she stood a good way off and rather pushed them at the guests, the thing somehow was done. At least, the covered dishes were no longer set on the table, as they used always to be.
Mrs. Langbrith had witnessed the changes with trepidation but absolute acquiescence even at the first, and finally with the submission in which her son held her in everything. In the afternoon, when he and his friend, whoever it might be, put on their top-hats and top-coats and went out to call on the village girls, who did not know enough of the world to offer them tea, she spent the interval before dinner in arranging for the meal with the faithful, faded Norah. After dinner, when the young men again put on their top-hats and top-coats to call again upon the village girls, whom they had impressed with the correctness of afternoon calls, and to whom they now relented in compliance with the village custom of evening calls, Mrs. Langbrith debated with Norah the success of the dinner, studied its errors, and joined her in vows for their avoidance.
IV
The event which confronted Mrs. Langbrith in her son’s words, as he sat behind the turkey and plunged the carving fork into its steaming and streaming breast, was so far beyond the scope of her widened knowledge that she mutely waited for him to declare it.
“ People,” he went on, “ have been so nice to Falk and me, that I think we ought to make some return. I put the duty side first, because I know you’ll like that, mother, and it will help to reconcile you to the fun of it. Falk is such a pagan that he can’t understand, but it will be for his good, all the same. My notion is to have a good, big dinner—twelve or fourteen at table, and then a lot in afterwards, with supper about midnight. What do you say, mother? Don’t mind Falk, if you don’t agree quite.”
“There is no Falk, Mrs. Langbrith,” the young fellow said, with an intelligence which comforted her and emboldened her against her son.
“I don’t see—she began, and then she stopped.
“That’s right!” her son encouraged her.
“James,” she said, desperately, “I wouldn’t know how to do it.”
“I don’t want you to do it.” He laughed exultantly. “ I propose to do it myself. I will have the whole thing sent up from Boston.” Between her gasps, he went on: “All I have got to do is to write an order to White, the caterer, with particulars of quantity and quality, the date and the hour, and it comes on the appointed train with three men in plain clothes; two reappear in lustrous dress-suits at dinner and supper, and serve the things the other has cooked at our range. I press the button, White does the rest. He brings china, cutlery, linen— everything. All you have to do is to hide Jerry in the barn and keep Norah up-stairs to show the ladies into the back chamber to take off their things. You can put our own cook under the sink. You’ll be astonished at the ease of the whole thing.”
“ Yes,” Mrs. Langbrith said, “it will be easy, but—”
“ But would it be right?” her son tenderly mocked. “ What did I tell you?” he asked towards his friend. “In New England, the notion of ease conveys the sense of culpability. My mother is afraid she would have a bad conscience. If she took all the work and worry on herself, she would feel that she was paying the penalty of her pleasure beforehand; if she didn’t, she would know that she must pay for it afterwards. Isn’t that so, mother? But now you leave it to me, you dear old thing.” Langbrith ran round the table and kissed her on top of the head, and made her blush like a girl, as he patted her shoulder. “Just imagine I was master, and you couldn’t help yourself.” He went back to his place. “ What was the largest dinner you ever had in the old time?”
She hesitated, as if for his meaning. “ Mr. Langbrith once entertained a company of six gentlemen, who came up here and talked of locating some cotton-mills. We called it “ supper.’ ”
“I can imagine them. Can’t you, Falk? The moneyed man to supply the funds, the lawyer to draw up the papers, the civil engineer to survey the property. Very solemn, and a little pompous, but secretly ready for a burst if the opportunity offered under the right auspices; something like an outing of city officials.”
“They were very pleasant gentlemen,” Mrs. Langbrith interposed, as from her conscience.
“Oh, I dare say they were when they had tasted my father’s madeira. But about our dinner now? I don’t think we’d better have more than twelve, and I should want them equally divided between youth and age.”
Mrs. Langbrith looked at him as if she did not quite understand him, and he said:
“Have Jessamy Colebridge and Hope Hawberk and Susie Johns and Bob Matthewson—he’s a good fellow—and make out the half-dozen with Falk and me; we’re both good fellows. Then, on your side of the line, yourself first of all, mother, and the rector and his wife, and Judge and Mrs. Garley, and—who else? Oh, Dr. Anther, of course! I want Falk to meet the doctor—the dearest and quaintest old type in the world. I don’t know why he hasn’t been in to see us, mother. Has he been here lately?”
“He was here a day or two before you came,” Mrs. Langbrith answered, with her eyes down.
“Perhaps he has been waiting for me to call. Well, what do you think of my dinner-party?’’
“It seems very nice,’’ Mrs. Langbrith sighed.
“And haven’t you any preferences? Nobody you want to turn down?”
“ It will be a good deal of a surprise for Saxmills,” she suffered herself to say.
“I flatter myself it will. I have been telling Falk that the mixed assembly of old and young is unknown in Saxmills.”
Falk had not troubled himself to take part in the discussion, if it was that, but had given himself to the turkey and the cranberry sauce, with the mashed potatoes and the stewed squash, which Mrs. Langbrith had very good. Her son had obliged her to provide claret, which Falk now drank out of an abnormal glass with a stout stem and pimpled cup, hitherto dedicated to currant wine, before saying: “ It astonished me less than if I had been used to something different all my life. You ought to have tried the other thing on me.”
“Well, I only supposed from the smartness of the people in your Caricature pictures that you had always lived in a whirl of fashion.”
“That shows how little you know of fashion,” said Falk, and Langbrith laughed with the difficult joy of a man who owns a hit.
Mrs. Langbrith glanced from one to the other; from her son, with his long, distinguished face (he had decided that it was colonial), to the dark, aquiline type of Falk, with his black hair, his upward-pointed mustache, his pouted lips, and his prominent, floating, brown eyes. In her abeyance, she was scared at the bold person who was not afraid of her son.
“Well,” said Langbrith, “I shall have to find someone to illustrate my vers de society who knows enough of the world for both.”
“You couldn’t!” Falk insinuated.
Mrs. Langbrith did not quite catch the point, but her son laughed again. “No one ever distances you, Falk!”
He discussed the arrangement of the affair with his mother. At the end, as she rose, obedient to his sign, and he came round to give her his arm, he said: “After all, perhaps, it wouldn’t be well
