This festival, on which we should like to linger, but cannot, took place at the new Dwyer residence.  For six months the Victorian mansion opposite Uncle Tom’s house had been sightless, with blue blinds drawn down inside the plate glass windows.  And the yellow stone itself was not so yellow as it once had been, but had now the appearance of soiled manilla wrapping paper, with black streaks here and there where the soot had run.  The new Dwyer house was of grey stone, Georgian and palatial, with a picture-gallery twice the size of the old one; a magnificent and fitting pioneer in a new city of palaces.

Westward the star of Empire—­away from the smoke.  The Dwyer mansion, with its lawns and gardens and heavily balustraded terrace, faced the park that stretched away like a private estate to the south and west.  That same park with its huge trees and black forests that was Ultima Thule in Honora’s childhood; in the open places there had been real farms and hayricks which she used to slide down with Peter while Uncle Tom looked for wild flowers in the fields.  It had been separated from the city in those days by an endless country road, like a Via Claudia stretching towards mysterious Germanian forests, and it was deemed a feat for Peter to ride thither on his big-wheeled bicycle.  Forest Park was the country, and all that the country represented in Honora’s childhood.  For Uncle Tom on a summer’s day to hire a surrey at Braintree’s Livery Stable and drive thither was like—­to what shall that bliss be compared in these days when we go to Europe with indifference?

And now Lindell Road—­the Via Claudia of long, ago—­had become Lindell Boulevard, with granitoid sidewalks.  And the dreary fields through which it had formerly run were bristling with new houses in no sense Victorian, and which were the first stirrings of a national sense of the artistic.  The old horse-cars with the clanging chains had disappeared, and you could take an electric to within a block of the imposing grille that surrounded the Dwyer grounds.  Westward the star!

Fading fast was the glory of that bright new district on top of the second hill from the river where Uncle Tom was a pioneer.  Soot had killed the pear trees, the apricots behind the lattice fence had withered away; asphalt and soot were slowly sapping the vitality of the maples on the sidewalk; and sometimes Uncle Tom’s roses looked as though they might advantageously be given a coat of paint, like those in Alice in Wonderland.  Honora should have lived in the Dwyers’ mansion-people who are capable of judging said so.  People who saw her at the garden party said she had the air of belonging in such surroundings much more than Emily, whom even budding womanhood had not made beautiful.  And Eliphalet Hopper Dwyer, if his actions meant anything, would have welcomed her to that house, or built her another twice as fine, had she deigned to give him the least encouragement.

Cinderella!  This was what she facetiously called herself one July morning of that summer she was eighteen.