Had the protest against Knickerbocker arrogance languished at this pass, history would be the poorer, but Cora Shelby found it impossible to stop with this show of independence. Her ambition was whetted for an exercise of actual power, and the outcome was the famous battle of Beverwyck, whose story still lacks its balladist.

Early in her survey of Albany society, Cora had met with the Beverwyck
Club.

"It is the local academy of immortals," instructed the military secretary. "Its judgments may not be infallible, but they're beyond appeal. It is the pink of exclusiveness; it worships etiquette above all other gods; and its receptions to incoming governors demand the reddest lettering in the calendar."

When Shelby's turn for this signal honor drew near, and the military secretary, to whom Fortune, not content with sending him into the world a grandson of Mrs. Teunis Van Dam, had added membership in the Beverwyck Club, approached him to discuss preliminaries, the governor cheerfully referred him to his wife in whose social knowingness he placed an abounding trust. Of Albany other than as a legislative workshop he knew next to nothing. His social progress in the salad days of his first term in the Assembly had begun in a saloon behind the capitol much frequented by departmental clerks, whence through hotel corridor intercourse he evolved by his second session to a grillroom, patronized by public servants of higher cast who gave stag dinners and occasional theatre parties, which called for evening dress. Up to this period Shelby had never found evening clothes essential to his happiness. His little sectarian college had rather frowned on such garments, and he, too, for a time had vaguely considered them un-American. Yet, taught by the grillroom, he assumed this livery, wore off its shyness, and grew to like it for the best it signified. Here evolution paused. Mrs. Teunis Van Dam, Canon North, and the Beverwyck Club, so far as they stood for anything, peopled a frigid zone of inconsequence which he had no wish to penetrate. Washington, influence in his party, and intimacy with its leaders sophisticated him before his return; behind every mask he now discerned a human being; and no social ordeal terrified. Nevertheless, something of his old-time diffidence toward the unknown country beyond the grillroom lingered, and it made for peace that his wife seemed so competent to guide.

On the score of her competency, Cora entertained no misgivings, and the day following Handsome Ludlow's public elevation to sanctity she met the club's representatives, the military secretary, and an august judge of the Court of Appeals, with a self-possession she felt would grace the daughter of a belted earl. The judge, after some ponderous compliments, told her that the committee in charge, having assured itself through the secretary that the governor and herself had no conflicting engagement, had agreed upon a near date for the reception, which he named. Cora promptly decided that in not consulting her the military secretary had been wanting in respect, and to punish him invented a previous engagement out of hand. Withered by his senior's Jove-like frown, the young man apologized in hot-skinned contrition for his ignorance of the unknowable.

"It's barely possible I didn't mention it," dropped Cora, scrupulously fair.

This gracious intercession for the culprit had no weight with the judge, who continued to regard the secretary with severity, and left him wholly out of the discussion of a date which should meet her wishes. This matter settled without further affront to her dignity, the judge expanded under her flattering attention, and gossiped of the reception itself.

"Between ourselves," he confessed, "the invitation list is bothering us unconscionably. You see, it has expanded beyond our space. At the last governor's reception the club-house was invaded by a mob—a mob, madame,—there is no other expression,—-which I need not add is out of keeping with our traditions. But how draw the line without offence?"

With the dregs of her wrath against Mrs. Van Dam stirred afresh by the disciplining of the grandson, Cora perceived and seized the opportunity for a swingeing blow.

"There's an absurdly simple remedy," she returned thoughtfully; "but of course it would hardly become me to offer suggestions."

"My dear madame," the judge protested, "it would be an act of charity."

After a politic interval of coaxing, Cora explained:—

"The reception is meant to be official in spirit, isn't it? Then why not make it so in fact? Limit your invitations to the official circle. If all the townspeople unconnected with the government are excluded, no one need take offence."

A few days afterward the invitations went forth, restricted according to Cora's plan, and the heart-burnings which were kindled scorched the club's self-esteem like nothing in its staid career. But while others merely bewailed the amazing fact of their exclusion, Mrs. Teunis Van Dam, with characteristic energy, determined to probe the indignity to its author, and summoned her grandson to an absorbing interview.

"Schuyler Livingston Smith," she inquired, "what is Mrs. Tommy Kidder's relation to public affairs that she should receive an invitation to the Beverwyck Club?"

The secretary named an insignificant board of which Mr. Kidder was a member. His grandmother rapidly instanced a dozen other names, and repeated her question. In most cases the young man had to confess his ignorance of their claims.

"So," she commented in the end; "so. And I, whose people have helped govern this community since there was a colony to govern, am beyond the pale! But who was Peter Stuyvesant beside Mrs. Tommy Kidder's husband? Nobody. Who was Abraham de Peyster? who was Gerardus Beekman? who was Rip Van Dam? And the Schuylers, Livingstons, and Van Rensselaers? All nobodies. My dear child, what lunatic in the Beverwyck Club suggested this official classification, which even the Archangel Michael could not carry out?"

Her grandson, with no friendly recollections, named the judge.

"The silly old man!" exclaimed Mrs. Van Dam. "And who inspired him?"

He cheerfully told her, with the added detail that Mrs. Shelby and the judge had subsequently gone over the invitation list together. She was silent for a time, and then dismissed him. Alone with her thoughts, she elaborated a countermine, whose energy was specially directed against the Beverwyck Club, though she had no objection to hoisting the governor's wife in the explosion, albeit she refused to consider her the real antagonist. The true offender was the exclusive organization which had prostituted itself to such ignoble influence.

Within an hour of her grandson's departure Mrs. Teunis Van Dam despatched an invitation of her own. The Beverwyck Club reception was scheduled to run its formal course from nine to eleven o'clock; Mrs. Van Dam asked the governor and his lady to dine with her on the same evening at the hour of eight.

All hinged now on the personal equation of Cora Shelby, whose vagaries the old lady owned herself quite unable to forecast. Nor in this respect was Cora herself a much wiser prophet. Her first instinct, mixed with wonder, was to decline, and she held to this opinion the better part of an hour. Yet before the impulse could stiffen into resolution, it met the neutralizing influence of the old town, which, partly through the military secretary, partly through the scoffing Ludlow, she had unwittingly assimilated. By these teachings she had learned the flattering, almost royal, significance of Mrs. Teunis Van Dam's dinner invitations. She was seized afresh by a curiosity to observe how they did things in Quality Row, and became of two minds forthwith. Appointed for the same evening as the club reception, the dinner had, moreover, the look of a peace overture, a concession to her power, even an admission of defeat, which was soothing. She could hardly present the matter to Shelby in this light, as she had withheld all mention of the Ludlow business from his ear; but with a generosity which astonished herself, she dwelt on Mrs. Teunis Van Dam's undoubted prestige, and ended by advising acceptance.

Shelby, preoccupied with an appeal for the pardon of a consumptive forger, mechanically agreed.

"Sooner or later we'd have had to endure both functions," he said. "It is time saved to pack them into one evening."

Cora bridled. It was a prodigious affair for her that he took so indifferently.

"Time, time," she reprimanded; "the state doesn't expect its governor to grub like a clerk."

Shelby promised to mend his ways; but the dinner and reception occupied his thoughts so little that he worked beyond his usual hour at the capitol on the afternoon of the appointed day, and, coming tardy home, was late in dressing and late in setting forth. Cora was indignant to the boiling-point. She meant to be behind-hand at the reception, as a display of what she deemed good form; but a dinner was a dinner, as her husband, in the privacy of the carriage, was taught past all forgetting. Yet his fault lost its gravity before Mrs. Van Dam's welcome.

"If you're really late, I'm delighted," she returned to Cora's embarrassed excuses; "for you see, I've just found that I must apologize for a delay myself. What a boon servants run by clockwork would be! But it won't be very long."

It was long, though neither of the guests suspected it. Shelby was diverted by Mrs. Van Dam's unimagined vivacity; while his wife had no immediate room for any impression save satisfaction that this autocrat, who held that punctuality should be the politeness of democracy no less than princes, had been caught napping. It was clear that she meant to bury the hatchet, and Cora, with her own point carried, saw no reason why she should not add a shovelful of symbolic earth herself. Thus, beginning with a trickle, the flow of her good humor presently broadened to the width of the sluice-gate, as she entered upon an absorbing scrutiny of the quaint old house which by tradition had served one of the earlier governors. It was a rambling structure of unexpected turns and endless alcoves stored with curios, art treasures, and trophies of travel.

Perceiving their interest in their surroundings, Mrs. Van Dam gladly played the cicerone.

"That chair and desk came from the Senate Chamber of the old State House," she said, following Shelby's eyes. "They were used by my grandfather, and I luckily got them at the demolition. His wooden inkstand and pounce-box are there too. That Stuart over the mantelpiece is his portrait."

"I've heard of him," answered Shelby, warmly. "He upheld De Witt
Clinton's hands in the fight for the canal."

She left him momentarily to give Cora the history of a faded Flemish tapestry that lay in a cabinet, and then included them both in the romantic tale of a Murillo, unearthed in a Mexican pawnshop, which she assumed would interest so steadfast a champion of art as the governor had shown himself in his congressional career. Cora basked in the exquisite flattery of being treated as a person of greater cultivation than she was, and strained on tiptoe to merit her reputation. Had her mind been free to register its ordinary impressions, two things might have struck her as singular; the absence of other guests, and, stranger still, in a temple of punctuality, the lack of clocks.

The same happy atmosphere enveloped the dinner itself, whose perfection of service and cookery betrayed no hint of delay. Mrs. Shelby found her views of life and the sphere of woman sought for and appreciated, and the governor was enticed into political by-paths illustrated by Tuscarora stories told in his happiest vein. He was frankly charmed. Many women had attracted him in many ways, ranging from the earthy fascination of the sometime Mrs. Hilliard to that commingling of girlish impulse, mature good sense, and an indefinite something else in Ruth which swayed him still; but none of them had met him on quite the serene plane of this delightful old woman of the world. By her birthright she seemed to bridge the present and the past, and under her spell the quaint-gabled Albany of another century rose again. Once more Arcadian youth picnicked in the "bush" and coasted down Pinkster Hill past the squat Dutch church; the Tontine Coffee House sprang from dust, and through its doors walked Hamilton and Burr, Jerome Bonaparte, and a comic-pathetic ÉmigrÉ marquis, who in poverty awaited the greater Bonaparte's downfall, cherishing his order of Saint Louis and powdering his poll with Indian meal; the Livingstons and Clintons divided the land between them; Van Buren and the Regency came to power.

There was more of this when the dinner had ended, and they lingered in the library over their coffee and Mrs. Van Dam's priceless collection of relics of the time of the royal province and the yet earlier New Netherland.

"A plague on the reception!" exclaimed the governor in the carriage, when the good nights had finally been said. "I could have talked with her till morning."

There was a lively stir and bustle about the entrance of the Beverwyck Club as they approached, which Cora took to be that of late-comers like themselves. She would have preferred that she be conspicuously the last,—the climax. Seen nearer, the flurry was peculiar. If the idea were not preposterous, she could believe that people were actually leaving the club—leaving before they met the governor in whose honor they assembled—leaving before she came!

"Your watch, Ross, your watch," she exclaimed suddenly.

"I did not wear it."

She bethought her of a recently acquired carriage clock whose face the lights of a passing trolley made plain. She looked, gasped, and looked again in horrid fascination. The punctilious Beverwyck Club had decreed that its reception should end at eleven, and the decrees of the Beverwyck Club were rigidly enforced. The carriage clock pointed its inexorable hands to a quarter past.