t:

"Henry, it is _too_ tragic! She is such a goose, and he is so silly
about her! What shall we do?"

"I'll tell you what not to do--spoil my new canvas! If you _really_ want
my advice:--tell Eleanor that the greatest compliment any husband can
pay his wife is contained in four words: 'You never bore me'; and that
if she isn't careful Maurice will never compliment her."

Down in the garden, no one was aware of any tragedy. "When I go to Fern
Hill," Edith said, "I'm going to tell all the girls _I know Eleanor_!
I'm 'ordinary,' too, beside her. And so is mother."

Maurice agreed. "We are all crude, compared to her."

Edith sighed with joy; if she had had any inclination to be contemptuous
of Eleanor's timidity, it vanished when it was pointed out to her that
it was really a sign of the Bride's infinite superiority.... So the
three Houghtons accepted--one with amused pity, and the other with
concern, and the third with admiration of such super-refinement,--the
fact that Eleanor was a coward. Yet if she had not been a coward,
something she did would not have been particularly brave, nor would it
have wrung from Mary Houghton the admission: "I _like_ her!"

The conquering incident happened in August. The hut up in the woods
meant to Maurice and Edith and Johnny that eager grasping at hardship
with which Age has no sympathy, but which is the very essence of Youth.
Within a week of her arrival at Green Hill, Eleanor (who did not like
hardship;) had been carried off for a day of eating smoky food, cooked
on a camp fire, and watching cloud shadows drift across the valley and
up and over the hills; she had wondered, silently, why Maurice liked
this very tiring sort of thing?--and especially why he liked to have
Edith go along! "A child of her age is such a nuisance," Eleanor
thought. But he did like it, all of it!--the fatigue, and the smoke, and
the grubby food--and Edith!--he liked it so much that, just before the
time set for their departure for Mercer--and the position in a
real-estate office, which had been secured for Maurice--he said:

"Nelly, let's camp out up in the cabin for our last week, all by
ourselves!"

Edith's face fell, and so, for that matter, did the Bride's. Edith said,
"By yourselves? Not Johnny and me, too?" And Eleanor said, "_At night?_
Oh, Maurice!"

"It will be beautiful," he said; "there'll be a moon next week, and
we'll sit up there and look down into the valley, and see the treetops
lift