but that was the least of it.

No, Mamma simply couldn't come to them now. She would have to go to
Miss Fox and the children. Myra wouldn't like it, and Mamma always
interfered with Miss Fox, and would have to take the second best
bedroom, and George would probably make a fuss, but there was nothing
else to do. It couldn't be helped.

Sometimes in moments of less strain, Mary was amused to remember that
it was through Mamma that she had met George. She, Mary, had gone down
from, her settlement work in hot New York for a little breathing spell
at Atlantic City, where Mamma, who had a very small room at the top of
a very large hotel, was enjoying a financially pinched but entirely
carefree existence. Mary would have preferred sober and unpretentious
boarding in some private family herself, but Mamma loved the big
dining-room, the piazzas, the music, and the crowds of the hotel, and
Mary amiably engaged the room next to hers. They had to climb a flight
of stairs above the last elevator stop to reach their rooms, and rarely
saw any one in their corridors except maids and chauffeurs, but Mamma
didn't mind that. She knew a score of Southern people downstairs who
always included her in their good times; her life never lacked the
spice of a mild flirtation. Mamma rarely had to pay for any of her own
meals, except breakfast, and the economy with which she could order a
breakfast was a real surprise to Mary. Mamma swam, motored, danced,
walked, gossiped, played bridge, and golfed like any debutante. Mary,
watching her, wondered sometimes if the father she had lost when a tiny
baby, and the stepfather whose marriage to her mother, and death had
followed only a few years later, were any more real to her mother than
the dreams they both were to her.

On the day of Mary's arrival, mother and daughter came down to the wide
hotel porch, in the cool idle hour before dinner, and took possession
of big rocking-chairs, facing the sea. They were barely seated, when a
tall man in white flannels came smilingly toward them.

"Mrs. Honeywell!" he said, delightedly, and Mary saw her mother give
him a cordial greeting before she said:

"And now, George, I want you to know my little girl, Ma'y,--Miss
Bannister. Ma'y, this is my Southe'n boy I was telling you about!"

Mary, turning unsmiling eyes, was quite sure the man would be nearer
forty than thirty, as indeed he was, grizzled and rather solid into the
bargain. Mamma's "boys" were rarely