Piper stopped twanging long enough to shake hands and smile. “Coming down to the Cove?” “I don’t think so, not this time,” Jean said, regretfully. She would have loved a visit back at the old home, and still it might only have made her dissatisfied. As Kit said, “Beware of the fleshpots of Egypt when one is living on corn bread and Indian pudding.” Marion Valleé remembered her at once, and had the girls help make sandwiches behind a tall screen. Rye bread sliced very thin, and buttered with sweet butter, then devilled crabmeat spread between. That was Bab’s task. Jean found herself facing a Japanese bowl of cream cheese, bottle of pimentoes and some chopped walnuts. Later there was dancing, Jean’s first dance in a year, and Mrs. Crane smiled at her approvingly when she finished and came to her side. “It’s good to watch you enjoy yourself. Jean, I want you to meet the youngest of the boys here tonight. He’s come all the way east from the Golden Gate to show us real enthusiasm.” Jean found herself shaking hands with a little white haired gentleman who beamed at her cheerfully, and proceeded to tell her all about his new picture, the Golden Gate at night. “Just at moonrise, you know, with the reflections of the signal lights on ships in the water and the moon shimmer faintly rising. I have great hopes for it. And I’ve always wanted to come to New York, always, ever since I was a boy.” “He’s eighty-three,” Mrs. Crane found a chance to whisper. “Think of him adventuring forth with his masterpiece and the fire of youth in his heart.” A young Indian princess from the Cherokee Nation stood in the firelight glow, dressed in ceremonial garb, and recited some strange folk poem of her people, about the “Trail of Tears,” that path trod by the Cherokees when they were driven forth from their homes in Georgia to the new country in the Osage Mountains. Jean leaned forward, listening to the words, they came so beautifully from her grave young lips, and last of all the broken treaty, after the lands had been given in perpetuity, “while the grass grows and the waters flow.” “Isn’t she a darling?” Bab said under her breath. “She’s a college girl too. I love to watch her eyes glow when she recites that poem. You know, Jean, you can smother it under all you like, not you, of course, but we Americans, still the Indian is the real thing after all. Mother Columbia has spanked him and put him in a corner and told him to behave, but he’s perfectly right.”