ism, which is nothing less than society on wheels, cannot be
satirized as a whim of fashion; it has a serious cause in--the discovery
of the disease called nervous prostration, which demands for its cure
constant change of scene, without any occupation. Henderson recognized
it, but he said that personally he had no time to indulge in it. His
summer was to be a very busy one. It was impossible to take Margaret with
him on his sudden and tedious journeys from one end of the country to the
other, but she needed a change. It was therefore arranged that after a
visit to Brandon she should pass the warm months with the Arbusers in
their summer home at Lenox, with a month--the right month--in the
Eschelle villa at Newport; and he hoped never to be long absent from one
place or the other.

Margaret came to Brandon at the beginning of June, just at the season
when the region was at its loveliest, and just when its society was
making preparations to get away from it to the sea, or the mountains, or
to any place that was not home. I could never understand why a people who
have been grumbling about snow and frost for six months, and longing for
genial weather, should flee from it as soon as it comes. I had made the
discovery, quite by chance--and it was so novel that I might have taken
out a patent on it--that if one has a comfortable home in our northern
latitude, he cannot do better than to stay in it when the hum of the
mosquito is heard in the land, and the mercury is racing up and down the
scale between fifty and ninety. This opinion, however, did not extend
beyond our little neighborhood, and we may be said to have had the summer
to ourselves.

I fancied that the neighborhood had not changed, but the coming of
Margaret showed me that this was a delusion. No one can keep in the same
place in life simply by standing still, and the events of the past two
years had wrought a subtle change in our quiet. Nothing had been changed
to the eye, yet something had been taken away, or something had been
added, a door had been opened into the world. Margaret had come home, yet
I fancied it was not the home to her that she had been thinking about.
Had she changed?

She was more beautiful. She had the air--I should hesitate to call it
that of the fine lady--of assured position, something the manner of that
greater world in which the possession of wealth has supreme importance,
but it was scarcely a change of manner so much as of ideas abou