t."

"No," said his wife, "it wouldn't do."

XIII.

HAVING distinctly given up the project of asking the Laphams to dinner,
Mrs. Corey was able to carry it out with the courage of sinners who
have sacrificed to virtue by frankly acknowledging its superiority to
their intended transgression. She did not question but the Laphams
would come; and she only doubted as to the people whom she should
invite to meet them. She opened the matter with some trepidation to
her daughters, but neither of them opposed her; they rather looked at
the scheme from her own point of view, and agreed with her that nothing
had really yet been done to wipe out the obligation to the Laphams
helplessly contracted the summer before, and strengthened by that
ill-advised application to Mrs. Lapham for charity. Not only the
principal of their debt of gratitude remained, but the accruing
interest. They said, What harm could giving the dinner possibly do
them? They might ask any or all of their acquaintance without
disadvantage to themselves; but it would be perfectly easy to give the
dinner just the character they chose, and still flatter the ignorance
of the Laphams. The trouble would be with Tom, if he were really
interested in the girl; but he could not say anything if they made it a
family dinner; he could not feel anything. They had each turned in her
own mind, as it appeared from a comparison of ideas, to one of the most
comprehensive of those cousinships which form the admiration and terror
of the adventurer in Boston society. He finds himself hemmed in and
left out at every turn by ramifications that forbid him all hope of
safe personality in his comments on people; he is never less secure
than when he hears some given Bostonian denouncing or ridiculing
another. If he will be advised, he will guard himself from concurring
in these criticisms, however just they appear, for the probability is
that their object is a cousin of not more than one remove from the
censor. When the alien hears a group of Boston ladies calling one
another, and speaking of all their gentlemen friends, by the familiar
abbreviations of their Christian names, he must feel keenly the exile
to which he was born; but he is then, at least, in comparatively little
danger; while these latent and tacit cousinships open pitfalls at every
step around him, in a society where Middlesexes have married Essexes
and produced Suffolks for two hundred and fifty years.

The