in her
calculations, and she chuckled immensely to find Dudley Venner devoting
himself chiefly to Helen Darley. If the Rowens woman should hook Dudley,
she felt as if she should gnaw all her nails off for spite. To think of
seeing her barouching about Rockland behind a pair of long-tailed bays
and a coachman with a band on his hat, while she, Blanche Creamer, was
driving herself about in a one-horse "carriage"! Recovering her spirits
by degrees, she began playing her surfaces off at the two old Doctors,
just by way of practice. First she heaved up a glaring white shoulder,
the right one, so that the Reverend Doctor should be stunned by it, if
such a thing might be. The Reverend Doctor was human, as the Apostle was
not ashamed to confess himself. Half-devoutly and half-mischievously he
repeated inwardly, "Resist the Devil and he will flee from you." As the
Reverend Doctor did not show any lively susceptibility, she thought
she would try the left shoulder on old Dr. Kittredge. That worthy and
experienced student of science was not at all displeased with the
manoeuvre, and lifted his head so as to command the exhibition through
his glasses. "Blanche is good for half a dozen years or so, if she is
careful," the Doctor said to himself, "and then she must take to her
prayer-book." After this spasmodic failure of Mrs. Blanche Creamer's
to stir up the old Doctors, she returned again to the pleasing task of
watching the Widow in her evident discomfiture. But dark as the Widow
looked in her half-concealed pet, she was but as a pale shadow, compared
to Elsie in her silent concentration of shame and anger.

"Well, there is one good thing," said Mrs. Blanche Creamer; "Dick
doesn't get much out of that cousin of his this evening! Doesn't he look
handsome, though?"

So Mrs. Blanche, being now a good deal taken up with her observations of
those friends of hers and ours, began to be rather careless of her two
old Doctors, who naturally enough fell into conversation with each other
across the white surfaces of that lady,--perhaps not very politely, but,
under the circumstances, almost as a matter of necessity.

When a minister and a doctor get talking together, they always have a
great deal to say; and so it happened that the company left the table
just as the two Doctors were beginning to get at each other's ideas
about various interesting matters. If we follow them into the other
parlor, we can, perhaps, pick up something of their co