The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne / Norris, Kathleen Thompson, 1880-1966

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by Kathleen Norris
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Title: The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne

Author: Kathleen Norris

Release Date: July, 2003  [Etext #4288]
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by Kathleen Norris
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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 M