and still impossible! I
was there myself all the time and they neither of thirty-five
cents a pound for the most ordinary ferns and red carnations
was all they had, and we thought it rather skimpy under the
brought up in one big braid and caught down with at Peterson's
they were pink and white with--' ... 'Oh, no, Madeleine! that
was at the Burlingame's_.' Mrs. Sandworth took a running jump
into the din and sank from her brother's sight, vociferating:
'_The Petersons had them of old gold, don't you remember, with
little_--'

The doctor, worming his way desperately through the masses of
femininity, and resisting all attempts to engage him in the
local fray, emerged at length into the darkened hall where
the air was, as he told himself in a frenzied flight of
imagination, less like a combination of a menagerie and a
perfume shop. Here, in a quiet corner, sat Lydia's father
alone. He held in one hand a large platter piled high with
wafer-like sandwiches, which he was consuming at a Gargantuan
rate, and as he ate, he smiled to himself.

'Well, Mr. Ogre,' said the doctor, sitting down beside him
with a gasp of relief; 'let a wave-worn mariner into your den,
will you?'

Provided with an auditor, Judge Emery's smile broke into an
open laugh. He waved the platter toward the uproar in the next
rooms: 'A boiler factory ain't in it with woman, lovely woman,
is it?' he put it to his friend.

'Gracious powers! There's nothing to laugh at in that
exhibition!' the doctor reproved him, with an acrimonious
savagery. 'I don't know which makes me sicker; to stay in
there and listen to them, or come out here and find you
thinking they're _funny_!'

They are funny!' insisted the Judge tranquilly. 'I stood by
the door and listened to the scraps of talk I could catch,
till I thought I should have a fit. I never heard anything
funnier on the stage.'

'Looky here, Nat,' the doctor stared up at him angrily,
'they're not monkeys in a zoo, to be looked at only on
holidays and then laughed at! They're the other half of a
whole that we're half of, and don't you forget it! Why in the
world should you think it funny for them to do this tomfool
trick all winter and have nervous prostration all summer to
pay for it? You'd lock up a _man_ as a dangerous lunatic if
he spent his