Here Mr. Tate was shown in by Hetty. He was exceedingly tall and his cheek-bones were prominent, and so was his earnestness. His skirted coat seemed ponderous and so did he.

Maud, for one, never had cared for Mr. Tate, possibly because he seemed so little aware of her. She was in a gloomy frame of mind anyway, not having cheered up since, so she put it, she'd seen herself as Mr. Welling and his sex saw her. She said afterwards, that this afternoon at the Harrisons only confirmed the point of view. Mr. Tate in his frock coat and his earnestness seemed to provide an outlet for her immediate ill-humor.

"When a person's dressed with all that excess of correctness, he only looks ridiculous," she told Selina, by whom she was sitting.

Amanthus apparently did not think so. She smiled for Mr. Tate and that marvel of a dimple showed and she gave him her soft hand. Mrs. Harrison smiled for him, too, and offered a hand and told him that she and Amanthus had enjoyed his matinÉe tickets hugely.

"He's never offered us matinÉe tickets," sotto voce from Maud at Selina's elbow. "That earnestness of his keeps its eye on exactly what it wants and doesn't waste itself elsewhere. He's recognizing we're here now and he's coming to tell us so. That's something to be grateful for."

He shook hands with Adele and called her Miss Adelina. She and her identity always seemed vague to him. He shook hands with Selina and asked her about her mother and her aunt; he shook hands with Juliette. He came to Maud. Her attitude to him at times savored of belligerency. She wasn't fond of persons who ignored her, but as she explained afterward, she hardly had flattered herself he'd noticed this manner.

"Miss Maud," Mr. Tate having said this in recognition of her as he put out his hand, paused, then said the name over again as if struck for the first time with the sound and significance of it. "Miss Maud?" consideringly and reflectively. "There's something then in names? Juliette now," with a beneficent wave of the hand in the direction of that pretty, dark, little person, "diminutive of Julia; Amanda, Amanthus, and the further derivatives," he turned and bowed gallantly in the direction of this young lady, "worthy to be loved—Matilda, Matilde, Maud—mighty battle maid."

Perhaps it was fortunate that Hetty came in here, this time ushering Mr. Welling, Mr. Cannon and Culpepper. They seemed to bring in with them the bracing of the outside cold and something of its vigor as to a man they rallied about their hostess, their spirits effervescent.

"We had your note," from Mr. Cannon, the good-looking and the debonaire, cheerfully.

"We've primed ourselves with the law on the subject of cook-ladies and their husbands and their wages," from Culpepper genially.

"We were pricking Tate, old man, into coming this afternoon anyway, before we heard from you, to give us an excuse for following him," from Mr. Welling.

"Tate's been right testy because you asked us instead of him for that advice. He prefers to think the whole lien on things around here is his," from Mr. Cannon.

They came about the room now shaking hands generally.

"You here, Selina? That's good," from Culpepper.

"And you won't forgive me, Miss Maud?" from Mr. Welling to this energetically handsome young lady in her cloth suit of hunter's green. "Won't believe me that my motives, far from trying to win you over to my democracy, were unmixed and pure? Wouldn't see me when I called the other evening! Haven't answered my pleading note! I appeal to you, Mrs. Harrison. I've a question in ethics, moral, social and otherwise that Miss Amanthus once told me about. Or perhaps I'd better put it direct to Miss Maud. Will a lady say she's out when she's in? I'm coming around again to satisfy myself as to this, to-morrow night."

And meanwhile did Mr. Cannon—perish the thought!—approximate a wink at Adele as he approached her? At Adele who when she used to sportively skip rope did it with such painful conscientiousness one's heart ached to watch her? At Adele who constitutionally would be so embarrassed with a wink thus placed on her hands, one could not figure out the consequences? Certainly this Mr. Preston Cannon the naughty did something with an eyelid quite confidentially as he reached her. And who pray had told him of his recent double identity in connection with the Carter reception?

"The vagabond interloper is discovered in the cherished nephew," he was saying jocularly to Adele whose face was scarlet.

But even so, despite this effervescence of good spirits bestowed around, the younger ladies could not deceive themselves. The gentlemen were glad to find them here, of course, but incidentally, their own coming and their own ardor being for Mrs. Harrison!

For the third time Hetty appeared, now bringing in the tea and its accompaniments, which she put down on a table before Mrs. Harrison.

Whereupon the gentlemen rallied to their hostess again, rallied with a zest and heartiness that spelled homage. Culpepper at the table by her elbow, with the silver tongs suspended above the silver sugar bowl, waited her word to distribute the cubes to saucers. Culpepper—the blunt and self-avowed scorner of the lady's man!

Mr. Welling went about carrying cups. According to Maud's undertones to Selina, his facetious speeches as he distributed these merely sounded excessive.

"And silly," she added a moment later to the first indictment.

It was his speech calling attention to the gracious occupation of the hostess at the tea-table, that provoked this last comment.

"Juno, to human needs sweetly descent, pours tea," Mr. Welling diagramed it, as he handed Maud a cup of the brew.

"He mails mental pabulum to me, and bestows compliments elsewhere," she remarked scathingly as he moved on.

Amanthus, artless sight, her shingled yellow bang altogether fetching, followed in the wake of Mr. Welling, with cakes in a silver basket. He called back gallantly over his shoulder diagraming her, too.

"Hebe to the children of earth," he explained.

It was nauseating, that is if one agreed with Maud.

Mr. Tate followed after the cups and the cakes with lemon and with cream. It was a risk to let him. He earnestly and even decorously stumbled over a rug and slopped the cream, and as earnestly and decorously looked annoyed and recovered himself. He also made rejoinder to Mr. Welling.

"Juno and Hebe, if you will, Henry," he was the only known soul apparently who addressed this gentleman by his Christian name, "except that in both cases, our Juno and our Hebe are first and last and always, radiantly and commendably, woman!"

Selina who earlier in the afternoon felt she was looking her best in her cashmere with its open throat and the knot of her hair at the nape of her neck, but was less fondly hopeful about it now, took her tea from Mr. Welling, her cake from Amanthus, her cream from Mr. Tate, but something of her state of mind from Maud.

She did not care for tea. If the truth be told, while she was a little sensitive about the childish look of the thing, a goblet of milk still stood at her plate three times a day, Mamma discouraging even a tentative cup of coffee at breakfast. But it was not her lack of ardor for the tea now in her hand which was dampening her spirits, but the realization that she and her companions were but incidents to a foreground adequately filled for these young gentlemen.

A foreground not even shared by Amanthus, but filled altogether by Mrs. Harrison, beautiful, smiling, and serene, too big, too adequate, too honest and too real to put forward one charm, one attribute deliberately to invite such recognition.

Too big, too honest and too real? Selina caught at the words as they passed through her mind. Could the secret lie in these? Auntie had deplored the borrowed furbelows with deep distress. Were she and her group paying the penalty of trying to be what they were not?

These young gentlemen whose good opinions the group yearned to possess, bantered them instead with jocularity, and gave sincerity and admiration to Mrs. Harrison. If Selina could judge, it was the same nature of homage men offered to Miss Pocahontas Boswell, that most natural and unassuming of persons.

Had Selina laid bare the secret? For was not Mrs. Harrison nobly and simply herself? Each charm and each loveliness taking its toll rightfully her own? And her interests and her occupations and her reading, her assumptions and her opinions, were not these too gently and quietly her own?

She had faced about from the tea-table now, her own cup in hand and was speaking. How lovely her fair hair was, how pleasing the apricot tones of her dress! And Mamma and Auntie said there was no degradation a husband might descend to that her money was not taken to pay for, no price a humiliated young wife could be taxed, her personal fortune did not stand voucher for! Why should a woman permit it? Why not consider her own to be her own, in such a case? Selina, looking at Mrs. Harrison, wondered.

She herself was speaking. "And now about old colored Aunt Hosanna in my kitchen. She has a lazy, ne'er-do-well husband, girls, though I've probably mentioned it before to you, who as regularly as the week-end rolls around, appears and collects her week's wages for her. I have asked to be assured by these young lawyers-to-be, that he has every right to do it, before I give in to him any longer."

"He has every right," from Mr. Welling, square-set now like his spectacles, and earnest and definite. "The common law, covering the law of husband and wife, has been modified in some of the states, but here in our own, is practically unchanged."

"Culpepper," from Mrs. Harrison still playing with her tea-cup, to this black-haired, blue-eyed young gentleman in a chair to her left, "you promised to look up the case of that little dressmaker for me. Don't think I hunt these things. By some force of attraction seemingly, they seek me."

Culpepper took advantage of the opportunity to put his cup down. Its undiminished contents would indicate that he didn't care for tea as a beverage either. He, too, was business-like and definite.

"I took the address you gave me," he said, "and went around to see her carpenter husband. She's temporarily left him since you saw her. He admits the house was bought and paid for by her out of her earnings before he knew her. And he admits he mistreats her every time he's drunk. But the house and its contents he proposes to keep if she leaves him."

"She lost three sewing-machines once before," said Mrs. Harrison, "and a piano she'd bought by installments that was the joy and pride of her life. They were seized a week after she married him three years ago to settle debts he had contracted before he knew her."

Mr. Cannon came into the conversation. Nor was he in the least the jollying, bandying person the younger ladies were familiar with.

"Which is proof of where he on his part puts us, too," murmured Maud.

"You women, Mrs. Harrison, so seldom take the protection offered you in the ante-nuptial or marriage settlement provisions. We've just been remarking on it among ourselves, the rich women seldom, the working-woman never."

Mrs. Harrison played with the spoon in her saucer, as if considering before answering. She had been holding her cup now for some time.

"Put it down," said Mr. Welling from his stand near the fender, persuasively; "you haven't tasted it."

"No more have you yours," retorted his hostess, "nor Selina, nor Maud, nor Culpepper nor Juliette—I don't like tea myself, and I don't believe one of the rest of you do."

There was relaxation at this, and general confession, and a setting down of cups.

"Tea as a function is more popular than tea as a beverage," from Mr. Welling, gallantly.

Mrs. Harrison reached for her tatting which lay near her book. "You say, Mr. Cannon, you wonder women so seldom take advantage of the marriage settlement provisions?" Her eyes glancing from one to the other of the young girls grouped about her fireside and then returning to Mr. Cannon seemed to say, "Here are cases in possible point to be. Consider them."

What she said, however, was, "How many young girls, even in the class you know, are likely to have heard of an ante-nuptial provision? Or as things go in our American life, would conceive any need of protection in her own case? American women usually marry for affection, which implies faith. Though the real truth is, we're not apt to think about marriage in any sense such as this at all, having been trained neither to the knowledge nor the thinking. I take it, Mr. Cannon," smiling, "that you will make it your business to instruct the young lady of your choice in these points beforehand?"

Mr. Cannon laughed, but he got red, too.

Was Mrs. Harrison too honest thus to be sowing insubordination in the camps of the possible future and not acknowledge it? She put her tatting down.

"I am not attacking the institution of marriage in the least, Maudie and Juliette, Selina, Adele and my Amanthus. I am not attacking it at all; I am repudiating woman's helplessness within the institution. Adele knows more of what I am talking about, I see it in her eyes. Adele is a browser among books."

"Mills on 'The Subjection of Woman,'" murmured Mr. Cannon still red. "This my defence. I lent it to her."

Hetty appeared again, this time ushering Bliss and Mr. Tuttle Jones.

"Oh," from Amanthus, "if you knew how glad I am to see you both. They've been talking and talking, and are still talking, and I haven't been able to make out one thing of what they think they're talking about."

Bliss ruddy-haired and pretty boy, hurried to her side, his face alight at the welcome. Bliss was twenty-one now, and his father had given him a wee interest in a box factory, and he was up and gone from home by half-past six in the mornings, and was tremendously proud and in earnest and interested, and very much in love with Amanthus.

Mr. Jones, his neat person and neat features and small moustache immaculate, finished his greetings without a shade of hurry, then made his way to Selina. Maud had wandered away now, and he took the place she had vacated. Whereupon the color began to rise in Selina's cheek, warm and permeating, and rich. For the eyes of Mr. Jones were sweeping over her face, her brow, her hair, even to the pale burnished knot at the nape of her neck, and sweeping back again over the whole. There were other masculine eyes that might have been doing the same that had declined their prerogative.

"I knew the style was yours when I asked you to try it" murmured Tuttle.

The color flamed higher.

"Mamma and I had cards to-day from your sister, Mrs. Sampson, for her next afternoon. It was nice of her to think of us," from Selina.

Selina and her mother did not know Mrs. Sampson.

"Promise me to accept and go," from Tuttle, earnestly. "A real promise I want. Exactly. Now I have it. I want you to know my people better, and my people to know you."

What could the color do at a speech such as this, but wave almost painfully, higher and even higher?

"Oh, I must tell you, by the way, your aunt, Mrs. Bruce came in the bank to-day to see me. She fancies she owes me some sort of thanks about her husband, which, of course, she doesn't at all. That off her mind, she asked me if I could give her any reasonable idea of how many women in town had a vault box, or if I could tell her how to find out how many have bank-books. What do you suppose?"

Selina had a nice voice, clear and sweet and when she was happy and merry, full of cadences. It rang silvery in its notes now. "I don't suppose. Nobody does when it's Aunt Juanita. Mamma says she's been hunting information of various kinds about women for fifteen years."

It was such a wonderfully pleasing thing to hear that silvery laugh, Tuttle Jones set about awakening it again.

About the time cloaks were being sought, Culpepper came strolling to hunt Selina.

"I'll walk back with you," he said easily.

We're all pitiable and ignoble, which is to say, human creatures. If Selina had admitted the slightest feeling of chagrin earlier in the evening, that feeling found satisfaction now. Moreover, she was looking that very best of hers again, which means she was sparkling and coloring and laughing, a thing calculated to increase one's satisfaction. She gave Culpepper a share of this sparkle and this color as she replied:

"Mr. Jones is going to take me home, thank you, Culpepper. He says it's quite dark and snowing fast."