and James the butler got his conge.  Mr. Stuyvesant induced his mother to make Clarice her companion, and then he met her at picture exhibitions, and in Central Park by chance, and next—­every one will recall the exciting scene—­he paid passionate court to her “in the pink sewing-room, where she had reclined on soft silken sofa pillows, with her tiny slippers upon the head of a lion whose skin formed a rug before her.”  Clarice thought him unprincipled, and repulsed him.  When the widow recovered her health and went to Newport, the former maid met all society there.  A gifted lawyer fell a victim to Clarice’s charms, and, on a moonlit porch overlooking the sea, warned her against young Stuyvesant.  On learning that the roue had already attempted to weaken the girl’s high principles, to rescue her he made her his wife.  He was soon afterward elected Mayor of New York, but remained a suitor for his beautiful wife’s approbation, waiting upon her in gilded halls with the fidelity of a knight of old.

Cordelia adored Clarice and fancied herself just like her—­beautiful, ambitious, poor, with a future of her own carving.  Of course such a case is phenomenal.  No other young woman was ever so ridiculous.

“You have on your besht dresh, Cordalia,” said her mother.  “It’ll soon be wore out, an’ ye’ll git no other, wid your father oidle, an’ no wan airnin’ a pinny but you an’ Johnny an’ Sarah Rosabel.  Fwhere are ye goin’?”

“I won’t be gone long,” said Cordelia, half out of the hall door.

“Cordalia Angeline, darlin’,” said her mother, “mind, now, doan’t let them be talkin’ about ye, fwherever ye go—­shakin’ yer shkirts an’ rollin’ yer eyes.  It doan’t luk well for a gyurl to be makin’ hersel’ attractive.”

“Oh, mother, I’m not attractive, and you know it.”

With her head full of meeting Jerry Donahue, Cordelia tripped down the four flights of stairs to the street door.  As Clarice, she thought of Jerry as James the butler; in fact, all the beaux she had had of late were so many repetitions of the unfortunate James in her mind.  All the other characters in her acquaintance were made to fit more or less loosely into her romance life, and she thought of everything she did as if it all happened in Lulu Jane Tilley’s beautiful novel.  Let the reader fancy, if possible, what a feat that must have been for a tenement girl who had never known what it was to have a parlor, in our sense of the word, who had never known courtship to be carried on indoors, except in a tenement hallway, and who had to imagine that the sidewalk flirtations of actual life were meetings in private parks, that the wharves and public squares and tenement roofs where she had seen all the young men and women making love were heavily carpeted drawing-rooms, broad manor, house verandas, and the fragrant conservatories of luxurious mansions!  But Cordelia managed all this mental necromancy easily, to her own satisfaction.