She had been to Harvard, summers, and taken all the courses which the vacation curriculum afforded—unnoticed, unapplauded, it is said, by her instructors. She had traveled—not so widely, either, but cleverly, eclectically, domineeringly, with her sole end in view. After five minutes with only—say—a timetable, acquired, let us suppose, at Cook’s, Topica, she could as showily allude to any express _de luxe_ there mentioned—be it for Tonkin or Salamanca—as the most confirmed passenger ever upon it. She had mastered French and Italian. And she had—first and last and betweenwhiles—read Hurrell Oaks. I venture to say there wasn’t a vowel—or consonant, for that matter—of the seventy-odd volumes she hadn’t persistently, enamouredly, and enviously devoured. At Newfair, people had by this time, of course, compared her “work” with the “works” of Hurrell Oaks; but you know how few people have the patience or the taste to “take him in”? And the result of comparisons almost invariably was that Marian Haviland was better. She had assimilated some of the psychology, much of the method, and a little of the charm; and had crossed all her T’s and dotted her I’s, and revised and simplified the style, as one person put it, for “the use of schools”; and brought what Hurrell Oaks called “the base rattle of the foreground” fully into play. Instead of being accused of having got so much from him, she was credited, one thought, with having given him a good deal. You might have guessed, to hear people at Newfair talk, that _she_ was partly responsible for the ovations being tendered him over the country during the season of his return—the first time in fifteen years—to his native land. “Mrs. ——,” Miss Haviland explained, mentioning a well-known metropolitan name, “has written me” (of course she would be the one literary fact at Newfair to write to on such matters) “to ask if we can possibly do with Mr. Oaks overnight.” I gaped under my handkerchief at the fluency of her “do.” “But I don’t just know how,” she went on, “we _could_ make him comfortable. Mrs. Edgerton won’t be well in time. And he _mustn’t_ stay at the Greens’.” She waxed indignant at the very possibility. “In _her_ guest-room, my dear? With those Honiton laces, and that scorbutic carpet, and the whirligig pattern on the walls—and the windows giving on the parti-colored slate roof of the gymnasium?” I tried, in spite of myself, to think commensurately. “And Mrs. Kneeland’s waitress wears ear-rings!... No. Now I’ve been thinking—don’t hurry along so, George. You never keep in line! It spoils the pleasure of walking when one constantly outsteps you like that.” “Pardon,” said George, and fell back. Miss Haviland winced and shifted her maroon parasol to the shoulder on his side, and smiled attentively at me to sweeten the interval, and continued: “Now _I_, if you’re interested to hear—”