Hudson River Bracketed

of nuances: her father, whom she loved and laughed at, was exactly that⁠—he was merely clever. It was perhaps because his wife belonged to the same category (though, being a Lorburn, she had never been placed in it, since a Lorburn woman might be beautiful, or masterful, or distinguished, but never anything so ambiguous as “clever”) that she had been attracted by young Spear, and had married him in spite of the family opposition. Emily Lorburn, brought up in an atmosphere of rigid social conformity, had become passionately nonconforming; her husband, educated after the strict rule of Episcopalian orthodoxy, had read Strauss and Renan in secret before going over openly to Darwin and Haeckel. The young people, dazzled by each other’s audacities, had perhaps expected, by pooling them, to form a nucleus of intellectual revolt; but the world had revolted without waiting for them. Their heresies were too mild to cause any excitement outside of their own circle, and their house, instead of being the centre of incendiarism they had imagined, was merely regarded as one where one was likely to meet agreeable people.

All this, though long since patent to their children, was still but dimly apprehended by Mr. and Mrs. Spear, and Halo knew that her mother secretly regarded Eaglewood, the obligations it entailed and the privations it necessitated, as the chief obstacle to the realizing of her ambitions. Mrs. Spear felt that what both she and her husband needed to produce the revolutionary effect they aimed at was a house in New York; and for years all her energies had been bent on getting it. These had been the years of Halo’s little girlhood and first youth: economical years marked by a series of snowbound winters at Eaglewood, and (whenever the place could be let) European summers in places dingily aesthetic. But in spite of these sacrifices the unequal struggle had had to be given up; the visionary house in New York had shrunk to a small flat, the flat to six weeks in a family hotel, with Eaglewood for the rest of the year; and at present, as Halo knew, her mother was anxiously calculating whether, with the growing cost of everything, and Lorry’s perpetual debts, and perpetual inability to find a job, it would not be necessary to renounce even a month in the family hotel.

There were times when to the girl herself Eaglewood was as much of a prison as to her elders. But the fact that it was easier for her than for her parents to get away made the being there less irksome; and besides, she loved the place for itself, instead of being proud of it for family reasons, and hating it for every other. The house depressed her, in spite of its portraits and relics, and the faded perfume of old days, because it was associated with the perpetual struggle to keep the roof dry, the ceilings patched, the furnace going, the curtains and carpets turned and darned, the taxes paid. But poverty and lack of care could not spoil what lay outside the house: the acres of neglected parkland with ancient trees widening their untrimmed domes over lawns that had lapsed into pasture, the woods beyond, murmuring and glinting with little streams, and that ever-renewed view on which the girl’s eyes never rested without the sense of inner communion which all the others had missed.

Ah, that view⁠ ⁠… suddenly she thought: “I believe the boy I saw down at the Willows last week has the only eyes I know that would really see it as I do⁠—”; and the thought, rousing her out of her dream, brought her to her feet with a jerk.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, with a cry in which amusement mingled with consternation; for she saw nearly everything in life first on the amusing side, even to her own shortcomings.

George Frenside lifted his head from the newspaper and turned his ironic eyeglasses on her. “What’s up?”

“Only that I’ve forgotten an engagement.”

“What? Again?”

She nodded contritely. “I’m a perfect beast⁠—it was simply vile of me!” She was talking to herself, not to Frenside. As for her own family, they were all too used to her frequent outbursts of compunction over forgotten engagements to let her remorse disturb their meditations.

For a moment she stood brooding over her latest lapse; then she turned to reenter the house. As she disappeared Mrs. Spear, roused from some inner calculation which had wrinkled her brows and sharpened the lines about her mouth, sat up to call after her in a deep wailing voice: “But Lewis Tarrant⁠—have you all forgotten Lewis Tarrant? Who’s going to fetch him from the station?”

Whenever Mrs. Spear emerged thus suddenly from the sea of her perplexities, her still lovely face wore a half-drowned look which made Halo feel as if one ought to give her breathing exercises and other first-aid remedies.

“Don’t look so upset, darling. Why should you think I’d forgotten Lewis? I’m going down presently to meet him; his train’s not due for another hour.”

But Lorry Spear, with an effort, had pulled himself to his feet and cast away his cigarette end. “You needn’t, Halo. I’ll go,” he said in a voice of brotherly self-sacrifice.

“Thanks ever so, Lorry. But don’t bother⁠—”

“No bother, child. I’ll call at the post at the same time, and pick up Mother’s arrowroot at the grocer’s.”

This evoked a languid laugh from Mr. Spear and Frenside, for the grocery at Paul’s Landing was the repository for all Mrs. Spear’s daily purchases, and whenever she suggested that, yes, well, perhaps they had better call there on the way home, because she believed she had ordered a packet of arrowroot, the motor would invariably climb the hill from the town groaning with innumerable parcels.

Halo paused in the glass door leading into the hall. “I want the car for myself, Lorry,” she said decisively, and turned to go in. Behind her, as she crossed the hall, she heard her brother’s precipitate steps. “See here, Halo⁠—stop! I’m going down to meet Lewis;