Sometimes Lapham advanced these ideas at his own table, to a guest whom he had brought to Nantasket for the night. Then he suffered exposure and ridicule at the hands of his wife, when opportunity offered. She would not let him bring Corey down to Nantasket at all.
“No, indeed!” she said. “I am not going to have them think we’re running after him. If he wants to see Irene, he can find out ways of doing it for himself.”
“Who wants him to see Irene?” retorted the Colonel angrily.
“I do,” said Mrs. Lapham. “And I want him to see her without any of your connivance, Silas. I’m not going to have it said that I put my girls at anybody. Why don’t you invite some of your other clerks?”
“He ain’t just like the other clerks. He’s going to take charge of a part of the business. It’s quite another thing.”
“Oh, indeed!” said Mrs. Lapham vexatiously. “Then you are going to take a partner.”
“I shall ask him down if I choose!” returned the Colonel, disdaining her insinuation.
His wife laughed with the fearlessness of a woman who knows her husband.
“But you won’t choose when you’ve thought it over, Si.” Then she applied an emollient to his chafed surface. “Don’t you suppose I feel as you do about it? I know just how proud you are, and I’m not going to have you do anything that will make you feel meeching afterward. You just let things take their course. If he wants Irene, he’s going to find out some way of seeing her; and if he don’t, all the plotting and planning in the world isn’t going to make him.”
“Who’s plotting?” again retorted the Colonel, shuddering at the utterance of hopes and ambitions which a man hides with shame, but a woman talks over as freely and coolly as if they were items of a milliner’s bill.
“Oh, not you!” exulted his wife. “I understand what you want. You want to get this fellow, who is neither partner nor clerk, down here to talk business with him. Well, now, you just talk business with him at the office.”
The only social attention which Lapham succeeded in offering Corey was to take him in his buggy, now and then, for a spin out over the Milldam. He kept the mare in town, and on a pleasant afternoon he liked to knock off early, as he phrased it, and let the mare out a little. Corey understood something about horses, though in a passionless way, and he would have preferred to talk business when obliged to talk horse. But he deferred to his business superior with the sense of discipline which is innate in the apparently insubordinate American nature. If Corey could hardly have helped feeling the social difference between Lapham and himself, in his presence he silenced his traditions, and showed him all the respect that he could have exacted from any of his clerks. He talked horse with him, and when the Colonel wished he talked house. Besides himself and his paint Lapham had not many other topics; and if he had a choice between the mare and the edifice on the water side of Beacon Street, it was just now the latter. Sometimes, in driving in or out, he stopped at the house, and made Corey his guest there, if he might not at Nantasket; and one day it happened that the young man met Irene there again. She had come up with her mother alone, and they were in the house, interviewing the carpenter as before, when the Colonel jumped out of his buggy and cast anchor at the pavement. More exactly, Mrs. Lapham was interviewing the carpenter, and Irene was sitting in the bow-window on a trestle, and looking out at the driving. She saw him come up with her father, and bowed and blushed. Her father went on upstairs to find her mother, and Corey pulled up another trestle which he found in the back part of the room. The first floorings had been laid throughout the house, and the partitions had been lathed so that one could realise the shape of the interior.
“I suppose you will sit at this window a good deal,” said the young man.
“Yes, I think it will be very nice. There’s so much more going on than there is in the Square.”
“It must be very interesting to you to see the house grow.”
“It is. Only it doesn’t seem to grow so fast as I expected.”
“Why, I’m amazed at the progress your carpenter has made every time I come.”
The girl looked down, and then lifting her eyes she said, with a sort of timorous appeal—
“I’ve been reading that book since you were down at Nantasket.”
“Book?” repeated Corey, while she reddened with disappointment. “Oh yes. Middlemarch. Did you like it?”
“I haven’t got through with it yet. Pen has finished it.”
“What does she think of it?”
“Oh, I think she likes it very well. I haven’t heard her talk about it much. Do you like it?”
“Yes; I liked it immensely. But it’s several years since I read it.”
“I didn’t know it was so old. It’s just got into the Seaside Library,” she urged, with a little sense of injury in her tone.
“Oh, it hasn’t been out such a very great while,” said Corey politely. “It came a little before Daniel Deronda.”
The girl was again silent. She followed the curl of a shaving on the floor with the point of her parasol.
“Do you like that Rosamond Vincy?” she asked, without looking up.
Corey smiled in his kind way.
“I didn’t suppose she was expected to have any friends. I can’t say I liked her. But I don’t think I disliked her so much as the author does. She’s pretty hard on her good-looking”—he was going to say girls, but as if that might have been rather personal, he said—“people.”
“Yes, that’s what Pen says. She says
