“The farther away from New York the better, my daughter.”

“What will you do here all alone with Miss Polly?

“Oh, we’ll do very well,” answered Gabriella with cheerful promptness; “you need not worry about me.”

“If I’m good this summer, will you change your mind, mother?”

“Try being good, and see.”  Though Gabriella spoke sweetly, it was with the obstinate sweetness of Mrs. Carr.  One thing she had resolved firmly in the last quarter of an hour:  Fanny should go away to boarding-school next September.

“Ain’t you goin’ to walk in the suffrage parade this year, Fanny?” inquired Miss Polly, who always thought it necessary to interrupt an argument between Gabriella and her daughter.

“I haven’t anything to wear,” replied Fanny pettishly.  Her brief interest in “votes for women” had evaporated with the entrance of the matinée idol into her life.

“There’s a lovely white gown just in from Paris I’ll get for you,” said Gabriella pleasantly.  She was tired, for she had had a trying day; but long ago, when her children were babies, she had determined that she would never permit herself to speak sharply to them.  In Fanny’s most exasperating humours, Gabriella tried to remember her own youthful mistakes, tried to be lenient to George’s faults which she recognized in the girl’s character.

“As if anybody needed to be dressed up to march!” exclaimed Archibald scornfully, and he added:  “She’s always acting, isn’t she, mother?”

“Hush, dear, you mustn’t tease your sister,” Gabriella admonished the boy, though her voice when she spoke to him was attuned to a deeper and softer note.

“If you make me go to boarding-school next year, I don’t care whether you take the rooms in Twenty-third Street or not,” said Fanny sullenly, for, in spite of her fickle temperament, there was a remarkable tenacity in her thwarted inclinations.

“Very well.  I’ll look at the house and decide to-morrow.”  As the servant came in to lay the table, Gabriella dismissed the subject of Fanny’s school, and opened the book—­it chanced to be a volume of Browning—­which she was reading aloud to the children.

“I am really worried about Fanny,” she said to Miss Folly at midnight, while she lingered in the living-room before going to bed.  “I honestly don’t know what to make of her, and I feel, somehow, that she is one of my failures.”

“Well, you can’t expect everything to go the way you want it.  Did you see the judge?”

“Yes, I saw him, but it was no use.”  Her visit to Judge Crowborough appeared to her perturbed mind as a piece of headstrong and extravagant folly, and she dismissed it from her thoughts as she had dismissed heavier burdens in the past.  “Men simply won’t treat Women in business as they treat men, and I don’t see unless human nature changes, how it is to be helped.  But what about the house in Twenty-third Street?  Do you think I ought to look at it?”