o it pretty well," he laughed. "By the way,
Honora, I've got to have a conference with Mr. Wing to-day, and I may not
be home to lunch."

"We're dining there to-night," she told him, in a listless voice.

Upon Ethel Wing had descended the dominating characteristics of the elder
James, who, whatever the power he might wield in Wall Street, was little
more than a visitor in Newport. It was Ethel's house, from the hour she
had swept the Reel and Carter plans (which her father had brought home)
from the table and sent for Mr. Farwell. The forehanded Reginald arrived
with a sketch, and the result, as every one knows, is one of the chief
monuments to his reputation. So exquisitely proportioned is its simple,
two-storied marble front as seen through the trees left standing on the
old estate, that tourists, having beheld the Chamberlin and other
mansions, are apt to think this niggardly for a palace. Two infolding
wings, stretching towards the water, enclose a court, and through the
slender white pillars of the peristyle one beholds in fancy the summer
seas of Greece.

Looking out on the court, and sustaining this classic illusion, is a
marble-paved dining room, with hangings of Pompeiian red, and frescoes of
nymphs and satyrs and piping shepherds, framed between fluted pilasters,
dimly discernible in the soft lights.

In the midst of these surroundings, at the head of his table, sat the
great financier whose story but faintly concerns this chronicle; the man
who, every day that he had spent down town in New York in the past thirty
years, had eaten the same meal in the same little restaurant under the
street. This he told Honora, on his left, as though it were not history.
He preferred apple pie to the greatest of artistic triumphs of his
daughter's chef, and had it; a glorified apple pie, with frills and
furbelows, and whipped cream which he angrily swept to one side with
contempt.

"That isn't apple pie," he said. "I'd like to take that Frenchman to the
little New England hilltown where I went to school and show him what
apple pie is."

Such were the autobiographical snatches--by no means so crude as they
sound that reached her intelligence from time to time. Mr. Wing was too
subtle to be crude; and he had married a Playfair, a family noted for
good living. Honora did not know that he was fond of talking of that
apple pie and the New England school at public banquets; nor did Mr. Wing
suspect that the young woman whom