“Well, but do you think John wants you to go?”

“He feels badly about it; and yet I have convinced him that it’s best.  Poor fellow! all these changes are not a bit to his taste.  He liked the old place as it was, and the old ways; but John is so unselfish.  He has got it in his head that Lillie is very sensitive and peculiar, and that her spirits require all these changes, as well as Newport air.”

“Well,” said Letitia, “if a man begins to say A in that line, he must say B.”

“Of course,” said Grace; “and also C and D, and so on, down to X, Y, Z. A woman, armed with sick-headaches, nervousness, debility, presentiments, fears, horrors, and all sorts of imaginary and real diseases, has an eternal armory of weapons of subjugation.  What can a man do?  Can he tell her that she is lying and shamming?  Half the time she isn’t; she can actually work herself into about any physical state she chooses.  The fortnight before Lillie went to Newport, she really looked pale, and ate next to nothing; and she managed admirably to seem to be trying to keep up, and not to complain,—­yet you see how she can go on at Newport.”

“It seems a pity John couldn’t understand her.”

“My dear, I wouldn’t have him for the world.  Whenever he does, he will despise her; and then he will be wretched.  For John is no hypocrite, any more than I am.  No, I earnestly pray that his soap-bubble may not break.”

“Well, then,” said Letitia, “at least, he might go down to Newport for a day or two; and his presence there might set some things right:  it might at least check reports.  You might just suggest to him that unfriendly things were being said.”

“Well, I’ll see what I can do,” said Grace.

So, by a little feminine tact in suggestion, Grace despatched her brother to spend a day or two in Newport.

His coming and presence interrupted the lounging hours in Lillie’s room; the introduction to “my husband” shortened the interviews.  John was courteous and affable; but he neither smoked nor drank, and there was a mutual repulsion between him and many of Lillie’s habitues.

“I say, Dan,” said Bill Sanders to Danforth, as they were smoking on one end of the veranda, “you are driven out of your lodgings since Seymour came.”

“No more than the rest of you,” said Danforth.

“I don’t know about that, Dan.  I think you might have been taken for master of those premises.  Look here now, Dan, why didn’t you take little Lill yourself?  Everybody thought you were going to last year.”

“Didn’t want her; knew too much,” said Danforth.  “Didn’t want to keep her; she’s too cursedly extravagant.  It’s jolly to have this sort of concern on hand; but I’d rather Seymour’d pay her bills than I.”

“Who thought you were so practical, Dan?”

“Practical! that I am; I’m an old bird.  Take my advice, boys, now:  keep shy of the girls, and flirt with the married ones,—­then you don’t get roped in.”