The Vacation Of The Kelwyns E-Book

William Dean Howells

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 348

Beschreibung

'The Vacation of the Kelwyns' was written at the time of his greatest literary activity but for purely personal reasons was denied publication by him during his lifetime. The exquisite delineation of the New England character, as affected by the Shaker faith, and the delicate love story set against the quaint rural background, will undoubtedly rank this with the most distinguished of Mr. Howells' works.

Leseprobe

The Vacation of the Kelwyns

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

The Vacation of the Kelwyns, W. D. Howells

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

ISBN: 9783849657932

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

CONTENTS:

I1

II3

III6

IV.. 10

V.. 15

VI22

VII25

VIII33

IX.. 38

X.. 42

XI48

XII52

XIII58

XIV.. 66

XV.. 68

XVI71

XVII80

XVIII87

XIX.. 92

XX.. 97

XXI106

XXII112

XXIII118

XXIV.. 130

XXV.. 137

XXVI142

XXVII149

XXVIII158

I

Kelwyn's salary as a lecturer in the post-graduate courses would not have been enough for his family to live upon; but his wife had some money of her own, and this with his salary enabled them to maintain themselves upon the scale of refined frugality which was the rule in the university town, and to indulge, now and then, a guarded hospitality. Like the other university people, they spent their whole income on their living, except the sum which Kelwyn paid for his life insurance. They kept two maids, and had, in common with four other university families, the use of one undivided one-fifth of a man, who took care of their furnace and shoveled the snow off their paths in winter, and cut their grass in the spring and fall; in the summer when they were away they let the grass tangle at will.

Mrs. Kelwyn passed this season largely in a terror of moths, especially the hairy sort called buffalo-bugs, which began to introduce themselves by that name at the date of our story. In dreams and in many a fearful reverie she saw them gorging themselves upon her carpets and furniture and blankets and all her other woolens, and treating the camphor the things were put up in as an agreeable condiment. She was, in fact, a New England housekeeper of the most exacting sort, with a conscience that gave those she loved very little peace, in its manifold scruples, anxieties, and premonitions. She was so far in the divine confidence as to be able to prophesy events with much precision, especially disastrous events, and especially disastrous events which her husband thought would not come to pass. In this, as in other things, she was entirely devoted to him and to their children; to hear her talk you would suppose there was a multitude of them.

She pampered Kelwyn and flattered him, and she did what she could to make him believe that because he had, after many years as a post-graduate student, become a post-graduate lecturer, he was something different from other men, and merited attention from destiny. He was really a very well-read and careful scholar in his department of Historical Sociology, with no thought of applying his science to his own life or conduct. In person, he was not tall, but he was very straight; he carried himself with a sort of unintentional pomp, and walked with short, stiff steps. He was rather dim behind the spectacles he wore; but he was very pleasant when he spoke, and his mind was not as dry as his voice; when pushed to the wall he was capable of a joke; in fact, he had a good deal of ancestral Yankee humor which he commonly repressed, but which came out in the stress put upon him by his wife's requisitions in hypothetical cases of principle and practice. He suffered at times from indigestion; but he was indefatigably industrious, and had thought the blond hair thin on his head in places; he wore a reddish mustache.

He was either not quite so tall as his wife, or he looked not quite so tall, because of her skirts, and her aquiline profile; she seemed always to have him in charge when they were together, which made him appear smaller still; they were both of about the same blondness, though hers tended rather more to dust color.

Kelwyn's father had been first a farm boy, and then a country merchant, who reserved him for an intellectual career; and his career since he first entered school had been as purely intellectual as if he had been detached from the soil by generations of culture and affluence. His associations had always been with nice people, in college and afterward; he liked that sort, and they liked him, for Kelwyn was a pleasant fellow, and was noticeably a gentleman, if not a gentleman by birth. In America society does not insist that one shall be a gentleman by birth; that is generally impossible; but it insists that he shall be intelligent and refined, and have the right sort of social instincts; and then it yields him an acceptance which ignores any embarrassing facts in his origin, and asks nothing but that he shall ignore them too. Kelwyn did this so completely that he never thought of them. His father and mother were now dead, and he had been an only child, so that he had not even a duty to the past. All his duties were to the present, and they were so agreeable that he could easily discharge them with conscience and credit. In a day when people were just beginning to look into sociology, and most people were still regarding it as the driest branch on the tree of knowledge, he made it one of the most important of the post-graduate courses at the university. The students liked him, and they took such a gratifying interest in their work under him that some of them had a habit, which he encouraged, of coming to talk with him about it at his house out of hours. He made them very welcome in his library, and even offered to offer them cigars, which they refused out of regard to Kelwyn's not smoking himself; and when one of them would begin, " Do you think, Mr. Kelwyn," and then go on to ask him some question on one of his favorite points in the morning's lecture, Kelwyn would feel that his office was a very high one, and could not be magnified too much.

His wife often wished that the faculty and the board of overseers could know the influence he had with the students; but, in fact, Kelwyn's usefulness was well known to them, and his promotion to an under-professorship in the body of the university was only a question of time. He was respected outside of the university as well as in it. In politics he was a reformer, and he was faithful in a good deal of committee work, when his college work alone was killing him, as Mrs. Kelwyn said more than once. She herself did not shirk a share in the local charities, and she would have done more in that way, if she had not felt that Mr. Kelwyn and the children had the first claim upon her.

II

ROBUST health would not have been in keeping with Kelwyn's vocation or circumstances; but his digestion was not so delicate as Mrs. Kelwyn believed when she took him every summer away from, the well-netted comfort of his study (they had wire nettings at every door and window of the house, and even over the tops of the chimneys, for it had been found that mosquitoes sometimes got in down the fines) and set him unnetted amid the insects of the open country. She had thought a great deal about the best places to go to, and she had gone to a great many places, each better in prospect and worse in retrospect than the other, but sufficing, for the time, to hold Kelwyn from his books, and give him what she called a rest; he felt it as an anguish of longing to get back to his work. They had not as yet imagined having a country house of their own, such as nearly everybody of their condition has now; even the summer shell was little known in the early eighteen-seventies, and the cheap and simple cottages of the better sort common in our day were undreamed of. Like other nice families of their circumstance and acquaintance, thirty or thirty-five years ago, the Kelwyns engaged board during the winter at some farm-house in the Massachusetts or New Hampshire hill country, going up to look at the place on a mild day of the January thaw, and settling themselves in it early in June. Their understanding would be for good beds and plain country fare, with plenty of milk and eggs and berries; and they would get mattresses of excelsior faced on one side with refuse wool; and premature beef and tardy lamb, with last year's potatoes, and no leaf of the contemporary vegetation till far into July. Kelwyn himself had a respite from all this during commencement week, when he went home and slept in his own dwelling, taking his meals at the nearest boarding-house, where they had the spring fruits and vegetables, tender steak, and cream such as never appeared upon the unstinted milk of the farm.

Mrs. Kelwyn's ideal was a place where there were no other boarders, and where they could have their meals at a table of their own, apart from the farmer's family; but even when she could realize this it was not in the perfection that her nerves demanded. If she made Kelwyn take all the rooms in the house, still there was some nook where the farmer's wife contrived to stow a boarder who ate with the farm family, or a visiting friend who woke the Kelwyns at dawn with the plaint of the parlor organ; the rest of the day they had the sole use of the parlor, and could keep the organ pacified. The farmer's wife imagined that she had fulfilled the agreement for a private table when she had put everything on it at once, and shut the Kelwyns in to take care of themselves. After the first relay of griddle cakes she expected them to come out to the kitchen for the next; and to get hot water from the kettle and cold water from the pump, as they needed either. Kelwyn did not mind this so much as his wife, who minded it chiefly for his sake as wholly out of keeping with the dignity of a university lecturer; for it fell to him mostly to do these things.

In the last place she had so often undergone the hardship of making Kelwyn hurry out untimely in the morning to fill the wash-pitcher, forgotten overnight by the hostess, that she was quite disheartened, and came home in the fall feeling that she must give up the notion of farm board thereafter, and try to find some small hotel not too public and not too expensive for them. The winter passed and the spring was well advanced, and still they had not found just such a hotel as they wanted, though they had asked among all the nice people they knew, and Kelwyn had looked several of the places up. He would have been willing to try another farm-house, and still more willing to pass the summer in town, under his own well-shaded roof; but Mrs. Kelwyn was not willing to do either, and he was by no means resting from his search, but merely rejoicing in a little respite, when one day he received a very odd visit.

This visit was paid him by a quaintly dressed old man, who said he was an Elder of the people called Shakers, and that he had come to Kelwyn because of some account he had read of the kind of work he was doing in the university, and had thought he would be pleased, in his quality of lecturer on Historical Sociology, to know something of the social experiment of the Shakers. It presently appeared that he had counted so much upon Kelwyn's interest in it as to believe that he might make it the theme of a lecture, and he had come with a little printed tract on the Shaker life and doctrine which he had written himself, and which he now gave Kelwyn with the hope, very politely expressed, that it might be useful to him in the preparation of his lectures. The whole affair was to Kelwyn's mind so full of a sweet innocence that he felt it invited the most delicate handling on his part, and he used all the niceness he was master of in thanking the old man for his pamphlet, without giving him the expectation that he would really treat of Shakerism before the students of his post-graduate course. Inwardly he was filled with amusement at the notion of his august science stooping to inquire into such a lowly experiment as that of those rustic communists; but outwardly he treated it with grave deference, and said that he should have the greatest pleasure in reading the pamphlet of the Elder. He was curious enough to ask some questions about the Family to which his visitor belonged, and then about the general conditions of Shakerism. It amused him again when his visitor answered, from a steadfast faith in its doctrine, that his sect was everywhere in decay, and that his own Family was now a community of aging men and women, and must soon die out unless it was recruited from the world outside. He seemed to feel that he had a mission to the gentler phases of this world, and he did not conceal that he had come with some hope that if the character of Shakerism could be truly set forth to such cultivated youth as must attend Kelwyn's lectures, considerable accessions from their number might follow. The worst thing in the present condition of Shakerism, he said, was that the community was obliged to violate the very law of its social being, for the brethren were too feeble to work in the fields themselves, and were forced to employ hireling labor. Kelwyn learned from his willing avowals that they had some thousands of acres which they could only let grow up in forests for the crops of timber they would finally yield, and that it was not easy always to find tenants for the farms they had to let. He spoke of one farm which would be given, with one of the Family dwellings, to a suitable tenant at a rent so ridiculously low that Kelwyn said, with a laugh, if the Shakers would furnish the house, though twenty-five rooms were rather more than his family needed, he did not know but he might take the farm himself for the summer. He went into a little history of their experience of farm board and the defeat of their aspirations for a house that they could control without putting the care of housekeeping upon his wife; and he ended by confessing that at the present moment they were without any prospects whatever for the summer.

III

The Elder did not seem to enter very eagerly into the matter, as if he were not expected to do so; he said it would not be easy to find just what they wanted, and when he took his leave he left Kelwyn with the feeling that he regarded his aspiration with a certain cautious disapproval. Kelwyn made a joke of this to his wife, in telling her of his visitor, and he was the more surprised, two days later, to get a letter from him saying that he had talked over with the Family Kelwyn's notion of furnishing the house, and they had decided to act upon it if he was still disposed to hire the place for a year. In this case, the Elder wrote, they knew of a man and his wife who would be willing to come into the house and board them at a much lower rate than usual, if he could have the produce of the farm, and the house for the rest of the year after they left it. The rent would be the same as for the house unfurnished.

Kelwyn's wife first provisionally disciplined him for giving his correspondent a groundless hope that he would do anything so wild; but when he convinced her that he was innocent she began to find it not such a bad scheme, and she ended by driving him off that very day to look at the place, which was just over the border in southern New Hampshire. There was no time to be lost, for the Shakers might offer it to somebody else if he did not act promptly. She made him telegraph them that he was coming, and the boy who drove him over to the Shaker village from the station carried his dispatch to them. He came home in a rapture with the place. The house, which had been left vacant by the shrinkage of the community, was almost as vast as a college dormitory, but it was curiously homelike at the same time, with a great kitchen, and a running spring of delicious water piped into it; a dining-room which had been the Family refectory and looked eastward through the leaves of embowering elms across beautiful country to Mount Ponkwasset in the distance; the choice of a multitude of airy bedrooms; and the hall where the Shaker Family used to dance for a parlor or sitting-room. The only trouble was that they might be lost in the huge mansion; but, if they settled themselves on one floor, they could perhaps find one another at mealtimes. Kelwyn drew a plan, and showed how they could take the second story, and leave the first to the farmer's family. The whole house was deliciously cool, and there were fireplaces where they could have a blaze in chilly weather, and cheer themselves with the flame at night. The high open plateau where the house stood, not far from the Shaker village which had dried away from it, was swept by pure breezes that blew in at every window, and made mosquitoes impossible and nettings superfluous.

" Flies," Mrs. Kelwyn suggested.

" I don't believe there would be any flies," Kelwyn returned; and then she accused him of being infatuated.

She felt the need of greater strictness with him because she knew herself hopelessly taken with his report, which she did not believe exaggerated. " And the farmer, did you see him or his wife? Because that's the most important matter."

" Yes, I understood that. But they were not living in the neighborhood, and I couldn't get at them. The man has been in the Shakers' employ, off and on, and they said his habits were good; they described the woman as a quiet, inoffensive person. They are people who have always had rather a hard time, and have never been able to get a place of their own. They wanted to take this place, but they didn't feel sure they could meet the rent. I suppose it would be a godsend if we took it for them. But we're not to consider that. The question is whether we want it; and I knew we couldn't decide till we had seen the people. The Shakers thought they could send the man down in a day or two, and then we could satisfy ourselves."

" And you haven't committed yourself?"

" Certainly not."

" Well, you have managed very prudently, Elmer," said Mrs. Kelwyn. She added with an impulse of the sudden fear that springs from security itself, " I hope you haven't lost the chance."

Kelwyn resented the imputation of over-caution, but he only answered, rather loftily, " I don't think there's any danger."

They began to talk of it as an accomplished fact, and it grew upon them in this vantage. They saw what a very perfect thing it would be if it were the thing at all. They would have complete control of the situation. The house would be their house, and the farmer would be their tenant at will. If they did not like him or his wife, if they did not find them capable or faithful, they could turn them out-of-doors any day; and they could not be turned out themselves, or molested, so long as they paid the Shakers the absurd trifle they asked for rent. It seemed impossible that they could fail of their pleasure in such circumstances, but Mrs. Kelwyn, merely in the interest of abstract knowledge, carried her scrutiny so far as to ask, " And could you turn him out of the farm, too, if they didn't do well in the house?"

Kelwyn had really not considered this point," but he said, " I don't know that I should think it quite right to do that after the man had got his crops in."

" No," said Mrs. Kelwyn, " of course not," and in a generous revulsion of feeling she added, " It will be a great opportunity for the poor things."

" Yes, I have thought of that," said Kelwyn. " They will have their rent free so long as they behave themselves, and if we find the arrangement works there is no reason why we should not continue it from year to year indefinitely. Of course," he added, " we mustn't pretend that we are making the arrangement on their account. We are primarily doing it for ourselves."

" Yes, charity begins at home," said Mrs. Kelwyn, thoughtfully, but there was a vague dissatisfaction in her voice.

Kelwyn smiled. " Were you thinking it didn't?" he asked.

" Why, yes," she answered, as if surprised into the admission. " Were you, too?"

" It struck me as rather a hollow-hearted saying; I don't know why. I never questioned it before. But I fancy it's something else that begins at home, and that charity begins away from home."

" I don't believe it's very well to look at those things in that spirit exactly," said Mrs. Kelwyn. " We can make anything appear ugly by putting it in a strange light. Besides, I don't think that this is a matter of charity, quite."

" No, it's most distinctly a matter of business. Ethically considered, it is merely a thing that is right in itself, and the good that may flow from it is none the less good for being incidental. That is the way that most of the good in the world has come about. The history of civilization is that of certain people who wished to better 'their own condition, and made others wish to do the same by the spectacle of their success." Kelwyn made a mental note of his notion for use in a lecture. It seemed to him novel, but he must think a little more whether it was tenable. Perhaps he could throw it out in the form of a suggestion.

His wife could not dwell in the region of speculation even with him; it is perhaps the weakness of their sex that obliges women to secure themselves in the practical. She said, " Well, then, all we can do is to wait until the man comes. Then, if we think they can manage for us, we can close the bargain at once. But don't let the place slip through your fingers, Elmer, The Shakers may have offered it to someone else, and you had better write to them, and tell them we think very well of it, and will decide as soon as we see the man."

They talked a great deal of the affair for the next day or two, and they somehow transmuted the financial disability of their prospective tenants into something physical; they formed the habit of speaking of them as " those poor little people," and with perhaps undue sense of their own advantage they figured them as of anxious and humble presence, fearful of losing the great chance of their lives. It was impossible, in this view of them, for the Kelwyns to intend them anything but justice. Without being sentimentalists, they both saw that they must not abuse those people's helplessness in any way. They decided that they would offer to pay them the full amount of board which they usually paid for board in the summer, after taking out, of course, a certain sum for the rent during the time they were with them; the rest of the year's rent they would forgive them. This seemed to the Kelwyns very handsome on their part, and the fact that they were to have the range of the whole house, instead of two rooms, as they had hitherto had at farmhouses, did not appear to them too much in the circumstances.

IV

They had no right to complain, but it certainly did not comport with their prepossessions that the farmer, when he came, should arrive in the proportions of a raw-boned giant, with an effect of hard-woodedness, as if he were hewn out of hickory, with the shag-bark left on in places; his ready-made clothes looked as hard as he. He had on his best behavior as well as his best clothes, but the corners of his straight wide mouth dropped sourly at moments, and Kelwyn fancied both contempt and suspicion in his bony face, which was tagged with a harsh black beard. Those unpleasant corners of his mouth were accented by tobacco stain, for he bad a form of the tobacco habit uncommon in New England; his jaw worked unceasingly with a slow, bovine grind; but when the moment came, after a first glance at Kelwyn's neat fireplace, he rose and spat out of the window; after Mrs. Kelwyn joined them in her husband's study, he made errands to the front door for the purpose of spitting.

Kelwyn expected that she would give him a sign of her instant rejection of the whole scheme at sight of the man, who had inspired him with a deep disgust; but to his surprise she did nothing of the kind; she even placated the man, by a special civility, as if she divined in him an instinctive resentment of her husband's feeling. She made him sit down in a better place than Kelwyn had let him take, and she inspired him to volunteer an explanation of his coming alone, in the statement he had already made to Kelwyn, that he guessed the Woman would have come with him, but the Boy had got a pretty hard cold on him, and she was staying at home to fix him up.

Kelwyn said, to put a stop to the flow of sympathy which followed from his wife, that he had been trying to ask Mr. Kite something about the cooking, but he thought he had better leave her to make the inquiries.

"Oh yes," she said, brightly. " You can give us light bread, I suppose?"

The man smiled scornfully, and looked round as if taking an invisible spectator into the joke, and said, " I guess the Woman can make it for you; I never touch it myself. We have hot biscuit."

" We should like hot bread too, now and then," Mrs. Kelwyn said.

" You can have it every meal, same's we do," the man said.

" We shouldn't wish to give Mrs. Kite so much trouble," Mrs. Kelwyn remarked, without apparent surprise at the luxury proposed. " I suppose she is used to broiling steak, and — "

" Always fry our'n," the man said, " but I guess she can broil it for you."

" I merely thought I would speak of it. We don't care much for pies; but we should like a simple pudding now and then; though, really, with berries of all kinds, and the different fruits as they come, we shall scarcely need any other desserts. We should expect plenty of good sweet milk, and we don't like to stint ourselves with the cream. I am sure Mrs. Kite will know how to cook vegetables nicely."

" Well," the farmer said, turning away from the Kelwyns to his invisible familiar for sympathy in his scorn, " what my wife don't know about cookin', I guess ain't wo'th knowin'."

" Because," Mrs. Kelwyn continued, " we shall almost live upon vegetables."

" I mean to put in a garden of 'em — pease, beans, and squash, and sweet-corn, and all the rest of 'em. You shan't want for vegetables. You've tasted the Shaker cookin'?"

" My husband dined with them the day he was up there."

" Then he knows what Shaker cookin' is. So do we. And I guess my wife ain't goin' to fall much below it, if any."

He looked round once more to his familiar in boastful contempt, and even laughed. Kelwyn's mouth watered at the recollection of the Shaker table, so simple, so wholesome, and yet so varied and appetizing, at a season when in the absence of fresh garden supplies art had to assist nature so much.

" Oh, I am sure we shall be very well off," said Mrs. Kelwyn. " We shall bring our own tea — English breakfast tea."

" Never heard of it," Kite interrupted. " We always have Japan tea. But you can bring whatever you want to. Guess we shan't steal it." This seemed to be a joke, and he laughed at it.

" Oh no," said Mrs. Kelwyn, in deprecation of the possibility that she might have given the ground for such a pleasantry. " Well, I think I have spoken of everything, and now I will leave you two to arrange terms."

"No, no! Don't go!" her husband entreated. "We'd better all talk it over together so that I can be sure that I am right."

" That's the way I do with my wife," Kite said, with a laugh of approval.

The Kelwyns, with each other's help, unfolded to him what they had proposed doing. As they did so, it seemed to them both a very handsome proposal, and they were aware of having considered themselves much less in it than they had feared. As it appeared now, they had thought so much more of their tenants than they had imagined that if it had not been too late, they might have wished they had thought less. Afterward they felt that they had not kept many of the advantages they might very well have kept, though again they decided that this was an effect from their failure to stipulate them, and that they remained in their hands nevertheless.

Kite sat listening with silent intensity. He winked his hard eyes from time to time, but he gave no other sign of being dazzled by their proposal.

" You understand?" Kelwyn asked, to break the silence which the farmer let ensue when he ended.

" I guess so," Kite answered, dryly. " I'll have to talk to the woman about it. You must set it down, so I can show it to her the way you said."

" Certainly," Kelwyn said, and he hastily jotted down the points and handed the paper to Kite; it did not enter into Kite's scheme of civility to rise and take it. He sat holding the paper in his hand and staring at it.

" I believe that's right?" Kelwyn suggested.

" I guess so," said Kite.

" I don't believe," Mrs. Kelwyn interposed, " that Mr. Kite can make it out in your handwriting, my dear. You do write such a hand!"

" Well, I guess I will have to get you to read it," Kite said, reaching the paper to Kelwyn, without rising, but letting him rise to get it.

Kelwyn read it carefully over, dwelling on each point. Kite kept a wooden immobility; but when Kelwyn had finished he reared his length from the lounge where it had been half folded, and put his hat on. " Well, I'll show this to the woman when I get back, and we'll let you know how we feel about it. Well, good-morning." He got himself out of the house with no further ceremony, and the Kelwyns remained staring at each other in a spell which they found it difficult to break.

" Don't you suppose he could read it ?" she asked, in a kind of a gasp.

" I have my doubts," said Kelwyn.

" He didn't seem to like the terms, did you think?"

" I don't know. I feel as if we had been proposing to become his tenants, and had been acting rather greedily in the matter."

" Yes, that was certainly the effect. Do you believe we offended him in some way? I don't think I did, for I was most guarded in everything I said; and unless you went against the grain with him before I came down — "

" I was butter in a lordly dish to him, before you came down, my dear!"

" I don't know. You were letting him sit in a very uncomfortable chair, and I had to think to put him on your lounge. And now, we're not sure that he will accept the terms."

" Not till he has talked it over with the ' woman.' I almost wish that the woman would refuse us."

" It gives us a chance to draw back, too. He was certainly very disagreeable, though I don't believe he meant it. He may have been merely uncouth. And, after all, it doesn't matter about him. We shall never see him or have anything to do with him, indoors. He will have to hitch up the horse for us, and bring it to the door, and that will be the end of it. I wish we knew something about her, though."

" He seemed to think his own knowing was enough," Kelwyn mused. " She is evidently perfection— in his eyes."

" Yea, his pride in her was touching," said Mrs. Kelwyn. " That was the great thing about him. As soon as that came out, it atoned for everything. You can see that she twists him round her finger."

" I don't know whether that's a merit or not."

" It's a great merit in such a man. She is probably his superior in every way. You can see how he looks up to her."

" Yes," Kelwyn admitted, rather absently. " Did you have a feeling that he didn't exactly look up to us?"

" He despised us," said Mrs. Kelwyn, very promptly. " But that doesn't mean that he won't use us well. I have often noticed that in country people, even when they are much smoother than he was, and I have noticed it in working-people of all kinds. They do despise us, and I don't believe they respect anybody but working people, really, though they're so glad to get out of working when they can. They think we're a kind of children, or fools, because we don't know how to do things with our hands, and all the culture in his won't change them. I could see that man's eye taking in your books and manuscripts, and scorning them."

" I don't know but you're right, Carry, and it is very curious. It's a thing that hasn't been taken into account in our studies of the conditions. We always suppose that the superiors despise the inferiors, but perhaps it is really the inferiors that despise the superiors, and it's that which embitters the classes against one another."

" Well," said Mrs. Kelwyn, " what I hope is that the wife may have education enough to tolerate us, if we're to be at their mercy."

" I hope she can read writing, anyway," Kelwyn said. "And it's droll, but you've hit it in what you say; it's been growing on me, too, that they will have us at their mercy. I had fancied that we were to have them at ours."

The scheme looked more and more doubtful to the Kelwyns. There were times when they woke together in the night, and confessed the same horror of it, and vowed each other to break it off. Yet when daylight came it always looked very simple, and it had so many alluring aspects that they smiled at their nightly terrors. It was true, after all, that they could command the situation, and whether they cared to turn the Kites out of the farm or not, they could certainly turn them out of the house if they proved unfit or unfaithful. They would have, for the first time, a whole house to themselves, for they should allow the Kites only servants' quarters in it, and they would have the whole vast range and space for very little more money than they had ordinarily paid for farm board. They could undoubtedly control the table, and if the things were not good, they could demand better. But a theory of Mrs. Kite grew upon Mrs. Kelwyn the more she thought of Kite's faith in his wife, which comforted her in her misgivings. This was the theory of her comparative superiority, which Mrs. Kelwyn based upon the probability that she could not possibly be so ignorant and uncouth as her husband. It was, no doubt, her ambition to better their lot which was urging him to take the farm, and she would do everything she could to please. In this view of her, Mrs. Kelwyn resolved to meet her half-way; to be patient of any little failures at first, and to teach the countrywoman town ways by sympathy rather than by criticism. That was a duty she owed her, and Mrs. Kelwyn meant to shirk none of her duties, while eventually claiming all her rights. She said this to herself in her reveries, and she said it to her husband in their conferences during the days that followed one another after Kite's visit. So many days followed before he made any further sign that Mrs. Kelwyn had time to work completely round from her reluctance to close the engagement with him, or his wife, rather, and to have wrought herself into an eagerness amounting to anxiety and bordering upon despair lest the Kites should not wish to close it. With difficulty she kept herself from making Kelwyn write and offer them better terms; she prevailed with herself so far, indeed, as to keep from making him write and ask for their decision. When it came unurged, however, she felt that she had made such a narrow escape that she must not risk further misgivings even. She argued the best from the quite mannerly and shapely letter (for a poor country person) which Mrs. Kite wrote in accepting the terms they offered. She did not express any opinion or feeling in regard to them, but she probably knew that they were very good; and Mrs. Kelwyn began to be proud of them again.

V

It was the afternoon of such a spring day as comes nowhere but in New England that the Kelwyns arrived at their summer home. There was a little edge of cold in it, at four o'clock, which the bright high sun did not soften, and which gave a pleasant thrill to the nerves. The blue sky bent over the earth a perfect dome without the faintest cloud. The trees, full foliaged, whistled in the gale that swept the land, and billowed the long grass, and tossed the blades of the low corn. All was sweet and clean, as if the spirit of New England housekeeping had entered into Nature, and she had set her house in order for company.

Mrs. Kelwyn kept feeling like a guest during the drive over from the station, and she had an obscure resentment of the feeling as a foreshadowed effect from an attempt on Mrs. Kite's part to play the hostess. She must be the mistress from the first, and, though Mrs. Kite was not to be quite her servant, she must be made to realize distinctly that the house was Mrs. Kelwyn's, and that she was in it by Mrs. Kelwyn's favor; this realization could not begin too soon.

But it had apparently begun already, and when the caravan of the Kelwyns drew up under the elms at the gable of the old Shaker Family house, nothing could have been more to Mrs. Kelwyn's mind than the whole keeping of the place, unless it was the behavior of Mrs. Kite. She did not come officiously forward in welcome, as Mrs. Kelwyn had feared she might; she stood waiting in the doorway for the Kelwyns to alight and introduce themselves; but Mrs. Kelwyn decided that this was from respect and not pride, for the woman seemed a humble creature enough when she spoke to her: not embarrassed, but not forth-putting.

She had the effect of having on the best dress she had compatible with household duties, and she looked neat and agreeable in it. She was rather graceful, and she was of a sort of blameless middlingness in looks. A boy, somewhat younger than the elder Kelwyn boy, stood beside her and stared at the two young Kelwyns with strange eyes of impersonal guile.

It was a relief for the moment, and then for another moment a surprise, not to see Kite himself about; but Mrs. Kelwyn had scarcely drawn an indignant breath when the man came hulking round the corner of the house, where he stopped to swear over his shoulder at the team he must have left somewhere, and then advanced to the wagon piled high with the Kelwyns' trunks, and called out to them rather than to the Kelwyns, " Well, how are you!"

The house was everything Kelwyn had painted it. Mrs. Kelwyn explored it with him to give him the pleasure of her approval before she settled down to the minute examination of their quarters; and together, with their children, they ranged up and downstairs and through the long passages, feeling like a bath the delight of its cool cleanliness. Mrs. Kite, who met them on their return from their wanderings, said the Shaker ladies had been up the day before, putting on the last touches before they should come. It was pleasant to know that they had been expected and prepared for, but Mrs. Kelwyn fancied that, though the housekeeping had been instituted by the Shaker ladies, it must have been the Shaker gentlemen who had looked after the house furnishing. She had expected that there might be a Shaker stiffness in the appointments, but that there would also be a Shaker quaintness; and she had imagined her rooms dressed in the Shaker gear, which the house must once have worn, and which would have been restored from the garrets and basements of the other community dwellings. But the Shakers had not imagined anything of that kind. Whichever of them it had been left to had laid one kind of ingrain carpet in all the rooms, and furnished the chambers in a uniformity of painted pine sets. There was a parlor set of black walnut, and there were painted shades at the windows. All was new, and smelled fresh and wholesome, but the things had no more character than they had in the furniture warerooms where they were bought. Apparently the greatest good-will had been used, and Mrs. Kelwyn could well believe that the Shakers supposed they had dealt much more acceptably by them than if they had given them the rag carpets and the hooked rugs, the high-post bedsteads and splint chairs which she would have so much rather had.

The Kelwyns were a long time getting settled into temporary form; the robins were shouting their goodnights around them, and a thrush was shrilling from the woods that covered the hill slope behind the house, when the tinkle of a far-off bell called them to supper. Then they found themselves suddenly hungry, and they sat down in the old Shaker refectory with minds framed to eager appreciation of what good things might be set before them. Mrs. Kite gave a glance at the table before she left it to them; and said that she would be right there in the kitchen if they wanted anything. She really went down-stairs beyond the kitchen to the ground floor, where she had four or five rooms with her family.

The Kelwyns had a four-o'clock dinner at home, and now it was a quarter past seven as they sat down with their orderly little boys at the supper which Mrs. Kite had imagined for them. There were two kinds of cake on the table: three slices of pound-cake, translucent but solid, at one end of the table, and thicker slices of marble-cake, with veins of verde antique