e ourselves joined it some few years later); and
she made it her concern, through the summer, to give it some of those
shaping pats which--for a new club, as for a new vase--have the greater
value the earlier they are bestowed. She was active about the place, and
she became conspicuous.

It was soon seen that she was "gay"--or was inclined to be, under
favoring conditions. The conditions were most favoring, it began to be
felt, when her husband was not about. A good many thought him stiff, and
a few who used obsolete dictionary words pronounced him proud--a term
stately enough to constitute somehow a tribute, though a damnatory one.
It was soon seen, too, that just as he irked her, so she disparaged
him--an open road to others.

One day she gave a lunch at the club--places for a dozen. Johnny McComas
appeared there for the first time. It was a plainer place than his own,
but I credit him with perceiving that it was much more worth while.
Adele McComas did not appear--for a good reason. Those obstreperous
twins now had a little sister two weeks old. The wife was doubtless
better at home, but was the husband better at the club? If I had been a
member at that time, and present, I should have felt like following him
to some corner of the veranda and saying: "Oh, come, now, Johnny, will
this quite do?" Well, I know what his look would have been--it came
later. He would have turned that wide, round face on me, with the curly
hair about the temples which gave him somehow an expression of abiding
youth and frankness; and he would have directed those hard, bright blue
eyes of his to look straight ahead at me--eyes that seemed to hold back
nothing, yet really told nothing at all; and would have disclaimed any
wrong-doing or any intention of wrong-doing. And I should have felt
myself a foolish meddler.

Well, the innocent informalities of the summer were resumed by the same
set in town next winter. The memories and the methods of one season were
tided over to another. Gertrude was still "gay"--perhaps gayer--and a
little more openly impatient with her husband, and a little more openly
disdainful of him. Young men swarmed and fluttered, and those who had
"never tried it on" before seemed inclined to try it on now.

I take, on the whole, a tempered view--by which I mean, a favorable
view--of our society and its moral tone. I am assured, and I believe
from my own observations, that this is higher than in some other of our
large c