When they stepped into the hall she said:
'Mamma's here. The auto is coming for her in half an hour. She came to dinner, but there's no dinner.'
'I've something to tell you,' said Hartley. 'I thought to break it to you gently, but since your mother is here we may as well out with it.'
He stooped and whispered something at her ear.
His wife screamed. Her mother came running into the hall. The dark-haired woman screamed again- the joyful scream of a well-beloved and petted woman.
'Oh, mamma!' she cried ecstatically, 'what do you think? Vivienne is coming to cook for us! She is the one that stayed with the Montgomerys a whole year. And now, Billy, dear,' she concluded, 'you must go right down into the kitchen and discharge Heloise. She has been drunk again the whole day long.'
The season of irresponsibility is at hand. Come, let us twine round our brows wreaths of poison ivy (that is for idiocy), and wander hand in hand with sociology in the summer fields.
Likely as not the world is flat. The wise men have tried to prove that it is round, with indifferent success. They pointed out to us a ship going to sea, and bade us observe that, at length, the convexity of the earth hid from our view all but the vessel's topmast. But we picked up a telescope and looked, and saw the decks and hull again. Then the wise men said: 'Oh, pshaw! anyhow, the variation of the intersection of the equator and the ecliptic proves it.' We could not see this through our telescope, so we remained silent. But it stands to reason that, if the world were round, the queues of China- Men would stand straight up from their heads instead of hanging down their backs, as travellers assure us they do.
Another hot-weather corroboration of the flat theory is the fact that all of life, as we know it, moves in little, unavailing circles. More justly than to anything else, it can be likened to the game of baseball. Crack! we hit the ball, and away we go. If we earn a run (in life we call it success) we get back to the home plate and sit upon a bench. If we are thrown out, we walk back to the home plate -- and sit upon a bench.
The circumnavigators of the alleged globe may have sailed the rim of a watery circle back to the same port again. The truly great return at the high tide of their attainments to the simplicity of a child. The billionaire sits down at his mahogany to his bowl of bread and milk. When you reach the end of your career, just take down the sign 'Goal' and look at the other side of it. You will find 'Beginning Point' there. It has been reversed while you were going around the track.
But this is humour, and must be stopped. Let us get back to the serious questions that arise whenever Sociology turns summer boarder. You are invited to consider the scene of the story-wild, Atlantic waves, thundering against a wooded and rock-bound shore -- in the Greater City of New York.
The town of Fishampton, on the south shore of Long Island, is noted for its clam fritters and the summer residence of the Van Plushvelts.
The Van Plushvelts have a hundred million dollars, and their name is a household word with tradesmen and photographers.
On the fifteenth of June the Van Plushvelts boarded up the front door of their city house, carefully deposited their cat on the sidewalk, instructed the caretaker not to allow it to eat any of the ivy on the walls, and whizzed away in a 40-horse-power to Fishampton to stray alone the shade -- Amaryllis not being in their class. If a subscriber to the Toadies' Magazine, you have often -- You say you are not? Well, you buy it at a news-stand, thinking that the newsdealer is not wise to you. But he knows about it all. HE knows -- HE knows! I say that you have often seen in the Toadies' Magazine pictures of the Van Plushvelts' summer home; so it will not be described here. Our business is with young Haywood Van Plushvelt, sixteen years old, heir to the century of millions, darling of the financial gods and great grandson of Peter Van Plushvelt, former owner of a particularly fine cabbage patch that has been ruined by an intrusive lot of downtown skyscrapers.
One afternoon young Haywood Van Plushvelt strolled out between the granite gate posts of 'Dolce far Niente' -- that's what they called the place; and it was an improve- ment on dolce Far Rockaway, I can tell you.
Haywood walked down into the village. He was human, after all, and his prospective millions weighed upon him. Wealth had wreaked upon him its direfullest. He was the product of private tutors. Even under his first hobby-horse had tan bark been strewn. He had been born with a gold spoon, lobster fork and fish-set in his mouth. For which I hope, later, to submit justification, I must ask your consideration of his haberdashery and tailoring.
Young Fortunatus was dressed in a neat suit of dark blue serge, a neat, white straw hat, neat low-cut tan shoes, of the well-known 'immaculate' trade mark, a neat, narrow four-in-hand tie, and carried a slender, neat, bamboo cane.
Down Persimmon Street (there's never tree north of Hagerstown, Md.) came from the village 'Smoky' Dodson, fifteen and a half, worst boy in Fishampton. 'Smoky' was dressed in a ragged red sweater, wrecked and weather-worn golf cap, run-over shoes, and trousers of the 'serviceable' brand. Dust, clinging to the mois- ture induced by free exercise, darkened wide areas of his face. 'Smoky' carried a baseball bat, and a league ball that advertised itself in the rotundity of his trousers pocket. Haywood stopped and passed the time of day.
'Going to play ball?' he asked.
'Smoky's' eyes and countenance confronted him with a frank blue-and-freckled scrutiny.
'Me?' he said, with deadly mildness; 'sure not. Can't you see I've got a divin' suit on? I'm goin' up in a submarine balloon to catch butterflies with a two-inch auger.
'Excuse me,' said Haywood, with the insulting polite- -ness of his caste, 'for mistaking you for a gentleman. I might have known better.'
'How might you have known better if you thought I was one?' said 'Smoky,' unconsciously a logician.
'By your appearances,' said Haywood. 'No gentle- man is dirty, ragged and a liar.'
'Smoky' hooted once like a ferry-boat, spat on his hand, got a firm grip on his baseball bat and then dropped it against the fence.
'Say,' said he, 'I knows you. You're the pup that belongs in that swell private summer sanitarium for city- guys over there. I seen you come out of the gate. You can't bluff nobody because you're rich. And because you got on swell clothes. Arabella! Yah!'
