“Yes, I know.  There, that is laid in smooth.”  She pretended to be thinking what to put in next, and suddenly she threw herself into McDonald’s lap and began to talk gayly.  “It is all my fault, dear; I should have stayed little.  And it doesn’t make any difference.  I know you love me, and oh, McDonald, I love you more, a hundred times more, than ever.  If you did not love me!  Think how dreadful that would be.  And we shall not be separated-only by streets, don’t you know.  They can’t separate us.  I know you want me to be brave.  And some day, perhaps” (and she whispered in her ear—­how many hundred times had she told her girl secrets in that way!), “if I do have a home of my own, then—­”

It was not very cheerful talk, however it seemed to be, but it was better than silence, and in the midst of it, with many interruptions, the packing was over, and some sort of serenity was attained even by Miss McDonald.  “Yes, dear heart, we have love and trust and hope.”  But when the preparations were all made, and Evelyn went to her own room, there did not seem to be so much hope, nor any brightness in the midst of this first great catastrophe of her life.

XXII

The great Mavick ball at Newport, in the summer long remembered for its financial disasters, was very much talked about at the time.  Long after, in any city club, a man was sure to have attentive listeners if he, began his story or his gossip with the remark that he was at the Mavick ball.

It attracted great attention, both on account of the circumstances that preceded it and the events which speedily followed, and threw a light upon it that gave it a spectacular importance.  The city journals made a feature of it.  They summoned their best artists to illustrate it, and illuminate it in pen-and-ink, half-tones, startling colors, and photographic reproductions, sketches theatrical, humorous, and poetic, caricatures, pictures of tropical luxury and aristocratic pretension; in short, all the bewildering affluence of modern art which is brought to bear upon the aesthetic cultivation of the lowest popular taste.  They summoned their best novelists to throw themselves recklessly upon the English language, and extort from it its highest expression in color and lyrical beauty, the novelists whose mission it is, in the newspaper campaign against realism, to adorn and dramatize the commonest events of life, creating in place of the old-fashioned “news” the highly spiced “story,” which is the ideal aspiration of the reporter.

Whatever may be said about the power of the press, it is undeniable that it can set the entire public thinking and talking about any topic, however insignificant in itself, that it may elect to make the sensation of the day—­a wedding, a murder, a political scandal, a divorce, a social event, a defalcation, a lost child, an unidentified victim of accident or crime, an election, or—­that undefined quickener of patriotism called a casus belli.  It can impose any topic it pleases upon the public mind.  In case there is no topic, it is necessary to make one, for it is an indefeasible right of the public to have news.