But it was hard on Aladdin.  He could go to her house almost when he liked, and be welcomed by her, but to her father and the rest of the household he was not especially welcome.  They were always polite to him, and always considerate, and he felt—­quite rightly—­that he was merely tolerated, as a more or less presentable acquaintance of Margaret’s.  Manners, on the other hand, and it took less intuition to know it, was not only greatly welcome to Margaret, but to all the others—­from the gardener up to the senator.  Manners’ distinction of manner, his wellbred, easy ways, his charmingly enunciative and gracious voice, together with his naive and simple nature, went far with people’s hearts.  Aladdin bitterly conceded every advantage to his rival except that of mind.  To this, for he knew even in his humble moments that he himself had it, he clung tenaciously.  Mrs. Brackett, with a sneaking admiration for Peter Manners, whom she had once seen on the street, had Aladdin’s interests well in heart, and the lay of the matter well in hand.  She put it like this to a friendly gossip: 

“I guess’ Laddin O’Brien’s ’bout smaht enough to go a long ways further than fine clothes and money and a genealogical past will carry a body.  He writes sometimes six and eight big sides of paper up in a day, and if he ain’t content with that he just tears it up and goes at it again.  There won’t be anybody’ll go further in this world than ’Laddin O’Brien, and you can say I said so—­”

Here under oath of secrecy Mrs. Brackett lowered her voice and divulged a secret: 

“He got a letter this mornin’ sayin’ that the Portland’spy’ is goin’ to print three poems he sent ’em, and enclosin’ three dollars to pay for ’em.  I guess beginnin’ right now he could go along at that rate and make mebbe five or six hundred dollars a year.  Poetry’s nothin’ to him; he can write it faster than you and I can baste.”

At the very moment of this adoring act of divulgence Aladdin was in the parlor, giving his first taste of success a musical soul, and waiting—­waiting—­waiting until it should be late enough in the day for him to climb the hill to the St. Johns’ and hand over the Big News to Margaret.  And as he sat before the piano, demipatient and wholly joyful, his fingers twinkled the yellowed and black keys into fits of merriment, or, after an abrupt pause, built heap upon heap of bass chords.  Then the mood would change and, to a whanging accompaniment, he would chant, recitative fashion, the three poems which alone he had made.

The day waned, and it was time to go and tell Margaret.  His way lay past the railway-station, under the “Look out for the locomotive” sign, across the track, and up the hill.  In the air was the exhilarating evening cool of June, and the fragrance of flowers, which in the north country, to make up for the shorter tale of their days, bloom bigger and smell sweeter than any other flowers in the world.  Even in the dirty paved square fronting the station was a smell of summer and flowers.  You could see people’s faces lighten and sniff it, as they got out of the hot, cindery coaches of the five-forty, which had just rolled in.