of Robert Breck did not console me, and yet here, in truth, was a life which might have served me as a model.  His store was his castle; and his reputation for integrity and square dealing as wide as the city.  Often I used to watch him with a certain envy as he stood in the doorway, his hands in his pockets, and greeted fellow-merchant and banker with his genuine and dignified directness.  This man was his own master.  They all called him “Robert,” and they made it clear by their manner that they knew they were addressing one who fulfilled his obligations and asked no favours.

Crusty old Nathaniel Durrett once declared that when you bought a bill of goods from Robert Breck you did not have to check up the invoice or employ a chemist.  Here was a character to mould upon.  If my ambition could but have been bounded by Breck and Company, I, too, might have come to stand in that doorway content with a tribute that was greater than Caesar’s.

I had been dreading the Christmas holidays, which were indeed to be no holidays for me.  And when at length they arrived they brought with them from the East certain heroes fashionably clad, citizens now of a larger world than mine.  These former companions had become superior beings, they could not help showing it, and their presence destroyed the Balance of Things.  For alas, I had not wholly abjured the feminine sex after all!  And from being a somewhat important factor in the lives of Ruth Hollister and other young women I suddenly became of no account.  New interests, new rivalries and loyalties had arisen in which I had no share; I must perforce busy myself with invoices of flour and coffee and canned fruits while sleigh rides and coasting and skating expeditions to Blackstone Lake followed one another day after day,—­for the irony of circumstances had decreed a winter uncommonly cold.  There were evening parties, too, where I felt like an alien, though my friends were guilty of no conscious neglect; and had I been able to accept the situation simply, I should not have suffered.

The principal event of those holidays was a play given in the old Hambleton house (which later became the Boyne Club), under the direction of the lively and talented Mrs. Watling.  I was invited, indeed, to participate; but even if I had had the desire I could not have done so, since the rehearsals were carried on in the daytime.  Nancy was the leading lady.  I have neglected to mention that she too had been away almost continuously since our misunderstanding, for the summer in the mountains,—­a sojourn recommended for her mother’s health; and in the autumn she had somewhat abruptly decided to go East to boarding-school at Farmington.  During the brief months of her absence she had marvellously acquired maturity and aplomb, a worldliness of manner and a certain frivolity that seemed to put those who surrounded her on a lower plane.  She was only seventeen, yet she seemed the woman of thirty whose role she played.  First there were murmurs, then sustained applause.  I scarcely recognized her:  she had taken wings and soared far above me, suggesting a sphere of power and luxury hitherto unimagined and beyond the scope of the world to which I belonged.