name, treating him kindly,
with almost motherly tenderness. Madeline's letters and Mrs. Fosdick's
own letters received during his convalescence abroad had prepared him,
or so he had thought, for some such change. Now he realized that he had
not been prepared at all. The reality was so much more revolutionary
than the anticipation that he simply could not believe it.

But it was not so very wonderful if he had known all the facts and had
been in a frame of mind to calmly analyze them. Mrs. Fletcher Fosdick
was a seasoned veteran, a general who had planned and fought many
hard campaigns upon the political battlegrounds of women's clubs and
societies of various sorts. From the majority of those campaigns she had
emerged victorious, but her experiences in defeat had taught her that
the next best thing to winning is to lose gracefully, because by
so doing much which appears to be lost may be regained. For Albert
Speranza, bookkeeper and would-be poet of South Harniss, Cape Cod,
she had had no use whatever as a prospective son-in-law. Even toward a
living Albert Speranza, hero and newspaper-made genius, she might have
been cold. But when that hero and genius was, as she and every one else
supposed, safely and satisfactorily dead and out of the way, she had
seized the opportunity to bask in the radiance of his memory. She had
talked Albert Speranza and read Albert Speranza and boasted of Albert
Speranza's engagement to her daughter before the world. Now that the
said Albert Speranza had been inconsiderate enough to "come alive
again," there was but one thing for her to do--that is, to make the best
of it. And when Mrs. Fletcher Fosdick made the best of anything she made
the very best.

"It doesn't make any difference," she told her husband, "whether he
really is a genius or whether he isn't. We have said he is and now
we must keep on saying it. And if he can't earn his salt by his
writings--which he probably can't--then you must fix it in some way so
that he can make-believe earn it by something else. He is engaged to
Madeline, and we have told every one that he is, so he will have to
marry her; at least, I see no way to prevent it."

"Humph!" grunted Fosdick. "And after that I'll have to support them, I
suppose."

"Probably--unless you want your only child to starve."

"Well, I must say, Henrietta--"

"You needn't, for there is nothing more TO say. We're in it and, whether
we like it or not, we must make the best of it