“What are you laughing at?” I was startled out of a revery of my own.

“Everything,” said the Butterfly Man, succinctly, and stood up and shook himself.  “And everybody.  And me in particular. Me! Oh, good Lord, think of Me!” He whistled for Kerry, and took himself off.  I watched him walk down the street, and saw Judge Mayne’s familiar greeting; and Major Cartwright stop him, and with his hand on the Butterfly Man’s arm, walk off with him.  Major Cartwright had kept George Inglesby out of two coveted clubs, for all his wealth; he was stiff as the proverbial poker to Howard Hunter, for all that gentleman’s impeccable connections; he met John Flint, not as through a glass darkly, but face to face.

My mother, coming out of the house with her cherished manuscript cookbook in her hand, looked after them thoughtfully: 

“Yes; it is high time for that man to know his proper place!”

“And does he not?”

“Oh, I suppose so, Armand.  In a man’s way, though—­not a woman’s.  It’s the woman’s way that really matters, you see.  When women acknowledge that man socially—­and I mean it to happen—­his light won’t be hidden under a bushel basket.  He will climb up into his candlestick and shine.”

That sense of bewilderment which at times overwhelmed me when the case of John Flint pressed hard, overtook me now, with its ironic humor.  As he himself had expressed it, I felt myself caught by a Something too big to withstand.  I was afraid to do anything, to say anything, for or against, this launching of his barque upon the social sea.  I felt that the affair had been once more lifted out of my power; that my serving now was but to stand and wait.

And in the meanwhile my mother, with her own hands, washed and darned the priceless old lace that was her chiefest pride; had something done to a frock; got out her sacredest treasures of linen and china and silver; requisitioned the Mayne and the Dexter spoons as well; had the Parish House scoured until it glittered; did everything to the garden but wash and iron it; spent momentous and odorous hours with Clelie over the making of toothsome delights; and on a golden afternoon gave a tea on the flower-decked verandahs and in the glorious garden, to which all Appleboro, in its best bib and tucker, came as one.  And there, in the heart and center of it, cool, calm, correct, collected, hiding whatever mortal qualms he might have felt under a demeanor as perfect as Hunter’s own, apparently at home and at ease, behold the Butterfly Man!

Everybody seemed to know him.  Everybody had something pleasant to say to him.  Folks simply accepted him at sight as one of themselves.  And the Butterfly Man accepted them quite as simply, with no faintest trace of embarrassment.

If Appleboro had cherished the legend that this was a prodigal well on his way home, that afternoon settled it for them into a positive fact.  His manner was perfect.  It was as if one saw the fine and beautiful grain of a piece of rare wood come out as the varnish that disfigured it was removed.  Here was no veneer to scratch and crack at a touch, but the solid, rare thing itself.  My mother had been right, as always.  John Flint stepped into his proper place.  Appleboro was acknowledging it officially.