inly a fate in these matters," she said to herself,
complacently. "_One_ thing always follows another."

Mrs. Argenter was apt to make to herself a "House that Jack built"
out of her providences. She had always a little string of them to
rehearse in every history; from the malt that lay in the house, and
the rat that ate the malt, up to the priest all shaven and shorn,
that married the man that kissed the maid--and so on, all the way
back again. She counted them up as they went along. "There was the
overturn," she would say, by and by "and there was Rodney
Sherrett's call because of that, and then his sister's because no
doubt he asked her, and then their both coming together; and there
was your pretty white polonaise, you know, the day they did come;
and there was"--Mrs. Argenter has not counted up to that yet.
Perhaps it may be a long while before she will so readily count it
in.

It had turned out a hot day; one of those days in the nineties, when
if you once hear from the thermometer, or in any way have the fact
forcibly brought home to you, you relinquish all idea of exertion
yourself, and look upon the world outside as one great pause, out of
which no movement can possibly come, unless there first come the
beneficence of an east wind, which the dwellers on Massachusetts Bay
have always for a reserve of hope. Yet it may quite well occur to
here and there an individual with a resolute purpose in the day, to
actually live through it and pursue the intended plan, without
realizing the extra degrees of Fahrenheit at all, and to learn with
surprise at set of sun when the deeds are done, of the excelsior
performances of the mercury. With what secret amazement and dismay
is one's valor recognized, however, when it has led one to render
one's self at four in the afternoon on such a day, near one's friend
who _has_ been vividly conscious of the torrid atmosphere! Did you
ever make or receive such an afternoon call?

Mrs. Argenter, comfortable in her thin wrapper, reading her thin
romance, did not trouble herself to be astonished. "They were young
people; young people could do anything," she dimly thought; and
putting the white polonaise into the structure of the House that
Jack built, she interrupted herself no farther than presently to
ring her bell again, and tell the maid on no account to admit any
one to see herself, and to be sure that there were plenty of
raspberries brought in for tea.

Meanwhile, away in the c