and men with
+orders. Of course I was very new to it all, but he liked to spoil
+me, draw me out. If it hadn't been for his accident, I never would
+have grown up at all, I dare say. As it was, I was more like his
+mother. We went to Washington for the season, New York for the
+opera, England for autumn visits, Paris for the spring: I loved to
+make him happy, Barry, and he wasn't happy except when we were
+going, going, going. He was exceptionally popular; he had
+exceptional friends, and he couldn't go anywhere without me. My
+babies were with his mother--"
+
+She paused, turning a white rose between her fingers. "And
+afterwards," she said presently, "there was Father. And Father never
+would spend two nights in the same place if he could help it,"
+
+"I wasn't drawn back here as you were," said Barry thoughtfully, "I
+liked New York; I could have made good there if I'd had a chance. It
+made me sick to give it up, then; but lately I've been feeling
+differently. A newspaper's a pretty influential thing, wherever it
+is. I've been thinking about that clubhouse plan of yours; I wish to
+the Lord that we could do something for those poor kids over there.
+You're right. Those girls have rotten homes. The whole family
+gathers in the parlor right after dinner. Pa takes his shoes off,
+and props his socks up before the stove; Ma begins to hear a kid his
+spelling; and other kids start the graphophone, and Aggie is
+expected to ask her young man to walk right in. So after that she
+meets him in the street, and the girls begin to talk about Aggie."
+
+"Oh, Barry, I'm so glad you're interested!" Standing a step above
+him, Sidney's ardent face was very close to his own. "Of course we
+can do it," she said.
+
+"We!" he echoed almost bitterly. "YOU'LL do it; you're the one--" He
+broke off with a short, embarrassed laugh. "I was going to cut that
+sort of thing out," he said gruffly, "but all roads lead to Rome, it
+seems. I can't talk to you five minutes without--and I've got to go.
+I said I'd look in at the office."
+
+"You seem to be afraid to be friendly lately, Barry," said Mrs.
+Burgoyne in a hurt voice, flinging away the rose she had been
+holding, "but don't you think our friendship means something to me,
+too? I don't like you to talk as if I did all the giving and you all
+the taking. I don't know how the girls and I would get along without
+your advice and help here at the Hall. I think," her voice broke
+into a troubled laugh, "I think you forget that the quality of
+friendship is not strained."
+
+"Sidney," he said with sudden resolution, turning to face her
+bravely, "I can't be just friends with you. You're so much the
+finest, so much the best--" He left the sentence unfinished, and
+began again: "You have a hundred men friends; you can't realize what
+you mean to me. You--but you know what you are, and I'm the editor
+of a mortgaged country paper, a man who has made a mess of things,
+who can't take care of his kid, or himself, on his job without help-
+-"
+
+"Barry--" she began breathlessly, but he interrupted her.
+
+"Listen to me," he said huskily, taking both her warm hands in his,
+"I want to tell you something. Say that I WAS weak enough to forget
+all that, your money and my poverty, your life and my life,
+everything that puts you as far above me as the moon and stars; say
+that I could do that--although I hope it's not true--even then--even
+then I'm not free, Sidney. There is Hetty, you know; there is
+Billy's mother--"
+
+There was a silence. Sidney slowly freed her hands, laid one upon
+her heart as unconsciously as a hurt child, and the other upon his
+shoulder. Her troubled eyes searched his face.
+
+"Barry," she said with a little effort, "have I been mistaken in
+thinking Billy's mother was dead?"
+
+"Everyone thinks so," he answered with a quick rush of words that
+showed how great the relief of speech was. "Even up in Hetty's home
+town, Plumas, they think so. I wrote home that Hetty had left me,
+and they drew their own conclusions. It was natural enough; she was
+never strong. She was always restless and unhappy, wanted to go on
+the stage. She did go on the stage, you know; her mother advised it,
+and she--just left me. We were in New York, then; Bill was a little
+shaver; I was having a hard time with a new job. It was an awful
+time! After a few months I brought Bill back here--he wasn't very
+well--and then I found that everyone thought Hetty was dead. Then
+her mother wrote me, and said that Hetty had taken a stage-name, and
+begged me to let people go on thinking she was dead, and, more for
+the kid's sake than Hetty's, I let things stand. But Hetty's in
+California now; she and her mother live in San Francisco; she is
+still studying singing, I believe. She gets the rent from two flats
+I have there. But she never writes. And that," he finished grimly,
+"is the last chapter of my history."
+
+Sidney still stood close to him, earnest, fragrant, lovely, in her
+white gown. And even above the troubled tumult of his thoughts Barry
+had time to think how honest, how unaffected she was, to stand so,
+making no attempt to disguise the confusion in her own mind. For a
+long time there was no sound but the vague stir of the night about
+them, the faint breath of some wandering breeze, the rustling flight
+of some small animal in the dark, the far-hushed, village sounds.
+
+"Thank you, Barry," Sidney said at length. "I'm sorry. I am glad you
+told me. Good-night."
+
+"Good-night," he said almost inaudibly. He ran down the steps and
+plunged into the dark avenue without a backward look. Sidney turned
+slowly, and slowly entered the dimly lighted hall, and shut the
+door.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+"Come down here--we're down by the river!" called Mrs. Burgoyne,
+from the shade of the river bank, where she and Mrs. Lloyd were busy
+with their sewing. "The American History section is entertaining the
+club."
+
+"You look studious!" laughed Mrs. Brown, coming across the grass, to
+put the Brown baby upon his own sturdy legs from her tired arms, and
+sink into a deep lawn chair. The June afternoon was warm, but it was
+delightfully cool by the water. "Is that the club?" she asked,
+waving toward the group of children who were wading and splashing in
+the shallows of the loitering river.
+
+"That's the American History Club," responded Mrs. Burgoyne, as she
+flung her sewing aside and snatched the baby. "Paul," said she,
+kissing his warm, moist neck, "do you truly love me a little bit?"
+
+"Boy ge' down," said Paul, struggling violently.
+
+"Yes, you shall, darling. But listen, do you want to hear the tick-
+tock? Oh, Paul, sit still just one minute!"
+
+"Awn ge' DOWN," said Paul, distinctly, every fibre of his small
+being headed, as it were, for the pebbly shingle where it was daily
+his delight to dig.
+
+"But say 'deck' first, sweetheart, say 'Deck, I love you,'" besought
+the mistress of the Hall.
+
+"Deck!" shouted Paul obediently, eyes on the river.
+
+"And a sweet kiss!" further stipulated Mrs. Burgoyne, and grabbed it
+from his small, red, unresponsive mouth before she let him toddle
+away. "Yes," she resumed, going on with the tucking of a small
+skirt, "Joanna and Jeanette and the Adams boy have to write an essay
+this week about the Battle of Bunker Hill, so I read them Holmes'
+poem, and they acted it all out. You never saw anything so
+delicious. Mrs. Lloyd came up just in time to see Mabel limping
+about as the old Corporal! The cherry tree was the steeple, of
+course, and both your sons, you'll be ashamed to hear, were
+redcoats. Next week they expect to do Paul Revere, and I daresay
+we'll have the entire war, before we're through. You are both
+cordially invited."
+
+"I'll come," said the doctor's wife, smiling. "I love this garden.
+And to take care of the boys and have a good time myself is more
+than I ever thought I'd do in this life!"
+
+"I live on this bank," said Mrs. Burgoyne, leaning back luxuriously
+in her big chair, to stare idly up through the apple-tree to the
+blue sky. "I'm going to teach the children all their history and
+poetry and myths, out here. It makes it so real to them, to act it.
+Jo and Ellen and I read Barbara Frietchie out here a few weeks ago,
+and they've wanted it every day or two, since."
+
+"We won't leave anything for the schools to do," said little Mrs.
+Brown.
+
+"All the better," Mrs. Burgoyne said, cheerfully.
+
+"Well, excuse me!" Mrs. Lloyd, holding the linen cuff she was
+embroidering at arm's length, and studying it between half-closed
+lids. "I am only too glad to turn Mabel over to somebody else part
+of the time. You don't know what she is when she begins to ask
+questions!"
+
+"I don't know anything more tiring than being with children day in
+and day out," said Mrs. Brown, "it gets frightfully on your nerves!"
+
+"Oh, I'd like about twelve!" said Mrs. Burgoyne.
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Burgoyne! You WOULDN'T!"
+
+"Yes, I would, granted a moderately secure income, and a rather
+roomy country home. Although," added Mrs. Burgoyne, temperately, "I
+do honestly think twelve children is too big a family. However, one
+may be greedy in wishes!"
+
+"Would you want a child of yours to go without proper advantages,"
+said Mrs. Lloyd, a little severely, "would you want more than one or
+two, if you honestly felt you couldn't give them all that other
+children have? Would you be perfectly willing to have your children
+feel at a disadvantage with all the children of your friends? I
+wouldn't," she answered herself positively, "I want to do the best
+by Mabel, I want her to have everything, as she grows up, that a
+girl ought to have. That's why all this nonsense about the size of
+the American family makes me so tired! What's the use of bringing a
+lot of children into the world that are going to suffer all sorts of
+privations when they get here?"
+
+"Privations wouldn't hurt them," said Mrs. Burgoyne, sturdily, "if
+it was only a question of patched boots and made-over clothes and
+plain food. They could even have everything in the world that's
+worth while."
+
+"How do you mean?" said Mrs. Lloyd, promptly defensive.
+
+"I'd gather them about me," mused Sidney Burgoyne, dreamily, her
+eyes on the sky, a whimsical smile playing about her mouth, "I'd
+gather all seven together--"
+
+"Oh, you've come down to seven?" chuckled Mrs. Brown.
+
+"Well, seven's a good Biblical number," Mrs. Burgoyne said serenely,
+"--and I'd say 'Children, all music is yours, all art is yours, all
+literature is yours, all history and all philosophy is waiting to
+prove to you that in starting poor, healthy, and born of intelligent
+and devoted parents, you have a long head-start in the race of life.
+All life is ahead of you, friendships, work, play, tramps through
+the green country in the spring, fires in winter, nights under the
+summer stars. Choose what you like, and work for it, your father and
+I can keep you warm and fed through your childhoods, and after that,
+nothing can stop you if you are willing to work and wait."
+
+"And then suppose your son asks you why he can't go camping with the
+other boys in summer school, and your daughter wants to join the
+cotillion?" asked Mrs. Lloyd.
+
+"Why, it wouldn't hurt them to hear me say no," said Mrs. Burgoyne,
+in surprise. "I never can understand why parents, who practise every
+imaginable self-denial themselves, are always afraid the first
+renunciation will kill their child. Sooner or later they are going
+to learn what life is. I know a little girl whose parents are multi-
+millionaires, and who is going to be told some day soon that her two
+older sisters aren't living abroad, as she thinks, but shut up for
+life, within a few miles of her. What worse blow could life give to
+the poorest girl?"
+
+"Horrors!" murmured Mrs. Brown.
+
+"And those are common cases," Mrs. Burgoyne said eagerly, "I knew of
+so many! Pretty little girls at European watering-places whose
+mothers are spending thousands, and hundreds of thousands of dollars
+to get out of their blood what no earthly power can do away with.
+Sons of rich fathers whose valets themselves wouldn't change places
+with them! And then the fine, clean, industrious middle-classes--or
+upper classes, really, for the blood in their veins is the finest in
+the world--are afraid to bring children into the world because of
+dancing cotillions and motor-cars!"
+
+"Well, of course I have only four," said Mrs. Brown, "but I've been
+married only seven years--"
+
+Mrs. Burgoyne laughed, came to a full stop, and reddened a little as
+she went back busily to her sewing.
+
+"Why do you let me run on at such a rate; you know my hobbies now!"
+she reproached them. "I am not quite sane on the subject of what
+ought to be done--and isn't--in that good old institution called
+woman's sphere."
+
+"That sounds vaguely familiar," said Mrs. Lloyd.
+
+"Woman's sphere? Yes, we hate the sound of it," said Mrs. Burgoyne,
+"just as a man who has left his family hates to talk of home ties,
+and just as a deserter hates the conversation to come around to the
+army. But it's true. Our business is children, and kitchens, and
+husbands, and meals, and we detest it all--"
+
+"I like my husband a little," said Mrs. Brown, in a meek little
+voice.
+
+They all laughed. Then said Mrs. Lloyd, gazing sentimentally toward
+the river bank, where her small daughter's twisted curls were
+tossing madly in a game of "tag":
+
+"I shall henceforth regard Mabel as a possible Joan of Arc."
+
+"One of those boys MAY be a Lincoln, or a Thomas Edison, or a Mark
+Twain," Sidney Burgoyne added, half-laughing, "and then we'll feel
+just a little ashamed for having turned him complacently over to a
+nurse or a boarding school. Of course, it leaves us free to go to
+the club and hear a paper on the childhood of Napoleon, carefully
+compiled years after his death. Why, men take heavy chances in their
+work, they follow up the slightest opening, but we women throw away
+opportunities to be great, every day of our lives! Scientists and
+theorists are spending years of their lives pondering over every
+separate phase of the development of children, but we, who have the
+actual material in our hands, turn it over to nursemaids!"
+
+"Yes, but lots of children disappoint their parents bitterly," said
+Mrs. Brown, "and lots of good mothers have bad children!"
+
+"I never knew a good mother to have a bad child--" began Mrs.
+Burgoyne.
+
+"Well, I have. Thousands," Mrs. Lloyd said promptly.
+
+"Oh, no! Not a BAD child," her hostess said, quickly. "A
+disappointing child perhaps, or a strong-willed child, you mean. But
+no good mother--and that doesn't mean merely a good woman, or a
+church-going woman!--could possibly have a really bad child. 'By
+their fruits,' you know. And then of course we haven't a perfect
+system of nursery training yet; we expect angels. We judge by
+little, inessential things, we're exacting about unimportant
+trifles. We don't want our sons to marry little fluffy-headed dolls,
+although the dolls may make them very good wives. We don't want them
+to make a success of real estate, if the tradition of the house is
+for the bar or the practice of medicine. And we lose heart at the
+first suspicion of bad company, or of drinking; although the best
+men in the world had those temptations to fight! But, anyway, I
+would rather try at that and fail, than do anything else in the
+world. My failures at least might save some other woman's children.
+And it's just that much more done for the world than guarding the
+valuable life of a Pomeranian, or going to New York for new furs!"
+They all laughed, for Mrs. Willard White's latest announcement of
+her plans had awakened some comment among them.
+
+"Mother, am I interrupting you?" said a patient voice at this point.
+Ellen Burgoyne, rosy, dishevelled, panting, stood some ten feet
+away, waiting patiently a chance to enter the conversation.
+
+"No, my darling." Her mother held out a welcoming hand. "Oh, I see,"
+she added, glancing at her watch. "It's half-past four. Yes, you can
+go up for the gingerbread now. You mustn't carry the milk, you know,
+Ellen."
+
+"Mother," said Ellen, flashing into radiance at the slightest
+encouragement, "have you told them about our Flower Festibul plans?"
+
+"Oh, not yet!" Mrs. Burgoyne heaved a great sigh. "I'm afraid I've
+committed myself to an entry for the parade," she told the others
+ruefully.
+
+"Oh, don't tell me you're going to compete!" exclaimed Mrs. Brown.
+
+"Well, we're rather afraid we are!" Mrs. Burgoyne's voice, if
+fearful, was hopeful too, for Ellen's face was a study. "Why, is it
+such a terrible effort?"
+
+"Oh, yes, it's an appalling amount of struggle and fuss, there's all
+sorts of red tape, and the flowers are so messy," answered the
+doctor's wife warningly, "and this year will be worse than ever. The
+Women's Club of Apple Creek is going to enter a carriage, and you
+know our club is to have the White's motor; it will be perfectly
+exquisite! It's to be all pink carnations, and Mr. White's nephew, a
+Berkeley boy, and some of his friends, all in white flannels, are
+going to run it. Doctor says there'll be a hundred entries this
+year."
+
+"Well, I'm afraid I'm in for it," said Mrs. Burgoyne, with a sigh.
+"I haven't the least idea in the world what I'm going to do. It
+isn't as if we even had a surrey. But I really was involved before I
+had time to think. You know I've been trying, with some of my spare
+time," her eyes twinkled, "to get hold of these little factory and
+cannery girls over in Old Paloma."
+
+"You told me," said Mrs. Brown, "but I don't see how that--"
+
+"Well, you see, their ringleader has been particularly ungracious to
+me. A fine, superb, big creature she is, named Alice Carter. This
+Alice came up to the children and me in the street the other day,
+and told me, in the gruffest manner, that she was interested in a
+little crippled girl over there, and had promised to take her to see
+the Flower Festival. But it seems the child's mother was afraid to
+trust her to Alice in the crowd and heat. Quite simply she asked me
+if I could manage it. I was tremendously touched, and we went to see
+the child. She's a poor, brave little scrap--twelve years old, did
+she say, Baby?"
+
+"Going on thirteen," said Ellen rapidly; "and her father is dead,
+and her mother works, and she takes care of such a fat baby, and she
+is very gen-tul with him, isn't she, Mother? And she cried when
+Mother gave her books, and she can't eat her lunch because her back
+aches, but she gave the baby his lunch, and Mother asked her if she
+would let a doctor fix her back, and she said, 'Oh, no!'--didn't
+she, Mother? She just twisted and twisted her hands, and said, 'I
+can't.' And Mother said, 'Mary, if you will be a brave girl about
+the doctor, I will make you a pink dress and a wreath of roses, and
+you shall ride with the others in the Flower Festibul!' And she just
+said, 'Oo-oo!'--didn't she, Mother? And she said she thought God
+sent you, didn't she, Mother?"
+
+"She did." Mrs. Burgoyne smiled through wet lashes. Mrs. Brown wiped
+her own eyes against the baby's fluffy mop. "She's a most pathetic
+little creature, this Mary Scott," went on the other woman when
+Ellen had dashed away, "and I'm afraid she's not the only one.
+There's my Miss Davids' little sister; if I took her in, Miss Davids
+would be free for the day; and there's a little deaf-mute whose
+mother runs the bakery. And I told Mary we'd manage the baby, too,
+and that if she knew any other children who positively couldn't come
+any other way, she must let me know. Of course the school children
+are cared for, they will have seats right near the grand stand, and
+sing, and so on. But I am really terrified about it, you'll have to
+help me out."
+
+"I'll do anything," Mrs. Brown promised.
+
+"I'll do anything I CAN," said Mrs. Lloyd, modestly, "I loathe and
+abominate children unless they're decently dressed and smell of
+soap--but I'll run a machine, if some one'll see that they don't
+swarm over me."
+
+"I'll put a barbed wire fence around you!" promised Mrs. Burgoyne,
+gaily.
+
+Mrs. Carew, coming up, as she expressed it, "to gather up some
+children," was decidedly optimistic about the plan. "Nobody ever
+uses hydrangeas, because you can't make artificial ones to fill in
+with," she said, "so you can get barrels of them." Mrs. Burgoyne was
+enthusiastic over hydrangeas, "But it's not the fancy touches that
+scare me," she confessed; "it's the awful practical side."
+
+"What does Barry think?" Mrs. Carew presently asked innocently. Mrs.
+Burgoyne's suddenly rosy face was not unobserved by any of the
+others.
+
+"I haven't seen him for several days, not since the night of my
+dinner," she admitted; "I've been lazy, sending my work down to the
+office. But I will see him right away."
+
+"He's the one really to have ideas," Mrs. Brown assured her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+So Barry was invited up to the Hall to dinner, and found himself so
+instantly swept into the plan that he had no time to be self-
+conscious. Dinner was served on the side porch, and the sunlight
+filtered across the white cloth, and turned the garden into a place
+of enchantment. When Billy and the small girls had seized two
+cookies and two peaches apiece, and retired to the lawn to enjoy
+them, he and Sidney sat talking on in the pleasant dusk.
+
+"You've asked eight, so far," he said, as she was departing for the
+office an hour or so after dinner was finished, "but do you think
+that's all?"
+
+"Oh, it positively must be!" Sidney said virtuously, but there was a
+wicked gleam in her eye that prepared him for her sudden descent
+upon the office two days later, with the startling news that now she
+had positively STOPPED, but fourteen children had been asked!
+
+Barry, rather to her surprise, remained calm.
+
+"Well, I've got an idea," he said presently, "that will make that
+all right, fourteen children or twenty, it won't make any
+difference. Only, it may not appeal to you."
+
+"Oh, it will--and you are an angel!" said the lady fervently.
+
+"I've got a friend up the country here in a lumber-mill," Barry
+explained, "Joe Painter--he hauls logs down from the forest to the
+river, with a team of eight oxen. Now, if he'd lend them, and you
+got a hay-wagon from Old Paloma, you wouldn't have any trouble at
+all."
+
+"Oh, but Barry," she gasped, her face radiant, "would he lend them?"
+
+"I think he would; he'd have to come too, you know, and drive them.
+I'll ride up and see, anyway."
+
+"Oxen," mused Mrs. Burgoyne, "how perfectly glorious! The children
+will go wild with joy. And, you see, my Indian boys--"
+
+"Your WHAT?"
+
+"I didn't mention them," said Sidney serenely, "because they'll walk
+alongside, and won't count in the load. But, you see, some of those
+nice little mill-boys who don't go to school heard the girls talking
+about it, and one of them asked me--so wistfully!--if there was
+anything THEY could do. I immediately thought of Indian costumes."
+
+"But how the deuce will you get the costumes made?" said Barry,
+drawing a sheet of paper toward him, and beginning some
+calculations, with an anxious eye.
+
+"Why, it's just cheese-cloth for the girls. Mrs. Brown and I have
+our machines up in the barn, and Mrs. Carew and Mrs. Adams will come
+up and help, there's not much to THAT! Barry, if you will really get
+us this--this ox-man--nothing else will worry me at all."
+
+"You'll have to put the beasts up in your barn."
+
+"Oh, surely! Ask him what they eat. Oh, Barry, we MUST have them!
+Think how picturesque they'll be! I've been thinking my entry would
+be a disgrace to the parade, but I don't believe it will be so bad.
+Barry, when will we know about it?"
+
+"You can count on it, I guess. Joe won't refuse," Barry said, with
+his lazy smile.
+
+"Oh, you're an angel! I'm going shopping this instant. Barry, there
+will be room now for my Ellen, and Billy, and Dicky Carew, won't
+there? It seems their hearts are bursting with the desire. Bunting,"
+murmured Sidney, beginning a list, "cheese-cloth, pink, blue, and
+cream, bolts of it; twine, beads, leather, feathers; some big white
+hats; ice-cream, extra milk--"
+
+"Hold on! What for?"
+
+"Why, they have to have something to eat afterward," she reproached
+him. "We're going to have a picnic up at the Hall. Then those that
+can will join their people for the fireworks, and the others will be
+taken home to Old Paloma. The little Scott girl will stay with Ellen
+and Jo overnight; Mammy Currey will look after them, and they'll
+watch the fireworks from my porch. I've written to ask Doctor Young-
+-he's the best in San Francisco--to come up from the city next day
+to see what he thinks can be done for Mary Scott."
+
+"You get a lot of fun out of your money, don't you, Sidney?" said
+Barry, watching her amusedly, as she tucked the list into her purse
+and arose with a great air of business.
+
+"More than any one woman deserves," she answered soberly.
+
+ "Walter," said Anne Pratt to her brother, one evening about this
+time, as she decorously filled his plate from the silver tureen,
+"have you heard that Mrs. Burgoyne has gathered up about twenty
+children in Old Paloma--cripples, and orphans, and I don't know what
+all!--and is getting up a wagon for the Flower Festival? I was up at
+the Hall to-day, and they're working like beavers."
+
+"Carew said something about it," said Walter Pratt. "Seems a good
+idea. Those poor little kids over there don't have much fun."
+
+"You never said so before, Walter," his sister returned almost
+resentfully.
+
+"I don't know why I shouldn't have," said Walter literally. "It's
+true."
+
+"If we did anything for any children, it ought to be Lizzie's," said
+Miss Pratt uncomfortably, after a pause.
+
+"I wish to the Lord we COULD do something for Lizzie's kids," her
+brother observed suddenly. "I suppose it would kill you to have 'em
+up here?"
+
+"Kill me!" Miss Anne echoed with painful eagerness, and with a
+sudden tremble of her thin, long hand. "I don't know why it should;
+there never were better behaved children born. I don't like Lizzie's
+husband, and never shall;" she rushed on, "but seeing those children
+up at the Hall to-day made me think of Betty, and Hope, and Davy,
+cooped up down there in town. They'd love the Flower Festival, and I
+could take them up to the Hall, and Nanny would be wild with joy to
+have Lizzie's children here; she'd bake cookies and gingerbread--" A
+flush had come into her faded, cool cheek. "Wouldn't they be in your
+way? You really wouldn't mind--you won't change your mind about it,
+Walt?" she said timidly.
+
+"Change my mind! Why, I'll love to have them running round here," he
+answered warmly. "Write Lizzie to-night, and tell her I've got to go
+down Tuesday, and I'll bring 'em up,"
+
+"I'll tell her that just the things they have will be quite good
+enough," said Miss Pratt. "The Burgoyne children just wear play-
+ginghams--I'll get them anything else they need!"
+
+"It won't interfere with your club work, Anne?"
+
+"Not in the least!" She was sure of that, "And anyway," she went on
+decidedly, "I'm not going to the club so much this summer. Mary
+Brown and I went yesterday, and there was--well, I suppose it was a
+good paper on 'The Mind of the Child,' by Miss Sarah Rich. But it
+seemed so flat. And Mary Brown said, coming away, 'I think Doctor
+and I will still come to the monthly receptions, but I believe I
+won't listen to any more papers like that. They're all very well for
+people who have no children--'"
+
+"Well, by Tuesday night you'll have three!" said Walter, with what
+was for him great gaiety of manner.
+
+"Walter," his sister suggested nervously, "you'll be awfully
+affectionate with Lizzie, won't you? Be sure to tell her that we
+WANT them; and tell her that they'll be playing up at the Hall all
+summer, as we used to. You know, I've been thinking, Walter," went
+on the poor lady, with her nose suddenly growing red and her eyes
+watering, "that I've not been a very good sister to Lizzie. She's
+the youngest, and Mother--Mother wasn't here to advise her about her
+marriage, and--and now I don't write her; and she wrote me that
+Betty had a cough, and Davy was so noisy indoors in wet weather--and
+I just go to the Club to hear papers upon 'Napoleon' and 'The Mind
+of the Child.'" And Miss Anne, beginning to cry outright, leaned
+back in her chair, and covered her face with her handkerchief.
+
+"Well, Anne--well, Anne," her brother said huskily, "we'll make it
+up now. Where are you going to put them?" he presently added, with
+an inspiration.
+
+Miss Pratt straightened up, blew her nose, wiped her eyes, and rang
+for the maid.
+
+"Betty and Hope in the big front room--" she began happily.
+
+ Another brief conversation, this time between George Carew and his
+wife, was indicative of a certain change of view-point that was
+affecting the women of Santa Paloma in these days. Mr. Carew, coming
+home one evening, found a very demure and charming figure seated on
+the porch. Mrs. Carew's gown was simplicity itself: a thin, dotted,
+dark blue silk, with a deep childish lace collar and cuffs.
+
+"You look terribly sweet, Jen," said Mr. Carew; "you look out of
+sight." And when he came downstairs again, and they were at dinner,
+he returned to the subject with, "Jen, I haven't seen you look so
+sweet for a long time. What is that, a new dress? Is that for the
+reception on the Fourth? Jen, didn't you have a dress like that when
+we were first married?"
+
+"Sorrel made this, and it only cost sixty dollars," said Mrs. Carew.
+
+"Well, get her to make you another," her husband said approvingly.
+At which Mrs. Carew laughed a little shakily, and came around the
+table, and put her arms about him and said:
+
+"Oh, George, you dear old BAT! Miss Pomeroy made this, upstairs
+here, in three days, and the silk cost nine dollars. I DID have a
+dress like this in my trousseau--my first silk--and I thought it was
+wonderful; and I think you're a darling to remember it; and I AM
+going to wear this on the Fourth. It's nice enough, isn't it?"
+
+"Nice enough! You'll be the prettiest woman there," stated Mr. Carew
+positively.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+The earliest daylight of July Fourth found Santa Paloma already
+astir. Dew was heavy on the ropes of flowers and greens, and the
+flags and bunting that made brilliant all the line of the day's
+march; and long scarfs of fog lingered on the hills, but for all
+that, and despite the delicious fragrant chill of the morning air,
+nobody doubted that the day would be hot and cloudless, and the
+evening perfect for fireworks. Lawn-sprinklers began to whir busily
+in the sweet shaded gardens long before the sunlight reached them;
+windows and doors were flung open to the air; women, sweeping
+garden-paths and sidewalks with gay energy, called greetings up and
+down the street to one another. Chairs were dragged out-of-doors;
+limp flags began to stir in the sunny air; other flags squeakily
+mounted their poles. At every window bunting showed; the schoolhouse
+was half-hidden in red, white, and blue; the women's clubhouse was
+festooned with evergreens and Japanese lanterns; and the Mail
+office, the grand stand opposite, the shops, and the bank, all
+fluttered with gay colors. Children shouted and scampered
+everywhere; gathered in fascinated groups about the ice-cream and
+candy and popcorn booths that sprang up at every corner; met
+arriving cousins and aunts at the train; ran on last-minute errands.
+Occasionally a whole package of exploding firecrackers smote the
+warm still air.
+
+By half-past ten every window on the line of march, every dooryard
+and porch, had its group of watchers. Wagons and motor-cars, from
+the surrounding villages and ranches, blocked the side streets. It
+was very warm, and fans and lemonade had a lively sale.
+
+From the two available windows of the Mail office, three persons, as
+eager as the most eager child, watched the gathering crowds, and
+waited for the Flower Parade. They were Mrs. Apostleman, stately in
+black lace, and regally fanning, Sidney Burgoyne, looking her very
+prettiest in crisp white, with a scarlet scarf over her arm, and
+Barry Valentine, who looked unusually festive himself in white
+flannels. All three were in wild spirits.
+
+"Hark, here they come!" said Sidney at last, drawing her head in
+from a long inspection of the street. She had been waving and
+calling greetings in every direction for a pleasant half-hour. Now
+eleven had boomed from the town-hall clock, and a general
+restlessness and wiltedness began to affect the waiting crowds.
+
+Barry immediately dangled almost his entire length across the window
+sill, and screwed his person about for a look.
+
+"H'yar dey come, li'l miss, sho's yo' bawn!" he announced joyfully.
+"There's the band!"
+
+Here they came, sure enough, under the flags and garlands, through
+the noonday heat. Only vague brassy notes and the general craning of
+necks indicated their approach now; but in another five minutes the
+uniformed band was actually in view, and the National Guard after
+it, tremendously popular, and the Native Sons, with another band,
+and the veterans, thin, silver-headed old men in half a dozen
+carriages, and more open carriages. One held the Governor and his
+wife, the former bowing and smiling right and left, and saluted by
+the rising school children, when he seated himself in the judges'
+stand, with the shrill, thrilling notes of the national anthem.
+
+And then another band, and--at last!--the slow-moving, flower-
+covered carriages and motors, a long, wonderful, brilliant line of
+them. White-clad children in rose-smothered pony-carts, pretty girls
+in a setting of scarlet carnations, more pretty girls half-hidden in
+bobbing and nodding daisies--every one more charming than the last.
+There were white horses as dazzling as soap and powder could make
+them; horses whose black flanks glistened as dark as coal, and there
+was a tandem of cream-colored horses that tossed rosettes of pink
+Shirley poppies in their ears. The Whites' motor-car, covered with
+pink carnations, and filled with good-looking lads flying the colors
+of the Women's Club and the nation's flag, won a special round of
+applause. Mrs. Burgoyne and Barry loyally clapped for the Pratt
+motor-car, from which Joanna Burgoyne and Lizzie Pratt's children
+were beaming upon the world.
+
+"But what are they halting for, and what are they clapping?" Sidney
+presently demanded, when a break in the line and a sudden outburst
+of cheering and applause interrupted the parade. Barry again hung at
+a dangerous angle from the window. Presently he sat back, his face
+one broad smile.
+
+"It's us," he remarked simply. "Wait until you see us; we're the
+cream of the whole show!"
+
+Too excited to speak, Sidney knelt breathless at the sill, her eyes
+fixed upon the spot where the cause of the excitement must appear.
+She was perhaps the only one of all the watchers who did not
+applaud, as the eight powerful oxen came slowly down the sunshiny
+street, guided by the tall, lean driver who walked beside them, and
+dragging the great wagon and its freight of rapturous children.
+
+Only an old hay-wagon, after all; only a team of shabby oxen, such
+as a thousand lumber-camps in California might supply; only a score
+or more of the ill-nourished, untrained children of the very poor;
+but what an enchantment of love and hope and summer-time had been
+flung over them all! The body of the wagon was entirely hidden by
+exquisite hydrangeas; the wheels were moving disks of the pale pink
+and blue blossoms; the oxen, their horns gilded, their polished
+hoofs twinkling as they moved, wore yokes that seemed solidly made
+of the flowers, and great ropes of blossoms hid the swinging chains.
+Over each animal a brilliant cover had been flung; and at the head
+of each a young Indian boy, magnificent in wampum and fringed
+leather, feathers and beads, walked sedately. The children were
+grouped, pyramid-fashion, on the wagon, in a nest of hydrangea
+blooms, the pink, and cream, and blue of their gowns blending with
+the flowers all about them, the sunlight shining full in their happy
+eyes. Over their shoulders were garlands of poppies, roses, sweet-
+peas, daisies, carnations, lilies, or other blossoms; their hands
+were full of flowers. But it was the radiance of their faces that
+shone brightest, after all. It was the little consumptive's ecstatic
+smile, as she sat resting against an invisible support; it was the
+joy in Mary Scott's thin eager face, framed now in her loosened dark
+hair, and with the shadow, like her crutch, laid aside for a while,
+that somehow brought tears to the eyes that watched. Santa Paloma
+cheered and applauded these forgotten children of hers; and the
+children laughed and waved their hands in return.
+
+Youth and happiness and summer-time incarnate, the vision went on
+its way, down the bright street; and other carriages followed it,
+and were praised as those that had gone before had been. But no
+entry in any flower parade that Santa Paloma had ever known, was as
+much discussed as this one. Indeed, it began a new era; but that was
+later on. When Mrs. Burgoyne's plain white frock appeared among the
+elaborate gowns worn at the club luncheon that afternoon, she was
+quite overwhelmed by congratulations. She went away very early, to
+superintend the children's luncheon at the Hall, and then Mrs. White
+had a chance to tell the distinguished guests who she was, and that
+she could well afford to play Lady Bountiful to the Santa Paloma
+children.
+
+"One wouldn't imagine it, she seems absolutely simple and
+unspoiled," said Mrs. Governor.
+
+"She is!" said Mrs. Lloyd unexpectedly.
+
+"I told her how scared most of us had been at the mere idea of her
+coming here, Parker," Mrs. Lloyd told her husband later, "and how
+friendly she is, and that she always wears little wash dresses, and
+that the other girls are beginning to wear checked aprons and
+things, because her girls do! Of course, I said it sort of
+laughingly, you know, but I don't think Clara White liked it ONE
+BIT, and I don't care! Clara is rather mad at me, anyway," she went
+on, musingly, "because yesterday she telephoned that she was going
+to send that Armenian peddler over here, with some Madeira lunch
+cloths. They WERE beauties, and only twenty-three dollars; you'd pay
+fifty for them at Raphael Weil's--they're smuggled, I suppose! But I
+simply said, 'Clara, I can't afford it!' and let it go at that. She
+laughed--quite cattily, Parker!--and said, 'Oh, that's rather
+funny!' But I don't care whether Clara White thinks I'm copying Mrs.
+Burgoyne or not! I might as well copy her as somebody else!"
+
+Mrs. Burgoyne and Barry Valentine went down-town on the evening of
+the great day, to see the fireworks and the crowds, and to hear the
+announcements of prize-winners. Santa Paloma was in holiday mood,
+and the two entered into the spirit of the hour like irresponsible
+children. It was a warm, wonderful summer night; the sky was close
+and thickly spangled with stars. Main Street bobbed with Japanese
+lanterns, rang with happy voices and laughter. The jostling, pushing
+currents of men in summer suits, and joyous girls in thin gowns,
+were all good-natured. Sidney found friends on all sides, and
+laughed and called her greetings as gaily as anyone.
+
+Barry had a rare opportunity to watch her unobserved, as she went
+her happy way; the earnest happy brightness in her eyes, when some
+shabby little woman from Old Paloma laid a timid hand on her arm,
+her adoring interest in the fat babies that slumbered heavily on
+paternal shoulders, her ready use of names, "Isn't this fun,
+Agnes?"--"You haven't lost Harry, have you, Mrs. O'Brien?"--"Don't
+you and your friend want to come and have some ice-cream with us,
+Josie?"
+
+"But we mustn't waste too much time here, Barry," she would say now
+and then; for at eight o'clock a "grand concert program and
+distribution of prizes" was scheduled to take place at the town
+hall, and Sidney was anxious not to miss an instant of it. "Don't
+worry, I'll get you there!" Barry would answer reassuringly, amused
+at her eagerness.
+
+And true to his word, he stopped her at the wide doorway of the
+concert hall, fully five minutes before the hour, and they found
+themselves joining the slow stream of men and women and children
+that was pouring up the wide, dingy stairway. Everyone was trying,
+in all good humor, to press ahead of everyone else, inspired with
+the sudden agonizing conviction that in the next two minutes every
+desirable seat would certainly be gone. Even Sidney, familiar as she
+was with every grand opera house in the world, felt the infection,
+and asked rather nervously if any of the seats were reserved.
+
+"Don't worry; we'll get seats," said the imperturbable Barry, and
+several children in their neighborhood laughed out in sudden
+exquisite relief.
+
+Seats indeed there were, although the front rows were filling fast,
+and all the aisle-chairs were taken by squirming, restless small
+children. Mrs. Burgoyne sat down, and studied the hall with
+delighted eyes. It was ordinarily only a shabby, enormous, high-
+ceiled room, filled with rows of chairs, and with an elevated stage
+at the far end. But, like all Santa Paloma, it was in holiday trim
+to-night. All the windows--wide open to the summer darkness--were
+framed in bunting and drooping flowers, and on the stage were potted
+palms and crossed flags. Great masses of bamboo and California ferns
+were tied with red, white and blue streamers between the windows,
+and, beside these decorations, which were new for the occasion, were
+purple and yellow banners, left from the night of the Native Sons'
+Grand Ball and Reception, a month ago, and, arched above the stage
+the single word "Welcome" in letters two feet high, which dated back
+to the Ladies of Saint Rose's Parish Annual Fair and Entertainment,
+in May. If the combined effect of these was not wholly artistic, at
+least it was very gay, and the murmur of voices and laughter all
+over the hall was gay, too, and gay almost to intoxication it was to
+hear the musicians tentatively and subduedly trying their
+instruments up by the piano, with their sleek heads close together.
+
+Presently every chair in the house had its occupant, and the younger
+element began a spasmodic sort of clapping, as a delicate hint to
+the agitated managers, who were behind the scenes, running blindly
+about with worn scraps of scribbled paper in their hands,
+desperately attempting to call the roll of their performers. When
+Joe, the janitor, came out onto the stage, he was royally applauded,
+although he did no more than move a tin stand on which there were
+numbered cards, from one side of the stage to the other, and change
+the number in view from "18" to "1."
+
+Fathers and mothers, perspiring, clean and good-natured, smiled upon
+youthful impatience and impertinence to-night, as they sat fanning
+and discussing the newcomers, or leaned forward or backward for
+hilarious scraps of conversation with their neighbors. Lovers, as
+always oblivious of time, sat entirely indifferent to the rise or
+fall of the curtain, the girls with demurely dropped lashes, the men
+deep in low monotones, their faces close to the lovely faces so
+near, their arms flung, in all absent-mindedness, across the backs
+of the ladies' chairs. And any motherly heart might have been
+stirred with an aching sort of tenderness, as Sidney Burgoyne's was,
+at the sight of so much awkward, budding manliness, so many shining
+pompadours, and carefully polished shoes and outrageous cravats--so
+many silky, filleted little heads, and innocent young bosoms half-
+hidden by all sorts of dainty little conspiracies of lace and lawn.
+Youth, enchanting, self-absorbed, important, had coolly taken
+possession of the hall, as it does of everything, for its own happy
+plans, and something of the gossamer beauty of it seemed to be
+clouding older and wiser eyes to-night. Sidney found her eyes
+resting upon Barry's big, shapely hand, as he leaned forward, deep
+in conversation with Dr. Brown, in the chair ahead, and she was
+conscious that she wanted to sit back and shut her eyes, and draw a
+deep breath of sheer irrational happiness because this WAS Barry
+next to her, and that he liked to be there.
+
+Presently the hall thrilled to see two modest-looking and obviously
+embarrassed men come out to seat themselves in the half-circle of
+chairs that lined the stage, and a moment later applause broke out
+for the Mayor and his wife, and the members of the Flower Parade
+Committee of Arrangements, and for the nondescript persons who
+invariably fill in such a group, and for the kindly, smiling
+Governor, and the ladies of his party, and for the Willard Whites,
+who, with the easiest manners in the world, were in actual
+conversation with the great people as they came upon the stage.
+
+At the sight of them, Mrs. Carew, still vigorously clapping, leaned
+over to say to Mrs. Burgoyne:
+
+"Look at Clara White! And we were wondering why they didn't come in!
+Wouldn't she make you TIRED!"
+
+"You might kiss her hand, when you go up to get your prize, Mrs.
+Burgoyne," suggested Barry, and a general giggle went the rounds.
+
+"If I get a prize," said Sidney, in alarm, "you've got to go up, I
+couldn't!"
+
+"We'll see--" Barry began, his voice drowned by the opening crash of
+the band.
+
+There followed what the three papers of Santa Paloma were unanimous
+the next day in describing as the most brilliant and enjoyable
+concert ever given in Santa Paloma. It was received with immense
+enthusiasm, entirely unaffected by the fact that everyone present
+had heard Miss Emelie Jeanne Foster sing "Twickenham Ferry" before,
+with "Dawn" as an encore, and was familiar also with the selections
+of the Stringed Instrument Club, and had listened to young Doctor
+Perry's impassioned tenor many times. As for George O'Connor, with
+his irresistible laughing song, and the song about the train that
+went to Morro to-day, he was more popular every time he appeared,
+and was greeted now by mad applause, and shouts of "There's George!"
+and "Hello, George!"
+
+And the Home Boys' Quartette from Emville was quite new, and various
+solo singers and a "lady elocutionist" from San Francisco were heard
+for the first time. The latter, who was on the program merely for a
+"Recitation--Selected," was so successful with "Pauline Pavlovna,"
+and "Seein' Things at Night" that it was nearly ten o'clock before
+the Governor was introduced.
+
+However, he was at last duly presented to the applauding hundreds,
+and came forward to the footlights to address them, and made
+everyone laugh and feel friendly by saying immediately that he knew
+they hadn't come out that evening to hear an old man make a long
+speech.
+
+He said he didn't believe in speechmaking much, he believed in DOING
+things; there were always a lot of people to stand around and make
+speeches, like himself--and there was more laughter.
+
+He said that he knew the business of the evening was the giving out
+of these prizes here--he didn't know what was in these boxes--he
+indicated the daintily wrapped and tied packages that stood on the
+little table in the middle of the stage--but he thought every lady
+in the hall would know before she went home, and perhaps some one of
+them would tell him--and there was more laughter. He said he hoped
+that there was something mighty nice in the largest box, because he
+understood that it was to go to a fairy-godmother; he didn't know
+whether the good people in the hall believed in fairies or not, but
+he knew that some of the children in Old Paloma did, and he had seen
+and heard enough that day to make him believe in 'em too! He'd heard
+of a fairy years ago who made a coach-and-four out of a pumpkin, but
+he didn't think that was any harder than to make a coach-and-six out
+of a hay-wagon, and put twenty Cinderellas into it instead of one.
+He said it gave him great pride and pleasure to announce that the
+first prize for to-day's beautiful contest had been unanimously
+awarded to--
+
+Sidney Burgoyne, watching him with fascinated eyes, her breath
+coming fast and unevenly, her color brightening and fading, heard
+only so much, and then, with a desperate impulse to get away, half
+rose to her feet.
+
+But she was too late. Long before the Governor reached her name, a
+sudden outburst of laughter and clapping shook the hall, there was a
+friendly stir and murmur about her; a hundred voices came to her
+ears, "It's Mrs. Burgoyne, of course!--She's got it! She's got the
+first prize!--Go on up, Mrs. Burgoyne! You've got it!--Isn't that
+GREAT,--she's got it! Go up and get it!"
+
+"You've got first prize, I guess. You'll have to go up for it,"
+Barry urged her.
+
+"He didn't say so!" Sidney protested nervously. But she let herself
+be half-pushed into the aisle, and somehow reached the three little
+steps that led up to the platform, and found herself facing His
+Excellency, in an uproar of applause.
+
+The Governor said a few smiling words as he put a large box into her
+hands; Sidney knew this because she saw his lips move, but the house
+had gone quite mad by this time, and not a word was audible.
+Everyone in the hall knew that a tall loving-cup was in the box, for
+it had been on exhibition in the window of Postag's jewelry store
+for three weeks. It was of silver, and lined with gold, both metals
+shining with an unearthly and flawless radiance; and there was
+"Awarded--as a First Prize--in the Twelfth Floral Parade--of Santa
+Paloma, California" cut beautifully into one side, and a scroll all
+ready, on the other side, to be engraved with the lucky winner's
+name.
+
+She had been joking for two or three weeks about the possibility of
+this very occurrence, had been half-expecting it all day, but now
+suddenly all the joke seemed gone out of it, and she was only
+curiously stirred and shaken. She looked confusedly down at the sea
+of faces below her, smiles were everywhere, the eyes that were upon
+her were full of all affection and pride--She had done so little
+after all, she said to herself, with sudden humility, almost with
+shame. And it was so poignantly sweet to realize that they loved
+her, that she was one of themselves, they were glad she had won, she
+who had been a stranger to all of them only a few months ago!
+
+Her eyes full of sudden tears, her lip shaking, she could only bow
+and bow again, and then, just as her smile threatened to become
+entirely eclipsed, she managed a husky "Thank you all so much!" and
+descended the steps rapidly, to slip into her chair between Barry
+and George Carew.
+
+"You know, you oughtn't to make a long tedious speech like that on
+an occasion like this, Sid," Barry said, when she had somewhat
+recovered her equilibrium, and the silver loving cup was unwrapped,
+and was being passed admiringly from hand to hand.
+
+"Don't!" she said warningly, "or you'll have me weeping on your
+shoulder!"
+
+Instead of which she was her gayest self, and accepted endless
+congratulations with joyous composure, as the audience streamed out
+into the reviving festivity of Main Street. The tide was turning in
+one direction now, for there were to be "fireworks and a stupendous
+band concert" immediately following the concert, in a vacant lot not
+far away.
+
+And presently they all found themselves seated on the fragrant
+grass, under the stars. George Carew, at Sidney's feet, solemnly
+wrapped sections of molasses popcorn in oiled paper, and passed them
+to the ladies. Barry's coat made a comfortable seat for Mrs.
+Burgoyne and little Mrs. Brown; Barry himself was just behind, and
+Mrs. Carew and her big son beside them. All about, in the darkness,
+were other groups: mothers and fathers and alert, chattering
+children. Alice Carter, the big mill-girl, radiant now, and with a
+hoarse, inarticulate, adoring young plumber in tow, went by them,
+and stooped to whisper something to Mrs. Burgoyne. "I wish you WOULD
+come, Alice!" the lady answered eagerly, as they went on.
+
+Then the rockets began to hiss up toward the stars, each falling
+shower of light greeted with a long rapturous "Ah-h-h!" Catherine-
+wheels sputtered nearer the ground; red lights made eerie great
+spots of illumination here and there, against which dark little
+figures moved.
+
+"I don't know that I ever had a happier day in my life!" said Sidney
+Burgoyne.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+More happy days followed; for Santa Paloma, after the Fourth of
+July, felt only friendliness for the new owner of the Hall, and Mrs.
+Burgoyne's informal teas on the river bank began to prove a powerful
+attraction, even rivaling the club in feminine favor. Sometimes the
+hostess enlisted all their sympathies for a newly arrived Old Paloma
+baby, and they tore lengths of flannel, and busily stitched at tiny
+garments, under the shade of the willow and pepper trees. Sometimes
+she had in her care one or more older babies whose busy mother was
+taking a day's rest, or whose father was perhaps ill, needing all
+the wife's care. Always there was something to read and discuss; an
+editorial in some eastern magazine that made them all indignant or
+enthusiastic, or a short story worth reading aloud. And almost
+always the children were within call, digging great holes in the
+pebbly shallows of the river, only to fill them up again, toiling
+over bridges and dams, climbing out to the perilous length of the
+branches that hung above the water. Little Mary Scott, released from
+the fear of an "op'ration," and facing all unconsciously a far
+longer journey than the dreaded one to a San Francisco hospital, had
+her own cushioned chair near the bank, where she could hear and see,
+and laugh at everything that went on, and revel in consolation and
+bandages when the inevitable accidents made them necessary. Mary had
+no cares now, no responsibility more serious than to be sure her
+feet didn't get cold, and to tell Mrs. Burgoyne the minute her head
+ached; there was to be nothing but rest and comfort and laughter for
+her in life now. "I don't know why we should pity her," little Mrs.
+Brown said thoughtfully, one day, as they watched her with the other
+children; "we can't ever hope to feel that any of our children are
+as safe as she is."
+
+Mrs. Burgoyne's method of entertaining the children was simple. She
+always made them work as hard as possible. One day they begged her
+to let them build a "truly dam" that would really stop the Lobos in
+its placid course. She consulted gravely with George Carew: should
+they attempt it? George, after serious consideration, thought they
+should.
+
+As a result, twenty children panted and toiled through a warm
+Saturday afternoon, George and the Adams boys shouting directions as
+they handled planks and stones; everybody wet, happy, and excited.
+Not the least glorious moment was when the dam was broken at five
+o'clock, just before refreshments were served.
+
+"We'll do that better next Saturday," said George. But a week later
+they wanted to clean the barn and organize a club. Mrs. Burgoyne was
+sure they couldn't. All that space, she said, and those bins, and
+the little rooms, and all? Very well, then, they could try. Later
+they longed for a picnic supper in the woods, with an open fire, and
+potatoes, and singing. Their hostess was dubious: entreated them to
+consider the WORK involved, dragging stones for the fire, and
+carrying potatoes and bacon and jam and all the rest of it 'way up
+there'. This was at two o'clock, and at six she was formally asked
+to come up and inspect the cleared camping ground, and the fireplace
+with its broilers, and the mammoth stack of fuel prepared.
+
+"I knew you'd do it!" said the lady delightedly. "Now we'll really
+have a fine supper!" And a memorable supper they had, and Indian
+stories, and singing, and they went home well after dusk, to end the
+day perfectly.
+
+"They like this sort of thing much better than white dresses, and a
+professional entertainer, and dancing, and too much ice-cream," said
+Mrs. Burgoyne to Mrs. Adams.
+
+"Of course they do," said Mrs. Adams, who had her own reasons for
+turning rather red and speaking somewhat faintly. "And it's much
+less work, and much less expense," she added.
+
+"Now it is, when they can be out-of-doors," said Mrs. Burgoyne; "but
+in winter they do make awful work indoors. However, there is
+tramping for dry weather, and I mean to have a stove set up in the
+old billiard-room down-stairs and turn them all loose in there when
+it's wet. Theatricals, and pasting things, and singing, and now and
+then candy-making, is all fun. And one knows that they're safe, and
+piling up happy memories of their home."
+
+"You make a sort of profession of motherhood," said Mrs. White
+dryly.
+
+"It IS my profession," said the hostess, with her happy laugh.
+
+But her happiness had a sudden check in mid-August; Sidney found
+herself no more immune from heartache than any other woman, no more
+philosophical over a hurt. It was, she told herself, only a trifle,
+after all. She was absurd to let it cloud the bright day for her and
+keep her restless and wakeful at night. It was nothing. Only--
+
+Only it was the first time that Barry had failed her. He was gone.
+Gone without a word of explanation to anyone, leaving his work at
+the Mail unfinished, leaving even Billy, his usual confidant, quite
+in the dark. Sidney had noticed for days a certain moodiness and
+unresponsiveness about him; had tried rather timidly to win him from
+it; had got up uneasily half a dozen times in the night just past to
+look across the garden to his house, and wonder why Barry's light
+burned on and on.
+
+She had meant to send for him in the morning, but Billy, artlessly
+appearing when the waffles came on at breakfast, remarked that Dad
+was gone to San Francisco.
+
+"To the city, Billy?" Sidney asked. "Didn't he say why?"
+
+"He didn't even say goodbye," Billy replied cheerfully. "He just
+left a note for Hayashi. It said he didn't know how long he would be
+gone."
+
+Sidney tried with small success to deceive herself into thinking
+that it was the mere mysteriousness of this that cut her. She
+presently went down to see Mrs. Carew, and was fretted because that
+lady would for some time discuss nothing but the successful
+treatment of insects on the rose-bushes.
+
+"Barry seems to have disappeared," said Sidney finally, in a casual
+tone.
+
+Mrs. Carew straightened up, forgot hellebore and tobacco juice for
+the moment.
+
+"Did I tell you what Silva told me?" she asked.
+
+"Silva?" echoed Sidney, at a loss.
+
+"The milkman. He told me that when he came up at five o'clock this
+morning, Barry came out of the gate, and that he looked AWFULLY. He
+said he was pale, and that his eyes looked badly, and that he hardly
+seemed to know what he was doing. And oh, my dear, I'm afraid that
+he's drinking again! I'm sure of it. It's two years now since he has
+done this. I think it's too bad. But you know he used to go down to
+town every little while for a regular TIME with those newspaper men.
+He doesn't like Santa Paloma, you know. He gets very bored here.
+He'll be back in a day or two, thoroughly ashamed of himself."
+
+Sidney did not answer, because she could not. Resentment and
+loyalty, shame and heartache, kept her lips dumb. She walked to and
+fro in the garden, alone in the sweet early darkness, for an hour.
+Then she went indoors, and tried to amuse herself at the piano.
+Suddenly her face twisted, she laid her arm along the rack, and her
+face on her arm; but it was only for a moment; then she straightened
+up resolutely, piled the music, closed the piano, and went upstairs.
+
+"But perhaps I'm not old enough yet for an olive garden," she told
+the stars from her window an hour later.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+Another day went by, and still there was no news from Barry. The
+early autumn weather was exquisite, and Sidney, with the additional
+work for the Mail that the editor's absence left for her, found
+herself very busy. But life seemed suddenly to taste flat and
+uninteresting to her. The sunlight was glaring, the afternoons dusty
+and windy, and under all the day's duties and pleasures--the meeting
+of neighbors, the children's confidences, her busy coming and going
+up and down the village streets--ran a sick undercurrent of
+disappointment and heartache. She went to the post-office twice, in
+that first long day, for the arriving mail, and Miss Potter, pleased
+at these glimpses of the lady from the Hall, chatted blithely as she
+pushed Italian letters, London letters, letters from Washington and
+New York, through the little wicket.
+
+But there was not a line from Barry. On the second day Sidney began
+to think of sending him a note; it might be chanced to the Bohemian
+Club--
+
+But no, she wouldn't do that. If he did not care enough to write
+her, she certainly wouldn't write him.
+
+She began to realize how different Santa Paloma was without his big
+figure, his laughter, his joyous comment upon people and things. She
+had taken his comradeship for granted, taken it as just one more
+element of the old childish days regained, never thought of its rude
+interruption or ending.
+
+Now she felt ashamed and sore, she had been playing with fire, she
+told herself severely; she had perhaps hurt him; she had certainly
+given herself needless heartache. No romantic girl of seventeen ever
+suffered a more unreasoning pang than did Sidney when she came upon
+Barry's shabby, tobacco-scented office coat, hanging behind his
+desk, or found in her own desk one of the careless notes he so
+frequently used to leave there at night for her to find in the
+morning.
+
+However, in the curious way that things utterly unrelated sometimes
+play upon each other in this life, these days of bewilderment and
+chagrin bore certain good fruit. Sidney had for some weeks been
+planning an attack upon the sympathies of the Santa Paloma Women's
+Club, but had shrunk from beginning it, because life was running
+very smoothly and happily, and she was growing too genuinely fond of
+her new neighbors to risk jeopardizing their affection for her by a
+move she suspected would be unpopular.
+
+But now she was unhappy, and, with the curious stoicism that is born
+of unhappiness, she plunged straight into the matter. On the third
+day after Barry's disappearance she appeared at the regular meeting
+of the club as Mrs. Carew's guest.
+
+"I hope this means that you are coming to your senses, ye bad girl!"
+said Mrs. Apostleman, drawing her to the next chair with a fat
+imperative hand.
+
+"Perhaps it does," Sidney answered, with a rather nervous smile. She
+sat attentive and appreciative, through the reading of a paper
+entitled "Some Glimpses of the Real Burns," and seemed immensely to
+enjoy the four songs--Burns's poems set to music--and the clever
+recitation of several selections from Burns that followed.
+
+Then the chairman announced that Mrs. Burgoyne, "whom I'm sure we
+all know, although she isn't one of us yet (laughter), has asked
+permission to address the club at the conclusion of the regular
+program." There was a little applause, and Sidney, very rosy, walked
+rapidly forward, to stand just below the platform. She was nervous,
+obviously, and spoke hurriedly and in a rather unnatural voice.
+
+"Your chairman and president," she began, with a little inclination
+toward each, "have given me permission to speak to you today for
+five minutes, because I want to ask the Santa Paloma Women's Club a
+favor--a great favor, in fact. I won't say how much I hope the club
+will decide to grant it, but just tell you what it is. It has to do
+with the factory girls across the river. I've become interested in
+some of them; partly I suppose because some friends of mine are
+working for just such girls, only under infinitely harder
+circumstances, in some of the eastern cities, I feel, we all feel, I
+know, that the atmosphere of Old Paloma is a dangerous one for
+girls. Every year certain ones among them 'go wrong,' as the
+expression is; and when a girl once does that, she is apt to go very
+wrong indeed before she stops. She doesn't care what she does, in
+fact, and her own people only make it harder, practically drive her
+away. Or even if she marries decently, and tries to live down all
+the past it comes up between her and her neighbors, between her and
+her children, perhaps, and embitters her whole life. And so finally
+she goes to join that terrible army of women that we others try to
+pretend we never see or hear of at all. These girls work hard all
+day, and their homes aren't the right sort of homes, with hot dirty
+rooms,--full of quarreling and crowding; and so they slip out at
+night and meet their friends in the dancehalls, and the moving-
+picture shows. And we--we can't blame them." Her voice had grown
+less diffident, and rang with sudden longing and appeal. "They want
+only what we all wanted a few years ago," she said. "They want good
+times, lights and music, and pretty gowns, something to look forward
+to in the long, hot afternoons--dances, theatricals, harmless
+meetings of all sorts. If we could give them safe clean fun--not
+patronizingly, and not too obviously instructive--they'd be willing
+to wait for it; they'd talk about it instead of more dangerous
+things; they'd give up dangerous things for it. They are very nice
+girls, some of them, and their friends are very nice fellows, for
+the most part, and they are--they are so very young.
+
+"However, about the club--I am wondering if it could be borrowed for
+a temporary meeting-place for them, if we form a sort of club among
+them. I say temporary, because I hope we will build them a clubhouse
+of their own some day. But meantime there is only the Grand Opera
+House, which all the traveling theatrical companies rent; Hansen's
+Hall, which is over a saloon, so that won't do; and the Concert
+Hall, which costs twenty-five dollars a night. We would, of course,
+see that the club was cleaned after every meeting, and pay for the
+lights. I--I think that's about all," finished Sidney, feeling that
+she had put her case rather ineloquently, and coming to a full stop.
+She sat down, her eyes nowhere, her cheeks very red.
+
+There was the silence of utter surprise in the room. After a pause,
+Mrs. White raised a gloved hand. Permission from the chair was given
+Mrs. White to speak.
+
+"Your idea would be to give the Old Paloma girls a dance here, Mrs.
+Burgoyne?"
+
+"Regular dances, yes," said Sidney, standing up. "To let them use
+the clubhouse, say, two nights a week. Reading, and singing, and
+sewing one night, perhaps, and a dance another. Or we could get good
+moving-picture films, or have a concert or play, and ask the mothers
+and fathers now and then; charades and Morris dances, something like
+that."
+
+"Dancing and moving-pictures--oh, dear, dear!" said Mrs. White, with
+a whimsical smile and a shake of her head, and there was laughter.
+
+"All those things take costuming, and that takes money," said the
+chairman, after a silence, rather hesitatingly.
+
+"Money isn't the problem," Mrs. Burgoyne rejoined eagerly; "you'll
+find that they spend a good deal now, even for the wretched
+pleasures they have."
+
+There was another silence. Then Mrs. White again gained permission
+to speak, and rose to do so.
+
+"I think perhaps Mrs. Burgoyne, being a newcomer here, doesn't quite
+understand our feeling toward our little club," she said very
+pleasantly. "We built it," she went on, with a slight touch of
+emotion, "as a little refuge from everything jarring and unpleasant;
+we meant it to stand for something a little BETTER and FINER than
+the things of everyday life can possibly be. Perhaps we felt that
+there are already too many dances and too many moving-picture shows
+in the world; perhaps we felt that if we COULD forget those things
+for a little while--I don't mean," said Mrs. White smilingly
+reasonable, "that the reform of wayward girls isn't a splendid and
+ennobling thing; I believe heartily in the work institutions and
+schools are doing along those lines, but--" and with a pretty little
+gesture of helplessness she flung out her hands--"but we can't have
+a Hull House in every little town, you know, and I'm afraid we
+shouldn't find very many Jane Addamses if we did! Good girls don't
+need this sort of thing, and bad girls--well, unfortunately, the
+world has always had bad girls and always will have! We would merely
+turn our lovely clubhouse over to a lot of little romping hoydens."
+
+"But--" began Mrs. Burgoyne eagerly.
+
+"Just ONE moment," said the President, sweetly, and Mrs. Burgoyne
+sat down with blazing cheeks. "I only want to say that I think this
+is outside the purpose for which the club was formed," added Mrs.
+White. "If the club would care to vote on this, it seems to me that
+would be the wisest way of settling the matter; but perhaps we could
+hear from a few more members first?"
+
+There was a little rustle of applause at this, and Sidney felt her
+heart give a sick plunge, and raged within herself because her own
+act had placed her at so great a disadvantage. In another moment,
+however, general attention was directed to a tall, plainly dressed,
+gentle woman, who rose and said rather shyly:
+
+"Since you suggested our discussing this a little, Mrs. President, I
+would like to say that I like this idea very much myself. I've often
+felt that we weren't doing very much good, just uplifting ourselves,
+as it were, and I hope Mrs. Burgoyne will let me help her in any way
+I can, whether the club votes for or against this plan. I--I have
+four girls and boys of my own at home, as you know, and I find that
+even with plenty of music, and all the library books and company
+they want, it's hard enough to keep those children happy at night.
+And, ladies, there must be plenty of mothers over there in Old
+Paloma who worry about it as we do, and yet have no way of helping
+themselves. It seems to me we couldn't put our clubhouse to better
+use, or our time either, for that matter. I would vote decidedly
+'yes' to such a plan. I've often felt that we--well, that we rather
+wasted some of our time here," she ended mildly.
+
+"Thank you, Mrs. Moore," said Mrs. White politely.
+
+"I hope it is part of your idea to let our own children have a part
+in the entertainments you propose," briskly added another woman, a
+clergyman's wife, rising immediately. "I think Doctor Babcock would
+thoroughly approve of the plan, and I am sure I do. Every little
+while," she went on smilingly, "my husband asks me what GOOD the
+club is doing, and I never can answer--"
+
+"Men's clubs do so much good!" said some loud, cheerful voice at the
+back of the hall, and there was laughter.
+
+"A great many of them do good and have side issues, like this one,
+that are all for good," the clergyman's wife responded quickly, "and
+personally I would thank God to be able to save even ten--to save
+even one--of those Old Paloma girls from a life of shame and
+suffering. I wish we had begun before. Mrs. Burgoyne may propose to
+build them their own clubhouse entirely herself; but if not, I hope
+we can all help in that too, when the time comes."
+
+"Thank you, Mrs. Babcock," said the President coldly. "What do you
+think, Miss Pratt?"
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Carew, and Mrs. Brown, and I all feel as Mrs. Burgoyne
+does," admitted Anne Pratt innocently, a little fluttered.
+
+It was Mrs. White's turn to color.
+
+"I didn't know that the matter had been discussed," she said
+stiffly.
+
+"Only generally; not in reference to the club," Mrs. Burgoyne
+supplied quickly.
+
+"I myself will propose an affirmative vote," said Mrs. Apostleman's
+rich old voice. Mrs. Apostleman was entirely indifferent to
+parliamentary law, and was never in order. "How d'ye do it? The ayes
+rise, is that it?"
+
+She pulled herself magnificently erect by the chair-back in front of
+her, and with clapping and laughter the entire club rose to its
+feet.
+
+"This is entirely out of order," said Mrs. White, very rosy.
+Everyone sat down suddenly, and the chairman gave two emphatic raps
+of her gavel.
+
+The President then asked permission to speak, and moved, with great
+dignity, that the matter be laid before the board of directors at
+the next meeting, and, if approved, submitted in due order to the
+vote of the club.
+
+The motion was briskly seconded, and a few minutes later Sidney
+found herself freed from the babel of voices and walking home with
+nervous rapidity. "Well, that's over!" she said once or twice aloud.
+"Thank Heaven, it's over!"
+
+"Is your head better, Mother?" said Joanna, who had been hanging on
+the Hall gate waiting for her mother, and who put an affectionate
+arm about her as they walked up the path. "You LOOK better."
+
+"Jo," said Mrs. Burgoyne seriously, "there's one sure cure for the
+blues in this world. I recommend it to you, for it's safer than
+cocaine, and just as sure. Go and do something you don't want to--
+for somebody else."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+It was no pleasant prospect of a reunion at the club, or an evening
+with his old friends, that had taken Barry Valentine so suddenly to
+San Francisco, but a letter from his wife--or, rather, from his
+wife's mother, for Hetty herself never wrote--which had stirred a
+vague distrust and discomfort in his mind. Mrs. Scott, his mother-
+in-law, was a worldly, shrewd little person, but good-hearted, and
+as easily moved or stirred as a child. This was one of her
+characteristic letters, disconnected, ill-spelled, and scrawled upon
+scented lavender paper. She wrote that she and Hetty were sick of
+San Francisco, and they wanted Barry's permission to sell the
+Mission Street flats that afforded them a living, and go away once
+and for all. Het, her mother wrote, had had a fine offer for the
+houses; Barry's signature only was needed to close the deal.
+
+All this might be true; it sounded reasonable enough; but, somehow,
+Barry fancied that it was not true, or at least that it was only
+partly so. What did Hetty want the money for, he wondered. Why
+should her mother reiterate so many times that if Barry for any
+possible reason disapproved, he was not to give the matter another
+thought; they most especially wanted only his simple yes or no. Why
+this consideration? Hetty had always been persistent enough about
+the things she wanted before. "I know you would consent if you could
+see how our hearts are set on this," wrote Mrs. Scott, "but if you
+say 'no,' that ends it."
+
+"Sure, I'll sell," Barry said, putting the letter in his pocket. But
+it came persistently between him and his work. What mischief was
+Hetty in, he wondered. Had some get-rich-quick shark got hold of
+her; it was extremely likely. He could not shake the thought of her
+from his mind, her voice, her pretty, sullen little face, rose again
+and haunted him. What a child she had been, and what a boy he was,
+and how mistaken the whole bitter experience!
+
+Walking home late at night, the memory of old days rode him like a
+hateful nightmare. He saw the little untidy flat they had had in New
+York; the white winter outside, and a deeper chill within; little
+Billy coughing and restless; Hetty practising her scales, and he,
+Barry, trying to write at one end of the dining-room table. He
+remembered how disappointment and restless ambition had blotted out
+her fresh, babyish beauty; how thin and sharp her voice had grown as
+the months went on.
+
+Barry tried to read, but the book became mere printed words. He went
+softly into Billy's room, and sat down by the tumbled bed and the
+small warm sleeper. Billy, even asleep, snuggled his hand
+appreciatively into his father's, and brought its little fellow to
+lie there too, and pushed his head up against Barry's arm.
+
+And there the father sat motionless, while the clock outside in the
+hall struck two, and three, and four. This was Hetty's baby, and
+where was Hetty? Alone with her little fretful mother, moving from
+boarding-house to boarding-house. Pretty no longer, buoyed up by the
+hope of an operatic career no longer, pinched--as they must be
+pinched--in money matters.
+
+The thought came to him suddenly that he must see her; and though he
+fought it as unwelcome and distasteful, it grew rapidly into a
+conviction. He must see her again, must have a long talk with her,
+must ascertain that nothing he could do for the woman who had been
+his wife was left undone. He was no longer the exacting,
+unsuccessful boy she had left so unceremoniously; he was a man now,
+standing on his own feet, and with a recognized position in the
+community. The little fretful baby was a well-brushed young person
+who attended kindergarten and Sunday School. A new era of
+respectability and prosperity had set in. Hetty, his newly awakened
+sense of justice and his newly aroused ambition told him, must
+somehow share it. Not that there could ever be a complete
+reconciliation between them, but there could be good-will, there
+could be a readjustment and a friendlier understanding.
+
+The thought of Sidney came suddenly upon his idle musings with a
+shock that made his heart sick. Gracious, beautiful, and fresh,
+although she was older than Hetty, how far she was removed from this
+sordid story of his, this darker side of his life! Perhaps months
+from now, his troubled thoughts ran on, he would tell her of his
+visit to Hetty. For he had determined to visit her.
+
+Just at dawn he left the house and went out of his own gate. His
+face was pale, his eyes deeply ringed and his head ached furiously,
+but it was with a sort of content that he took his seat in the early
+train for San Francisco. He sank into a reverie, head propped on
+hand, that lasted until his journey was almost over; but once in the
+city, his old dread of seeing his wife came over him again, and it
+was only after a leisurely luncheon at the club that Barry took a
+Turk Street car to the dingy region where Hetty lived.
+
+The row of dirty bay-windowed houses on either side of the street,
+and the dust and papers blowing about in the hot afternoon wind,
+somehow reminded him forcibly of old days and ways. With a sinking
+heart he went up one of the flights of wooden steps and asked at the
+door for Mrs. Valentine. A Japanese boy in his shirt-sleeves ushered
+him into a front room. This was evidently the "parlor"; hot sunlight
+streamed through the bay windows; there was an upright piano against
+the closed folding doors, and a graphophone on a dusty cherry table;
+wind whined at the window-casing; one or two big flies buzzed
+against the glass.
+
+After a while Mrs. Smiley, the widow who conducted this little
+boarding-house, who was a cousin of Hetty and whom Barry had known
+years ago, came in. She was a tall, angular blonde, cheerlessly
+resigned to a cheerless existence. With her came a keen-faced,
+freckled boy of fourteen or fifteen, with his finger still marking a
+place in the book he had been reading aloud.
+
+Hetty and her mother were out, it appeared. Mrs. Smiley didn't think
+they would be back to dinner; in fact, she reiterated nervously, she
+was sure they wouldn't. She was extremely and maddeningly non-
+committal. No, she didn't know why they wanted to sell the Mission
+Street flats. She had warned them it was a silly thing to bother
+Barry about it. No, she didn't know when he could see them tomorrow;
+she guessed, almost any time.
+
+Barry went away full of uneasy suspicions, and more than ever
+convinced that something was wrong. He went back again the next
+morning, but nobody but the Japanese boy appeared to be at home. But
+a visit in the late afternoon was more successful, for he found Mrs.
+Smiley and the tall son again.
+
+"Hetty IS here, isn't she?" he burst out suddenly, in the middle of
+a meaningless conversation. Mrs. Smiley turned pale and tried to
+laugh.
+
+"Where else would she be?" she demanded, and she went back to her
+interrupted dissertation upon the unpleasantness of several
+specified boarders then under her roof.
+
+"It is funny," Barry mused. "What did she say when she went out?"
+
+"Why--" Mrs. Smiley began uncomfortably, "But, my gracious, I wish
+you would ask Aunt Ide, Barry!" she interrupted herself
+uncomfortably. "She'll tell you. She's the one to ask." Aunt Ide was
+Mrs. Scott.
+
+"Tell me WHAT?" he persisted. "You tell me, Lulu; that's a dear."
+
+"Auntie 'll tell you," she repeated, adding suddenly, to the boy,
+"Russy, wasn't Aunt Ide in her room when you went up? You run up and
+see."
+
+"Nome," said Russell positively; but nevertheless he went.
+
+"Nice kid, Lulu," said Barry in his idle way, "but he looks thin."
+
+"He's the finest little feller God ever sent a woman," the mother
+answered with sudden passionate pride. Color leaped to her sallow
+cheeks. "But this house is no place for him to be cooped up reading
+all day," she went on in a worried tone, after a moment, "and I
+can't let him run with the boys around here; it's a regular gang. I
+don't know what I AM going to do with him. 'Tisn't as if he had a
+father."
+
+"He wouldn't like to come up to me, and get broken on the Mail?"
+Barry queried in his interested way. "He'd get lots of fresh air,
+and he could sleep at my house. I'll keep an eye on him, if you say
+so."
+
+"Go on the newspaper! I think he'd go crazy with joy," his mother
+said. Tears came into her faded eyes. "Barry, you're real good-
+hearted to offer it," she said gratefully. "Of all things in the
+world, that's the one Russ wants to do. But won't he be in your
+way?"
+
+"He'll fit right in," Barry said. "Pack him up and send him along.
+If he doesn't like it, I guess his mother'll let him come home."
+
+"Like it!" she echoed. Then in a lower tone she added, "You don't
+know what a load you're taking off my mind, Barry." She paused,
+colored again, and, to his surprise, continued rapidly, with a quick
+glance at the door, "Barry, I never did a thing like this before in
+my life, and I can't do it now. You know how much I owe Aunt Ide:
+she took me in, and did for me just as she did for Het, when I was a
+baby; she made my wedding dress, and she came right to me when Gus
+died, but I can't let you go back to Santa Paloma not knowing."
+
+"Not knowing what?" Barry said, close upon the mystery at last.
+
+"You know what Aunt Ide is," Mrs. Smiley said pleadingly. "There's
+not a mite of harm in her, but she just--You know she'd been signing
+Hetty's checks for a long time, Barry--"  "Go on," Barry said, as
+she paused distressedly.
+
+"And she just went on--" Mrs. Smiley continued simply.
+
+"Went on WHAT?" Barry demanded.
+
+"After Het--went. Barry," the woman interrupted herself, "I oughtn't
+be the one to tell you, but don't you see--Don't you see Het's--"
+
+"Dead," Barry heard his own voice say heavily. The cheap little room
+seemed to be closing in about him, he gripped the back of the chair
+by which he was standing. Mrs. Smiley began to cry quietly. They
+stood so for a long time.
+
+After a while he sat down, and she told him about it, with that
+faithfulness to inessential detail that marks her class. Barry
+listened like a man in a dream. Mrs. Smiley begged him to stay to
+dinner to see "Aunt Ide," but he refused, and in the gritty dusk he
+found himself walking down the street, alone in silence at last. He
+took a car to the ocean beach, and far into the night sat on the
+rocks watching the dark play of the rolling Pacific, and listening
+to the steady rush and fall of the water.
+
+The next day he saw his wife's mother, and at the sight of her
+frightened, fat little face, and the sound of the high voice he knew
+so well, the last shred of his anger and disgust vanished, and he
+could only pity her. He remembered how welcome she had made him to
+the little cottage in Plumas, those long years ago; how she had
+laughed at his youthful appreciation of her Sunday fried chicken and
+cherry pie, and the honest tears she had shed when he went, with the
+dimpled Hetty beside him, to tell her her daughter was won. She was
+Billy's grandmother, after all, and she had at least seen that Hetty
+was protected all through her misguided little career from the
+breath of scandal, and that Hetty's last days were made comfortable
+and serene. He assured her gruffly that it was "all right," and she
+presently brightened, and told him through tears that he was a
+"king," when it was finally arranged that she should go on drawing
+the rents of the Mission Street property for the rest of her life.
+She and Mrs. Smiley persuaded him to dine with them, and he thought
+it quite characteristic of "Aunt Ide" to make a little occasion of
+it, and take them to a certain favored little French restaurant for
+the meal. But Mrs. Smiley was tremulous with gratitude and relief,
+Russell's face was radiant, his adoring eyes all for Barry, and
+Barry, always willing to accept a situation gracefully, really
+enjoyed his dinner.
+
+He stayed in San Francisco another day and went to Hetty's grave,
+high up in the Piedmont Hills, and took a long lonely tramp above
+the college town afterward. Early the next morning he started for
+home, fresh from a bath and a good breakfast, and feeling now, for
+the first time, that he was free, and that it was good to be free--
+free to work and to plan his life, and free, his innermost
+consciousness exulted to realize, to go to her some day, the Lady of
+his Heart's Desire, and take her, with all the fragrance and beauty
+that were part of her, into his arms. And oh, the happy years ahead;
+he seemed to feel the sweetness of spring winds blowing across them,
+and the glow of winter fires making them bright! What of her
+fabulous wealth, after all, if he could support her as she chose to
+live, a simple country gentle-woman, in a little country town?
+
+Barry stared out at the morning fields and hills, where fog and
+sunshine were holding their daily battle, and his heart sang within
+him.
+
+Fog held the field at Santa Paloma when he reached it, the station
+building dripped somberly. Main Street was but a line of vague
+shapes in the mist. No grown person was in sight, but Barry was not
+ten feet from the train before a screaming horde of small boys was
+upon him, with shouted news in which he recognized the one word,
+over and over: "Fire!"
+
+It took him a few minutes to get the sense of what they said. He
+stared at them dully. But when he first repeated it to himself
+aloud, it seemed already old news; he felt as if he had known it for
+a very long time: "The MAIL office caught fire yesterday, and the
+whole thing is burned to the ground."
+
+"Caught fire yesterday, and the whole thing is burned to the ground:
+yes, of course," Barry said. He was not conscious of starting for
+the scene, he was simply there. A fringe of idle watchers, obscured
+in the fog, stood about the sunken ruins of what had been the MAIL
+building. Barry joined them.
+
+He did not answer when a dozen sympathetic murmurs addressed him,
+because he was not conscious of hearing a single voice. He stood
+silently, looking down at the twisted great knots of metal that had
+been the new presses, the great wave of soaked and half-burned
+newspapers that had been the last issue of the MAIL. The fire had
+been twenty-four hours ago, but the ruins were still smoking.
+Lengths of charred woodwork, giving forth a sickening odor, dripped
+water still; here and there brave little spurts of flame still
+sucked noisily. A twisted typewriter stood erect in steaming ashes;
+a lunch-basket, with a red, fringed napkin in it, had somehow
+escaped with only a wetting. Barry noticed that the walls of the
+German bakery next door were badly singed, that one show-window was
+cracked across, and that the frosted wedding-cake inside stood in a
+pool of dirty water.
+
+He was presently aware that someone was telling him that nobody was
+to blame. Details were volunteered, and he listened quietly, like a
+dispassionate onlooker. "Hits you pretty hard, Barry," sympathetic
+voices said.
+
+"Ruins me," he answered briefly.
+
+And it dawned upon him sickly and certainly that it was true. He was
+ruined now. All his hopes had been rooted here, in what was now this
+mass of wet ashes steaming up into the fog. Here had been his chance
+for a livelihood, and a name; his chance to stand before the
+community for what was good, and strong, and helpful. He had been
+proud because his editorials were beginning to be quoted here and
+there; he had been keenly ambitious for Sidney's plans, her hopes
+for Old Paloma. How vain it all was now, and how preposterous it
+seemed that only an hour ago he had let his thoughts of the future
+include her--always so far above him, and now so infinitely removed!
+
+She would be sympathetic, he knew; she would be all kindness and
+generosity. And perhaps, six months ago, he would have accepted more
+generosity from her; but Barry had found himself now, and he knew
+that she had done for him all he would let her do.
+
+He smiled suddenly and grimly as he remembered another bridge, just
+burned behind him. If he had not promised Hetty's mother that her
+income should go on uninterruptedly, he might have pulled something
+out of this wreckage, after all. For a moment he speculated: he
+COULD sell the Mission Street property now; he might even revive the
+MAIL, after a while--
+
+But no, what was promised was promised, after all, and poor little
+Mrs. Scott must be left to what peace and pleasure the certainty of
+an income gave her. And he must begin again, somehow, somewhere,
+burdened with a debt, burdened with a heartache, burdened with--His
+heart turned with sudden warmth to the thought of Billy; Billy at
+least, staunch little partner of so many dark days, and bright,
+should not be counted a burden.
+
+Even as he thought of his son, a small warm hand slid into his with
+a reassuring pressure, and lie looked down to see the little figure
+beside him. Moment after moment went by, timid shafts of gold
+sunshine were beginning to conquer the mist now, and still father
+and son stood silent, hand in hand.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+The mischief was done; no use to stand there by the smoking ruins of
+what had been his one real hope for himself and his life. After a
+while Barry roused himself. There seemed to be nothing to do at the
+moment, no more to be said. He and Billy walked up River Street to
+their own gate, but when they reached it, Barry, obeying an
+irresistible impulse, merely left his coat and suit-case there, and
+went on through the Hall gateway, and up to the house.
+
+The sun was coming out bravely now, and already he felt its warmth
+in the garden. Everywhere the fog was rising, was fading against the
+green of the trees. He followed a delicious odor of wood smoke and
+the sound of voices, to the barnyard, and here found the lady of the
+house, with her inevitable accompaniment of interested children.
+Sidney was managing an immense brush fire with a long pole; her
+gingham skirt pinned back trimly over a striped petticoat, her
+cheeks flushed, her hair riotous under a gipsy hat.
+
+At Barry's first word she dropped her pole, her whole face grew
+radiant, and she came toward him holding out both her hands.
+
+"Barry!" she said eagerly, her eyes trying to read his face, "how
+glad I am you've come! We didn't know how to reach you. You've
+heard, of course--! You've seen--?"
+
+"The poor old MAIL? Yes, I'm just from there," he said soberly. "Can
+we talk?"
+
+"As long as you like," she answered briskly. And after some
+directions to the children, she led him to the little garden seat
+below the side porch, and they sat down. "Barry, you look tired,"
+she said then. "Do you know, I don't know where you've been all
+these days, or what you went for? Was it to San Francisco?"
+
+"San Francisco, yes," he assented, "I didn't dream I'd be there so
+long." He rubbed his forehead with a weary hand. "I'll tell you all
+about it presently," he said. "I had a letter from my wife's mother
+that worried me, and I started off at half-cock, I got worrying--but
+of course I should have written you--"
+
+"Don't bother about that now, if it distresses you," she said
+quickly and sympathetically. "Any time will do for that. I--I knew
+it was something serious," she went on, relief in her voice, "or you
+wouldn't have simply disappeared that way! I--I said so. Barry, are
+you hungry?"
+
+He tried to laugh at the maternal attitude that was never long
+absent in her, but the tears came into his eyes instead. After all
+the strain and sleeplessness and despondency, it was too poignantly
+sweet to find her so simply cheering and trustful, in her gipsy
+dress, with the brightening sunlight and the sweet old garden about
+her. Barry could have dropped on his knees to bury his face in her
+skirts, and feel the motherly hands on his hair, but instead he
+admitted honestly to hunger and fatigue.
+
+Sidney vanished at once, and presently came back followed by her
+black cook, both carrying a breakfast that Barry was to enjoy at
+once under the rose vines. Sidney poured his coffee, and sat
+contentedly nibbling toast while he fell upon the cold chicken and
+blackberries.
+
+"Now," said her heartening voice, "we'll talk! What is to be done
+first about the MAIL?"
+
+"No insurance, you know," he began at once. "We never did carry any
+in the old days and I suppose that's why I didn't. So that makes it
+a dead loss. Worse than that--for I wasn't clear yet, you know. The
+safe they carried out; so the books are all right, I suppose,
+although they say we had better not open it for a few days. Then I
+can settle everything up as far as possible. And after that--well,
+I've been thinking that perhaps Barker, of the San Francisco
+TELEGRAM might give me a start of some sort--" He rumpled his hair
+with a desperate gesture. "The thing's come on me like such a
+thunderbolt that I really haven't thought it out!" he ended
+apologetically.
+
+"The thing's come on you like such a thunderbolt," she echoed
+cheerfully, "that you aren't taking it like yourself at all! The
+question, is if we work like Trojans from now on, can we get an
+issue of the MAIL out tomorrow?"
+
+"Get an issue out tomorrow!" he repeated, staring at her.
+
+"Certainly. I would have done what I could about it," said Sidney
+briskly, "but not knowing where you were, or when you were coming
+back, my hands were absolutely tied. Now, Barry, LISTEN!" she broke
+off, not reassured by his expression, "and don't jump at the
+conclusion that it's impossible. What would it mean?"
+
+"To get an issue of the MAIL out tomorrow? Why, great Scott, Sid,
+you don't seem to realize that there's not a stick left standing!"
+
+"I do realize. I was there until the fire was out," she said calmly.
+And for a few minutes they talked of the fire. Then she said
+abruptly: "Would Ferguson let you use the old STAR PRESS for a few
+weeks, do you think?"
+
+"I don't see why he should," Barry said perversely.
+
+"I don't see why he shouldn't. I'll tell you something you don't
+know. Night before last, Barry, while I was down in the office, old
+Ferguson himself came in, and poked about, and asked various
+questions. Finally he asked me what I thought the chances were of
+your wanting to buy out the Star. What do you think at THAT?"
+
+"He's sick of it, is he?" Barry said, with kindling eyes. "Well,
+we've seen that coming, haven't we? I will be darned!" He shook his
+head regretfully. "That would have been a big thing for the MAIL" he
+said, "but it's all up now!"
+
+"Not necessarily," the lady undauntedly rejoined. "I've been
+thinking, Barry," she went on, "if you reordered the presses, they'd
+give you plenty of time to pay for them, wouldn't they? Might even
+take something off the price, under the circumstances?"
+
+"I suppose they might." He made an impatient gesture. "But  that's
+just one--"
+
+"One item, I know. But it's the main item. Then you could rent the
+office and loft over the old station, couldn't you? And move the old
+Star press in there this afternoon."
+
+"This afternoon," said Barry calmly.
+
+"Well, we don't gain anything by waiting. You can write a manly and
+affecting editorial,"--her always irrepressible laughter broke out,
+"full of allusions to the phoenix, you know! And my regular Saturday
+column is all done, and Miss Porter can send in something, and
+there's any amount of stuff about the Folsom lawsuit. And Young,
+Mason and Company ought to take at least a page to advertise their
+premium day to-morrow. I'll come down as soon as you've moved--"
+
+Barry reached for his hat.
+
+"The thing can't be done," he announced firmly, "but, by George,
+Sid, you would give a field mouse courage! And what a grandstand
+play, if we COULD put it through! There's not a second to be lost,
+though. But look here," and with sudden gravity he took both her
+hands, "it'll take some more money, you know."
+
+"I have some more money," she answered serenely.
+
+"Well, I'll GET some!" he declared emphatically. "It won't be so
+much, either, once we get started. And so old Ferguson wanted to
+sell, did he?"
+
+"He did. And we'll buy the STAR yet." They were on the path now.
+"Telephone me when you can," she said, "and don't lose a minute now!
+Good luck!"
+
+And Barry's great stride had taken him half-way down River Street,
+his hands in his pockets, his mind awhirl with plans, before it
+occurred to him that he had not told her the news of Hetty, after
+all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+On that same afternoon, several of the most influential members of
+the Santa Paloma Woman's Club met informally at Mrs. Carew's house.
+Some of the directors were there, Miss Pratt, Mrs. Lloyd and Mrs.
+Adams, and of course Mrs. White, who had indeed been instrumental in
+arranging the meeting. They had met to discuss Mrs. Burgoyne's plan
+of using the clubhouse as a meeting place for the Old Paloma factory
+girls. All these ladies were quite aware that their verdict, however
+unofficial, would influence the rest of the club, and that what this
+group of a dozen or fifteen decided upon to-day would practically
+settle the matter.
+
+Mrs. Willard White, hitherto serenely supreme in this little world,
+was curiously upset about the whole thing, openly opposed to Mrs.
+Burgoyne's suggestion, and surprised that her mere wish in the
+matter was not sufficient to carry a negative vote. Her contention
+was that the clubhouse had been built for very different purposes
+than those Mrs. Burgoyne proposed, and that charity to the Old
+Paloma girls had no part in the club's original reasons for being.
+She meant, in the course of the argument, to hint that while so many
+of the actual necessities of decent living were lacking in the
+factory settlement homes, mere dancing and moving-pictures did not
+appeal to her as reasonable or right; and although uneasily aware
+that she supported the unpopular argument, still she was confident
+of an eventual triumph.
+
+But despite the usual laughter, and the pleasantries and
+compliments, there was an air of deadly earnestness about the
+gathered club-women today that bespoke a deeper interest than was
+common in the matter up for discussion. The President's color rose
+and deepened steadily, as the afternoon wore on, and one voice after
+another declared for the new plan, and her arguments became a little
+less impersonal and a little more sharp. This was especially
+noticeable when, as was inevitable, the name of Mrs. Burgoyne was
+introduced.
+
+"I personally feel," said Mrs. White finally, "that perhaps we Santa
+Paloma women are just a little bit undignified when we allow a
+perfect stranger to come in among us, and influence our lives so
+materially, JUST because she happens to be a multi-millionaire. Are
+we so swayed by mere money? I hope not. I hope we all live our lives
+as suits US best, not to please--or shall I say flatter, and perhaps
+win favor with?--a rich woman. We--some of us, that is!"--her smile
+was all lenience--"have suddenly decided we can dress more simply,
+have suddenly decided to put our girls into gingham rompers, and
+instead of giving them little dancing parties, let them play about
+like boys! We wonder why we need spend our money on imported hats
+and nice dinners and hand-embroidered underwear, and Oriental rugs,
+although we thought these things very well worth having a few months
+ago--and why? Just because we are easily led, I'm afraid, and not
+quite conscious enough of our own dignity!"
+
+There had been a decided heightening of color among the listening
+women during this little speech, and, as the President finished,
+more than one pair of eyes rested upon her with a slightly resentful
+steadiness. There was a short silence, in which several women were
+gathering their thoughts for speech, but Mrs. Brown, always popular
+in Santa Paloma, from the days of her short braids and short
+dresses, and quite the youngest among them to-day, was the first to
+speak.
+
+"I daresay that is quite true, Mrs. White," said Mrs. Brown, with
+dignity, "except that I don't think Mrs. Burgoyne's money influences
+me, or any of us! I admit that she herself, quite apart from her
+great fortune, has influenced me tremendously in lots of ways, but I
+don't think she ever tried to do it, or realizes that she has. And
+as far as copying goes, don't we women always copy somebody, anyway?
+Aren't we always imitating the San Francisco women, and don't they
+copy New York, and doesn't New York copy London or Paris? We read
+what feathers are in, and how skirts are cut, and how coffee and
+salads are served, and we all do it, or try to. And when Mrs.
+Burgoyne came to the Hall, and never took one particle of interest
+in that sort of thing, I just thought it over and wondered why I
+should attempt to impress a woman who could buy this whole town and
+not miss the money?"
+
+Laughter interrupted her, and some sympathetic clapping, but she
+presently went on seriously:
+
+"I took all the boys' white socks one day, and dyed them dark brown.
+And I dyed all their white suits dark blue. I've gotten myself some
+galatea dresses that nothing tears or spoils, and that come home
+fresh and sweet from the wash every week. And, as a result, I
+actually have some time to spare, for the first time since I was
+married. We are going to try some educational experiments on the
+children this winter, and, if that leaves any leisure, I am heart
+and soul for this new plan. Doctor Brown feels as I do. Of course,
+he's a doctor," said the loyal little wife, "and he KNOWS! And he
+says that all those Old Paloma girls want is a little mothering, and
+that when there are mothers enough to go round, there won't be any
+charity or legislation needed in this world."
+
+"I think you've said it all, for all of us, Mary!" Mrs. Carew said,
+when some affectionate applause had subsided. "I think things were
+probably different, a few generations ago," she went on, "but
+nowadays when fashions are so arbitrary, and change so fast, really
+and honestly, some of us, whose incomes are limited, will have to
+stop somewhere. Why, the very children expect box-parties, and
+motor-trips, and caterers' suppers, in these days. And one wouldn't
+mind, if it left time for home life, and reading, and family
+intercourse, but it doesn't. We don't know what our children are
+studying, what they're thinking about, or what life means to them at
+all, because we are too busy answering the telephone, and planning
+clothes, and writing formal notes, and going to places we feel we
+ought to be seen in. I'm having more fun than I had in years,
+helping our children plan some abridged plays from Shakespeare, with
+the Burgoyne girls, for this winter, and I'm perfectly astonished,
+even though I'm their mother, at their enjoyment of it, and at my
+own. Mr. Carew himself, who NEVER takes much interest in that sort
+of thing, asked me why they couldn't give them for the Old Paloma
+Girls' Club, if they get a club room. I didn't know he even knew
+anything about our club plans. I said, 'George, are you willing to
+have Jeannette get interested in that crowd?' and he said, 'Finest
+thing in the world for her!' and I don't know," finished Mrs. Carew,
+thoughtfully, "but what he's right."
+
+"I'm all for it," said breezy Mrs. Lloyd, "I don't imagine I'd be
+any good at actually talking to them, but I would go to the dances,
+and introduce people, and trot partners up to the wallflowers--"
+
+There was more laughter, and then Mrs. Adams said briskly:
+
+"Well, let's take an informal vote!"
+
+"I don't think that's necessary, Sue," said Mrs. White, generously,
+"I think I am the only one of us who believes in preserving the
+tradition of the dear old club, and I must bow to the majority, of
+course. Perhaps it will be a little hard to see strangers there; our
+pretty floors ruined, and our pretty walls spotted, but--" an
+eloquent shrug, and a gesture of her pretty hands finished the
+sentence with the words, "isn't that the law?"
+
+And upon whole-hearted applause for Mrs. White, Mrs. Carew tactfully
+introduced the subject of tea.
+
+They were all chatting amicably enough in the dining-room a few
+minutes later when George Carew and Barry Valentine came in. Barry,
+who seemed excited, exhilarated and tired, had come to borrow a
+typewriter from the Carews. He responded to sympathetic inquiries,
+that he had been working like a madman since noon, and that there
+would be an issue of the Mail ready for them in the morning. He
+said, "everyone had been simply corking about everything," and it
+began to look like smooth sailing now. In the few minutes that he
+waited for young George Carew to find the typewriter and bring it
+down to him, a fresh interruption occurred in the entrance of old
+Mrs. Apostleman.
+
+Mrs. Apostleman, between being out of breath from hurrying up the
+hill in the late afternoon heat, and fearful that the gathering
+would break up before she could say what she wanted to say, and
+entirely unable to control her gasping and puffing, was a sight at
+once funny and pitiable. As she sank into a comfortable chair she
+held up one fat hand to command attention, and with the other laid
+forcible hold upon Barry Valentine. Three or four of the younger
+women hurried to her with fans and tea, and in a moment or two she
+really could manage disconnected words.
+
+"Thanks, me dear. No, no cake. Just a mouthful of tea to--there,
+that's better! I was afraid ye'd all be gone--that'll do, thank ye,
+Susie! Well," she set down her tea-cup, "well! I've a little piece
+of news for you all--don't go, Barry, you'll be interested in this,
+and I couldn't wait to come up and tell ye!" She began to fumble in
+her bag, and presently produced therefrom her eye-glasses and a
+letter. The latter she opened with a great crackling of paper.
+
+"This is from me brother, Alexander Wetherall," said she, with an
+impressive glance over her glasses. "As ye know, he's a family
+lawyer in New York, he has the histories of half the old families in
+the country pigeon-holed away in those old offices of his. He
+doesn't write me very often; his wife does now and then--stupid
+woman, but nice. However, I wrote him in May, and told him Mrs.
+Burgoyne had bought the Hall, and just asked him what he knew about
+her and her people. Here--"marking a certain line with a pudgy,
+imperative finger, she handed a page of the letter to Barry, "read
+from there on," she commanded, "this is what he says."
+
+Barry took the paper, but hesitated.
+
+"It's all right!" said the old lady, impatiently, "nobody could say
+anything that wasn't good about Sidney Burgoyne."
+
+Thus reassured, Barry turned obediently to the indicated place.
+
+"'You ask me about your new neighbor,'" he read, "'I suppose of
+course you know that she is Paul Frothingham's only child by his
+second marriage. Her mother died while she was a baby, and
+Frothingham took her all over the world with him, wherever he went.
+She married very young, Colonel John Burgoyne, of the Maryland
+family, older than she, but a very fine fellow. As a girl and as his
+wife she had an extraordinary opportunity for social success, she
+was a great favorite in the diplomatic circle at Washington, and
+well known in the best London set, and in the European capitals. She
+seems to be quite a remarkable young woman, but you are all wrong
+about her money; she is very far from rich. She--'"
+
+Barry stopped short. Mrs. Apostleman cackled delightedly; no one
+else stirred.
+
+"'She got very little of Frothingham's money,'" Barry presently read
+on, '"it came to him from his first wife, who was a widow with two
+daughters when he married her. The money naturally reverted to her
+girls, Mrs. Fred Senior and Mrs. Spencer Mack, both of this city.'"
+
+"Ha! D'ye get that?" said Mrs. Apostleman. "Go on!"
+
+"'Frothingham left his own daughter something considerably less than
+a hundred thousand dollars,'" Barry presently resumed, "'not more
+than seventy or eighty thousand, certainly. It is still invested in
+the estate. It must pay her three or four thousand a year. And
+besides that she has only Burgoyne's insurance, twenty or twenty-
+five thousand, for those years of illness pretty well used up his
+own money. I believe the stepsisters were very anxious to make her a
+more generous arrangement, but she seems to have declined it. Alice
+says they are quite devoted--'"
+
+"Alice don't count!" said the old lady "that's his wife. That's
+enough." She stopped the reader and refolded the letter, her
+mischievous eyes dancing. "Well, what d'ye think of that?" she
+demanded.
+
+Barry's bewildered, "Well, I will be darned!" set loose a babel of
+tongues. Mrs. Apostleman had not counted in vain upon a sensation;
+everyone talked at once. Mrs. White's high, merry laugh dominated
+all the other voices.
+
+"So there is a very much better reason for this simple-dinner-blue-
+gingham existence than we supposed," said the President of the Santa
+Paloma Women's Club amusedly when the first rush of comment died
+away. "I think that is quite delicious! While all of us were feeling
+how superior she was not to get a motor, and not to rebuild the
+Hall, she was simply living within her income, and making the best
+of it!"
+
+"I don't know that it makes her any less superior," Mrs. Carew said
+thoughtfully. "It--it certainly makes her seem--NICER. I never
+suspected her of--well, of preaching, exactly, but I have sometimes
+thought that she really couldn't enter into our point of view, with
+all that money! I think I'm going to like her more than ever!" she
+finished laughingly.
+
+"Why, it's the greatest relief in the world!" exclaimed Mrs. Adams.
+"I've been rather holding back about going up there, and imitating
+her, because I honestly didn't want to be influenced by eight
+millions, and I was afraid. I WAS. Not a week ago Wayne asked me if
+I thought she'd like him to donate a sewing machine to her Girls'
+Club for them to run up their little costumes with--he has the
+agency, you know--and I said, 'Oh, don't, Wayne, she can buy them a
+sewing machine apiece if she wants to, and never know it!' But I'm
+going to make him write her, TO-NIGHT," said Mrs. Adams, firmly,
+"and I declare I feel as if a weight had dropped off my shoulders.
+It MEANS so much more now, if we offer her the club. It means that
+we aren't merely giving a Lady Bountiful her way, but that we're all
+working together like neighbors, and trying to do some good in the
+world."
+
+"And I don't think there's any question that she would live exactly
+this way," Miss Pratt contributed shyly, "and play with the
+children, and dress as she does, even if she had fifty millions!
+She's simply found out what pays in this life, and what doesn't pay,
+and I think a good many of us were living too hard and fast ever to
+stop and think whether it was really worth while or not. She's the
+happiest woman I ever knew; it makes one happy just to be with her,
+and no money can buy that."
+
+"But it's curious she never has taken the trouble to undeceive us,"
+said Mrs. White beginning to fit on an immaculate pair of white
+gloves, finger by finger.
+
+"Why--you'll see!--She never dreamed we thought she was anything but
+one of ourselves." Mrs. Brown predicted. "Why should she? When did
+she ever speak of money, or take the least interest in money? She
+never speaks of it. She says 'I can't afford the time, or I can't
+afford the effort,' that's what counts with her. Doesn't it, Barry?"
+
+"Barry, do you really suppose--" Mrs. Carew was beginning, as she
+turned to the doorway where he had been standing.
+
+But Barry had gone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+Barry went straight up to the Hall, but Sidney was not there. Joanna
+and Ellen, busily murmuring over "Flower Ladies" on the wide terrace
+steps, told him that Mother was to be late to supper, and, with
+obviously forced hospitality and one eye upon their little families
+of inverted roses and hollyhocks, asked him to wait. Barry thanked
+them, but couldn't wait.
+
+He went like a man in a dream down River Street, past gardens that
+glowed with fragrant beauty, and under the great trees and the warm,
+sunset sky. And what a good world it seemed to be alive in, and what
+a friendly village in which to find work and love and content. A
+dozen returning householders, stopping at their gates, wanted the
+news of his venture, a dozen freshly-clad, interested women,
+watering lawns in the shade, called out to wish him good fortune.
+And always, before his eyes, the thought of the vanished millions
+danced like a star. She was not infinitely removed, she was not set
+apart by great fortune, she was only the sweetest and best of women,
+to be wooed and won like any other. He ran upstairs and flung open
+the door of the little bare new office of the MAIL, like an
+impetuous boy. There was no one there. But a wide white hat with a
+yellow rose pinned on it hung above the new oak desk in the corner,
+and his heart rose at the sight. His own desk had an improvised drop
+light hung over it; he lowered the typewriter from his cramped arm
+upon a mass of clippings and notes. Beyond this room was the great
+bare loft, where two or three oily men were still toiling in the
+fading light over the establishing of the old STAR press. Sashes had
+been taken from one of the big windows to admit the entrance of the
+heavier parts; thick pulley ropes dangled at the sill. Great
+unopened bundles of gray paper filled the center of the floor, a
+slim amused youth was putting the finishing touches to a telephone
+on the wall, and Sidney, bare-headed, very business-like and keenly
+interested, was watching everybody and making suggestions. She
+greeted Barry with a cheerful wave of the hand.
+
+"There you are!" she said, relievedly. "Come and see what you think
+of this. Do you know this office is going to be much nicer than the
+old one? How goes everything with you?"
+
+"Like lightning!" he answered. "At this rate, there's nothing to it
+at all. Have the press boys showed up yet?"
+
+"They are over at the hotel, getting their dinners," she explained.
+"And we have borrowed lamps from the hotel to use here this evening.
+Did you hear that Martin, of the Press, you know, has offered to
+send over the A.P. news as fast as it comes in? Isn't that very
+decent of him? Here's Miss Porter's stuff."
+
+She sat down, and began to assort papers on her desk, quite absorbed
+in what she was doing. Barry, at his own desk, opened and shut a
+drawer or two noisily, but he was really watching her, with a
+thumping heart. Watching the bare brown head, the lowered lashes,
+the mouth that moved occasionally in time with her busy thoughts--
+
+Suddenly she looked up, and their eyes met.
+
+Without the faintest consciousness of what he did, Barry crossed the
+floor between them, and as, on an equally unconscious impulse, she
+stood up, paling and breathless, he laid his hand over hers on the
+littered desk, and they stood so, staring at each other, the desk
+between them.
+
+"Sidney," he said incoherently, "who--where--where did your father's
+money go--who got it?"
+
+She looked at him in utter bewilderment.
+
+"Where did WHAT--father's money? Who got it? Are you crazy, Barry?"
+she stammered.
+
+"Ah, Sidney, tell me! Did it come to you?"
+
+"Why--why--" She seemed suddenly to understand that there was some
+reason for the question, and answered quite readily: "It belonged to
+my father's first wife, Barry, most of it. And it went to her
+daughters, my step-sisters, they are older than I and both married--
+"
+
+"Then you're NOT worth eight million dollars?"
+
+"I--? Why, you know I'm not!" Her eyes were at their widest. "Who
+ever said I was? _I_ never said so!"
+
+"But everyone in town thinks so!" Barry's great sigh of relief came
+from his very soul.
+
+Sidney, pale before, grew very red. She freed her hands, and sat
+down.
+
+"Well, they are very silly, then!" she said, almost crossly. And as
+the thought expanded, she added, "But I don't see how anyone COULD!
+They must have thought my letting them help me out with the Flower
+Show and begging for the Old Paloma girls was a nice piece of
+affectation! If I had eight million dollars, or one million, don't
+you suppose I'd be DOING something, instead of puttering away with
+just the beginning of things!" The annoyed color deepened. "I hope
+you're mistaken, Barry," said she. "Why didn't you set them right?"
+
+"I! Why, I thought so too!"
+
+"Oh, Barry! What a hypocrite you must have thought me!" She buried
+her rosy face in her hand for a moment. Presently she rushed on,
+half indignantly, "--With all my talk about the sinfulness of
+American women, who persistently attempt a scheme of living that is
+far beyond their incomes! And talking of the needs of the poor all
+over the world, with all that money lying idle!"
+
+"I thought of it chiefly as an absolute and immovable barrier
+between us," Barry said honestly, "and that was as far as my
+thinking went."
+
+Her eyes met his with that curious courage she had when a difficult
+moment had to be faced.
+
+"There is a more serious barrier than that between us," she reminded
+him gravely.
+
+"Hetty!" he said stupidly. "But I TOLD you--"
+
+But he stopped short, realizing that he had not yet told her, and
+rather at a loss.
+
+"You didn't tell me anything," she said, eyeing him steadily.
+
+"Why," Barry's tone was much lower, "I meant to tell you first of
+all, but--you know what a day I have had! It seems impossible that I
+only left San Francisco this morning."
+
+He brought his chair from his own desk, and sat opposite her, and,
+while the summer twilight outside deepened into dusk, unmindful of
+time, he went over the pitiful little story. Sidney listened, her
+serious eyes never leaving his face, her fine hands locked idly
+before her. The telephone boy and the movers had gone now, and there
+was silence all about.
+
+"You have suffered enough, Barry; thank God it is all over!" she
+said, at the end, "and we know," she went on, with one of her rare
+revelations of the spiritual deeps that lay so close to the surface
+of her life, "we know that she is safe and satisfied at last, in His
+care." For a moment her absent eyes seemed to fathom far spaces.
+Barry abruptly broke the silence.
+
+"For one year, Sidney," he said, in a purposeful, steady voice that
+was new to her, and that brought her eyes, almost startled, to his
+face, "for one year I'm going to show you what I can do. In that
+time the Mail will be where it was before the fire, if all goes
+well. And then--"
+
+"Then--" she said, a little unsteadily, rising and gathering hat and
+gloves together, "then you shall come to me and tell me anything you
+like! But--but not now! All this is so new and so strange--"
+
+"Ah, but Sidney!" he pleaded, taking her hands again, "mayn't I
+speak of it just this one day, and then never again? Let me think
+for this whole year that PERHAPS you will marry a country editor,
+and that we shall spend the rest of our lives together, writing and
+planning, and tramping through the woods, and picnicking with the
+kiddies on the river, and giving Christmas parties for every little
+rag-tag and bob-tail in Old Paloma!"
+
+"But you don't want to settle down in this stupid village," she
+laughed tremulously, tears on her lashes, "at the ugly old Hall, and
+among these superficial empty-headed women?"
+
+"Just here," he said, smiling at his own words, "in the sweetest
+place in the world, among the best neighbors! I never want to go
+anywhere else. Our friends are here, our work is here--"
+
+"And we are here!" she finished it for him, laughing. Barry, with a
+great rising breath, put his arms about the white figure, and
+crushed her to him, and Sidney laid her hand on his shoulder, and
+raised her face honestly for his first kiss.
+
+"And now let me go home to my neglected girls," she said, after an
+interval. "You have a busy night ahead of you, and your press boys
+will be here any minute."
+
+But first she took a sheet of yellow copy paper, and wrote on it,
+"One year of silence. August thirtieth to August thirtieth." "Is
+this inclusive?" she asked, looking up.
+
+"Exclusive," said Barry, firmly.
+
+"Exclusive," she echoed obediently. And when she had added the word,
+she folded the sheet and gave it to Barry. "There is a little
+reminder for you," said she.
+
+Barry went down to the street door with her, to watch her start
+homeward in the sweet summer darkness.
+
+"Oh, one more thing I meant to say," she said, as they stood on the
+platform of what had been the old station, "I don't know why I
+haven't said it already, or why you haven't."
+
+"And that is, Madam--?" he asked attentively.
+
+"It's just this," she swayed a little nearer to him--her laughing
+voice was no more than a whisper. "I love you, Barry!"
+
+"Haven't I said that?" he asked a little hoarsely.
+
+"Not yet."
+
+"Then I say it," he answered steadily, "I love you, my darling!"
+
+"Oh, not here, Barry--in the street!" was Mrs. Burgoyne's next
+remark.
+
+But there was no moon, and no witnesses but the blank walls and
+shuttered windows of neighboring storehouses. And the silent year
+had not, after all, fairly begun.
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne
+by Kathleen Norris
+
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