dge of her mantle.' No, you mustn't hiss, my dear; but if you find
Salome getting too much for you you can throw a dynamite bomb at the
young woman who is doing her. I dare say we shall want to blow up the
whole theatre before the play is over."

"Oh, I don't believe we shall. I know the piece will go splendidly if
the love-business is well done. But you can understand, can't you, just
how I feel about Salome?"

"I think I can, and I am perfectly sure that you will be bitterly
disappointed in her, no matter how she's done, unless you do her
yourself."

"I wish I could!"

"Then the other people might be disappointed."

XI.

The Maxwells went to New York early in October, and took a little
furnished flat for the winter on the West Side, between two streets
among the Eighties. It was in a new apartment-house, rather fine on the
outside, and its balconies leaned caressingly towards the tracks of the
Elevated Road, whose trains steamed back and forth under them night and
day. At first they thought it rather noisy, but their young nerves were
strong, and they soon ceased to take note of the uproar, even when the
windows were open.

The weather was charming, as the weather of the New York October is apt
to be. The month proved much milder than September had been at Magnolia.
They were not very far from Central Park, and they went for whole
afternoons into it. They came to have such a sense of ownership in one
of the seats in the Ramble, that they felt aggrieved when they found
anybody had taken it, and they resented other people's intimacy with
the squirrels, which Louise always took a pocketful of nuts to feed; the
squirrels got a habit of climbing into her lap for them. Sometimes
Maxwell hired a boat and rowed her lazily about on the lake, while he
mused and she talked. Sometimes, to be very lavish, they took places in
the public carriage which plied on the drives of the Park, and went up
to the tennis-grounds beyond the reservoirs, and watched the players, or
the art-students sketching the autumn scenery there. They began to know,
without acquaintance, certain attached or semi-attached couples; and no
doubt they passed with these for lovers themselves, though they felt a
vast superiority to them in virtue of their married experience; they
looked upon them, though the people were sometimes their elders, as very
young things, who were in the right way, but were as yet deplorably
ignorant how happy they were g