y clothes, racing madly up and down the broad asphalted
walks, instead of turning in aversion from the commonplace people
sitting talking, staring, smoking, sleeping, flirting, or courting on
the benches, he was able to take Miss Callender's view of the matter and
to feel gratified that the poor, and especially the little folk so long
winter-cribbed in narrow tenements, were now able to get so much
happiness in the open ground.

IX.

WASHINGTON SQUARE AND ELSEWHERE.

Mrs. Gouverneur had invited both Phillida and Millard to a family dinner
this evening with a notion of furthering their acquaintance and drawing
her niece into society. She would not admit to herself any purpose or
expectation ulterior. She had engaged each one to come two hours before
dinner to make a quiet afternoon of it, and when she found them both
unpunctual she wondered.

"Philip," she said to her son, who was sitting by the window reading a
folio volume of Sir Thomas Browne, "I asked Phillida to come early this
afternoon, and I can't imagine what keeps her."

"Oh, some leper, or some one who has fallen among thieves. It's a
dreadful thing to be a Christian. I have only known three or four, and
Phillida is one of them."

"You don't mean to say we are not all Christians?" demanded Philip's
father, a taciturn man with a rather handsome face of the broad Dutch
type. What history it carried was mainly one of good dinners and fine
wines. The senior Gouverneur had been sitting looking into the fire for
half an hour without saying a word. His son's way of treating the sacred
white elephants of conventionality was the main grief of this
dignified, well-bred, entirely commonplace man.

"Yes, you're all--we're all, Christians in the sense that we're neither
Jews, Mohammedans, nor Buddhists. But most of us don't belong to the
same totem with Jesus."

"What do you mean by the same totem with Jesus?" said the mother, who
could not help shuddering a little at the temerity of her son's
paradoxes, though fondly indulgent of his irreverent cleverness.

"A totem among the Indians is the subdivision of a tribe. The Mohawks or
Cayugas, for example, were subdivided into totems called the 'Wolf,' the
'Turtle,' the 'Bear.' Every man belonged to the totem of his mother and
was akin to everybody in it. If a Mohawk of the Wolf totem stopped in
the village of the Cayugas or the Senecas, he was entertained by some
Seneca of the same totem who claimed him for