s,
going around and collecting his rents.

But the old families still fought the tide of trade, many of them
neck-deep and very uncomfortable. They would not go from St. John's
Park, nor from North Moore and Grand Streets. They had not the
_bourgeois_ conservatism of the Greenwich Villagers, which has held them
in a solid phalanx almost to this very day; but still, in a way, they
resented the up-town movement, and resisted it. So that when they did
have to buy lots in the high-numbered streets they had to pay a fine
price for them.

It was this social party that was stirred by a bit of scandal about the
Dolphs. I do not know why I should call it scandal; yet I am sure
society so held it. For did not society whisper it, and nod and wink
over it, and tell it in dark corners, and chuckle, and lift its
multitudinous hands and its myriad eyebrows, and say in innumerable
keys: "Well, _upon_ my word!" and "Well, I _should_ think----!" and "Who
would _ever_ have thought of such a thing?" and the like? Did not
society make very funny jokes about it, and did not society's
professional gossips get many an invitation to dinner because they
professed to have authentic details of the way Mr. and Mrs. Dolph looked
when they spoke about it, and just what they had to say for themselves?

And yet it was nothing more than this, that Mr. Dolph being fifty-four,
and his wife but a few years younger, were about to give to the world
another Dolph. It was odd, I admit; it was unusual; if I must go so far,
it was, I suppose, unconventional. But I don't see that it was necessary
for Mr. Philip Waters to make an epigram about it. It was a very clever
epigram; but if you had seen dear old Mrs. Dolph, with her rosy cheeks
and the gray in her hair, knitting baby-clothes with hands which were
still white and plump and comely, while great dark eyes looked
timorously into the doubtful, fear-clouded future, I think you would
have been ashamed that you had even listened to that epigram.

The expected event was of special and personal interest to only three
people--for, after all, when you think of it, it was not exactly
society's business--and it affected them in widely different ways.

Jacob Dolph was all tenderness to his wife, and all sympathy with her
fears, with her nervous apprehensions, even with her morbid forebodings
of impossible ills. He did not repine at the seclusion which the
situation forced upon them, although his life for years had