_ Bibbs indulged in his silent chuckle again; he seemed greatly amused.
"I thought that the people who actually had the real what-you-may-
call-it didn't know it," he said. "I've always understood that it was
very unsatisfactory, because if you thought about it you didn't have
it, and if you had it you didn't know it."
"That's just bosh," she retorted. "They know it in this town, all
right! I found out a lot of things, long before we began to think
of building out in this direction. The right people in this town
aren't always the society-column ones, and they mix around with
outsiders, and they don't all belong to any one club--they're taken
in all sorts into all their clubs--but they're a clan, just the same;
and they have the clan feeling and they're just as much We, Us and
Company as any crowd you read about anywhere in the world. Most of
'em were here long before papa came, and the grandfathers of the girls
of my age knew each other, and--"
"I see," Bibbs interrupted, gravely. "Their ancestors fled together
from many a stricken field, and Crusaders' blood flows in their veins.
I always understood the first house was built by an old party of the
name of Vertrees who couldn't get along with Dan'l Boone, and hurried
away to these parts because Dan'l wanted him to give back a gun he'd
lent him."
Edith gave a little ejaculation of alarm. "You mustn't repeat that
story, Bibbs, even if it's true. The Vertreeses are THE best family,
and of course the very oldest here; they were an old family even
before Mary Vertrees's great-great-grandfather came west and founded
this settlement. He came from Lynn, Massachusetts, and they have
relatives there YET--some of the best people in Lynn!"
"No!" exclaimed Bibbs, incredulously.
"And there are other old families like the Vertreeses," she went
on, not heeding him; "the Lamhorns and the Kittersbys and the
J. Palmerston Smiths--"
"Strange names to me," he interrupted. "Poor things! None of them
have my acquaintance."
"No, that's just it!" she cried. "And papa had never even heard the
name of Vertrees! Mrs. Vertrees went with some anti-smoke committee
to see him, and he told her that smoke was what made her husband bring
home his wages from the pay-roll on Saturday night! HE told us about
it, and I thought I just couldn't live through the night, I was so
ashamed! Mr. Vertrees has always lived on his income, and papa didn't
know him, of course. They're the stiffist, most elegant people in the
whole town. And to crown it all, papa went and bought the next lot to
the old Vertrees country mansion--it's in the very heart of the best
new residence district now, and that's where the New House is, right
next door to them--and I must say it makes their place look rather
shabby! I met Mary Vertrees when I joined the Mission Service
Helpers, but she never did any more than just barely bow to me, and
since papa's break I doubt if she'll do that! They haven't called."
"And you think if I spread this gossip about Vertrees the First
stealing Dan'l Boone's gun, the chances that they WILL call--"
"Papa knows what a break he made with Mrs. Vertrees. I made him
understand that," said Edith, demurely, "and he's promised to try
and meet Mr. Vertrees and be nice to him. It's just this way: if we
don't know THEM, it's practically no use in our having build the New
House; and if we DO know them and they're decent to us, we're right
with the right people. They can do the whole thing for us. Bobby
Lamhorn told Sibyl he was going to bring his mother to call on her
and on mamma, but it was weeks ago, and I notice he hasn't done it;
and if Mrs. Vertrees decides not to know us, I'm darn sure Mrs
Lamhorn'll never come. That's ONE thing Sibyl didn't manage! She
SAID Bobby offered to bring his mother--"
"You say he is a friend of Roscoe's?" Bibbs asked.
"Oh, he's a friend of the whole family," she returned, with a
petulance which she made an effort to disguise. "Roscoe and he got
acquainted somewhere, and they take him to the theater about every
other night. Sibyl has him to lunch, too, and keeps--" She broke
off with an angry little jerk of the head. "We can see the New House
from the second corner ahead. Roscoe has built straight across the
street from us, you know. Honestly, Sibyl makes me think of a snake,
sometimes--the way she pulls the wool over people's eyes! She honeys
up to papa and gets anything in the world she wants out of him, and
then makes fun of him behind his back--yes, and to his face, but HE
can't see it! She got him to give her a twelve-thousand-dollar porch
for their house after it was--"
"Good heavens!" said Bibbs, staring ahead as they reached the corner
and the car swung to the right, following a bend in the street.
"Is that the New House?"
"Yes. What do you think of it?"
"Well," he drawled, "I'm pretty sure the sanitarium's about half a
size bigger; I can't be certain till I measure."
And a moment later, as they entered the driveway, he added, seriously:
"But it's beautiful!"
It was gray stone, with long roofs of thick green slate. An architect
who loved the milder "Gothic motives" had built what he liked: it was
to be seen at once that he had been left unhampered, and he had
wrought a picture out of his head into a noble and exultant reality.
At the same time a landscape-designer had played so good a second,
with ready-made accessories of screen, approach and vista, that
already whatever look of newness remained upon the place was to its
advantage, as showing at least one thing yet clean under the grimy
sky. For, though the smoke was thinner in this direction, and at this
long distance from the heart of the town, it was not absent, and under
tutelage of wind and weather could be malignant even here, where cows
had wandered in the meadows and corn had been growing not ten years
gone.
Altogether, the New House was a success. It was one of those
architects' successes which leave the owners veiled in privacy;
it revealed nothing of the people who lived in it save that they
were rich. There are houses that cannot be detached from their own
people without protesting: every inch of mortar seems to mourn the
separation, and such a house--no matter what be done to it--is ever
murmurous with regret, whispering the old name sadly to itself
unceasingly. But the New House was of a kind to change hands without
emotion. In our swelling cities, great places of its type are useful
as financial gauges of the business tides; rich families, one after
another, take title and occupy such houses as fortunes rise and fall
--they mark the high tide. It was impossible to imagine a child's toy
wagon left upon a walk or driveway of the New House, and yet it was
--as Bibbs rightly called it--"beautiful."
What the architect thought of the "Golfo di Napoli," which hung in
its vast gold revel of rococo frame against the gray wood of the hall,
is to be conjectured--perhaps he had not seen it.
"Edith, did you say only eleven feet?" Bibbs panted, staring at it,
as the white-jacketed twin of a Pullman porter helped him to get out
of his overcoat.
"Eleven without the frame," she explained. "It's splendid, don't
you think? It lightens things up so. The hall was kind of gloomy
before."
"No gloom now!" said Bibbs.
"This statue in the corner is pretty, too," she remarked. "Mamma and
I bought that." And Bibbs turned at her direction to behold, amid a
grove of tubbed palms, a "life-size," black-bearded Moor, of a plastic
compositon painted with unappeasable gloss and brilliancy. Upon his
chocolate head he wore a gold turban; in his hand he held a gold-
tipped spear; and for the rest, he was red and yellow and black and
silver.
"Hallelujah!" was the sole comment of the returned wanderer, and
Edith, saying she would "find mamma," left him blinking at the Moor.
Presently, after she had disappeared, he turned to the colored man who
stood waiting, Bibbs's traveling-bag in his hand. "What do YOU think
of it?" Bibbs asked, solemnly.
"Gran'!" replied the servitor. "She mighty hard to dus'. Dus' git
in all 'em wrinkles. Yessuh, she mighty hard to dus'."
"I expect she must be," said Bibbs, his glance returning reflectively
to the black bull beard for a moment. "Is there a place anywhere
I could lie down?"
"Yessuh. We got one nem spare rooms all fix up fo' you, suh. Right
up staihs, suh. Nice room."
He led the way, and Bibbs followed slowly, stopping at intervals to
rest, and noting a heavy increase in the staff of service since the
exodus from the "old" house. Maids and scrubwomen were at work under
the patently nominal direction of another Pullman porter, who was
profoundly enjoying his own affectation of being harassed with care.
"Ev'ything got look spick an' span fo' the big doin's to-night,"
Bibbs's guide explained, chuckling. "Yessuh, we got big doin's
to-night! Big doin's!" _