“Did you have a good time, child?”

“Oh, yes,” replied Evelyn, cheerfully, “and Mrs. Van Cortlandt was very sweet to me.  Don’t you think she is very hospitable, mamma?”

“Tries to be,” Mrs. Mavick replied, in no cordial tone.  “Good-natured and eccentric.  She picks up the queerest lot of people.  You can never know whom you will not meet at her house.  Just now she goes in for being literary.”

Evelyn was not so reticent with McDonald.  While she was undressing she disclosed that she had had a beautiful evening, that she was taken out by Mr. Burnett, and talked about his story.

“And, do you know, I think I almost persuaded him to write another.”

“It’s an awful responsibility,” dryly said the shrewd Scotch woman, “advising young men what to do.”

XVIII

Upon the recollection of this dinner Philip maintained his hope and courage for a long time.  The day after it, New York seemed more brilliant to him than it had ever been.  In the afternoon he rode down to the Battery.  It was a mild winter day, with a haze in the atmosphere that softened all outlines and gave an enchanting appearance to the harbor shores.  The water was silvery, and he watched a long time the craft plying on it—­the businesslike ferry-boats, the spiteful tugs, the great ocean steamers, boldly pushing out upon the Atlantic through the Narrows or cautiously drawing in as if weary with the buffeting of the waves.  The scene kindled in him a vigorous sense of life, of prosperity, of longing for the activity of the great world.

Clearly he must do something and not be moping in indecision.  Uncertainty is harder to bear than disaster itself.  When he thought of Evelyn, and he always thought of her, it seemed cowardly to hesitate.  Celia, after her first outburst of enthusiasm, had returned to her cautious advice.  The law was much surer.  Literature was a mere chance.  Why not be content with his little success and buckle down to his profession?  Perhaps by-and-by he would have leisure to indulge his inclination.  The advice seemed sound.

But there was Evelyn, with her innocent question.

“Would the law pay you?” Evelyn?  Would he be more likely to win her by obeying the advice of Celia, or by trusting to Evelyn’s inexperienced discernment?  Indeed, what chance was there to win her at all?  What had he to offer her?

His spirits invariably fell when he thought of submitting his pretensions to the great man of Wall Street or to his worldly wife.  Already it was the gossip of the clubs that Lord Montague was a frequent visitor at the Mavicks’, that he was often seen in their box at the opera, and that Mrs. Mavick had said to Bob Shafter that it was a scandal to talk of Lord Montague as a fortune-hunter.  He was a most kind-hearted, domestic man.  She should not join in the newspaper talk about him.  He belonged to an old English family, and she should be civil to him.  Generally she did not fancy Englishmen, and this one she liked neither better nor worse because he had a title.  And when you came to that, why shouldn’t any American girl marry her equal?