Between the end of the college year and the departure on the journey westward there was to be an interval of three weeks. Mrs. Ansley had insisted on that. She was a mother. For eight or nine months she had seen almost nothing of her boy. Now if he was to be taken from her for the summer, and for another college year after that, she might as well not have a son at all.
Tom was considering where he should pass the intervening time when the following note unnerved him.
Dear Mr. Whitelaw
Mother wants to know if when college closes, and Guy joins us in New Hampshire, you will not come with him for the three weeks before you start on your trip. Please do. I shall have got there by that time, and I haven't seen you now for nearly two years. We must have a lot of notes to compare, and ought to be busy comparing them. Do come then, for our sakes if not for your own. You will give us a great deal of pleasure.
Yours very sincerely,
Hildred Ansley.
His heart failed him. It failed him because of the details as to customs, etiquette, and dress he didn't know anything about. He should be called on to speak fluently in a language of which he was only
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 beginning to spell out the little words. It seemed to him at first that he couldn't accept the invitation.
Then, not to accept it began to look like cowardice. He would never get anywhere if he funked what he didn't know. When you didn't know you went to work and found out. You couldn't find out unless you put yourself in the way of seeing what other people did. After twenty-four hours of reflection he penned the simplest form of note. Thanking Hildred for her mother's kind invitation, he accepted it. Before putting his letter in the post, however, he dropped in to call on Guy. Guy, who was strumming the Love-Death of Isolde, tossed his comments over his shoulder as he thumped out the passion.
"That's Hildred. She's made mother do it. Nutty on that sort of thing."
Tom's heart failed him again. "Nutty on what sort of thing?"
Isolde's anguish mounted and mounted till it seemed as if it couldn't mount any higher, and yet went on mounting. "Oh, well! She's toted it up that you haven't got a home—that for three weeks after college closes you'll be on the town—and so on."
"I see."
"All the same, come along. I'd just as soon. Dad won't be there hardly. The old lady'll be booming about, but you needn't mind her. You'll have your room and grub for those three weeks, and that's all you've got to think about. Anyhow, it's bats in the attic with Hildred the minute it comes to a lame dog."
While Guy's fat figure swayed over the piano, Isolde's great heart broke. Tom went back to his
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 room and wrote a second answer, regretting that owing to the pressure of his engagements he would be unable....
And then there came another reaction. What did it matter if Hildred Ansley was opening the door out of pity? Pity was one of the loveliest traits of character. Only a cad would resent it. He sent his first reply.
Having done this, he felt it right to go and call on Mrs. Ansley. He was sure she didn't want him in New Hampshire, but by taking it for granted that she did he would discount some of her embarrassment.
As Mrs. Ansley was not at home Pilcher held out a little silver tray. Tom understood that he should have had a card to put in it. A card was something of which he had never hitherto felt the need. He said so to Pilcher frankly.
Pilcher's stony medieval face, the face of a saint on the portal of some primitive cathedral, smiled rarely, but when it did it smiled engagingly.
"You'll find a visitin' card very 'andy, Mr. Tom, now that you're so big. Mr. Guy has had one this long spell back."
It was a lead. In shy unobtrusive ways Pilcher had often shown himself his friend. Tom confessed his yearning for a card if only he knew how to order one.
"I'll show you one of Mr. Guy's. He always has the right thing. I'll find out too where he gets them done. If you'll step in, Mr. Tom...."
As he waited in the dining room, with the good-natured Ansley ancestor smiling down at him, there
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 floated through Tom's mind a phrase from the Bible as taught by Mrs. Tollivant. "The Lord sent His angel." Wasn't that what He was doing now, and wasn't the angel taking Pilcher's guise? When the heavenly messenger came back with the card Tom went straight to his point.
"Pilcher, I wonder if you'd mind helping me?"
"I'd do it and welcome, Mr. Tom."
Mr. Tom told of his invitation to New Hampshire, and of his ignorance of what to do and wear. If Pilcher would only give him a hint....
He could not have found a better guide. Pilcher explained that a few little things had to be as second nature. A few other little things were uncertain points as to which it was always permissible to ask. In the way of second nature Tom would find sporting flannels and tennis shoes an essential. So he would find a dinner-jacket suit, with the right kind of shirt, collar, tie, shoes, and socks to wear with it. As to things permissible to ask about, Pilcher could more easily explain them when they were both in the same house. Occasions would crop up, but could not be foreseen.
"The real gentry is ever afraid of showin' that they don't know. They takes not knowin' as a joke. Many's the time when I've been waitin' at table I've 'eard a born gentleman ask the born lady sittin' next to 'im which'd be the right fork to use, and she'd say that she didn't know but was lookin' round to see what other people done. That's what they calls hease of manner, Mr. Tom."
Under the Ansley roof he would meet none but the
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 gentry born. Any one of them would respect him more for asking when he didn't know. It was only the second class that bothered about being so terribly correct, and they were not invited by Mrs. Ansley. In addition to these consoling facts Tom could always fall back on him, Pilcher, as a referee.
Being a guest in a community in which two years earlier he had been a chauffeur Tom found easier than he had expected because he worked out a formula. He framed his formula before going to New Hampshire.
"Servants are servants and masters are masters because they divide themselves into classes. The one is above, and is recognized as being above; the other is below, and is recognized as being below. I shall be neither below nor above; or I shall be both. I will not go into a class. As far as I know how I'll be everybody's equal."
He had, however, to find another formula for this.
"You're everybody's equal when you know you are. Whatever you know will go of itself. The trouble I see with the bumptious American, who claims that he's as good as anybody else, is that he thinks only of forcing himself to the level of the highest; he doesn't begin at the bottom, and cover all the ground between the bottom and the top. I'm going to do that. I shall be at home among the lot of them. To be at home I must feel at home. I mustn't condescend to the boys of two years ago who'll still be driving cars, and I mustn't put on airs to be fit for Mrs. Ansley's drawing-room. I must be myself. I mustn't be ashamed because I've been in a
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 humble position; and I mustn't be swanky because I've been put in a better one. I must be natural; I must be big. That'll give me the ease of manner Pilcher talks about."
With these principles as a basis of behavior, his embarrassments sprang from another source. They began at the station in Keene. He knew he was to be met; and he supposed it would be by Guy.
"Oh, here you are!"
She came on him suddenly in the crowd, tall, free in her movements, always a little older than her age. If in the nearly two years since their last meeting changes had come to him, more had apparently come to her. She was a woman, while he was not yet a man. She was easy, independent, taking the lead with natural authority. From the first instant of shaking hands he felt in her something solicitous and protective.
It showed itself in the little things as to which awkwardness or diffidence on his part might have been presumed. So as not to leave him in doubt of what he ought to do, she took the initiative with an air of quiet, competent command. She led the way to the car; she told him to throw his handbags and coat into the back part of it; she made him sit beside her as she drove.
"No, I'm going to drive," she insisted, when he had offered to take the wheel. "I want you to see how well I can do it. I like showing off. This is my own car. I drove it all last summer."
They talked about cars and their makes because the topic was an easy one.
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Speeding out of Keene, they left behind them the meadows of the Ashuelot to climb into a country with which Nature had been busy ever since her first flaming forces had cooled down to form a world. Cooling down and flinging up, she had tossed into the azoic age a tumble of mountains higher doubtless than Andes or Alps. Barren, stupendous, appalling, they would not have been easy for man, when he came, to live with in comfort, had not the great Earth-Mother gone to some pains to polish them down. Taking her leisure through eons of years, she brought from the north her implement, the ice. Without haste, without rest, a few inches in a century, she pushed it against the barrier she meant to mold and penetrate.
As a dyke before the pressure of a flood, the barrier broke here, broke there, and yet as a whole m............