“It is very sad,” observed Mrs. Sherrington Trimm, thoughtfully. “Their mother died in London last autumn, and now they are quite alone—nobody with them but an aunt, or something like that—poor girls! I am so glad they are rich, at least. You ought to know them.”

“Ought I?” asked the visitor who was drinking his tea on the other side of the fireplace. “You know I do not go into society.”

“The girls go nowhere, either. They are still in mourning. You ought to know them. Who knows, you might marry one or the other.”

“I will never marry a fortune.”

“Do not be silly, George!”

The relationship between the two speakers was not very close. George Winton Wood’s mother had been a second cousin of Mrs. Sherrington Trimm’s, and the two ladies had not been on very friendly terms with each other. Moreover, Mrs. Trimm had nothing to do with old Jonah Wood, the father of the young man with whom she was now speaking, and Jonah Wood refused to have anything to do with her. Nevertheless she called his son by his first name, and the latter usually addressed her as “Cousin Totty.” An examination of Mrs. Sherrington Trimm’s baptismal certificate would have revealed the fact that she had been christened Charlotte, but parental fondness had made itself felt with its usual severity in such cases, and before she was a year old she had been labelled with the comic diminutive which had stuck to her ever since, through five and twenty years of maidenhood, and twenty years more of married life. On her visiting cards, and in her formal invitations she appeared as Mrs. Sherrington Trimm; but the numerous members of New York society who were related to her by blood or marriage, called her “Totty” to her face, while those who claimed no connection called her “Totty” behind her back; and though she may live beyond three score years and ten, and though her strength come to sorrow and weakness, she will be “Totty” still, to the verge of the grave, and beyond, even after she is comfortably laid away in the family vault at Greenwood.

After all, the name was not inappropriate, so far at least, as Mrs. Trimm’s personal appearance was concerned; for she was very smooth, and round, and judiciously plump, short, fair, and neatly made, with pretty little hands and feet; active and not ungraceful, sleek but not sleepy; having small, sharp blue eyes, a very obliging and permanent smile, a diminutive pointed nose, salmon-coloured lips, and perfect teeth. Her good points did not, indeed, conceal her age altogether, but they obviated all necessity for an apology to the world for the crime of growing old; and those features which were less satisfactory to herself were far from being offensive to others.

She bore in her whole being and presence the stamp of a comfortable life. There is nothing more disturbing to society than the forced companionship of a person who either is, or looks, uncomfortable, in body, mind, or fortune, and many people owe their popularity almost solely to a happy faculty of seeming always at their ease. It is certain that neither birth, wealth, nor talent will of themselves make man or woman popular, not even when all three are united in the possession of one individual. But on the other hand they are not drawbacks to social success, provided they are merely means to the attainment of that unobtrusively careless good humour which the world loves. Mrs. Sherrington Trimm knew this. If not talented, she possessed at all events a pedigree and a fortune; and as for talent, she looked upon culture as an hereditary disease peculiar to Bostonians, and though not contagious, yet full of danger, inasmuch as its presence in a well-organised society must necessarily be productive of discomfort. All the charm of general conversation must be gone, she thought, when a person appeared who was both able and anxious to set everybody right. She even went so far as to say that if everybody were poor, it would be very disagreeable to be rich. She never wished to do what others could not do; she only aimed at being among the first to do what everybody would do by and by, as a matter of course.

Mrs. Trimm’s cousin George did not understand this point of view as yet, though he was beginning to suspect that “Totty and her friends”—as he generally designated society—must act upon some such principle. He was only five and twenty years of age, and could hardly be expected to be in the secrets of a life he had hitherto seen as an outsider; but he differed from Totty and her friends in being exceedingly clever, exceedingly unhappy, and exceedingly full of aspirations, ambitions, fancies, ideas, and thoughts; in being poor instead of rich, and, lastly, in being the son of a man who had failed in the pursuit of wealth, and who could not prove even the most distant relationship to any one of the gentlemen who had signed the Declaration of Independence, fought in the Revolution, or helped to frame the Constitution of the United States. George, indeed, possessed these ancestral advantages through his mother, and in a more serviceable form through his relationship to Totty; but she, on her part, felt that the burden of his cleverness might be too heavy for her to bear, should she attempt to launch him upon her world. Her sight was keen enough, and she saw at a glance the fatal difference between George and other people. He had a habit of asking serious questions, and of saying serious things, which would be intolerable at a dinner-party. He was already too strong to be put down, he was not yet important enough to be shown off. Totty’s husband, who was an eminent lawyer, occasionally asked George to dine with him at his club, and usually said when he came home that he could not understand the boy; but, being of an inquiring disposition, Mr. Trimm was impelled to repeat the hospitality at intervals that gradually became more regular. At first he had feared that the dark, earnest face of the young man, and his grave demeanour, concealed the soul of a promising prig, a social article which Sherrington Trimm despised and loathed. He soon discovered, however, that these apprehensions were groundless. From time to time his companion gave utterance to some startling opinion or freezing bit of cynicism which he had evidently been revolving in his thoughts for a long time, and which forced Mr. Trimm’s gymnastic intelligence into thinking more seriously than usual. Doubtless George’s remarks were often paradoxical and youthfully wild, but his hearer liked them none the less for that. Keen and successful in his own profession he scented afar the capacity for success in other callings. Accustomed by the habits and pursuits of his own exciting life to judge men and things quickly, he recognised in George another mode of the force to which he himself owed his reputation. To lay down the law and determine the precise manner in which that force should be used, was another matter, and one in which Sherrington Trimm did not propose to meddle. More than once, indeed, he asked George what he meant to do in the world, and George answered, with a rather inappropriate look of determination that he believed himself good for nothing, and that when there was no more bread and butter at home he should doubtless find his own level by going up long ladders with a hod of bricks on his shoulder. Mr. Trimm’s jovial face usually expressed his disbelief in such theories by a bland smile as he poured out another glass of wine for his young guest. He felt sure that George would do something, and George, who got little sympathy in his life, understood his encouraging certainty, and was grateful.

Mrs. Trimm, however, shared her cousin’s asserted convictions about himself so far as to believe that unless something was done for him, he might actually be driven to manual labour for support. She assuredly had no faith in general cleverness as a means of subsistence for young men without fortune, and yet she felt that she ought to do something for George Wood. There was a good reason for this beneficent instinct. Her only brother was chiefly responsible for the ruin that had overtaken Jonah Wood, when George was still a boy, and she herself had been one of the winners in the game, or at least had been a sharer with her brother in the winnings. It is true that the facts of the case had never been generally known, and that George’s father had been made to suffer unjustly in his reputation after being plundered of his wealth; but Mrs. Trimm was not without a conscience, any more than the majority of her friends. If she loved money and wanted more of it, this was because she wished to be like other people, and not because she was vulgarly avaricious. She was willing to keep what she had, though a part of it should have been George’s and was ill-gotten. She wished her brother, Thomas Craik, to keep all he possessed until he should die, and then she wished him to leave it to her, Charlotte Sherrington Trimm. But she also desired that George should have compensation for what his father had lost, and the easiest and least expensive way of providing him with the money he had not, was to help him to a rich marriage. It was not, indeed, fitting that he should marry her only daughter, Mamie, though the girl was nineteen years old and showed a disquieting tendency to like George. Such a marriage would result only in a transfer of wealth without addition or multiplication, which was not the form of magnanimity most agreeable to cousin Totty’s principles. There were other rich girls in the market; one of them might be interested in the tall young man with the dark face and the quiet manner, and might bestow herself upon him, and endow him with all her worldly goods. Totty had now been lucky enough to find two such young ladies together, orphans both, and both of age, having full control of the large and equally divided patrimony they had lately inherited. Better still, they were reported to be highly gifted and fond of clever people, and she herself knew that they were both pretty. She had resolved that George should know them without delay, and had sent for him as a preliminary step towards bringing about the acquaintance. George met her at once with the plain statement that he would never marry money, as the phrase goes, but she treated his declaration of independence with appropriate levity.

“Do not be silly, George!” she exclaimed with a little laugh.

“I am not,” George answered, in a tone of conviction.

“Oh, I know you are clever enough,” retorted his cousin. “But that is quite a different thing. Besides, I was not thinking seriously of your marrying.”

“I guessed as much, from the fact of your mentioning it,” observed the young man quietly.

Mrs. Trimm stared at him for a moment, and then laughed again.

“Am I never thinking seriously of what I am saying?”

“Tell me about these girls,” said George, avoiding an answer. “If they are rich and unmarried, they must be old and hideous——”

“They are neither.”

“Mere children then——”

“Yes—they are younger than you.”

“Poor little things! I see—you want me to play with them, and teach them games and things of that sort. What is the salary? I am open to an engagement in any respectable calling. Or perhaps you would prefer Mrs. Macwhirter, my old nurse. It is true that she is blind of one eye and limps a little, but she would make a reduction in consideration of her infirmities, if money is an object.”

“Try and be serious; I want you to know them.”

“Do I look like a man who wastes time in laughing?” inquired George, whose imperturbable gravity was one of his chief characteristics.

“No—you have other resources at your command for getting at the same result.”

“Thanks. You are always flattering. When am I to begin amusing your little friends?”

“To-day, if you like. We can go to them at once.”

George Wood glanced down almost unconsciously at the clothes he wore, with the habit of a man who is very poor and is not always sure of being presentable at a moment’s notice. His preoccupation did not escape cousin Totty, whose keen instinct penetrated his thoughts and found there an additional incentive to the execution of her beneficent intentions. It was a shame, she thought, that any relation of hers should need to think of such miserable details as the possession of a decent coat and whole shoes. At the present moment, indeed, George was arrayed with all appropriate correctness, but Totty remembered to have caught sight of him sometimes when he was evidently not expecting to meet any acquaintance, and she had noticed on those occasions that his dress was very shabby indeed. It was many years since she had seen his father, and she wondered whether he, too, went about in old clothes, sure of not meeting anybody he knew. The thought was not altogether pleasant, and she put it from her. It was a part of her method of life not to think disagreeable thoughts, and though her plan to bring about a rich marriage for her cousin was but a scheme for quieting her conscience, she determined to believe that she was putting herself to great inconvenience out of spontaneous generosity, for which George would owe her a debt of lifelong gratitude.

George, having satisfied himself that his appearance would pass muster, and realising that Totty must have noticed his self-inspection, immediately asked her opinion.

“Will I do?” he asked with an odd shade of shyness, and glancing again at the sleeve of his coat, as though to explain what he meant, well knowing that all explanation was unnecessary.

Totty, who had thoroughly inspected him before proposing that they should go out together, now pretended to look him over with a critical eye.

“Of course—perfectly,” she said, after three or four seconds. “Wait for me a moment, and I will get ready,” she added, as she rose and left the room.

When George was alone, he leaned back in his comfortable chair and looked at the familiar objects about him with a weary expression which he had not worn while his cousin had been present. He could not tell exactly why he came to see cousin Totty, and he generally went home after his visits to her with a vague sense of disappointment. In the first place, he always felt that there was a sort of disloyalty in coming at all. He knew the details of his father’s past life, and was aware that old Tom Craik had been the cause of his ruin, and he guessed that Totty had profited by the same catastrophe, since he had always heard that her brother managed her property. He even fancied that Totty was not so harmless as she looked, and that she was very fond of money, though he was astonished at his own boldness in suspecting the facts to be so much at variance with the outward appearance. He was very young, and he feared to trust his own judgment, though he had an intimate conviction that his instincts were right. On the whole he was forced to admit to himself that there were many reasons against his periodical visits to the Trimms, and he was quite ready to allow that it was not Totty’s personality or conversation that attracted him to the house. Yet, as he rested in the cushioned chair he had selected and felt the thick carpet under his feet, and breathed that indefinable atmosphere which impregnates every corner of a really luxurious house, he knew that it would be very hard to give up the habit of enjoying all these things at regular intervals. He imagined that his thoughts liquefied and became more mobile under the genial influence, forgetting the grooves and moulds so unpleasantly familiar to them. Hosts of ideas and fancies presented themselves to him, which he recognised as belonging to a self that only came to life from time to time; a self full of delicate sensations and endowed with brilliant powers of expression; a self of which he did not know whether to be ashamed or proud; a self as overflowing with ready appreciation, as his other common, daily self was inclined to depreciate all that the world admired, and to find fault with everything that was presented to its view. Though conscious of all this, however, George did not care to analyse his own motives too closely. It was disagreeable to his pride to find that he attached so much importance to what he described collectively as furniture and tea. He was disappointed with himself, and he did all in his power not to increase his disappointment. Then an extreme depression came upon him, and showed itself in his face. He felt impelled to escape from the house, to renounce the visit Totty had proposed, to go home, get into his oldest clothes and work desperately at something, no matter what. But for his cousin’s opportune return, he might have yielded to the impulse. She re-entered the room briskly, dressed for walking and smiling as usual. George’s expression changed as he heard the latch move in the door, and Mrs. Sherrington Trimm must have been even keener than she was, to guess what had been passing in his mind. She was not, however, in the observant mood, but in the subjective, for she felt that she was now about to appear as her cousin’s benefactress, and, having got rid of her qualms of conscience, she experienced a certain elation at her own skill in the management of her soul.

George took his hat and rose with alacrity. There was nothing essentially distasteful to him in the prospect of being presented to a pair of pretty sisters, who had doubtless been warned of his coming, and his foolish longing for his old clothes and his work disappeared as suddenly as it had come.

It was still winter, and the low afternoon sun fell across the avenue from the westward streets in broad golden patches. It was still winter, but the promise of spring was already in the air, and a faint mist hung about the vanishing point of the seemingly endless rows of buildings. The trees were yet far from budding, but the leafless branches no longer looked dead, and the small twigs were growing smooth and glossy with the returning circulation of the sap. There were many people on foot in the avenue, and Totty constantly nodded and smiled to her passing acquaintances, who generally looked with some interest at George as they acknowledged or forestalled his companion’s salutation. He knew a few of them by sight, but not one passed with whom he had ever spoken, and he felt somewhat foolishly ashamed of not knowing every one. When he was alone the thought did not occur to him, but his cousin’s incessant smiles and nods made him realise vividly the difference between her social position and his own. He wondered whether the gulf would ever be bridged over, and whether at any future time those very correct people who now looked at him with inquiring eyes would be as anxious to know him and be recognised by him as they now seemed desirous of knowing Totty and being saluted by her.

“Do you mean to say that you really remember the names of all these friends of yours?” he asked, presently.

“Why not? I have known most of them since I was a baby, and they have known me. You could learn their names fast enough if you would take the trouble.”

“Why should I? They do not want me. I should never be a part of their lives.”

“Why not? You could if you liked, and I am always telling you so. Society never wants anybody who does not want it. It is founded on the principle of giving and receiving in return. If you show that you like people, they will show that they like you.”

“That would depend upon my motives.”

Mrs. Sherrington Trimm laughed, lowered her parasol, and turned her head so that she could see George’s face.

“Motives!” she exclaimed. “Nobody cares about your motives, provided you have good manners. It is only in business that people talk about motives.”

“Then any adventurer who chose might take his place in society,” objected George.

“Of course he might—and does. It occurs constantly, and nothing unpleasant happens to him, unless he makes love in the wrong direction or borrows money without returning it. Unfortunately those are just the two things most generally done by adventurers, and then they come to grief. A man is taken at his own valuation in society, until he commits a social crime and is found out.”

“You think there would be nothing to prevent my going into society, if I chose to try it?”

“Nothing in the world, if you will follow one or two simple rules.”

“And what may they be?” inquired George, becoming interested.

“Let me see—in the first place—dear me! how hard it is to explain such things! I should say that one ought never to ask a question about anybody, unless one knows the answer, and knows that the person to whom one is speaking will be glad to talk about the matter. One may avoid a deal of awkwardness by not asking a man about his wife, for instance, if she has just applied for a divorce. But if his sister is positively engaged to marry an English duke, you should always ask about her. That kind of conversation makes things pleasant.”

“I like that view,” said George. “Give me some more advice.”

“Never say anything disagreeable about any one you know.”

“That is charitable, at all events.”

“Of course it is; and, now I think of it, charity is really the foundation of good society,” continued Mrs. Trimm very sweetly.

“You mean a charitable silence, I suppose.”

“Not always silence. Saying kind words about people you hate is charitable, too.”

“I should call it lying,” George observed.

Totty was shocked at such bluntness.

“That is far too strong language,” she answered, beginning to look as she did in church.

“Gratuitous mendacity,” suggested her companion. “Is the word ‘lie’ in the swearing dictionary?”

“Perhaps not—but after all, George,” continued Mrs. Trimm with sudden fervour, “there are often very nice things to be said quite truly about people we do not like, and it is certainly charitable and magnanimous to say them in spite of our personal feelings. One may just as well leave out the disagreeable things.”

“Satan is a fallen angel. You hate him of course. If he chanced to be in society you would leave out the detail of the fall and say that Satan is an angel. Is that it?”

“Approximately,” laughed Totty, who was less shocked at the mention of the devil than at hearing tact called lying. “I think you would succeed in society. By-the-bye, there is another thing. You must never talk about culture and books and such things, unless some celebrity begins it. That is most important, you know. Of course you would not like to feel that you were talking of things which other people could not understand, would you?”

“What should I talk about, then?”

“Oh—people, of course, and—and horses and things—yachting and fashions and what people generally do.”

“But I know so few people,” objected George, “and as for horses, I have not ridden since I was a boy, and I never was on board of a yacht, and I do not care a straw for the fashions.”

“Well, really, then I hardly know. Perhaps you had better not talk much until you have learned about things.”

“Perhaps not. Perhaps I had better not try society after all.”

“Oh, that is ridiculous!” exclaimed Mrs. Trimm, who did not want to discourage her pupil. “Now, George, be a good boy, and do not get such absurd notions into your head. You are going to begin this very day.”

“Am I?” inquired the young man in a tone that promised very little.

“Of course you are. And it will be easy, too, for the Fearing girls are clever——”

“Does that mean that I may talk about something besides horses, fashions, and yachting?”

“How dreadfully literal you are, George! I did not mean precisely those things, only I could think of nothing else just at that moment. I know, yes—you are going to ask if I ever think of anything else. Well, I do sometimes—there, now do be good and behave like a sensible being. Here we are.”

They had reached a large, old-fashioned house in Washington Square, which George had often noticed without knowing who lived in it, and which had always attracted him. He liked the quiet neighbourhood, so near the busiest part of the city and yet so completely separated from it, and he often went there alone to sit upon one of the benches under the trees and think of all that might have been even then happening to him if things had not been precisely what they were. He stood upon the door-step and rang the bell, wondering at the unexpected turn his day had taken, and wondering what manner of young women these orphan sisters might be, with whom cousin Totty was so anxious to make him acquainted. His curiosity on this head was soon satisfied. In a few seconds he found himself in a sombrely-furnished drawing-room, bowing before two young girls, while Mrs. Trimm introduced him.

“Mr. Winton Wood—my cousin George, you know. You got my note? Yes—so sweet of you to be at home. This is Miss Constance Fearing, and this is Miss Grace, George. Thanks, no—we have just been having tea. Yes—we walked. The weather is perfectly lovely, and now tell me all about yourself, Conny dear!”

Thereupon Mrs. Sherrington Trimm took Miss Constance Fearing beside her, held her hand affectionately, and engaged in an animated conversation of smiles and questions, leaving George to amuse the younger sister as best he could.

At first sight there appeared to be a strong resemblance between the two girls, which was much increased by their both being dressed in black and in precisely the same manner. They were very nearly of the same age, Constance being barely twenty-two years old and her sister just twenty, though Mrs. Trimm had said that both had reached their majority. Both were tall, graceful girls, well-proportioned in every way, easy in their bearing, their heads well set upon their shoulders, altogether well grown and well bred. But there was in reality a marked difference between them. Constance was fairer and more delicate than her younger sister, evidently less self-reliant and probably less strong. Her eyes were blue and quiet, and her hair had golden tinges not to be found in Grace’s dark-brown locks. Her complexion was more transparent, her even eyebrows less strongly marked, her sensitive lips less firm. Of the two she was evidently the more gentle and feminine. Grace’s voice was deep and smooth, whereas Constance spoke in a higher though a softer key. It was easy to see that Constance would be the one more quickly moved by womanly sympathies and passions, and that Grace, on the contrary, would be at once more obstinate and more sure of herself.

George was pleasantly impressed by both from the first, and especially by the odd contrast between them and their surroundings. The house was old-fashioned within as well as without. It was clear that the girls’ father and mother had been conservatives of the most severe type. The furniture was dark, massive, and imposing; the velvet carpet displayed in deeper shades of claret, upon a claret-coloured ground, that old familiar pattern formed by four curved scrolls which enclose as in a lozenge an imposing nosegay of almost black roses. Full-length portraits of the family adorned the walls, and the fireplace was innocent of high art tiles, being composed of three slabs of carved white marble, two upright and one horizontal, in the midst of which a black grate supported a coal fire. Moreover, as in all old houses in New York, the front drawing-room communicated with a second at the back of the first by great polished mahogany folding-doors, which, being closed, produce the impression that one-half of the room is a huge press. There were stiff sofas set against the wall, stiff corner bookcases filled with histories expensively bound in dark tree calf, a stiff mahogany table under an even stiffer chandelier of gilded metal; there were two or three heavy easy-chairs, square, dark and polished like everything else, and covered with red velvet of the same colour as the carpet, each having before it a footstool of the old style, curved and made of the same materials as the chairs themselves. A few modern books in their fresh, perishable bindings showed the beginning of a new influence, together with half a dozen magazines and papers, and a work-basket containing a quantity of coloured embroidering silks.

George looked about him as he took his place beside Grace Fearing, and noticed the greater part of the details just described.

“Are you fond of horses, yachting, fashions, and things people generally do, Miss Fearing?” he inquired.

“Not in the least,” answered Grace, fixing her dark eyes upon him with a look of cold surprise.