his article, which he did with a good deal of inward derision, he went home to Marcia, still smiling over the thought of Lapham, whose burly simplicity had peculiarly amused him. “He regularly turned himself inside out to me,” he said, as he sat describing his interview to Marcia.
“Then I know you could make something nice out of it,” said his wife; “and that will please Mr. Witherby.”
“Oh yes, I’ve done pretty well; but I couldn’t let myself loose on him the way I wanted to. Confound the limitations of decency, anyway! I should like to have told just what Colonel Lapham thought of landscape advertising in Colonel Lapham’s own words. I’ll tell you one thing, Marsh: he had a girl there at one of the desks that you wouldn’t let ME have within gunshot of MY office. Pretty? It ain’t any name for it!” Marcia’s eyes began to blaze, and Bartley broke out into a laugh, in which he arrested himself at sight of a formidable parcel in the corner of the room.
“Hello! What’s that?”
“Why, I don’t know what it is,” replied Marcia tremulously. “A man brought it just before you came in, and I didn’t like to open it.”
“Think it was some kind of infernal machine?” asked Bartley, getting down on his knees to examine the package. “MRS. B. Hubbard, heigh?” He cut the heavy hemp string with his penknife. “We must look into this thing. I should like to know who’s sending packages to Mrs. Hubbard in my absence.” He unfolded the wrappings of paper, growing softer and finer inward, and presently pulled out a handsome square glass jar, through which a crimson mass showed richly. “The Persis Brand!” he yelled. “I knew it!”
“Oh, what is it, Bartley?” quavered Marcia. Then, courageously drawing a little nearer: “Is it some kind of jam?” she implored. “Jam? No!” roared Bartley. “It’s PAINT! It’s mineral paint — Lapham’s paint!”
“Paint?” echoed Marcia, as she stood over him while he stripped their wrappings from the jars which showed the dark blue, dark green, light brown, dark brown, and black, with the dark crimson, forming the gamut of colour of the Lapham paint. “Don’t TELL me it’s paint that I can use, Bartley!”
“Well, I shouldn’t advise you to use much of it — all at once,” replied her husband. “But it’s paint that you can use in moderation.”
Marcia cast her arms round his neck and kissed him. “O Bartley, I think I’m the happiest girl in the world! I was just wondering what I should do. There are places in that Clover Street house that need touching up so dreadfully. I shall be very careful. You needn’t be afraid I shall overdo. But, this just saves my life. Did you BUY it, Bartley? You know we couldn’t afford it, and you oughtn’t to have done it! And what does the Persis Brand mean?”
“Buy it?” cried Bartley. “No! The old fool’s sent it to you as a present. You’d better wait for the facts before you pitch into me for extravagance, Marcia. Persis is the name of his wife; and he named it after her because it’s his finest brand. You’ll see it in my interview. Put it on the market her last birthday for a surprise to her.”
“What old fool?” faltered Marcia.
“Why, Lapham — the mineral paint man.”
“Oh, what a good man!” sighed Marcia from the bottom of her soul. “Bartley! you WON’T make fun of him as you do of some of those people? WILL you?”
“Nothing that HE’LL ever find out,” said Bartley, getting up and brushing off the carpet-lint from his knees.
II
After dropping Bartley Hubbard at the Events building, Lapham drove on down Washington Street to Nankeen Square at the South End, where he had lived ever since the mistaken movement of society in that direction ceased. He had not built, but had bought very cheap of a terrified gentleman of good extraction who discovered too late that the South End was not the thing, and who in the eagerness of his flight to the Back Bay threw in his carpets and shades for almost nothing. Mrs. Lapham was even better satisfied with their bargain than the Colonel himself, and they had lived in Nankeen Square for twelve years. They had seen the saplings planted in the pretty oval round which the houses were built flourish up into sturdy young trees, and their two little girls in the same period had grown into young ladies; the Colonel’s tough frame had expanded into the bulk which Bartley’s interview indicated; and Mrs. Lapham, while keeping a more youthful outline, showed the sharp print of the crow’s-foot at the corners of her motherly eyes, and certain slight creases in her wholesome cheeks. The fact that they lived in an unfashionable neighbourhood was something that they had never been made to feel to their personal disadvantage, and they had hardly known it till the summer before this story opens, when Mrs. Lapham and her daughter Irene had met some other Bostonians far from Boston, who made it memorable. They were people whom chance had brought for the time under a singular obligation to the Lapham ladies, and they were gratefully recognisant of it. They had ventured — a mother and two daughters — as far as a rather wild little Canadian watering-place on the St. Lawrence, below Quebec, and had arrived some days before their son and brother was expected to join them. Two of their trunks had gone astray, and on the night of their arrival the mother was taken violently ill. Mrs. Lapham came to their help, with her skill as nurse, and with the abundance of her own and her daughter’s wardrobe, and a profuse, single-hearted kindness. When a doctor could be got at, he said that but for Mrs. Lapham’s timely care, the lady would hardly have lived. He was a very effusive little Frenchman, and fancied he was saying something very pleasant to everybody.
A certain intimacy inevitably followed, and when the son came he was even more grateful than the others. Mrs. Lapham could not quite understand why he should be as attentive to her as to Irene; but she compared him with other young men about the place, and thought him nicer than any of them. She had not the means of a wider comparison; for in Boston, with all her husband’s prosperity, they had not had a social life. Their first years there were given to careful getting on Lapham’s part, and careful saving on his wife’s. Suddenly the money began to come so abundantly that she need not save; and then they did not know what to do with it. A certain amount could be spent on horses, and Lapham spent it; his wife spent on rich and rather ugly clothes and a luxury of household appointments. Lapham had not yet reached the picture-buying stage of the rich man’s development, but they decorated their house with the costliest and most abominable frescoes; they went upon journeys, and lavished upon cars and hotels; they gave with both hands to their church and to all the charities it brought them acquainted with; but they did not know how to spend on society. Up to a certain period Mrs. Lapham had the ladies of her neighbourhood in to tea, as her mother had done in the country in her younger days. Lapham’s idea of hospitality was still to bring a heavy-buying customer home to pot-luck; neither of them imagined dinners.
Their two girls had gone to the public schools, where they had not got on as fast as some of the other girls; so that they were a year behind in graduating from the grammar-school, where Lapham thought that they had got education enough. His wife was of a different mind; she would have liked them to go to some private school for their finishing. But Irene did not care for study; she preferred house-keeping, and both the sisters were afraid of being snubbed by the other girls, who were of a different sort from the girls of the grammar-school; these were mostly from the parks and squares, like themselves. It ended in their going part of a year. But the elder had an odd taste of her own for reading, and she took some private lessons, and read books out of the circulating library; the whole family were amazed at the number she read, and rather proud of it.
They were not girls who embroidered or abandoned themselves to needle-work. Irene spent her abundant leisure in shopping for herself and her mother, of whom both daughters made a kind of idol, buying her caps and laces out of their pin-money, and getting her dresses far beyond her capacity to wear. Irene dressed herself very stylishly, and spent hours on her toilet every day. Her sister had a simpler taste, and, if she had done altogether as she liked, might even have slighted dress. They all three took