“Are you going anywhere this summer? Of course not, for so long as there is an unbaptized child, or a bedridden old woman in the parish, you must stay at home, even if you do grow as rusty as did Professor Cobden’s coat before we boys made him a present of a new one. I say, Arthur, there was a capital fellow spoiled when you took to the ministry, with your splendid talents, and rare gift for making people like and believe in you. “Now, I suppose you will reply that for this denial of self you look for your reward in heaven, and I suppose you are right; but as I have no reason to think I have stock in that region, I go in for a good time here, and this summer I take Saratoga, where I expect to meet one of your lambs. I hear you have in your flock forty in all, their ages varying from sixteen to fifty. But this particular lamb, Miss Anna Ruthven, is, I think, the fairest of them all, and as I used to make you my father confessor in the days when I was rusticated out in Winsted, and fell so desperately in love with the six Miss Larkins, each old enough to be my mother, so now I confide to you the programme as marked out by Mrs. Julia Meredith, the general who brings the lovely Anna in the field. “We, that is, Mrs. Meredith and myself, are on the best of terms. I lunch with her, dine with her, lounge in her parlors, drive her to the park, take her to operas, concerts, and plays, and compliment her good looks, which are wonderfully well-preserved for a woman of forty-five. I am twenty-six, you know, and so no one ever associates us together in any kind of gossip. She is the very quintessence of fashion, and I am one of the danglers whose own light is made brighter by the reflection of her rays. Do you see the point? Well, then, in return for my attentions, she takes a very sisterly interest in my future wife, and has adroitly managed to let me know of her niece, a certain Anna Ruthven, who, inasmuch as I am tired of city belles, will undoubtedly suit my fancy, said Anna being very fresh, very artless, and very beautiful withal. She is also niece to Mrs. Meredith, whose only brother married very far beneath him, when he took to wife the daughter of a certain old-fashioned Captain Humphreys, a pillar, no doubt, in your church. This young Ruthven was drowned, or hung, or something, and the sister considers it as another proof of his wife’s lack of refinement and discretion, that at her death, which happened when Anna was three years old, she left her child to the charge of her parents, Captain Humphreys and spouse, rather than to Mrs. Meredith’s care, and that, too, in the very face of the lady’s having stood as sponsor for the infant, an act which you will acknowledge as very unnatural and ungrateful in Mrs. Ruthven, to say the least of it.