It was a fact that young Tom Gaylord had approached Austen Vane with a “delegation” to request him to be a candidate for the Republican nomination for the State senate in his district against the railroad candidate and Austen’s late opponent, the Honourable Nat Billings.  It was a fact also that Austen had invited the delegation to sit down, although there were only two chairs, and that a wrestling match had ensued with young Tom, in the progress of which one chair had been broken.  Young Tom thought it was time to fight the railroad, and perceived in Austen the elements of a rebel leader.  Austen had undertaken to throw young Tom out of a front window, which was a large, old-fashioned one,—­and after Herculean efforts had actually got him on the ledge, when something in the street caught his eye and made him desist abruptly.  The something was the vision of a young woman in a brown linen suit seated in a runabout and driving a horse almost as handsome as Pepper.

When the delegation, after exhausting their mental and physical powers of persuasion, had at length taken their departure in disgust, Austen opened mechanically a letter which had very much the appearance of an advertisement, and bearing a one-cent stamp.  It announced that a garden-party would take place at Wedderburn, the home of the Honourable Humphrey Crewe, at a not very distant date, and the honour of the bearer’s presence was requested.  Refreshments would be served, and the Ripton Band would dispense music.  Below, in small print, were minute directions where to enter, where to hitch your team, and where to go out.

Austen was at a loss to know what fairy godmother had prompted Mr. Crewe to send him an invitation, the case of the injured horse not having advanced with noticeable rapidity.  Nevertheless, the prospect of the garden-party dawned radiantly for him above what had hitherto been a rather gloomy horizon.  Since the afternoon he had driven Victoria to the Hammonds’ he had had daily debates with an imaginary man in his own likeness who, to the detriment of his reading of law, sat across his table and argued with him.  The imaginary man was unprincipled, and had no dignity, but he had such influence over Austen Vane that he had induced him to drive twice within sight of Fairview gate, when Austen Vane had turned round again.  The imaginary man was for going to call on her and letting subsequent events take care of themselves; Austen Vane, had an uncomfortable quality of reducing a matter first of all to its simplest terms.  He knew that Mr. Flint’s views were as fixed, ineradicable, and unchangeable as an epitaph cut in a granite monument; he felt (as Mr. Flint had) that their first conversation had been but a forerunner of, a strife to come between them; and add to this the facts that Mr. Flint was very rich and Austen Vane poor, that Victoria’s friends were not his friends, and that he had grave doubts that the interest she had evinced in him sprang from any other incentive than a desire to have communication with various types of humanity, his hesitation as to entering Mr. Flint’s house was natural enough.