Laydon's three days spun themselves out to five with a fine smoothness. Colonel Ashendyne's tone was balm itself to what it might have been. Miss Serena was willing to discuss with him "In Memoriam" and the novels of Miss Broughton, and Ralph Coltsworth who was also at the New Springs walked with him over the place. Laydon was keen enough to see that Hagar had appealed to her family, and that Ashendyne breeding had rallied to her support. He was at once provoked and soothed; now conscious only of the injury to his healthy self-love, and now of a vague relief that, young as he still was, and with that wonderful future all to make, he really was not tied down. His very vanity would not agree but that the woman with whom he had thought himself in love must be of a superior type and an undeniable charm, but the same vanity conceded gently that to err was mortal, and that there were as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it, and that he certainly had not been fatally smitten—on the whole, she, poor little thing! had probably suffered the most of the two. Charming as she was, the glamour for him, he conceded, was gone. He had come off pretty well, after all.

When the five days were up, he felt positive regret at having to go, and his good-bye to all the Ashendynes was cordial. He had already written to Mrs. LeGrand, and, of course, to his mother. He went; the stage took him up the mountain....

"For all I could see—and I watched pretty closely—there didn't anything come of it," remarked Marie Caton. "On the whole, I am rather glad. Now you can't hear the rumble of the stage any longer. He's gone out of the picture.—Betsy, stop writing and look at the robin and the chipmunk—"

They had the tiniest cottage to themselves—Elizabeth's brother being an old-timer here, and his letter to the proprietor procuring them great consideration. There were but two rooms in the cottage. Roof and porch, it was sunk in traveller's-joy, and in front sprang a vast walnut tree, and beyond the walnut a span-wide stream purled between mint over a slaty bed. From the porch you looked southward over mountains and mountains, and every evening Antares looked redly back at you. Now it was morning, and wrens and robins and cat-birds all were singing.

Elizabeth looked up from the table where she was working. "If I watch chipmunks all morning, I'll never get these textile figures done.—Mrs. Josslyn said at breakfast that it wasn't a good day for fishing, and that she might wander by."

"She's coming now. I see her in the distance. I like Molly Josslyn."

"So do I.—We haven't been here a week and yet we talk as though we had known these people always!"

"Well, the fact that quite a number knew your brother made for there being no ice to break. And it would be so absurd not to know one another at the New Springs! as absurd as if a shipload of people cast on a desert island—Here she is. Come in, Mrs. Josslyn!"

"Thank you, I don't want a chair," said Molly Josslyn. "You don't mind if I sit on the edge of the porch and dangle my feet, do you? Nor if I take off my hat and roll up my sleeves so that I can feel the air on my arms?"

"Not a bit. Take the hairpins out of your hair and let it fly."

"I wish that I could cut it off!" said Molly viciously. "I will some day! Pretty nearly a whole three-quarters of an hour out of every twenty-four gone in brushing and combing and doing up hair! You have to do it in the morning and the middle of the day and the evening. A twentieth part of your whole waking existence!... Oh, me!"

"What a sigh!"

"I've been in rocking-chair-and-gossip land over on the big porch. I've heard everybody—in a petticoat—who wasn't there hanged, drawn, and quartered. Of course, I knew they were eager to get at me, and so I was obliging and came away."

Marie Caton laughed. "Miss Eden here is an optimist of the first water. If you ask her she'll tell you that women are growing beyond that sort of thing—that they don't sting one another half as much as they used to!"

"No, I don't think they do," said Mrs. Josslyn. "I think that's getting apparent nowadays. Speaking for myself, fresh air and out of doors and swinging off by one's self seem to make a body more or less charitable. But some of us have got the habit yet. Gnat or wasp or hornet or snake, on they go!" she laughed. "Over on the porch it wasn't anything but a little cloud of gnats. They weren't really stinging—just getting between your eyes and the blue sky."

"But it is growing better—it is, it is!" said Elizabeth. "I wouldn't give up that belief for anything."

"No, don't!" said Molly Josslyn. "I like women and like to think well of them."

A strong, rosy blonde, she stood up and stretched her arms above her head. "I wish there were a pool somewhere, deep enough to swim in! I'd like to cross the Hellespont this morning—swim it and swim back.—Christopher is coming to-morrow."

"Christopher?"

"My husband—Christopher Josslyn. They don't," said Mrs. Josslyn, "make them any nicer than Christopher! Christopher was my born mate." And went away with a beamy look, over the grass.

Marie spoke thoughtfully. "Yesterday I heard one of the gnats singing. It sang, 'Yes, rather handsome, but don't you find her dreadfully unfeminine?'"

"Oh, 'feminine'!" said Elizabeth, and went on adding figures.

Marie Caton took a book from the generous number ranged around a jar of Black-eyed Susans on the rustic table in the middle of the porch, but "The chipmunks and the robins get so in the way," she presently dreamily murmured, and then, "You had just as well put up your work. Here's Judge Black and General Argyle!"

Judge Black was sixty-two, rather lean than stout, rather short than tall, clean-shaven, with a good-looking countenance below grizzled, close-clipped hair, with a bald spot at the top like a monk's tonsure. General Argyle was a much larger and taller man, big-framed, wide-girthed, with a well-set head framed about with shaggy white hair. His countenance was rubicund, his voice mellow. He was sixty-seven, in some respects very old, and in others quite young. Usually, at the New Springs, Colonel Ashendyne marched in company, but this morning—"Ashendyne's got some family conference or other on hand. It's a day off for fishing, and nobody seems to have a mind for whist or poker, and the papers haven't come. Argyle and I are floating around like two lost corks or the Babes in the Wood—"

"So I said," said General Argyle richly, "let's stroll over there and say good-morning to Tom Eden's sister and her attractive friend.—No, no; no chairs! We'll sit here on the steps. As soon as Ashendyne appears, we're going after young Coltsworth and have a turn in the bowling-alley. Must exercise!—that's what I'm always telling Black here—"

"As if I didn't exercise," said Judge Black, "more in a day than he does in a week.—What a pretty little porch you've got! Books, flowers, needlework—"

The General surveyed it, too. "It is pretty. Woman's touch—woman's touch!"

"That isn't needlework in the basket," said Marie demurely. "It's apples. Will you have one?"

"No, thanks, Mistress Eve—or yes, on second thoughts, I will! What are you reading?—'The Doll's House.' Ibsen!"

"Yes."

"I do not know," said the Judge, "what young ladies are coming to! I have never had time, nor, I may say, inclination, to read Ibsen myself, but of course I know the kind of thing he's responsible for. And, frankly, I should not permit my daughter to read that book!"

"Oh," said Marie, "I don't think myself it is a book for a child!"

"She's not a child. She's twenty-six. I should dissuade my wife, too, from reading it."

"Then your wife," answered Marie, "would miss an illuminating piece of literature."

Elizabeth came in with her serene voice. "Don't you think, Judge Black, that we all acquire a habit of judging a writer, whom we haven't yet had time to study for ourselves, too much in terms of some review or other, or of the mere unthinking, current talk? I think we all do it. I believe when you read Ibsen you will feel differently about him."

"Not I!" said the Judge. "I have seen extracts enough. I tell you, Miss Eden, the age is reading too much of such decadent stuff—"

"Oh, 'decadent'!"

"And it is read, amazingly, by women. I would rather see my wife or daughter with the old dramatists at their worst in their hands than with stuff like that—! Overturning all our concepts, criticizing supremacies—I beg your pardon, Miss Caton, but if you knew how women, nowadays, amaze me—"

"Stop hectoring, Black," said the General mellowly. "She's not in the dock. Just so that women stay women, they can fill their heads with what stuff they will—"

"Exactly!" said Judge Black. "Do you see them staying women?"

"Women of the past," said Elizabeth.

"That is woman,—the women of the past. There isn't any other. The eternal feminine—"

"I think you are limiting the eternal and denying the universe power to evolve," said Elizabeth. "Why not eternally the man of the past? Why not 'There isn't any other'? Why not 'The eternal masculine'? Why do you change and grow from age to age?"

"I'm not so sure that they do," said Marie sotto voce.

"Yes, they do! They grow and become freer always; though I think," said Elizabeth painfully, "that they lag in the way they look at women.—Well, if you grow, being one half, do you suppose that we are not going to grow, being the other half? And if you think that the principle of growth is not in us, still I shouldn't worry! If we can't grow, we won't grow, and you needn't fash yourselves. On the other hand, if we can, we will—and that is all there is about it. And it wouldn't do you the least harm to read Ibsen—nor to get another definition of 'decadent.'"

She leaned forward in her chair. "Do you see that strip of blanched grass there?—or rather it was blanched yesterday when that board over there was lying upon it and had lain, I don't know how long!—blanched and bent and sicklied over. Now look! It is getting colour and standing straight—only beginning, but it is beginning—beginning to be on terms with the sun! Well, that grass is woman to-day! The heavy board is being lifted, and that's the change and all the change—and you find it 'pernicious'!"

Glowing-cheeked, she ceased speaking. Judge Black's colour, too, had heightened. "My dear Miss Eden, how did all this begin? I'm the last person in the world to deny to woman a proper freedom. I only ask that it shan't go beyond a certain point—that it shan't threaten the unsettling of a certain divine status quo—"

"I doubt if a divine status quo is ever unsettled, Judge Black," said Elizabeth. "But there—but there!" She smiled, and she had a very sweet, sunny smile. "I didn't in the least mean to quarrel! Tom will have told you that I sometimes use my tongue, and that's the ancient woman, still, isn't it? You see I care for women—being one—a good deal."

"Let us," said Marie Caton, "talk about fishing."

General Argyle chuckled. "Black doesn't think you know anything about fishing. He has to acknowledge that Mrs. Josslyn does—but then he thinks that she's a charming lusus naturÆ. I like to hear you give it to Black. Pay him back. He's always giving it to me!"

"That's right!" said Black. "Pitch into me! Cover me with obloquy! Poor homeless, friendless sailor with the pole star mysteriously shifted from its place—" ...

"The homeless, friendless sailor stayed a long time, even with the pole star shifted," remarked Marie, forty minutes later.

"I certainly didn't mean to be rude," murmured Elizabeth, her eyes upon the disappearing guests, now well on their way to the bowling-alley. "They mean you never to resent a thing which they would at once recognize for an impertinence if one of themselves said it to another—"

"Oh, I shouldn't dub you rude," said the other. "And if he found you uncomfortable for a minute, you made up for it afterwards! You were charming enough, just as charming as if the pole star had never shifted. He went off still in mind the Eastern King."

"Ah," said Elizabeth, "that is where all of us are weak. We say the truth, and then we bring in 'charm' and sandpaper it away again! It's going to take another generation, Marie!"

"Another?" said Marie. "A dozen, more like!—Now I suppose I can read 'The Doll's House' in peace.—No, by all that's fated in this place, here comes another guest!"

This was Ralph Coltsworth, but he made no long tarrying; he was as transient as a butterfly. "Have you ladies seen Hagar Ashendyne? I want her to go to walk with me, and I can't find her anywhere."

"No, we haven't," said Marie. "Judge Black and General Argyle are looking for you to play tenpins."

Ralph smiled back at her. "Let them look! It will do the old codgers good. Do you like this place?"

"Yes, very much. Don't you?"

"Oh, I like it so-so!" said Ralph. "It's a good enough lotus land, but there's a lack somehow of wild, exciting adventure. I've been trying to read on the hotel porch. What do you think they're talking about over there? Fringed doilies!"

"What do you like to do and to talk about?"

"Live things." He laughed, tossed an apple into the air and caught it again. "I want first to make fifty millions, and then I want to spend fifty millions!"

"What an admirable American you are!"

"Am I not? And I vary it with just wanting to be a cowboy with a six-shooter on a Western plain—" He tossed the apple into the air again and, watching it, missed the glimpse of Hagar which the other two received. She appeared around the corner of a neighbouring cottage, her face directed toward the traveller's-joy porch, saw Coltsworth, wheeled and withdrew. He caught the apple, and after gazing meditatively for a moment in the direction of the tenpin-alley, sighed, and said that he supposed after all he might as well go help the General demolish the Army of the Potomac. "That's what he calls the pins when they're set up. He takes the biggest bowl and sends it thundering. I believe he thinks for the moment it is a ball from one of his old twenty-pounders. He sees fire and smells smoke. Sometimes he demolishes the Army of the Potomac and sometimes he doesn't; but he never gets discouraged. The next cannon ball will surely do the work!"

When he was gone, and had been gone twenty minutes or more, Hagar reappeared. She came swiftly across the grass, mounted the porch steps, and stood, with a little deprecating shake of her head for the offered chair, by Elizabeth's work-table. "I am not going to stay, thank you! Miss Eden, somebody told me last night that you had written and published books—"

"Only text and reference books—compilations," said Elizabeth. "I only do that kind of unoriginal work."

"Yes, but a book is a book," said Hagar. "What I wondered was if you wouldn't be good enough to tell me some things. No one in all my connection writes—I don't know any one to go to. I only want to know plain things—A, B, C's of how to manage—"

"About a manuscript, you mean?"

"Yes. I don't know anything. I've read all kinds of useless things and so little useful! For instance," said Hagar, "is it wrong to write on both sides of the paper?"