ell,
now, listen! You're anxious about me."

"You know how I feel, Bessie," said Mary Enderby, looking her in the
eyes.

"Yes, I do," said Bessie. "The trouble is, I don't know how I feel. But
if I ever do, Molly, I'll tell you! Is that fair?"

"Yes."

"I'll give you ample warning. At the least little consciousness in the
region of the pericardium, off will go a note by a district messenger,
and when you come I'll do whatever you say. There!"

"Oh, Bessie!" cried her friend, and she threw her arms round her, "you
always were the most fascinating creature in the world!"

"Yes," said Bessie, "that's what I try to have him think."

XLII.

Toward the end of April most people who had places at the Shore were
mostly in them, but they came up to town on frequent errands, and had one
effect of evanescence with people who still remained in their Boston
houses provisionally, and seemed more than half absent. The Enderbys had
been at the Shore for a fortnight, and the Lyndes were going to be a
fortnight longer in Boston, yet, as Bessie made her friend observe, when
Mary, ran in for lunch, or stopped for a moment on her way to the train,
every few days, they were both of the same transitory quality.

"It might as well be I as you," Bessie said one day, "if we only think
so. It's all very weird, dear, and I'm not sure but it is you who sit day
after day at my lonely casement and watch the sparrows examining the
fuzzy buds of the Jap ivy to see just how soon they can hope to build in
the vines. Do you object to the ivy buds looking so very much like
snipped woollen rags? If you do, I'm sure it's you, here in my place, for
when I come up to town in your personality it sets my teeth on edge. In
fact, that's the worst thing about Boston now--the fuzzy ivy buds;
there's so much ivy! When you can forget the buds, there are a great many
things to make you happy. I feel quite as if we were spending the summer
in town and I feel very adventurous and very virtuous, like some sort of
self-righteous bohemian. You don't know how I look down on people who
have gone out of town. I consider them very selfish and heartless; I
don't know why, exactly. But when we have a good marrow-freezing
northeasterly storm, and the newspapers come out with their ironical
congratulations to the tax-dodgers at the Shore, I feel that Providence
is on my side, and I'm getting my reward, even in this world." Bessie
suddenly laughed. "I see by your exp