Fred was eager to impart to her man of business her wonderful discovery that visits to Payton Street should be made, not because of "duty," but because they were of value to the world.

"Your premises were wrong, but your deductions were correct," she instructed him, and he roared with laughter.

"Fred, you'll discover the Ten Commandments next. It's the same old result, only you call it by a different name. But go ahead; run the universe! I don't care what kind of oil you use, so long as the gears don't stick."

Mr. Weston's metaphors confessed the fact that he had achieved a motor so that he might go thirty miles for a cup of tea. He used to come out to the camp two or three times a week, and, shading his eyes from the magenta lamp-shade, and the frieze of Japanese fans, and the yellow "Votes for Women" flags, listen dreamily to Fred's theories for the running of the universe, and also to that paper on which she was so hard at work. She wanted his criticism, she said, but, of course, what she really wanted was his praise. She got it—meagerly, and with so many qualifications that, when all was said, it hardly seemed like praise at all. That he was doing his best to make her carry her little torch so that it might shed its glimmer of[Pg 161] light, yet not set things on fire, never occurred to her. If it had, she would have resented it hotly. As it was, his temperance never checked her vehemence, but neither did it irritate her. Her arrogant and shallow certainties, on the contrary, did occasionally irritate him, and, of course, they never brought him any conviction; but they did oblige him to be intellectually candid with himself, and his candor brought him to the point of telling her that he thought her generation better than his, because it was not afraid of Truth. "So, perhaps you women may save civilization," he said.

"Hooray!" said Fred.

"Hold on," he told her, dryly; "cheers are premature. What I mean is that feminism, with its hideously bad taste and its demand for Truth, is here, whether we like it or not! It may make the world over, or it may send us all on the rocks."

"Nonsense!"

"The hope in it is your brand-new sense of social responsibility. The menace is your conceited individualism."

"Of course you are not conceited yourself," she said, sweetly.

"I wish you wouldn't interrupt me! I concede that your sense of responsibility needs the tool of the ballot, just as a farmer needs a spade when he wants to raise a crop of potatoes. That is why I am compelled to call myself a suffragist."

"Hooray!" she said again.

He looked at her drolly. "It's queer about you—not[Pg 162] you, but your sex; you are mentally, but not emotionally, interesting. You are not nearly as charming as the ladies of my youth; you have no sense of proportion, and you jolt the life out of a man, by trying to jump the track the minute you get tired of the scenery. Also you are occasionally boring. But you can't help that; you are reformers."

"Are reformers bores?" she said.

"Always!" he declared.

"Why?"

"Because," he said, dryly, "they never suffer from any impediment in their speech."

Yet he was not so much bored that he stayed away from Lakeville. The place itself seemed to him entirely funny. Its very respectable population was made up of hardworking, good-naturedly vulgar folk, whose taste was painful or amusing, as you might happen to look at it. Once Fred made him stay to supper, and afterward go to a party with her and Laura—whose presence had been secured by judicious pressure upon Billy-boy. This especial festivity was called a "can-can" because the guests' idea of humor consisted in wearing a string of empty tin cans over their shoulders, with a resultant noise when they danced which gave, it seemed, a peculiar joy. Frederica's man of business, sitting on a bench with several gentlemen who mopped themselves breathlessly after their exertions and were obviously comfortable in their shirtsleeves, laughed until, he said, his sides ached.

"You like it, Fred?" he asked, incredulously—she and Laura had taken him home with them to give him [Pg 163]something cool to drink before he started on his midnight spin into town.

"Love it!" she said.

"Well," he said, "it seems to be a case of 'give me heaven for climate, but hell for company!' It would bore me to death."

They were on the little front porch of Sunrise Cottage—Laura lounging on the lowest step, looking up at the stars, and Arthur Weston sitting on the railing, sipping ginger-ale. Frederica, standing up, began to expatiate on the woman's club she had organized. After the first meeting she had turned it into a suffrage league, under the admiring eyes of ladies who whispered to each other that she was the Miss Payton—"you know? Society girl. Why, my husband says the Paytons could buy up every house in Lakeville and not know they'd put their hands in their pockets!" Fred had constant afternoon teas for these ladies—which would have been pleasanter if Flora, when waiting upon them, had been less haughty.

"She calls all our neighbors 'common people,'" Fred said.

Laura laughed: "Wait till we get the vote and we'll have equality, won't we, Fred?"

"You bet we will!"

"You won't," Weston assured them, "because there ain't no such thing. My dear infants, the Lord made us different, and no vote can change His arrangements."

"That's what Mother said; I was quite astonished to have Mother pull off an opinion on me," Fred said.

"Your mother has a great many opinions, and mighty sensible ones, too."

[Pg 164]

She gave him a surprised look, like a child catching an older person in a foolish statement. "Oh, well," she said, "of course, it's hard for people of your generation to keep up with the procession."

If he flinched, nobody saw it. "You being the 'procession,' I suppose?" he said, raising an amiable eyebrow—but he did not feel amiable. Then he looked at his watch and said he must start.

"Oh, don't go!" Fred entreated.

"You two girls ought to be in bed," he said. They went with him and watched him crank his machine; as he threw in the clutch, he called back, a little anxiously, "Make her loaf, Laura! She's tired."

Indoors, while they were locking up, Laura giggled. "He's daft about you, Freddy!"

"Mr. Weston? My dear, you're mad! He looks on me as a granddaughter."

"Those aunts or cousins, or whatever they are, of his," Laura said, sleepily, "are at the hotel, and I went with Mother to call on them. The old one, who looks like an eagle, is perfectly sweet; but the pouter-pigeon one said that she did not think the young woman of to-day, who went into business, 'was calculated to make any man happy.' 'Course, I knew she was afraid you would catch 'dear Arthur'! But really—"

"Come on," Fred interrupted, starting up-stairs.

Laura stumbled along behind her. "Really, I think he is gone on you."

"Goose!" The idea was too absurd to discuss; instead, when she was combing her hair Fred called through[Pg 165] the partition that separated the tiny bedrooms and said she wanted to tell Laura something.

"Come in!" Laura called back; and Frederica, comb in hand, came in, and sat on the edge of the bed. At first she talked about Flora, who didn't like to come out to the camp, because it took her away from her beau. "The McKnight chauffeur is very attentive," Fred said; "fortunately for me, Jack's going off with the car for all of August, or I'm afraid she'd leave me, so as to get back to town. Isn't it funny how crazy women in the lower classes are to get married?"

Laura nodded, sleepily.

"Want me to read you Howard's last letter?" Fred said, and took it out of the pocket of her kimono.

Laura, curled up on the bed, listened. "He's right," she said, when Frederica, with due carelessness, read Howard's panegyrics on her brains; "you are terribly clever, Freddy."

"Go off!" Fred said. "Laura, he's awfully down on Jack McKnight. You wouldn't look at him, would you?"

"At Jack? The idea! If there wasn't another man in the world, I wouldn'............