Mrs. Clymer Ketchum was so well pleased with the young lady she was entertaining, that she thought it worth while to give a party while Myrtle was staying with her.  She had her jealousies and rivalries, as women of the world will, sometimes, and these may have had their share in leading her to take the trouble a large party involved.  She was tired of the airs of Mrs. Pinnikle, who was of the great Apex family, and her terribly accomplished daughter Rhadamartha, and wanted to crush the young lady, and jaundice her mother, with a girl twice as brilliant and ten times handsomer.  She was very willing, also, to take the nonsense out of the Capsheaf girls, who thought themselves the most stylish personages of their city world, and would bite their lips well to see themselves distanced by a country miss.

In the mean time circumstances were promising to bring into Myrtle’s neighborhood several of her old friends and admirers.  Mrs. Clymer Ketchum had written to Murray Bradshaw that she had asked his pretty milkmaid to come and stay awhile with her, but he had been away on business, and only arrived in the city a day or two before the party.  But other young fellows had found out the attractions of the girl who was “hanging out at the Clymer Ketchum concern,” and callers were plenty, reducing tete-a-tetes in a corresponding ratio.  He did get one opportunity, however, and used it well.  They had so many things to talk about in common, that she could not help finding him good company.  She might well be pleased, for he was an adept in the curious art of being agreeable, as other people are in chess or billiards, and had made a special study of her tastes, as a physician studies a patient’s constitution.  What he wanted was to get her thoroughly interested in himself, and to maintain her in a receptive condition until such time as he should be ready for a final move.  Any day might furnish the decisive motive; in the mean time he wished only to hold her as against all others.

It was well for her, perhaps, that others had flattered her into a certain consciousness of her own value.  She felt her veins full of the same rich blood as that which had flushed the cheeks of handsome Judith in the long summer of her triumph.  Whether it was vanity, or pride, or only the instinctive sense of inherited force and attraction, it was the best of defences.  The golden bracelet on her wrist seemed to have brought as much protection with it as if it had been a shield over her heart.

But far away in Oxbow Village other events were in preparation.  The “fugitive pieces” of Mr. Gifted Hopkins had now reached a number so considerable, that, if collected and printed in large type, with plenty of what the unpleasant printers call “fat,”—­meaning thereby blank spaces,—­upon a good, substantial, not to say thick paper, they might perhaps make a volume which would have substance enough to bear the title, printed lengthwise along the back, “Hopkins’s Poems.”  Such a volume that author had in contemplation.  It was to be the literary event of the year 1861.