University of Virginia Library

II.

After dropping Bartley Hubbard at the Events
building, Lapham drove on down Washington Street
to Nankeen Square at the South End, where he had
lived ever since the mistaken movement of society
in that direction ceased. He had not built, but had
bought very cheap of a terrified gentleman of good
extraction who discovered too late that the South
End was not the thing, and who in the eagerness of
his flight to the Back Bay threw in his carpets and
shades for almost nothing. Mrs. Lapham was even
better satisfied with their bargain than the Colonel
himself, and they had lived in Nankeen Square for
twelve years. They had seen the saplings planted
in the pretty oval round which the houses were
built flourish up into sturdy young trees, and their
two little girls in the same period had grown into
young ladies; the Colonel's tough frame had expanded
into the bulk which Bartley's interview indicated;
and Mrs. Lapham, while keeping a more
youthful outline, showed the sharp print of the
crow's-foot at the corners of her motherly eyes, and
certain slight creases in her wholesome cheeks.
The fact that they lived in an unfashionable neighbourhood

was something that they had never been
made to feel to their personal disadvantage, and they
had hardly known it till the summer before this
story opens, when Mrs. Lapham and her daughter
Irene had met some other Bostonians far from
Boston, who made it memorable. They were people
whom chance had brought for the time under a
singular obligation to the Lapham ladies, and they
were gratefully recognisant of it. They had ventured—a
mother and two daughters—as far as a
rather wild little Canadian watering-place on the
St. Lawrence, below Quebec, and had arrived some
days before their son and brother was expected to
join them. Two of their trunks had gone astray,
and on the night of their arrival the mother was
taken violently ill. Mrs. Lapham came to their
help, with her skill as nurse, and with the abundance
of her own and her daughter's wardrobe, and
a profuse, single-hearted kindness. When a doctor
could be got at, he said that but for Mrs. Lapham's
timely care, the lady would hardly have lived. He
was a very effusive little Frenchman, and fancied he
was saying something very pleasant to everybody.

A certain intimacy inevitably followed, and when
the son came he was even more grateful than the
others. Mrs. Lapham could not quite understand
why he should be as attentive to her as to Irene;
but she compared him with other young men about
the place, and thought him nicer than any of them.
She had not the means of a wider comparison; for
in Boston, with all her husband's prosperity, they

had not had a social life. Their first years there
were given to careful getting on Lapham's part, and
careful saving on his wife's. Suddenly the money
began to come so abundantly that she need not
save; and then they did not know what to do with
it. A certain amount could be spent on horses,
and Lapham spent it; his wife spent on rich and
rather ugly clothes and a luxury of household
appointments. Lapham had not yet reached the
picture-buying stage of the rich man's development,
but they decorated their house with the costliest
and most abominable frescoes; they went upon
journeys, and lavished upon cars and hotels; they
gave with both hands to their church and to all the
charities it brought them acquainted with; but they
did not know how to spend on society. Up to a
certain period Mrs. Lapham had the ladies of her
neighbourhood in to tea, as her mother had done in
the country in her younger days. Lapham's idea of
hospitality was still to bring a heavy-buying customer
home to pot-luck; neither of them imagined
dinners.

Their two girls had gone to the public schools,
where they had not got on as fast as some of the
other girls; so that they were a year behind in
graduating from the grammar-school, where Lapham
thought that they had got education enough. His
wife was of a different mind; she would have liked
them to go to some private school for their finishing.
But Irene did not care for study; she preferred
house-keeping, and both the sisters were afraid of

being snubbed by the other girls, who were of a different
sort from the girls of the grammar-school; these
were mostly from the parks and squares, like themselves.
It ended in their going part of a year. But
the elder had an odd taste of her own for reading,
and she took some private lessons, and read books
out of the circulating library; the whole family were
amazed at the number she read, and rather proud
of it.

They were not girls who embroidered or abandoned
themselves to needle-work. Irene spent her
abundant leisure in shopping for herself and her
mother, of whom both daughters made a kind of idol,
buying her caps and laces out of their pin-money,
and getting her dresses far beyond her capacity to
wear. Irene dressed herself very stylishly, and spent
hours on her toilet every day. Her sister had a
simpler taste, and, if she had done altogether as she
liked, might even have slighted dress. They all
three took long naps every day, and sat hours
together minutely discussing what they saw out of
the window. In her self-guided search for self-improvement,
the elder sister went to many church
lectures on a vast variety of secular subjects, and
usually came home with a comic account of them,
and that made more matter of talk for the whole
family. She could make fun of nearly everything;
Irene complained that she scared away the young
men whom they got acquainted with at the dancing-school
sociables. They were, perhaps, not the wisest
young men.

The girls had learned to dance at Papanti's; but
they had not belonged to the private classes. They
did not even know of them, and a great gulf divided
them from those who did. Their father did not like
company, except such as came informally in their
way; and their mother had remained too rustic to
know how to attract it in the sophisticated city
fashion. None of them had grasped the idea of
European travel; but they had gone about to mountain
and sea-side resorts, the mother and the two girls,
where they witnessed the spectacle which such resorts
present throughout New England, of multitudes of
girls, lovely, accomplished, exquisitely dressed, humbly
glad of the presence of any sort of young man; but
the Laphams had no skill or courage to make themselves
noticed, far less courted by the solitary invalid,
or clergyman, or artist. They lurked helplessly about
in the hotel parlours, looking on and not knowing
how to put themselves forward. Perhaps they did
not care a great deal to do so. They had not a conceit
of themselves, but a sort of content in their own
ways that one may notice in certain families. The
very strength of their mutual affection was a barrier
to worldly knowledge; they dressed for one another;
they equipped their house for their own satisfaction;
they lived richly to themselves, not because they
were selfish, but because they did not know how to
do otherwise. The elder daughter did not care for
society, apparently. The younger, who was but
three years younger, was not yet quite old enough to
be ambitious of it. With all her wonderful beauty,

she had an innocence almost vegetable. When her
beauty, which in its immaturity was crude and harsh,
suddenly ripened, she bloomed and glowed with the
unconsciousness of a flower; she not merely did not
feel herself admired, but hardly knew herself discovered.
If she dressed well, perhaps too well, it
was because she had the instinct of dress; but till
she met this young man who was so nice to her
at Baie St. Paul, she had scarcely lived a detached,
individual life, so wholly had she depended on her
mother and her sister for her opinions, almost her
sensations. She took account of everything he did
and said, pondering it, and trying to make out exactly
what he meant, to the inflection of a syllable,
the slightest movement or gesture. In this way
she began for the first time to form ideas which
she had not derived from her family, and they were
none the less her own because they were often mistaken.

Some of the things that he partly said, partly
looked, she reported to her mother, and they talked
them over, as they did everything relating to these
new acquaintances, and wrought them into the novel
point of view which they were acquiring. When
Mrs. Lapham returned home, she submitted all the
accumulated facts of the case, and all her own conjectures,
to her husband, and canvassed them anew.

At first he was disposed to regard the whole affair
as of small importance, and she had to insist a little
beyond her own convictions in order to counteract
his indifference.

"Well, I can tell you," she said, "that if you
think they were not the nicest people you ever saw,
you're mightily mistaken. They had about the
best manners; and they had been everywhere, and
knew everything. I declare it made me feel as if
we had always lived in the backwoods. I don't
know but the mother and the daughters would have
let you feel so a little, if they'd showed out all they
thought; but they never did; and the son—well, I
can't express it, Silas! But that young man had
about perfect ways."

"Seem struck up on Irene?" asked the Colonel.

"How can I tell? He seemed just about as much
struck up on me. Anyway, he paid me as much
attention as he did her. Perhaps it's more the
way, now, to notice the mother than it used to
be."

Lapham ventured no conjecture, but asked, as he
had asked already, who the people were.

Mrs. Lapham repeated their name. Lapham
nodded his head. "Do you know them? What
business is he in?"

"I guess he ain't in anything," said Lapham.

"They were very nice," said Mrs. Lapham impartially.

"Well, they'd ought to be," returned the Colonel.
"Never done anything else."

"They didn't seem stuck up," urged his wife.

"They'd no need to—with you. I could buy him
and sell him, twice over."

This answer satisfied Mrs. Lapham rather with

the fact than with her husband. "Well, I guess I
wouldn't brag, Silas," she said.

In the winter the ladies of this family, who returned
to town very late, came to call on Mrs.
Lapham. They were again very polite. But the
mother let drop, in apology for their calling almost
at nightfall, that the coachman had not known the
way exactly.

"Nearly all our friends are on the New Land or
on the Hill."

There was a barb in this that rankled after the
ladies had gone; and on comparing notes with her
daughter, Mrs. Lapham found that a barb had been
left to rankle in her mind also.

"They said they had never been in this part of
the town before."

Upon a strict search of her memory, Irene could
not report that the fact had been stated with anything
like insinuation, but it was that which gave
it a more penetrating effect.

"Oh, well, of course," said Lapham, to whom
these facts were referred. "Those sort of people
haven't got much business up our way, and they
don't come. It's a fair thing all round. We don't
trouble the Hill or the New Land much."

"We know where they are," suggested his wife
thoughtfully.

"Yes," assented the Colonel. "I know where
they are I've got a lot of land over on the Back
Bay."

"You have?" eagerly demanded his wife.

"Want me to build on it?" he asked in reply,
with a quizzical smile.

"I guess we can get along here for a while."

This was at night. In the morning Mrs. Lapham
said—

"I suppose we ought to do the best we can for
the children, in every way."

"I supposed we always had," replied her husband.

"Yes, we have, according to our light."

"Have you got some new light?"

"I don't know as it's light. But if the girls are
going to keep on living in Boston and marry here,
I presume we ought to try to get them into society,
some way; or ought to do something."

"Well, who's ever done more for their children
than we have?" demanded Lapham, with a pang at
the thought that he could possibly have been outdone.
"Don't they have everything they want?
Don't they dress just as you say? Don't you go
everywhere with 'em? Is there ever anything
going on that's worth while that they don't see it
or hear it? I don't know what you mean. Why
don't you get them into society? There's money
enough!"

"There's got to be something besides money, I
guess," said Mrs. Lapham, with a hopeless sigh. "I
presume we didn't go to work just the right way
about their schooling. We ought to have got them
into some school where they'd have got acquainted
with city girls—girls who could help them along

Nearly everybody at Miss Smillie's was from some
where else."

"Well, it's pretty late to think about that now,"
grumbled Lapham.

"And we've always gone our own way, and not
looked out for the future. We ought to have gone
out more, and had people come to the house. Nobody
comes."

"Well, is that my fault? I guess nobody ever
makes people welcomer."

"We ought to have invited company more."

"Why don't you do it now? If it's for the
girls, I don't care if you have the house full all the
while."

Mrs. Lapham was forced to a confession full of
humiliation. "I don't know who to ask."

"Well, you can't expect me to tell you."

"No; we're both country people, and we've kept
our country ways, and we don't, either of us, know
what to do. You've had to work so hard, and your
luck was so long coming, and then it came with
such a rush, that we haven't had any chance to learn
what to do with it. It's just the same with Irene's
looks; I didn't expect she was ever going to have
any, she was such a plain child, and, all at once,
she's blazed out this way. As long as it was Pen
that didn't seem to care for society, I didn't give
much mind to it. But I can see it's going to be
different with Irene. I don't believe but what
we're in the wrong neighbourhood."

"Well," said the Colonel, "there ain't a prettier

lot on the Back Bay than mine. It's on the water
side of Beacon, and it's twenty-eight feet wide and
a hundred and fifty deep. Let's build on it."

Mrs. Lapham was silent a while. "No," she said
finally; "we've always got along well enough here,
and I guess we better stay."

At breakfast she said casually: "Girls, how
would you like to have your father build on the
New Land?"

The girls said they did not know. It was more
convenient to the horse-cars where they were.

Mrs. Lapham stole a look of relief at her husband,
and nothing more was said of the matter.

The mother of the family who had called upon
Mrs. Lapham brought her husband's cards, and
when Mrs. Lapham returned the visit she was in
some trouble about the proper form of acknowledging
the civility. The Colonel had no card but a
business card, which advertised the principal depot
and the several agencies of the mineral paint; and
Mrs. Lapham doubted, till she wished to goodness
that she had never seen nor heard of those people,
whether to ignore her husband in the transaction
altogether, or to write his name on her own card.
She decided finally upon this measure, and she had
the relief of not finding the family at home. As
far as she could judge, Irene seemed to suffer a little
disappointment from the fact.

For several months there was no communication
between the families. Then there came to Nankeen
Square a lithographed circular from the people or

the Hill, signed in ink by the mother, and affording
Mrs. Lapham an opportunity to subscribe for a
charity of undeniable merit and acceptability. She
submitted it to her husband, who promptly drew a
cheque for five hundred dollars.

She tore it in two. "I will take a cheque for a
hundred, Silas," she said.

"Why?" he asked, looking up guiltily at her.

"Because a hundred is enough; and I don't want
to show off before them."

"Oh, I thought may be you did. Well, Pert,"
he added, having satisfied human nature by the
preliminary thrust, "I guess you're about right.
When do you want I should begin to build on
Beacon Street?" He handed her the new cheque,
where she stood over him, and then leaned back in
his chair and looked up at her.

"I don't want you should begin at all. What do
you mean, Silas?" She rested against the side of
his desk.

"Well, I don't know as I mean anything. But
shouldn't you like to build? Everybody builds, at
least once in a lifetime."

"Where is your lot? They say it's unhealthy,
over there."

Up to a certain point in their prosperity Mrs.
Lapham had kept strict account of all her husband's
affairs; but as they expanded, and ceased to be of
the retail nature with which women successfully
grapple, the intimate knowledge of them made her
nervous. There was a period in which she felt that

they were being ruined, but the crash had not come;
and, since his great success, she had abandoned
herself to a blind confidence in her husband's judgment,
which she had hitherto felt needed her
revision. He came and went, day by day, unquestioned.
He bought and sold and got gain. She
knew that he would tell her if ever things went
wrong, and he knew that she would ask him
whenever she was anxious.

"It ain't unhealthy where I've bought," said
Lapham, rather enjoying her insinuation. "I
looked after that when I was trading; and I guess
it's about as healthy on the Back Bay as it is
here, anyway. I got that lot for you, Pert; I
thought you'd want to build on the Back Bay some
day."

"Pshaw!" said Mrs. Lapham, deeply pleased
inwardly, but not going to show it, as she would
have said. "I guess you want to build there yourself."
She insensibly got a little nearer to her
husband. They liked to talk to each other in that
blunt way; it is the New England way of expressing
perfect confidence and tenderness.

"Well, I guess I do," said Lapham, not insisting
upon the unselfish view of the matter. "I always
did like the water side of Beacon. There ain't a
sightlier place in the world for a house. And some
day there's bound to be a drive-way all along behind
them houses, between them and the water, and then
a lot there is going to be worth the gold that will
cover it—coin. I've had offers for that lot, Pert,

twice over what I give for it. Yes, I have. Don't
you want to ride over there some afternoon with me
and see it?"

"I'm satisfied where we be, Si," said Mrs.
Lapham, recurring to the parlance of her youth in
her pathos at her husband's kindness. She sighed
anxiously, for she felt the trouble a woman knows
in view of any great change. They had often talked
of altering over the house in which they lived, but
they had never come to it; and they had often
talked of building, but it had always been a house
in the country that they had thought of. "I wish
you had sold that lot."

"I hain't," said the Colonel briefly.

"I don't know as I feel much like changing our
way of living."

"Guess we could live there pretty much as we
live here. There's all kinds of people on Beacon
Street; you mustn't think they're all big-bugs. I
know one party that lives in a house he built to sell,
and his wife don't keep any girl. You can have just
as much style there as you want, or just as little.
I guess we live as well as most of 'em now, and set
as good a table. And if you come to style, I don't
know as anybody has got more of a right to put it
on than what we have."

"Well, I don't want to build on Beacon Street,
Si," said Mrs. Lapham gently.

"Just as you please, Persis. I ain't in any hurry
to leave.

Mrs. Lapham stood flapping the cheque which she

held in her right hand against the edge of her
left.

The Colonel still sat looking up at her face, and
watching the effect of the poison of ambition which
he had artfully instilled into her mind.

She sighed again—a yielding sigh. "What are
you going to do this afternoon?"

"I'm going to take a turn on the Brighton road,"
said the Colonel.

"I don't believe but what I should like to go
along," said his wife.

"All right. You hain't ever rode behind that
mare yet, Pert, and I want you should see me let
her out once. They say the snow's all packed down
already, and the going is A 1."

At four o'clock in the afternoon, with a cold, red
winter sunset before them, the Colonel and his wife
were driving slowly down Beacon Street in the light,
high-seated cutter, where, as he said, they were a
pretty tight fit. He was holding the mare in till
the time came to speed her, and the mare was
springily jolting over the snow, looking intelligently
from side to side, and cocking this ear and that,
while from her nostrils, her head tossing easily, she
blew quick, irregular whiffs of steam.

"Gay, ain't she?" proudly suggested the Colonel.

"She is gay," assented his wife.

They met swiftly dashing sleighs, and let them
pass on either hand, down the beautiful avenue
narrowing with an admirably even sky-line in the
perspective. They were not in a hurry. The mare

jounced easily along, and they talked of the different
houses on either side of the way. They had a
crude taste in architecture, and they admired the
worst. There were women's faces at many of the
handsome windows, and once in a while a young
man on the pavement caught his hat suddenly from
his head, and bowed in response to some salutation
from within.

"I don't think our girls would look very bad
behind one of those big panes," said the Colonel.

"No," said his wife dreamily.

"Where's the young man? Did he come with
them?"

"No; he was to spend the winter with a friend
of his that has a ranch in Texas. I guess he's got
to do something."

"Yes; gentlemaning as a profession has got to
play out in a generation or two."

Neither of them spoke of the lot, though Lapham
knew perfectly well what his wife had come with
him for, and she was aware that he knew it. The
time came when he brought the mare down to a
walk, and then slowed up almost to a stop, while
they both turned their heads to the right and looked
at the vacant lot, through which showed the frozen
stretch of the Back Bay, a section of the Long
Bridge, and the roofs and smoke-stacks of Charlestown.

"Yes, it's sightly," said Mrs. Lapham, lifting her
hand from the reins, on which she had unconsciously
laid it.

Lapham said nothing, but he let the mare out a
little.

The sleighs and cutters were thickening round
them. On the Milldam it became difficult to restrict
the mare to the long, slow trot into which he let her
break. The beautiful landscape widened to right
and left of them, with the sunset redder and redder,
over the low, irregular hills before them. They
crossed the Milldam into Longwood; and here, from
the crest of the first upland, stretched two endless
lines, in which thousands of cutters went and came.
Some of the drivers were already speeding their
horses, and these shot to and fro on inner lines,
between the slowly moving vehicles on either side of
the road. Here and there a burly mounted policeman,
bulging over the pommel of his M`Clellan
saddle, jolted by, silently gesturing and directing
the course, and keeping it all under the eye of the
law. It was what Bartley Hubbard called "a carnival
of fashion and gaiety on the Brighton road," in
his account of it. But most of the people in those
elegant sleighs and cutters had so little the air of
the great world that one knowing it at all must
have wondered where they and their money came
from; and the gaiety of the men, at least, was expressed,
like that of Colonel Lapham, in a grim
almost fierce, alertness; the women wore an air of
courageous apprehension. At a certain point the
Colonel said, "I'm going to let her out, Pert," and
he lifted and then dropped the reins lightly on the
mare's back.

She understood the signal, and, as an admirer
said, "she laid down to her work." Nothing in the
immutable iron of Lapham's face betrayed his sense
of triumph as the mare left everything behind her
on the road. Mrs. Lapham, if she felt fear, was too
busy holding her flying wraps about her, and shielding
her face from the scud of ice flung from the mare's
heels, to betray it; except for the rush of her feet,
the mare was as silent as the people behind her; the
muscles of her back and thighs worked more and
more swiftly, like some mechanism responding to an
alien force, and she shot to the end of the course, grazing
a hundred encountered and rival sledges in her
passage, but unmolested by the policemen, who probably
saw that the mare and the Colonel knew what
they were about, and, at any rate, were not the sort
of men to interfere with trotting like that. At the
end of the heat Lapham drew her in, and turned off
on a side street into Brookline.

"Tell you what, Pert," he said, as if they had been
quietly jogging along, with time for uninterrupted
thought since he last spoke, "I've about made up
my mind to build on that lot."

"All right, Silas," said Mrs. Lapham; "I suppose
you know what you're about. Don't build on it for
me, that's all."

When she stood in the hall at home, taking off her
things, she said to the girls, who were helping her,
"Some day your father will get killed with that
mare."

"Did he speed her?" asked Penelope, the elder.

She was named after he grandmother, who had in
her turn inherited from another ancestress the name
of the Homeric matron whose peculiar merits won
her a place even among the Puritan Faiths, Hopes,
Temperances, and Prudences. Penelope was the
girl whose odd serious face had struck Bartley
Hubbard in the photograph of the family group
Lapham showed him on the day of the interview.
Her large eyes, like her hair, were brown; they had
the peculiar look of near-sighted eyes which is called
mooning; her complexion was of a dark pallor.

Her mother did not reply to a question which
might be considered already answered. "He says
he's going to build on that lot of his," she next
remarked, unwinding the long veil which she had
tied round her neck to hold her bonnet on. She put
her hat and cloak on the hall table, to be carried
upstairs later, and they all went in to tea: creamed
oysters, birds, hot biscuit, two kinds of cake, and
dishes of stewed and canned fruit and honey. The
women dined alone at one, and the Colonel at the
same hour down-town. But he liked a good hot
meal when he got home in the evening. The house
flared with gas; and the Colonel, before he sat down,
went about shutting the registers, through which a
welding heat came voluming up from the furnace.

"I'll be the death of that darkey yet," he said,
`if he don't stop making on such a fire. The only
way to get any comfort out of your furnace is to
take care of it yourself."

"Well," answered his wife from behind the teapot,

as he sat down at table with this threat, "there's
nothing to prevent you, Si. And you can shovel the
snow too, if you want to—till you get over to
Beacon Street, anyway."

"I guess I can keep my own sidewalk on Beacon
Street clean, if I take the notion."

"I should like to see you at it," retorted his wife.

"Well, you keep a sharp lookout, and may be
you will."

Their taunts were really expressions of affectionate
pride in each other. They liked to have it, give
and take, that way, as they would have said, right
along.

"A man can be a man on Beacon Street as well as
anywhere, I guess."

"Well, I'll do the wash, as I used to in Lumberville,"
said Mrs. Lapham. "I presume you'll let me
have set tubs, Si. You know I ain't so young any
more." She passed Irene a cup of Oolong tea,—none
of them had a sufficiently cultivated palate for Souchong,—and
the girl handed it to her father.

"Papa," she asked, "you don't really mean that
you're going to build over there?"

"Don't I? You wait and see," said the Colonel,
stirring his tea.

"I don't believe you do," pursued the girl.

"Is that so? I presume you'd hate to have me.
Your mother does." He said doos, of course.

Penelope took the word. "I go in for it. I don't
see any use in not enjoying money, if you've got it
to enjoy. That's what it's for, I suppose; though

you mightn't always think so." She had a slow,
quaint way of talking, that seemed a pleasant personal
modification of some ancestral Yankee drawl,
and her voice was low and cozy, and so far from
being nasal that it was a little hoarse.

"I guess the ayes has it, Pen," said her father.
"How would it do to let Irene and your mother
stick in the old place here, and us go into the new
house?" At times the Colonel's grammar failed
him.

The matter dropped, and the Laphams lived on
as before, with joking recurrences to the house on
the water side of Beacon. The Colonel seemed less
in earnest than any of them about it; but that was
his way, his girls said; you never could tell when
he really meant a thing.