even resented her activity, and thought of her as a malevolent old gossip. These latter were deeply in the wrong. Miss Tabitha loved everybody, and had never consciously done injury to any living soul. As for gossip, she could no more help talking than the robin up in the elm boughs of a sunny April morning can withhold the song that is in him.
It has been said that the presence of the butler threw a gloom over the dinner-party. It did not silence Miss Tabitha, but at least she felt constrained to discourse upon general and impersonal subjects while he was in hearing. The two daughters of the house, who faced each other at the ends of the table, asked her questions or offered comments at intervals, and once or twice their mother spoke. All ate from the plates that were set before them, in a perfunctory way, without evidence of appreciation. There was some red wine in a decanter on the table—I fancy none of them could have told precisely what it was—and of this Miss Tabitha drank a little, diluted with water. The two girls had allowed the butler to fill their glasses as well, and from time to time they made motions as of sipping from these, merely to keep their guest in company. Mrs. Minster had no wine-glasses at her plate, and drank ice-water. Every time that any one of the others lifted the wine to her lips, a common thought seemed to flash through the minds around the table—the memory of the son and heir who had died from drink.
When the butler, with an accession of impressiveness in his reserved demeanor, at last handed around plates containing each its thin layer of pale meat, Ethel Minster was moved to put into words what all had been feeling:
“Mamma, this isn’t like Thanksgiving at all!” she said, with the freedom of a favorite child; “it was ever so much nicer to have the turkey on the table where we could all see him, and pick out in our minds what part we would especially like. To have the carving done outside, and only slices of the breast brought in to us—it is as if we were away from home somewhere, in a hotel among strangers.”
Mrs. Minster, by way of answer, looked at the butler, the glance being not so much an inquiry as a reference of the matter to one who was a professor of this particular sort of thing. Her own inclination jumped with that of her daughter, but the possession of a butler entailed certain responsibilities, which must be neither ignored nor evaded. Happily Cozzens’s mind was not wholly inelastic. He uttered no word, but, with a slight obeisance which comprehended mistress and daughter and guest in careful yet gracious gradations of significance, went out, and presently returned with a huge dish, which he set in front of Mrs. Minster. He brought the carving instruments, and dignifiedly laid them in their place, as a chamberlain might invest a queen with her sceptre. Even when Miss Kate said, “If we need you any more, Cozzens, we will ring,” he betrayed neither surprise nor elation, but bowed again gravely, and left the room, closing the door noiselessly behind him.
“I am sure he will turn out a perfect jewel,” said Miss Tabitha. “You were very fortunate to get him.”
“But there are times,” said Kate, “when one likes to take off one’s rings, even if the stones are perfection itself.”
This guarded reference to the fact that Mrs. Minster had secured an admirable servant who was a nuisance at small feminine dinner-parties sufficed to dismiss the subject. Miss Tabitha assumed on the moment a more confidential manner and tone:
“I wonder if you’ve heard,” she said, “that young Horace Boyce has come back. Why, now I think of it, he must have come up in your train.”
“He was in our car,” replied Mrs. Minster. “He sat by us, and talked all the way up. I never heard a man’s tongue run on so in all my born days.”
“He takes that from his grandmother Beekman,” explained Miss Tabitha, by way of parenthesis. “She was something dreadful: talking ‘thirteen to the dozen’ doesn’t begin to express it. You don’t remember her. She went down to New York when I was a mere slip of a girl, to have a set of false teeth fitted—they were a novelty in those days—and it was winter time, and she wouldn’t listen to the dentist’s advice to keep her mouth shut, and she caught cold, and it turned into lockjaw, and that was the last of her. It was just after her daughter Julia had been married to young Sylvanus Boyce. Dear me, how time flies! I can remember her old bombazine gown and her black Spanish mits, and her lace cap on one side of her head, as if it were only yesterday. And here Julia’s been dead twenty years and more, and her grown-up son’s come home from Europe, and the General—”
The old maid stopped short, because her sentence could not be charitably finished. “How did you like Horace?” she asked, to shift the subject, and looking at Kate Minster.
The tall, dark girl with the rich complexion and the beautiful, proud eyes glanced up at her questioner impatiently, as if disposed to resent the inquiry. Then she seemed to reflect that no offence could possibly have been intended, for she answered pleasantly enough:
“He seemed an amiable sort of person; and I should judge he was clever, too. He always was a smart boy—I think that is the phrase. He talked to mamma most of the time.”
“How can you say that, Kate? I’m sure it was because you scarcely answered him at all, and read your book—which was not very polite.”
“I was afraid to venture upon anything more than monosyllables with him,” said Kate, “or I should have been ruder still. I should have had to tell him that I did not like Americans who made the accident of their having been to Europe an excuse for sneering at those who haven’t been there, and that would have been highly impolite, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t think he sneered,” replied Mrs. Minster. “I thought he tried to be as affable and interesting as he knew how. Pray what did he say that was sneering?”
“Oh, dear me, I don’t in the least remember what he said. It was his tone, I think, more than any special remark. He had an air of condoling with me because he had seen so many things that I have only read about; and he patronized the car, and the heating-apparatus, and the conductor, and the poor little black porter, and all of us.”
“He was a pretty boy. Does he hold his own, now he’s grown up?” asked Miss Tabitha. “He used to favor the Boyce side a good deal.”
“I should say he favored the Boyce side to the exclusion of everybody else’s side,” said Kate, with a little smile at her own conceit, “particularly his own individual section of it. He is rather tall, with light hair, light eyes, light mustache, light talk, light everything; and he looks precisely like all the other young men you see in New York nowadays, with their coats buttoned in just such a way, and their gloves of just such a shade, and a scarf of just such a shape with the same kind of pin in it, and their hats laid sidewise in the rack so that you can observe that they have a London maker’s brand in-side. There! you have his portrait to a t. Do you recognize it?”
“What will poor countrified Thessaly ever do with such a metropolitan model as this?” asked Ethel. “We shall all be afraid to go out in the street, for fear he should discover us to be out of the fashion.”
“Oh, he is not going to stay here,” said Mrs. Minster. “He told us that he had decided to enter some law firm in New York. It seems a number of very flattering openings have been offered him.”
“I happen to know,” put in Miss Tabitha, “that he is going to stay here. What is more, he has as good as struck up a partnership with Reuben Tracy. I had it this morning from a lady whose brother-in-law is extremely intimate with the General.”
“That is very curious,” mused Mrs. Minster. “He certainly talked yesterday of settling in New York, and mentioned the offers he had had, and his doubt as to which to accept.”
“Are
