e sure to lose
the good of their summer, and to feel the loss all the winter, if they
did not actually come down with a fever.

She was by no means aware that she was a selfish or foolish person. She
made Mr. Lander subscribe statedly to worthy objects in Boston, which
she still regarded as home, because they had not dwelt any where else
since they ceased to live there; and she took lavishly of tickets for
all the charitable entertainments in the hotels where they stayed. Few
if any guests at hotels enjoyed so much honor from porters, bell-boys,
waiters, chambermaids and bootblacks as the Landers, for they gave
richly in fees for every conceivable service which could be rendered
them; they went out of their way to invent debts of gratitude to menials
who had done nothing for them. He would make the boy who sold papers at
the dining-room door keep the change, when he had been charged a profit
of a hundred per cent. already; and she would let no driver who had
plundered them according to the carriage tariff escape without something
for himself.

A sense of their munificence penetrated the clerks and proprietors with
a just esteem for guests who always wanted the best of everything, and
questioned no bill for extras. Mrs. Lander, in fact, who ruled these
expenditures, had no knowledge of the value of things, and made her
husband pay whatever was asked. Yet when they lived under their own roof
they had lived simply, and Lander had got his money in an old-fashioned
business way, and not in some delirious speculation such as leaves a
man reckless of money afterwards. He had been first of all a tailor,
and then he had gone into boys' and youths' clothing in a small way, and
finally he had mastered this business and come out at the top, with his
hands full. He invested his money so prosperously that the income
for two elderly people, who had no children, and only a few outlying
relations on his side, was far beyond their wants, or even their whims.

She as a woman, who in spite of her bulk and the jellylike majesty with
which she shook in her smoothly casing brown silks, as she entered hotel
dining-rooms, and the severity with which she frowned over her fan down
the length of the hotel drawing-rooms, betrayed more than her husband
the commonness of their origin. She could not help talking, and her
accent and her diction gave her away for a middle-class New England
person of village birth and unfashionable sojourn in Boston. H