ded themselves in their
rooms. They lived in cottages. Oh yes! all those fine houses were called
cottages. It was a sort of fad--American modesty, the clerk supposed.
There was not much run of any sort at the hotel until the fifteenth,
when a good many tourists came. Oh yes! there were some people there,
mostly old ones, who had come every season for many years, he believed.
Rather depressing parties, these; they looked so old-fashioned, and
didn't do much to brighten up things.

Webb, with growing dejection, left the hotel and strolled up the avenue.
There his spirits revived. The avenue was so beautiful, so gloomy, so
old! He drew in deep inhalations of its unmistakably aristocratic
atmosphere. He felt its subtle possessing influence. Once more his
imagination awakened. He leaned on a Gothic gateway and gazed upon a
superb Queen Anne cottage with Tudor towers. Incongruities in
architecture mattered nothing to him. He precipitated his astral part
through the massive door and wandered, with ponderous, thoughtful tread,
over the deep carpets of the drawing-rooms and corridors. He drank tea
on the back veranda with languid dames and with men who had never stood
at desks. He threw himself into an arm-chair and listened to a
slim-waisted smooth-haired girl coquetting with the piano. He sat with
the haughty chatelaine and talked of--there his imagination failed him.
He hardly knew what these people talked of, although he had read many
society novels. As far as his memory served him, they talked of nothing
in particular. He wandered down the avenue, dreaming his dream at many
gate-posts. He saw no one, but thereby was the illusion deepened.
Newport for the hour was his.

He returned to the hotel veranda, lit another cigar, and was about to
meditate upon some plan of campaign, when suddenly an odd and delightful
thing happened. It was four-and-thirty of the clock. As if to the
ringing of a bell and the rising of a curtain, Bellevue Avenue became
suddenly alive with carriages. The big gates seemed to yawn
simultaneously and discharge their expensive freight. It was as if these
actors in the Newport drama would lose their weekly salary did they step
on the boards a moment too late. The avenue, with its gay frocks and
parasols, was like a long flower-bed in spring. Webb's cigar went out.
He leaned forward eagerly, straining his eyes.

In some of the superb traps were decrepit old dowagers wagging their
feeble heads, wondering,