don't you think she was?"
"May be so."
"Didn't she seem pleased?"
"I think she was relieved, for my confession that I hadn't heard many operas bothered her."
"You said Mr. Millard was polite. How was he polite?"
"He made you feel that he liked you, and admired you; I can't tell you how. He didn't say a single flattering word to me, but when he promised to meet Mrs. Hilbrough again, to arrange about the people she is to have at the reception, he bowed to me and said, 'And Miss Callender, I hope.'"
"I'll tell you what, Phillida, I'll bet he took a fancy to you."
"Nonsense, Agatha Callender; don't talk such stuff. He's been for years in society, and knows all the fine people in New York."
"Nonsense, yourself, Phillida; you're better than any of the fine ladies in New York. Mr. Millard isn't good enough for you. But I just know he was taken with you."
"Do you think I'm going to have my head turned by bows and fine speeches that have been made to five hundred other women?"
"There never was any other woman in New York as fine as you, Phillida."
"Not among your acquaintance, and in your opinion, my dear, seeing you hardly know any other young woman but me."
"I know more than you think I do. If you had any common sense, Phillida, you'd make the most of Aunt Harriet, and marry some man that would furnish you with a horse and a carriage of your own. But you won't. You're just a goosey. You spend your time on the urchins down in Mackerelville. The consequence is you'll never get married, and I shall have you on my hands an old maid who never improved her opportunities."
"What stuff!" laughed Phillida.
"You've got a fine figure – a splendid figure," proceeded the younger, "and a face that is sweet and charming, if I do say it. It's a dreadful waste of woman. You wrap your talent in a Sunday-school lesson-paper and bury it down in Mackerelville."
At this point Mrs. Callender put away her elaborate hand-finished stocking, saying softly:
"Agatha, why do you tease Phillida so?"
"Because she's such a goose," said the younger sister, stubbornly.
Twenty minutes later Agatha, looking from her bedside in the dark corner of the room, saw her sister kneeling by a chair near the fireside. The sight of Phillida at prayer always awed her. Agatha herself was accustomed to say, before jumping into bed, a conventional little prayer, very inclusive as to subjects embraced, and very thin in texture, but Phillida's prayers were different. Agatha regarded the form of her sister, well developed and yet delicately graceful, now more graceful than ever as she knelt in her long night-dress, her two hands folded naturally the one across the other, and her head bowed. As she arranged the bed, Agatha followed mentally what she imagined to be the tenor of the prayer – she fancied that Phillida was praying to be saved from vanity and worldliness; she knew that each of the little urchins in the mission Sunday-school class was prayed for by name. She turned away a moment, and then caught sight of Phillida as she unclasped her hands and rested them on the chair. Agatha knew that when Phillida changed her position at the close of her prayer it was to recite, as she always did, the "Now I lay me," which was associated in her mind, as in Agatha's, with an oriental environment, a swarthy nurse in waist-cloth and shoulder scarf, and, more than all, was linked with her earliest memories of the revered father at whose knees the children were accustomed to repeat it. When Phillida rose to her feet in that state of exaltation which prayer brings to one who has a natural genius for devotion, the now penitent and awe-stricken Agatha went to her sister, put her arms about her neck, and leaned her head upon her shoulder, saying softly:
"You dear, good Phillida!"
VII.
THE LION SOIRÉE
Notwithstanding the romancing of her sister, Phillida built no castles. Millard's politeness to her had been very agreeable, but she knew that it was only politeness. Almost every man's and every woman's imagination is combustible on one side or another. Many young women are set a-dreaming by any hint of love or marriage. But Phillida had read only sober books – knowing little of romances, there was no stock of incendiary material in her memory. Her fancy was easily touched off on the side of her religious hopes; all her education had intensified the natural inflammability of her religious emotions, but in affairs of this world she was by nature and education unusually self-contained for a woman of one and twenty.
Millard, on his part, had been exposed to the charms of many women, and his special interest in Phillida amounted only to a lively curiosity. Always susceptible to the charm of a woman's presence, this susceptibility had been acted on from so many sides as to make his interest in women superficial and volatile. The man who is too much interested in women to be specially interested in a woman is pretty sure not to marry at all, or to marry late.
Baron Pohlsen arrived, and was duly installed at Mrs. Hilbrough's. He was greatly pleased with the hospitality shown him by this wealthy household, and fancied that Americans were the most generous of peoples. Millard, as in duty bound, took pains to introduce him in many desirable quarters, and showed him the lions of the city in Hilbrough's carriage. But in spite of Millard's care to relieve him, Hilbrough afterward confessed that the panic of 1873 had not taxed his patience and cheerfulness so deeply as this entertainment for two weeks of a great German antiquary. Dutifully the banker attended a session of the Geographical Society to listen to an address made by his guest in broken English, on the ancient importance of Uxmal and Palenque. Hilbrough also heard with attentive perplexity the Baron's account before the Historical Society of the Aztec Calendar Stone, and his theory of its real purpose.
When the American banker was left alone with the learned High Dutchman, it became very serious business. Von Pohlsen, with all his erudition, was extremely ignorant of the art of banking as practised in New York. He did not know, at least in English, the difference between collateral and real estate security, and "gilt-edged" paper was more foreign than papyrus to him. Nor could Hilbrough interest him much in the remarkable rise in Brooklyn real estate since 1860. Brooklyn was too new by a millennium for the Baron to care for it. Hilbrough tried the plan of shunting the antiquary to his main lines of American hieroglyphs, aboriginal architecture, and Pueblo domestic economy. But this only shifted the difficulty, for under the steady downpour of Pohlsen's erudition, Hilbrough had continually to change position, now putting the right knee over the left and now placing the left atop, to keep from nodding, and he was even reduced to pinching himself, sometimes, in order to keep awake, just as the learned and ingenious Baron had got his pyramid of inference ready to balance on its rather slender apex of fact. Archæology was new to Hilbrough, and deductive profits so large from inductive investments so small always seemed to the financier to indicate bad security.
Mrs. Hilbrough, clever woman, appeared to understand it all. She had crammed on a copy of Stephens's "Travels in Yucatan" that had belonged to her father, and she gave Pohlsen no end of pleasure by asking him about such things as the four-headed altars before the great idols at Copan, and the nature of the great closed house at Labphak. If you will look in Pohlsen's book of travels in America (Reise durch Amerika: Leipzig, 1888) you will discover in his chapter on New York that in this metropolis the ladies take a remarkable interest in science, and are generally better informed regarding such matters than their husbands, these latter being deeply immersed in mere dollar-hunting.
But Mrs. Hilbrough was much more interested in her reception to be given in honor of Baron Pohlsen than she was in the four-headed altars of the remoter Aztecs. If she could not fill her house with those very richest and most exclusive people who
