“Dear Gracie,—so she has got a house all to herself; how I shall miss her! but, really, John, I think she will be happier. Since you would insist on revolutionizing our house, you know”— “But, Lillie, it was to please you.” “Oh, I know it! but you know I begged you not to. Well, John, I don’t think I should like to go in and settle down on Grace; perhaps, as I am here, and the sea-air and bathing strengthens me so, we may as well put it through. I will come home as soon as the house is done.” “But perhaps you would want to go with me to New York to select the furniture?” “Oh, the artist does all that! Charlie Ferrola will give his orders to Simon & Sauls, and they will do every thing up complete. It’s the way they all do—saves lots of trouble.” John went home, after three days spent in Newport, feeling that Lillie was somehow an injured fair one, and that the envious world bore down always on beauty and prosperity. But incidentally he heard and overheard much that made him uneasy. He heard her admired as a “bully” girl, a “fast one;” he heard of her smoking, he overheard something about “painting.” The time was that John thought Lillie an embryo angel,—an angel a little bewildered and gone astray, and with wings a trifle the worse for the world’s wear,—but essentially an angel of the same nature with his own revered mother. Gradually the mercury had been falling in the tube of his estimation. He had given up the angel; and now to himself he called her “a silly little pussy,” but he did it with a smile. It was such a neat, white, graceful pussy; and all his own pussy too, and purred and rubbed its little head on no coat-sleeve but his,—of that he was certain. Only a bit silly. She would still _fib_ a little, John feared, especially when he looked back to the chapter about her age,—and then, perhaps, about the cigarettes. Well, she might, perhaps, in a wild, excited hour, have smoked _one or two_, just for fun, and the thing had been exaggerated. She had promised fairly to return those cigarettes,—he dared not say to himself that he feared she would not. He kept saying to himself that she would. It was necessary to say this often to make himself believe it. As to painting—well, John didn’t like to ask her, because, what if she shouldn’t tell him the truth? And, if she did paint, was it so great a sin, poor little thing? he would watch, and bring her out of it. After all, when the house was all finished and arranged, and he got her back from Newport, there would be a long, quiet, domestic winter at Springdale; and they would get up their reading-circles, and he would set her to improving her mind, and gradually the vision of this empty, fashionable life would die out of her horizon, and she would come into his ways of thinking and doing.