Except for the Lakeville ladies, so looked down upon by Flora, Fred had very few visitors that summer. Even Laura did not come very often, though Lakeville was only five miles from Laketon. Perhaps she was afraid of being asked questions. In September both girls were invited by a school friend to come to the seashore for two or three weeks, but Laura waited to know that Fred had declined the invitation ("I can't fool with Society. I'm on my job!" said Fred) before she, Laura, accepted it.

There was, however, one formal call which gave Frederica great joy; her grandmother and Miss Eliza Graham came over from the Laurels to see her—and she never behaved more outrageously! She told Mr. Weston afterward that she had had the time of her life joshing Mrs. Holmes. He assured her that she was an imp, but that he would gladly have paid the price of admission if he had only known that the circus was going to take place. He asked his cousin about it afterward, but her description of the scene was not so funny as Fred's. Indeed, it was rather pathetic—poor Freddy, fighting her grandmother, while Miss Eliza stood outside the ring, so to speak, and watched, pityingly.

"For there's nothing one can do for her, Arthur," Miss[Pg 173] Eliza told him; "she's got to get some very hard knocks before she'll give up advising the Creator how to manage His world."

She and Mr. Weston had found a deserted spot on the veranda at the Laurels, and she told him what she thought of Freddy. "It's a sort of violent righteousness that possesses the child," she said. "Where does she come from, Arthur? That mother! That grandmother! She must be a foundling."

"Her father had power. His righteousness was not very violent, but his temper was."

"She must make her mother very unhappy."

"Yeast makes dough uncomfortable, I suppose," he admitted.

"She's an unscrupulous truth-teller," Miss Graham said, and repeated some of the impertinently accurate things that Frederica, sitting in her ugly little living-room, with the Japanese fans on the walls, and yellow "Votes for Women" pennons over the doors, had flung at Mrs. Holmes. "Her grandmother said the 'women of to-day cheapened themselves'; to which she replied that 'the women of yesterday were dear at any price'!"

"She told me she had merely been truthful," Mr. Weston said. "Justifying herself on the ground of Truth is Fred's form of repentance. But the girl suffers, Cousin Eliza!"

"She'll have to suffer a good deal before she'll amount to anything," Miss Eliza said, dryly; "I wanted to shake her! Arthur, if you had any missionary spirit, you would marry her."

[Pg 174]

"But Cousin Mary says she is 'not a young woman who is calculated'—"

They both laughed. "Nonsense! If she gets a master, she'll make him happy. A good-natured boy won't do. The gray mare would be the better horse. Marry her and beat her."

"Maitland will have to do the beating," he said. But he could not evade her.

"Don't be a fool. Take her! I know you want her."

"I do," he confessed. "But the little matter of her not wanting me seems to be an obstacle."

Miss Eliza, her old eagle head silhouetted against the dazzle of the lake, meditated; then she said, "Is she engaged to Mr. Maitland?"

"No, but she's going to be. Besides, dear lady, I am forty-seven and she is twenty-six. Youth calls to Youth! Please don't suggest that she might prefer to be an 'old man's darling.'"

"You're not an old man. But the average young man—if he fell in love with her—would be under her thumb."

"Why do you say 'if'? Maitland has fallen in love with her, head over heels! He can't stop talking about her brains for five minutes at a time!"

Miss Eliza gave him a keen look. "Well, perhaps human nature has changed since my time. Then, a boy didn't fall in love with a girl's brains, though a grown man sometimes did. Cleverness in a girl is like playfulness in a kitten; it amuses a middle-aged man. The next thing he knows, he's in love!"

"Amuses!" Arthur Weston broke in, cynically; "to[Pg 175] 'amuse' a middle-aged man doesn't seem a very satisfying occupation for a girl. Don't you think she'd rather have a boy's ridiculously solemn devotion?"

"But don't I tell you?—Love comes next! And I know you are in love, because you are so foolish. Arthur, I'm ashamed of you! Do have some spunk. Get her! Get her! I don't believe she's in love with that boy."

He gave a rather hopeless laugh. "Oh, yes, she is. I haven't the ghost of a chance; besides—" he paused, took off his glasses, and put them on again, with deliberation—"besides, if I had a chance, I'd be a cur to take it. As you know, I had a blow below the belt. A man never quite gets his wind again, after a little affair like mine. It would be great luck for me to have Fred, but what sort of luck would it be for her to spend her life 'amusing' me?"

"Nonsense! I won't listen to such—" she paused, while three girls, romping along, arm in arm, swept past them, down the veranda. "Pretty things, aren't they?" she said, looking after them with tender old eyes; "how lovely Youth is!—even when it does its best to be ugly as to clothes and manners, like two of those youngsters. They didn't even see us, they were so absorbed in being young, bless their hearts! The outside one who bowed is a Wharton girl. She is a charming child, charming! And doing wonderfully at college. But those others—!"

"Awful," he agreed. "Cousin Eliza, what's the matter with women, nowadays?"

"Perfectly simple. They are drunk!"

"Drunk?"

"With the sudden sense of freedom. My dear boy,[Pg 176] reflect: When you were born—no, you're too young"—he waved a deprecating hand, but he liked the phrase—"when I w............