greeing to alligator pear salad, "shall
we say Fairy God-cousin? That's a gay and pleasing relationship without
undue responsibilities. Will that do?"

"That will do for the present," said Mr. Harrison. He regarded her across
the small table with perfectly apparent satisfaction. Nothing bucolic
here; a dark and gypsy beauty which glowed and kindled beside the fainter
types about them, a wholly modish smartness, an elusive something to
which he could not put a name, which gave him always the sense of glad
pursuit. There had been in his early attitude, as she had divined, just a
trifle of the King and the Beggar Maid, the Town Mouse and the City
Mouse, but that was gone now. She knew his New York very nearly as well
as he did himself and with her increased activities had come decreased
dependence on him. She was either so gayly busy or so busily gay that she
was able to accept only one invitation in four, which made it very
necessary to ask her early and often. He was a wary young man, Rodney
Harrison, urban from head to heel; marriage had not entered into his
calculations. Yet he was aware of his growing fondness and approval, his
growing conviction that domesticity with Jane Vail need not of necessity
be the curbing and cloying thing he had visioned.

It was May when he told her that his mother wanted to come to see her,
and it was the following day that Jane wrote home to tell them she was
coming to Vermont for the summer months. She wasn't quite ready for
Rodney Harrison's mother to call on her; she wanted a little time and a
little perspective, and she knew that the hour had struck for her to go
back and put a firm if mournful period to the affair of Marty Wetherby.
There had been constantly recurring scoldings by mail from Sarah Farraday
and Nannie Slade Hunter, and, while he was the poorest and least
articulate of correspondents, his stammering letters had still achieved a
pathos of their own, and the thing was no longer to be shirked.

So she said good-by at the boarding house to Mrs. Hills and Emma Ellis
and Michael Daragh and at the station to Rodney Harrison; and went back
in smart triumph with a wardrobe trunk full of clever clothes and the
latest shining model in typewriters.

They were out in force to meet her; her Aunt Lydia Vail, happily tearful
and trembling; Nannie Slade Hunter and Edward R. with the amazingly
enlarged and humanized Teddy-bear, in their new roadster; Sarah Farraday,
a little thinner a