ns, when Mrs.
Lapham and her daughter Irene had met some other Bostonians far from
Boston, who made it memorable. They were people whom chance had
brought for the time under a singular obligation to the Lapham ladies,
and they were gratefully recognisant of it. They had ventured--a
mother and two daughters--as far as a rather wild little Canadian
watering-place on the St. Lawrence, below Quebec, and had arrived some
days before their son and brother was expected to join them. Two of
their trunks had gone astray, and on the night of their arrival the
mother was taken violently ill. Mrs. Lapham came to their help, with
her skill as nurse, and with the abundance of her own and her
daughter's wardrobe, and a profuse, single-hearted kindness. When a
doctor could be got at, he said that but for Mrs. Lapham's timely care,
the lady would hardly have lived. He was a very effusive little
Frenchman, and fancied he was saying something very pleasant to
everybody.

A certain intimacy inevitably followed, and when the son came he was
even more grateful than the others. Mrs. Lapham could not quite
understand why he should be as attentive to her as to Irene; but she
compared him with other young men about the place, and thought him
nicer than any of them. She had not the means of a wider comparison;
for in Boston, with all her husband's prosperity, they had not had a
social life. Their first years there were given to careful getting on
Lapham's part, and careful saving on his wife's. Suddenly the money
began to come so abundantly that she need not save; and then they did
not know what to do with it. A certain amount could be spent on
horses, and Lapham spent it; his wife spent on rich and rather ugly
clothes and a luxury of household appointments. Lapham had not yet
reached the picture-buying stage of the rich man's development, but
they decorated their house with the costliest and most abominable
frescoes; they went upon journeys, and lavished upon cars and hotels;
they gave with both hands to their church and to all the charities it
brought them acquainted with; but they did not know how to spend on
society. Up to a certain period Mrs. Lapham had the ladies of her
neighbourhood in to tea, as her mother had done in the country in her
younger days. Lapham's idea of hospitality was still to bring a
heavy-buying customer home to pot-luck; neither of them imagined
dinners.

Their two girls had gone to the public schools,