“Then you leave him entirely to me?”

“I hope you will regard his right to candid and open treatment.”

“He’s had nothing but the most open and candid treatment from me, mamma.  It’s you that wants to play fast and loose with him.  And, to tell you the truth, I believe he would like that a good deal better; I believe that, if there’s anything he hates, it’s openness and candor.”  Alma laughed, and put her arms round her mother, who could not help laughing a little, too.

II.

The winter did not renew for Christine and Mela the social opportunity which the spring had offered.  After the musicale at Mrs. Horn’s, they both made their party-call, as Mela said, in due season; but they did not find Mrs. Horn at home, and neither she nor Miss Vance came to see them after people returned to town in the fall.  They tried to believe for a time that Mrs. Horn had not got their cards; this pretence failed them, and they fell back upon their pride, or rather Christine’s pride.  Mela had little but her good-nature to avail her in any exigency, and if Mrs. Horn or Miss Vance had come to call after a year of neglect, she would have received them as amiably as if they had not lost a day in coming.  But Christine had drawn a line beyond which they would not have been forgiven; and she had planned the words and the behavior with which she would have punished them if they had appeared then.  Neither sister imagined herself in anywise inferior to them; but Christine was suspicious, at least, and it was Mela who invented the hypothesis of the lost cards.  As nothing happened to prove or to disprove the fact, she said, “I move we put Coonrod up to gittun’ it out of Miss Vance, at some of their meetun’s.”

“If you do,” said Christine, “I’ll kill you.”

Christine, however, had the visits of Beaton to console her, and, if these seemed to have no definite aim, she was willing to rest in the pleasure they gave her vanity; but Mela had nothing.  Sometimes she even wished they were all back on the farm.

“It would be the best thing for both of you,” said Mrs. Dryfoos, in answer to such a burst of desperation.  “I don’t think New York is any place for girls.”

“Well, what I hate, mother,” said Mela, “is, it don’t seem to be any place for young men, either.”  She found this so good when she had said it that she laughed over it till Christine was angry.

“A body would think there had never been any joke before.”

“I don’t see as it’s a joke,” said Mrs. Dryfoos.  “It’s the plain truth.”

“Oh, don’t mind her, mother,” said Mela.  “She’s put out because her old Mr. Beaton ha’r’t been round for a couple o’ weeks.  If you don’t watch out, that fellow ’ll give you the slip yit, Christine, after all your pains.”

“Well, there ain’t anybody to give you the slip, Mela,” Christine clawed back.