Also, three times a week he boarded the Sandy Hook boat, returning always at night because he dared not remain at the reservation lest an imperative telegram from Edgewater find him unable to respond.

So, when in November the first few hurrying snow-flakes whirled in among the city’s canons of masonry and iron, Selwyn had already systematised his winter schedule; and when Nina opened her house, returning from Lenox with Eileen to do so, she found that Selwyn had made his own arrangements for the winter, and that, according to the programme, neither she nor anybody else was likely to see him oftener than one evening in a week.

To Boots she complained bitterly, having had visions of Selwyn and Gerald as permanent fixtures of family support during the season now imminent.

“I cannot understand,” she said, “why Philip is acting this way.  He need not work like that; there is no necessity, because he has a comfortable income.  If he is determined to maintain a stuffy apartment somewhere, of course I won’t insist on his coming to us as he ought to, but to abandon us in this manner makes me almost indignant.  Besides, it’s having anything but a salutary effect on Eileen.”

“What effect is it having on Eileen?” inquired Boots curiously.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Nina, coming perilously close to a pout; “but I see symptoms—­indeed I do, Boots!—­symptoms of shirking the winter’s routine.  It’s to be a gay season, too, and it’s only her second.  The idea of a child of that age informing me that she’s had enough of the purely social phases of this planet!  Did you ever hear anything like it?  One season, if you please—­and she finds it futile, stale, and unprofitable to fulfil the duties expected of her!”

Boots began to laugh, but it was no laughing matter to Nina, and she said so vigorously.

“It’s Philip’s fault.  If he’d stand by us this winter she’d go anywhere—­and enjoy it, too.  Besides, he’s the only man able to satisfy the blue-stocking in her between dances.  But he’s got this obstinate mania for seclusion, and he seldom comes near us, and it’s driving Eileen into herself, Boots—­and every day I catch her hair slumping over her ears—­and once I discovered a lead-pencil behind ’em!—­and a monograph on the Ming dynasty in her lap, all marked up with notes!  Oh, Boots!  Boots!  I’ve given up all hopes of that brother of mine for her—­but she could marry anybody, if she chose—­anybody!—­and she could twist the entire social circus into a court of her own and dominate everything.  Everybody knows it; everybody says it! . . .  And look at her!—­indifferent, listless, scarcely civil any longer to her own sort, but galvanised into animation the moment some impossible professor or artist or hairy scientist flutters batlike into a drawing-room where he doesn’t belong unless he’s hired to be amusing!  And that sounds horridly snobbish, I know; I am a snob about Eileen, but not about myself because it doesn’t harm me to make round wonder-eyes at a Herr Professor or gaze intensely into the eyes of an artist when he’s ornamental; it doesn’t make my hair come down over my ears to do that sort of thing, and it doesn’t corrupt me into slinking off to museum lectures or spending mornings prowling about the Society Library or the Chinese jades in the Metropolitan—­”