"Oh yes," Eleanor heard her say; "Eleanor's voice is perfectly _fine_,
father says. I'm not musical. Father says I don't know the difference
between 'Yankee Doodle' and 'Old Hundred.' Father say--" and so on.

"She's tiresome!" Eleanor told herself. Later, as she sat at the little
dinner table, all gay with flowers and the bride's new candlesticks and
glittering bonbon dishes ("Hetty's showing off our loot," the bridegroom
said, proudly), Eleanor, looking on, and straining sometimes to be silly
like the rest of them, said to herself, bleakly, that the doctor, who
looked fifty, had been asked on her account. When he began to talk to
her it was all she could do to say, "Really?" or, "Of course!" at the
proper places; she was absorbed in watching Edith--the vivid face, the
broad smile, the voice so full of preposterous certainties! "I _look_
old," she thought; and indeed she did--most unnecessarily! for she was
only forty-four. Her throat suddenly ached with unshed tears of longing
to be young. Yet if she had not been so bitter she would have seen that
Maurice looked almost as old as she did! And no wonder. His
consternation at the sight of Doctor Nelson had been panic! He could
hardly eat. Naturally, the preoccupation of the two Curtises threw the
burden of talk upon the others. Doctor Nelson gave himself up to his
hostess, and Morton found Edith's ardors, upon every subject under
heaven, most diverting; he teased her and baited her, and her eyes grew
more shining, and her cheeks pinker, and her gayety more contagious with
every repartee she flung back at him. Mrs. Morton struggled heroically
with Maurice's heaviness, but she told her husband afterward, that Mr.
Curtis was nearly as dull as his wife! "I _couldn't_ make him talk!" she
said. After a while she gave up trying to make him talk, and listened to
Edith's story of what happened when she was a little girl and came to
Mercer with her father:

"A terrible shipwreck!" Edith said; "I remember it because of Maurice's
gallantry in giving the flopping girl his coat--he was a perfect Sir
Walter Raleigh! Remember, Maurice?"

Maurice said, briefly, that he "remembered"; "if she says Dale, I'm
dished," he thought; aloud, he said that the river was growing
impossible for boating; which caused them to drop the subject of the
flopping girl, and talk about Mercer's increasing dinginess, at which
Edith said, eagerly:

"You ought to see our mountains--no smoke there!"

Then, o