“So you’re going to take the old lady to New York with you, Gabriella?”

“I can’t bear to think of it, Cousin Jimmy,” remarked Mrs. Carr, while she adjusted her crape veil over the back of her chair.  “I don’t see how I can stand living in the North.”

“Well, what about our friend Charley?  Do you think you could get on any better with Charley for a son-in-law?”

“You oughtn’t to joke about it, Cousin Jimmy.  It is too serious for joking.”

“I beg your pardon, Cousin Fanny—­but where is George, Gabriella?  I thought he was to meet you here.”

“He had to go just before you came.  Don’t you think mother is looking well?”

“As well as I ever saw her.  I was telling her so as we drove back from Hollywood.  All she needs is to leave off moping for a while and she’d lose ten years of her age.  Why, I tell you if it were I, I’d jump at the chance to go to New York for a few years.  If there wasn’t a single thing there except the theatres, I’d jump at it.  You can go to a different show every night of your life, Cousin Fanny.”

“I have never been inside of a theatre in my life.  You ought to know me better than to think it,” replied Mrs. Carr, while the corners of her mouth drooped.  She had laid her bag of grosgrain silk on the table at her elbow, and untying the strings of her bonnet, she neatly rolled them into two tight little wads which she fastened with jet-headed pins.

“You make her go, honey, when you get hold of her,” said Jimmy to Gabriella in a sympathetic aside “What she needs is bracing up—­I was saying so to Pussy only this morning.  ’If you could just brace up Cousin Fanny, she’d be as well as you or I,’ was what I said to her Now I don’t believe there’s a better place on earth to brace a body up than old New York.  I remember I took my poor old father there just a month or two before his last illness, when he was getting over a spell of lumbago, and it worked on him like magic.  We stayed at the Fifth Avenue Hotel—­you must be sure to get a dinner at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, Cousin Fanny—­and went to a show every blessed night for a week.  It made the old man young again, upon my word it did, and he was still talking about it when he came down with his last illness.  Well, I must be going home to Pussy now.  The boys and I went out squirrel hunting yesterday, and Pussy promised me Brunswick stew for dinner.  Now, don’t you forget to brace up, Cousin Fanny.  That’s all on earth you need.  The world ain’t such a bad place, after all, when you sit down and think right hard about it.”

He went out gaily, followed by Mrs. Carr’s accusing eyes to the hatrack, where he stopped to take his glossy silk hat from a peg.  Turning in the buggy as he drove off, he waved merrily back at them with the whip before he touched the fat flanks of his gray.

“Cousin Jimmy means well, but he has a most unfortunate manner at times,” observed Mrs. Carr.