“Did Mr. Carter let you have them?” Montague asked; and the other smiled a dry smile.

“We have them,” he said.  “And now the thing for you to do is to have your own surveyors go over the ground.  I imagine that when you get their reports, the proposition will look very different.”

These were the instructions which came in a letter from Price the next day; and with the help of Andrews Montague made the necessary arrangements, and the next night he left for New York.

He arrived upon a Friday afternoon.  He found that Alice had departed for her visit to the Prentices’, and that Oliver was in Newport, also.  There was an invitation from Mrs. Prentice to him to join them; as Price was away, he concluded that he would treat himself to a rest, and accordingly took an early train on Saturday morning.

Montague’s initiation into Society had taken place in the winter-time, and he had yet to witness its vacation activities.  When Society’s belles and dames had completed a season’s round of dinner-parties and dances, they were more or less near to nervous prostration, and Newport was the place which they had selected to retire to and recuperate.  It was an old-fashioned New England town, not far from the entrance to Long Island Sound, and from a village with several grocery shops and a tavern, it had been converted by a magic touch of Society into the most famous and expensive resort in the world.  Estates had been sold there for as much as a dollar a square foot, and it was nothing uncommon to pay ten thousand a month for a “cottage.”

The tradition of vacation and of the country was preserved in such terms as “cottage.”  You would be invited to a “lawn-party,” and you would find a blaze of illumination, and potted plants enough to fill a score of green-houses, and costumes and jewelled splendour suggesting the Field of the Cloth of Gold.  You would be invited to a “picnic” at Gooseberry Point, and when you went there, you would find gorgeous canopies spread overhead, and velvet carpets under foot, and scores of liveried lackeys in attendance, and every luxury one would have expected in a Fifth Avenue mansion.  You would take a cab to drive to this “picnic,” and it would cost you five dollars; yet you must on no account go without a cab.  Even if the destination was just around the corner, a stranger would commit a breach of the proprieties if he were to approach the house on foot.

Coming to Newport as Montague did, directly from the Mississippi Steel Mills, produced the strangest possible effect upon him.  He had seen the social splurge in the Metropolis, and had heard the fabulous prices that people had paid for things.  But these thousands and millions had seemed mere abstractions.  Now suddenly they had become personified—­he had seen where they came from, where all the luxury and splendour were produced!  And with every glance that he cast at the magnificence about him, he thought of the men who were toiling in the blinding heat of the blast-furnaces.