wife thoughtfully.

"Yes," assented the Colonel. "I know where they are. I've got a lot
of land over on the Back Bay."

"You have?" eagerly demanded his wife.

"Want me to build on it?" he asked in reply, with a quizzical smile.

"I guess we can get along here for a while."

This was at night. In the morning Mrs. Lapham said--

"I suppose we ought to do the best we can for the children, in every
way."

"I supposed we always had," replied her husband.

"Yes, we have, according to our light."

"Have you got some new light?"

"I don't know as it's light. But if the girls are going to keep on
living in Boston and marry here, I presume we ought to try to get them
into society, some way; or ought to do something."

"Well, who's ever done more for their children than we have?" demanded
Lapham, with a pang at the thought that he could possibly have been
out-done. "Don't they have everything they want? Don't they dress just
as you say? Don't you go everywhere with 'em? Is there ever anything
going on that's worth while that they don't see it or hear it? I don't
know what you mean. Why don't you get them into society? There's money
enough!"

"There's got to be something besides money, I guess," said Mrs. Lapham,
with a hopeless sigh. "I presume we didn't go to work just the right
way about their schooling. We ought to have got them into some school
where they'd have got acquainted with city girls--girls who could help
them along."

"Nearly everybody at Miss Smillie's was from some where else."

"Well, it's pretty late to think about that now," grumbled Lapham.

"And we've always gone our own way, and not looked out for the future.
We ought to have gone out more, and had people come to the house.
Nobody comes."

"Well, is that my fault? I guess nobody ever makes people welcomer."

"We ought to have invited company more."

"Why don't you do it now? If it's for the girls, I don't care if you
have the house full all the while."

Mrs. Lapham was forced to a confession full of humiliation. "I don't
know who to ask."

"Well, you can't expect me to tell you."

"No; we're both country people, and we've kept our country ways, and we
don't, either of us, know what to do. You've had to work so hard, and
your luck was so long coming, and then it came with such a rush, that
we haven't had any chance to learn what to do with it. It's just the
same with Irene's looks; I didn't expect she was ever going to hav