y in a wide wicker chair on the
piazza of the old-fashioned cottage of the Gouverneurs at Newport. This
plain but ample cottage had once held up its head stoutly as one of the
best. But now that the age of the Newport cliff-dwellers had come, in
which great architects are employed to expend unsparingly all the ideas
they have ever borrowed, on cottages costlier than kings' palaces, the
Gouverneur house had been overshadowed, and, after the manner of age
outstripped by youth, had taken refuge in the inexpugnable advantage of
priority. Like the family that dwelt within, it maintained a certain
dignity of repose that could well afford to despise decoration and
garniture, and look with contempt on newness. The very althaeas, and
lilacs, and clambering jasmines in the dooryard and the large trees that
lent shade to a lawn alongside, bespoke the chronological superiority of
the place. There was no spruceness of biweekly mowing about the lawn, no
ambitious spick-and-spanness about the old, white, wooden, green-blinded
cottage itself, but rather a restful mossiness of ancient
respectability.

Here Philip watched out the lazy September days, as he had watched them
since he was a lad. This was a Newport afternoon, not cloudy, but
touched by a certain marine mistiness which took the edge off the hard
outlines of things and put the world into tone with sweet
do-nothingness. Half-sitting, half-lying, in the wide piazza chair,
clearly not made to measure for him, Philip had remained for two hours,
reading a little at intervals, sometimes smoking, but mostly with head
drawn down between his shoulders while he gazed off at the familiar
trees and houses, and noted the passing of white-capped maids with their
infant convoys, and the infrequent carriages that rolled by. His mother,
with her fingers busy at something of no consequence, sat near him. Each
was fond of the other's presence, neither cared much for conversation.
Gouverneur, the father, was enjoying a fine day in his fashion, asleep
on a lounge in the library.

"It's just as I expected, mother," said Philip, coming out of a
prolonged reverie. "Charley and Phillida will marry without ever getting
acquainted, and then will come the blow-out."

"What do you mean by the blow-out?" said Mrs. Gouverneur. "They are
neither of them quarrelsome."

"No; but they are both sensitive. Aunt Callender's sickness took
Phillida to the Catskills before he got home, and she's been there ever