rhaps you've been thinking that Wade's advent in Eden Village was the
signal for calls and invitations to dinners, receptions, and bridge. If
you have you don't know New England, or, at least, you don't know Eden
Village. One can't dive into society in Eden Village; one has to wade
in, and very cautiously. In the course of events the newcomer became
thoroughly immersed, and the waters of Eden Village society enclosed him
beneficently, but that was not yet. He was still undergoing his
novitiate, and to raise his hat to Miss Cousins, when he encountered
that austere lady on the street, was as yet the height of social
triumph. Wade, however, was experiencing no yearnings for a wider social
sphere. Eve and Miss Mullett and the Doctor, Zephania, and the two
Zenases were sufficient for him. In fact he would have been quite
satisfied with one of that number could he have chosen the one.

For Wade's deliberate effort to fall in love with Eve had proved
brilliantly successful. In fact he had not been conscious of the effort
at all, so simple and easy had the process proved. Of course he ought to
have been delighted, but, strange to tell, after the first brief moment
of self-gratulation, he began to entertain doubts as to the wisdom of
his plan. Regrets succeeded doubts. Being in love with a girl who didn't
care a rap whether you stayed or went wasn't the unalloyed bliss he had
pictured. He would know better another time.

That was in the earlier stage. Later it dawned upon him that there never
could be another time, and he didn't want that there should. This
knowledge left him rather dazed. He felt a good deal like a man who,
walking across a pleasant beach and enjoying the view, suddenly finds
himself up to his neck in quicksand. And, like a person in such a
quandary, Wade's first instinctive thought was to struggle.

The struggle lasted three days, three days during which he sedulously
avoided The Cedars and tramped dozens of miles with Zenas Third in
search of fish--and very frequently lost his bait because his thoughts
were busy elsewhere. At the end of the three days he found himself, to
return to our comparison, deeper than ever.

Then it was that he looked facts in the face. He reduced the problem to
simple quantities and studied it all one evening, with the aid of an
eighth of a pound of tobacco and a pile of lumber which the carpenters
had left near the woodshed. The problem, as Wade viewed it, was this:

A man, wit