now at the clump of rural free-delivery boxes, where the path comes down from my cottage. Intimating that I might 'drop around' toward the end of the afternoon, I got out and, having handed up Cornelia's mail, walked home with my own. It proved rather piquantly amusing.

II

There was a light rain at lunch-time, but it blew over, leaving the out-ofdoors extraordinarily inviting. After I had written for two or three hours, I found myself walking — and chuckling - up the path through the birches to Cornelia's place. Under the hemlocks near the house, I passed Dorothy in white tennis-attire with a sketchy sweater the color of California poppies, curled up in a hammock with a book. A young girl alone fills me with awe, like a cardinal building a nest; and I always try to slip past without disturbance I feel that her mind must be occupied with something beautiful. 'What are you reading?' I called by way of greeting.

'I'm not reading,' she replied, 'I'm waiting for the young man that mother likes to have me play tennis with.'

With an additional chuckle, I proceeded to the front of the house. My original merriment had been occasioned by two letters, in the morning mail, from correspondents at large who desired me to inform them whether Cornelia was 'real.' I was also wondering how much of these letters I could discreetly disclose to her.

She met me on the threshold of the wide verandah, standing for an instant tiptoe in a practicable yet perfect sylvan costume, and framed between two tall Chinese vases of wild tiger-lilies, which made a little pattern with the glints in her hair and the knot of soft flame at her breast.

'Let's walk!' she said.

'Let's,' I replied; and we struck briskly into the abandoned road which runs, carpeted with bindweed and bittersweet, for miles and miles skirting the forest, with only a thin curtain of young silver poplars and birches between it and the lake. Cornelia is a light, crisp-footed walker, at her gayest walking, and good for long distances, my only complaint being that she has forgotten how to loiter. She seems rather bent upon reaching the terminus ad quem than careful to let me fall a step to the rear, where I may consider with more detachment how like a dryad she expresses and completes the woodland vista.

'I had a letter this morning,' I began, 'from an unknown lady. It would amuse you.'

'Would it indeed?' said Cornelia, moving swiftly forward and at the same time calling my attention to the twittering brown flutter of a tree full of cedar-wings.

'Yes,' I insisted, 'I'm sure it's as interesting as bird study. This lady doubts your existence. Listen to this.' I pulled forth a delicately tinted letter with a faint scent which died among the pungent fresh odors of the rain-washed air. ""Tell me," she writes, "whether Cornelia is real. If she is, I hope you are not in love with her. She is the feminine of Sir Austin Feverel. She has no heart. She is just unfaltering correctness. As a girl, I fancy, she folded her still hands in her lap and calmly waited till her family had consulted the bankers and the genealogists before she decided to care for the man she married. As a woman, she wishes to inspect and authorize every passion before she allows it to peep. I pity her children. She has never done a thing in her life merely because for one rapturous hour it seemed the most desirable thing in the wide world to do. I should hate her."'

Cornelia brushed me sidelong with the sweep of her gray eyes, of which the gray eyes, of which the effect, when one catches it so, is like that of the cool rays of a May sun bent to a focus under a burning-glass. But she said only: 'What queer correspondents you have! And what a charming impression of me you have given them! Am I as hateful as that?'

It is n't difficult to say complimentary things to Cornelia. The difficulty is not to say them. But I make it a practice not to answer rhetorical questions. They divert one from one's point. 'Please remember,' I said, carving my accents on the air with my crabtree stick and looking straight ahead, 'please remember that this is not my portrait of you, but only the comment of one woman upon the image of another woman reflected in the eyes of a man who has worn spectacles for many years. But I have another letter from a novelist; he has a quite different theory of you.'

'Is it nice?' asked Cornelia, with a demipirouette and the instinctive capricious smile of a very pretty woman about to step before a mirror. 'You should tell me something very nice to offset the spitefulness of that horrid person. But what a silly question! Your letter is from a novelist; so of course it is n't nice. Is it?'

'No,' I replied, 'I'm afraid it is n't nice in your sense of the word; but it is interesting in my sense of the word. I call a thing interesting, you see, when it seems to be earnestly pointing in the direction where truth, like a rabbit, has just disappeared in the bushes. Now this novelist belongs to the large and productive group of hunters who are leaving the highroad to pursue truth into the underbrush. His theory of you is not a personal reflection upon you; it is only part of his general theory of society and human nature.'

'Bah! bah! bah!' Cornelia exclaimed. 'I'm sick of human nature their theories of it, I mean. I love people, but I hate what our current writers say about them. Life is so much more decent, when one knows how to live and whom to live with, than any of our novelists will admit. I have the same feeling in the theatre. I go to a play and see nothing in it that can compare with the quality of real experience if one has any taste and discrimination. But tell me, now, what does this dreadful creature say about me?'

'Well, I'll take the risk,' I said, 'since you have the courage or the curiosity to insist on it.' I pulled out the second letter. 'What he says is this: "I am afraid your Cornelia is not real. For me, at any rate, she does n't exist. She is n't elemental. She is n't spontaneous. She strikes me as a theoretical construction to please a Victorian grandmother. Or perhaps I had better call her an old bachelor's pipe dream of a lady. One can't write modern fiction from that point of view. It's insubstantial. We realists have been demonstrating now for years that Judith O'Grady and the Colonel's lady are very much alike beneath the skin. We have destroyed the legend of the lady, and we have destroyed the legend of the gentleman. We have put them out of their misery: they don't exist any more. We're just men and women together. If you don't know Cornelia as a wife, you don't know her — you don't know her as a realist. Women are not like her not inside. Go beneath the surface, and you'll find the Judith O'Grady in Cornelia.'

'What nonsense!' cried Cornelia. 'What perfect nonsense! Give it to me.'

And, almost snatching the letter from my hand, she tore it into fine shreds, and tossed it showering into a wild-currant bush.

III

'Don't you see,' she continued, 'as we came over the brow of a little hill, 'why I can't have Dorothy reading these current novels? I don't wish her to be what this creature calls "elemental" and "spontaneous." I wish her to be civilized and rational — and not a well-dressed little savage, ready to act at once on whatever passion or fancy circumstances put into her head. I wish her to associate with people who are rational and civilized, and, when she marries, I wish her to marry a man who is civilized and rational. Do you know that in the course of the last year I have met just one man in fiction who seems to have retained elements of the ideas of a gentleman, rather, one man and his father, mean the hero of Struthers Burt's The Interpreter's House. As for Mr. Burt's women, they are almost as uncivilized as anybody's.'

or

I

'Is n't there a season of life,' I suggested, 'in which almost everyone has some uncivilized promptings?'

'Is there a season in life,' countered Cornelia, in which a properly trained person cannot present at least the appearance of discretion?'

'My dear Cornelia,' I said, 'do you ever glance through those columns in our great national fireside magazines in which wise old editors converse with their contributors and advise young girls how to catch a man?'

social position, his religion and principles of personal conduct, his property and prospects and professional standing. We are becoming absurd in our carelessness about such matters.'

'But that,' I protested, 'is just what makes the beauty of life in America.' "That,' said Cornelia, 'is what makes American life so ugly no respect for any of the things that make people respectable, no sense for the substantial basis of social distinctions, no regard for the hedges and barriers behind which one tries to cultivate the flowers of a finer garden.'

"That,' I said, 'is the really decisive evidence of our freedom from snobbishness.'

'It is the decisive evidence,' said Cornelia, 'of our deficiency in taste.' "You lack patience,' I persisted. 'It is the new social wisdom of democracy.'

'It is the new social idiocy of democracy,' she replied; 'and let me assure you there is none of it in my house. If I lack patience, I possess some experience. I was taught by my mother to be kind and considerate to servants - my old nurse loved me like a daughter. And I was taught at home and in church to be charitable to poor people and ignorant people and people without advantages and without manners. But I was also brought up to believe that a nice girl had better be dead than form a sentimental relationship with one who was not in her class not a gentleman.'

'Don't you think that is a rather silly prejudice?' I ventured.

'I certainly do not,' she replied. 'I think the salvation of a girl is her pride

legitimate pride in her family, her position, her connections. I have conscientiously striven to train my daughter to feel that, so far as her personal fortunes are concerned, common people—that is, vulgar ordinary people

simply are not in the world. Call it

of it.'

'But Cornelia,' I said, 'can't you concede that, in the relation we are discussing, there is something more elemental and imperative than can be governed by such considerations as you put foremost?'

"Yes to the sense of animals and savages. Yes to the sense of vulgar and ignorant people. To the sense of what my mother used to call gentlefolk

emphatically, No. To them there can be nothing more elemental and imperative than just those considerations which distinguish them from the ignorant and the vulgar.'

'You yourself have half apologized for the old word, "gentlefolk," I nagged. 'Please tell me what gentlefolk were, or rather what a gentleman is. Must he belong to the Church and be a member of the militia? For how many generations must he be able to trace his family? How much money must he have in the bank? How much of the Decalogue and how many rules for perfect behavior may he break in a day, without losing caste? Are you quite clear about all this?'

"You have a very irritating way,' said Cornelia, ‘of trying to make the most sensible and obvious positions absurd to maintain. But you know I am right. You know that there is nothing absurd in being conscious of the claims of the Church and the State and the established system of morals and manners. You know there is nothing absurd in being conscious of the significance of money in enabling one to take and maintain a position of dignity and influence. A man has no dignity nor influence until he enters relations with the instituted and continuing forms of society. And though silly little girls may think they could spend a happy lifetime "traipsing" after a gypsy minstrel, a wife knows better. Every

'Very possibly,' I said; 'but you were going to define a gentleman.'

"Why, a gentleman,' said Cornelia, 'is a man so well-bred and so intelligent that he knows what I have just been saying without being told; consequently he does n't ask a nice girl to marry him if he is aware that he can offer her nothing but perpetual humiliation. A gentleman is a man whose character has been formed by the standards of civilized and rational people. To him these considerations are so elementary and so familiar that he acts upon them spontaneously.'

"Then you would admit,' I suggested, a little petulantly, 'that what a man is, after he is a vestryman, an officer in the militia, and a property-holder, may have a certain remote bearing on the felicity of a marriage, if you think that of any importance?'

on

'Of course I think that of importance,' responded Cornelia. 'Don't be foolish. I am discussing the conditions in which felicity begins to be possible. You recall what Henry James says so beautifully: "The object of money is to enable one to forget it." In the whole course of my life, I believe I was never before hectored into saying so flatly what the prerequisites of a decent marriage are. But you and your novelist friends you realists, as you call yourselves - have filled the world with the glorification of merely instinctive and utterly irrational "matings," or with childish sentimentality about them; so that now, when I talk with Dorothy about suitable and unsuitable marriages, I find myself obliged to reconstruct for her the very rudiments of common sense.'

I do not consider Cornelia subtle, but sometimes she says the same things that she would say if she were subtle.

However, if I was being instructed over the head of her daughter, I did not propose to acknowledge it. 'My dear Cornelia,' I remonstrated, 'do you for get that I am not Dorothy?'

'No,' she said, 'but I often think you are just as sentimental.'

IV

The old road dips here into a hollow, where an extensive thicket of wild roses encroaches upon it and diminishes it to a narrow and thorny footpath. We picked our way through it single-file and in silence. Cornelia, emerging some steps ahead, turned and waited, waisthigh behind the briars, smiling - with a rose in her hand and its hue in her face. Suddenly she seemed a long way off- twenty years off. The breeze had brought youth into her eyes if not into her mind. She was very lovely, and I wished the wind might have loosened a wisp why could n't it?- of her sunlit hair; but that was too much for the wind. Her arrangements had been complete.

She fixed the rose in my coat.

'Cornelia,' I said, as we footed it again together over the vivid green gloss of dewberry leaves, 'you remind me of an old sweetheart of the seventeenth century—who also married a diplomat. I mean Dorothy Osborne. When Temple was courting her, she wrote to him, oh quite delicious letters

one in particular, in which she says she has been crying over the story of Baucis and Philemon. "Methinks," she says, "they were the perfectest characters of a contented marriage, where piety and love were all their wealth, and in their poverty feasted the gods when rich men shut them out.' But in that identical letter she warns her lover that "this is the world; would you and I were out on't!" And in the next letter she derides the foolish young

'Yes - yes; I remember,' Cornelia said, with I thought a faint note of reverie. 'Love and wit met in that encounter, and both came away much improved. I must give that book to my Dorothy. She was a sensible girl Dorothy Osborne was a very sensible girl. It is a book that will help a young girl to understand that she need n't be an idiot.'

'At heart,' I said, 'even the sweetest women are as hard as nails, are n't they?'

'Someone has to be,' said Cornelia.

'You mean,' I interpreted, "if young lovers are n't to make fools of themselves.'

'Yes,' she said, 'or old ones, either.' 'H'm,' I resumed; 'what I was getting at was this: when I was a young fellow, with even less experience than I have now, I used rather to revel in reading tragedies and tales of dismally bitter and disillusioned men. All young fellows do. I suppose it intensifies the sense of their own existence. In the presence of dark and disastrous things sin, crime, murder for love, and so they persuade themselves that they are drawing close to the "throbbing heart of reality."'

on

-

'Yes,' said Cornelia, 'I remember. I remember that you used to like tragedy.'

'But now,' I said, 'I am following an entirely different clue. I have a theory that the only matter that is really worth investigating is happiness. And so I haunt the trails of people who are reputed to be happy, or who act as if they were happy; and I pester them for their secrets.'