prompt:
Chapter: HAVING distinctly given up the project of asking the Laphams to dinner,
Mrs. Corey was able to carry it out with the courage of sinners who
have sacrificed to virtue by frankly acknowledging its superiority to
their intended transgression.  She did not question but the Laphams
would come; and she only doubted as to the people whom she should
invite to meet them.  She opened the matter with some trepidation to
her daughters, but neither of them opposed her; they rather looked at
the scheme from her own point of view, and agreed with her that nothing
had really yet been done to wipe out the obligation to the Laphams
helplessly contracted the summer before, and strengthened by that
ill-advised application to Mrs. Lapham for charity.  Not only the
principal of their debt of gratitude remained, but the accruing
interest.  They said, What harm could giving the dinner possibly do
them? They might ask any or all of their acquaintance without
disadvantage to themselves; but it would be perfectly easy to give the
dinner just the character they chose, and still flatter the ignorance
of the Laphams.  The trouble would be with Tom, if he were really
interested in the girl; but he could not say anything if they made it a
family dinner; he could not feel anything.  They had each turned in her
own mind, as it appeared from a comparison of ideas, to one of the most
comprehensive of those cousinships which form the admiration and terror
of the adventurer in Boston society.  He finds himself hemmed in and
left out at every turn by ramifications that forbid him all hope of
safe personality in his comments on people; he is never less secure
than when he hears some given Bostonian denouncing or ridiculing
another.  If he will be advised, he will guard himself from concurring
in these criticisms, however just they appear, for the probability is
that their object is a cousin of not more than one remove from the
censor.  When the alien hears a group of Boston ladies calling one
another, and speaking of all their gentlemen friends, by the familiar
abbreviations of their Christian names, he must feel keenly the exile
to which he was born; but he is then, at least, in comparatively little
danger; while these latent and tacit cousinships open pitfalls at every
step around him, in a society where Middlesexes have married Essexes
and produced Suffolks for two hundred and fifty years.

These conditions, however, so perilous to the foreigner, are a source
of strength and security to those native to them.  An uncertain
acquaintance may be so effectually involved in the meshes of such a
cousinship, as never to be heard of outside of it and tremendous
stories are told of people who have spent a whole winter in Boston, in
a whirl of gaiety, and who, the original guests of the Suffolks,
discover upon reflection that they have met no one but Essexes and
Middlesexes.

Mrs. Corey's brother James came first into her mind, and she thought
with uncommon toleration of the easy-going, uncritical, good-nature of
his wife.  James Bellingham had been the adviser of her son throughout,
and might be said to have actively promoted his connection with Lapham.
She thought next of the widow of her cousin, Henry Bellingham, who had
let her daughter marry that Western steamboat man, and was fond of her
son-in-law; she might be expected at least to endure the paint-king and
his family.  The daughters insisted so strongly upon Mrs. Bellingham's
son Charles, that Mrs. Corey put him down--if he were in town; he might
be in Central America; he got on with all sorts of people.  It seemed
to her that she might stop at this: four Laphams, five Coreys, and four
Bellinghams were enough.

"That makes thirteen," said Nanny.  "You can have Mr. and Mrs. Sewell."

"Yes, that is a good idea," assented Mrs. Corey.  "He is our minister,
and it is very proper."

"I don't see why you don't have Robert Chase.  It is a pity he
shouldn't see her--for the colour."

"I don't quite like the idea of that," said Mrs. Corey; "but we can
have him too, if it won't make too many." The painter had married into
a poorer branch of the Coreys, and his wife was dead.  "Is there any
one else?"

"There is Miss Kingsbury."

"We have had her so much.  She will begin to think we are using her."

"She won't mind; she's so good-natured."

"Well, then," the mother summed up, "there are four Laphams, five
Coreys, four Bellinghams, one Chase, and one Kingsbury--fifteen. Oh!
and two Sewells.  Seventeen.  Ten ladies and seven gentlemen.  It
doesn't balance very well, and it's too large."

"Perhaps some of the ladies won't come," suggested Lily.

"Oh, the ladies always come," said Nanny.

Their mother reflected.  "Well, I will ask them.  The ladies will
refuse in time to let us pick up some gentlemen somewhere; some more
artists.  Why! we must have Mr. Seymour, the architect; he's a
bachelor, and he's building their house, Tom says."

Her voice fell a little when she mentioned her son's name, and she told
him of her plan, when he came home in the evening, with evident
misgiving.

"What are you doing it for, mother?" he asked, looking at her with his
honest eyes.

She dropped her own in a little confusion.  "I won't do it at all, my
dear," she said, "if you don't approve.  But I thought--You know we
have never made any proper acknowledgment of their kindness to us at
Baie St. Paul.  Then in the winter, I'm ashamed to say, I got money
from her for a charity I was interested in; and I hate the idea of
merely USING people in that way.  And now your having been at their
house this summer--we can't seem to disapprove of that; and your
business relations to him----"

"Yes, I see," said Corey.  "Do you think it amounts to a dinner?"

"Why, I don't know," returned his mother.  "We shall have hardly any
one out of our family connection."

"Well," Corey assented, "it might do.  I suppose what you wish is to
give them a pleasure."

"Why, certainly.  Don't you think they'd like to come?"

"Oh, they'd like to come; but whether it would be a pleasure after they
were here is another thing.  I should have said that if you wanted to
have them, they would enjoy better being simply asked to meet our own
immediate family."

"That's what I thought of in the first place, but your father seemed to
think it implied a social distrust of them; and we couldn't afford to
have that appearance, even to ourselves."

"Perhaps he was right."

"And besides, it might seem a little significant."

Corey seemed inattentive to this consideration.  "Whom did you think of
asking?" His mother repeated the names.  "Yes, that would do," he said,
with a vague dissatisfaction.

"I won't have it at all, if you don't wish, Tom."

"Oh yes, have it; perhaps you ought.  Yes, I dare say it's right.  What
did you mean by a family dinner seeming significant?"

His mother hesitated.  When it came to that, she did not like to
recognise in his presence the anxieties that had troubled her.  But "I
don't know," she said, since she must.  "I shouldn't want to give that
young girl, or her mother, the idea that we wished to make more of the
acquaintance than--than you did, Tom."

He looked at her absent-mindedly, as if he did not take her meaning.
But he said, "Oh yes, of course," and Mrs. Corey, in the uncertainty in
which she seemed destined to remain concerning this affair, went off
and wrote her invitation to Mrs. Lapham.  Later in the evening, when
they again found themselves alone, her son said, "I don't think I
understood you, mother, in regard to the Laphams.  I think I do now.  I
certainly don't wish you to make more of the acquaintance than I have
done.  It wouldn't be right; it might be very unfortunate.  Don't give
the dinner!"

"It's too late now, my son," said Mrs. Corey.  "I sent my note to Mrs.
Lapham an hour ago." Her courage rose at the trouble which showed in
Corey's face.  "But don't be annoyed by it, Tom.  It isn't a family
dinner, you know, and everything can be managed without embarrassment.
If we take up the affair at this point, you will seem to have been
merely acting for us; and they can't possibly understand anything more."

"Well, well! Let it go! I dare say it's all right. At any rate, it can't
be helped now."

"I don't wish to help it, Tom," said Mrs. Corey, with a cheerfullness
which the thought of the Laphams had never brought her before.  "I am
sure it is quite fit and proper, and we can make them have a very
pleasant time.  They are good, inoffensive people, and we owe it to
ourselves not to be afraid to show that we have felt their kindness to
us, and his appreciation of you."

"Well," consented Corey.  The trouble that his mother had suddenly cast
off was in his tone; but she was not sorry.  It was quite time that he
should think seriously of his attitude toward these people if he had
not thought of it before, but, according to his father's theory, had
been merely dangling.

It was a view of her son's character that could hardly have pleased her
in different circumstances, yet it was now unquestionably a consolation
if not wholly a pleasure.  If she considered the Laphams at all, it was
with the resignation which we feel at the evils of others, even when
they have not brought them on themselves.

Mrs. Lapham, for her part, had spent the hours between Mrs. Corey's
visit and her husband's coming home from business in reaching the same
conclusion with regard to Corey; and her spirits were at the lowest
when they sat down to supper.  Irene was downcast with her; Penelope
was purposely gay; and the Colonel was beginning, after his first plate
of the boiled ham,--which, bristling with cloves, rounded its bulk on a
wide platter before him,--to take note of the surrounding mood, when
the door-bell jingled peremptorily, and the girl left waiting on the
table to go and answer it.  She returned at once with a note for Mrs.
Lapham, which she read, and then, after a helpless survey of her
family, read again.

"Why, what IS it, mamma?" asked Irene, while the Colonel, who had taken
up his carving-knife for another attack on the ham, held it drawn half
across it.

"Why, I don't know what it does mean," answered Mrs. Lapham
tremulously, and she let the girl take the note from her.

Irene ran it over, and then turned to the name at the end with a joyful
cry and a flush that burned to the top of her forehead.  Then she began
to read it once more.

The Colonel dropped his knife and frowned impatiently, and Mrs. Lapham
said, "You read it out loud, if you know what to make of it, Irene."
But Irene, with a nervous scream of protest, handed it to her father,
who performed the office.

"DEAR MRS.  LAPHAM:

"Will you and General Lapham----"

"I didn't know I was a general," grumbled Lapham.  "I guess I shall
have to be looking up my back pay.  Who is it writes this, anyway?" he
asked, turning the letter over for the signature.

"Oh, never mind.  Read it through!" cried his wife, with a kindling
glance of triumph at Penelope, and he resumed--

"--and your daughters give us the pleasure of your company at dinner on
Thursday, the 28th, at half-past six.

"Yours sincerely,

"ANNA B. COREY."

The brief invitation had been spread over two pages, and the Colonel
had difficulties with the signature which he did not instantly
surmount.  When he had made out the name and pronounced it, he looked
across at his wife for an explanation.

"I don't know what it all means," she said, shaking her head and
speaking with a pleased flutter.  "She was here this afternoon, and I
should have said she had come to see how bad she could make us feel.  I
declare I never felt so put down in my life by anybody."

"Why, what did she do? What did she say?" Lapham was ready, in his
dense pride, to resent any affront to his blood, but doubtful, with the
evidence of this invitation to the contrary, if any affront had been
offered.  Mrs. Lapham tried to tell him, but there was really nothing
tangible; and when she came to put it into words, she could not make
out a case.  Her husband listened to her excited attempt, and then he
said, with judicial superiority, "I guess nobody's been trying to make
you feel bad, Persis.  What would she go right home and invite you to
dinner for, if she'd acted the way you say?"

In this view it did seem improbable, and Mrs. Lapham was shaken.  She
could only say, "Penelope felt just the way I did about it."

Lapham looked at the girl, who said, "Oh, I can't prove it! I begin to
think it never happened.  I guess it didn't."

"Humph!" said her father, and he sat frowning thoughtfully a
while--ignoring her mocking irony, or choosing to take her seriously.
"You can't really put your finger on anything," he said to his wife,
"and it ain't likely there is anything.  Anyway, she's done the proper
thing by you now."

Mrs. Lapham faltered between her lingering resentment and the appeals
of her flattered vanity.  She looked from Penelope's impassive face to
the eager eyes of Irene.  "Well--just as you say, Silas.  I don't know
as she WAS so very bad.  I guess may be she was embarrassed some----"

"That's what I told you, mamma, from the start," interrupted Irene.
"Didn't I tell you she didn't mean anything by it? It's just the way
she acted at Baie St. Paul, when she got well enough to realise what
you'd done for her!"

Penelope broke into a laugh.  "Is that her way of showing her
gratitude? I'm sorry I didn't understand that before."

Irene made no effort to reply.  She merely looked from her mother to
her father with a grieved face for their protection, and Lapham said,
"When we've done supper, you answer her, Persis.  Say we'll come."

"With one exception," said Penelope.

"What do you mean?" demanded her father, with a mouth full of ham.
"Oh, nothing of importance.  Merely that I'm not going."

Lapham gave himself time to swallow his morsel, and his rising wrath
went down with it.  "I guess you'll change your mind when the time
comes," he said.  "Anyway, Persis, you say we'll all come, and then, if
Penelope don't want to go, you can excuse her after we get there.
That's the best way."

None of them, apparently, saw any reason why the affair should not be
left in this way, or had a sense of the awful and binding nature of a
dinner engagement.  If she believed that Penelope would not finally
change her mind and go, no doubt Mrs. Lapham thought that Mrs. Corey
would easily excuse her absence.  She did not find it so simple a
matter to accept the invitation.  Mrs. Corey had said "Dear Mrs.
Lapham," but Mrs. Lapham had her doubts whether it would not be a
servile imitation to say "Dear Mrs. Corey" in return; and she was
tormented as to the proper phrasing throughout and the precise
temperature which she should impart to her politeness.  She wrote an
unpractised, uncharacteristic round hand, the same in which she used to
set the children's copies at school, and she subscribed herself, after
some hesitation between her husband's given name and her own, "Yours
truly, Mrs. S. Lapham."

Penelope had gone to her room, without waiting to be asked to advise or
criticise; but Irene had decided upon the paper, and on the whole, Mrs.
Lapham's note made a very decent appearance on the page.

When the furnace-man came, the Colonel sent him out to post it in the
box at the corner of the square.  He had determined not to say anything
more about the matter before the girls, not choosing to let them see
that he was elated; he tried to give the effect of its being an
everyday sort of thing, abruptly closing the discussion with his order
to Mrs. Lapham to accept; but he had remained swelling behind his
newspaper during her prolonged struggle with her note, and he could no
longer hide his elation when Irene followed her sister upstairs.

"Well, Pers," he demanded, "what do you say now?"

Mrs. Lapham had been sobered into something of her former misgiving by
her difficulties with her note.  "Well, I don't know what TO say.  I
declare, I'm all mixed up about it, and I don't know as we've begun as
we can carry out in promising to go.  I presume," she sighed, "that we
can all send some excuse at the last moment, if we don't want to go."

"I guess we can carry out, and I guess we shan't want to send any
excuse," bragged the Colonel.  "If we're ever going to be anybody at
all, we've got to go and see how it's done.  I presume we've got to
give some sort of party when we get into the new house, and this gives
the chance to ask 'em back again.  You can't complain now but what
they've made the advances, Persis?"

"No," said Mrs. Lapham lifelessly; "I wonder why they wanted to do it.
Oh, I suppose it's all right," she added in deprecation of the anger
with her humility which she saw rising in her husband's face; "but if
it's all going to be as much trouble as that letter, I'd rather be
whipped.  I don't know what I'm going to wear; or the girls either.  I
do wonder--I've heard that people go to dinner in low-necks. Do you
suppose it's the custom?"

"How should I know?" demanded the Colonel.  "I guess you've got clothes
enough.  Any rate, you needn't fret about it.  You just go round to
White's or Jordan & Marsh's, and ask for a dinner dress.  I guess
that'll settle it; they'll know.  Get some of them imported dresses.  I
see 'em in the window every time I pass; lots of 'em."

"Oh, it ain't the dress!" said Mrs. Lapham.  "I don't suppose but what
we could get along with that; and I want to do the best we can for the
children; but I don't know what we're going to talk about to those
people when we get there.  We haven't got anything in common with them.
Oh, I don't say they're any better," she again made haste to say in
arrest of her husband's resentment.  "I don't believe they are; and I
don't see why they should be.  And there ain't anybody has got a better
right to hold up their head than you have, Silas.  You've got plenty of
money, and you've made every cent of it."

"I guess I shouldn't amounted to much without you, Persis," interposed
Lapham, moved to this justice by her praise.

"Oh, don't talk about ME!" protested the wife.  "Now that you've made
it all right about Rogers, there ain't a thing in this world against
you.  But still, for all that, I can see--and I can feel it when I
can't see it--that we're different from those people.  They're
well-meaning enough, and they'd excuse it, I presume, but we're too old
to learn to be like them."

"The children ain't," said Lapham shrewdly.

"No, the children ain't," admitted his wife, "and that's the only thing
that reconciles me to it."

"You see how pleased Irene looked when I read it?"

"Yes, she was pleased."

"And I guess Penelope'll think better of it before the time comes."

"Oh yes, we do it for them.  But whether we're doing the best thing for
'em, goodness knows.  I'm not saying anything against HIM.  Irene'll be
a lucky girl to get him, if she wants him.  But there! I'd ten times
rather she was going to marry such a fellow as you were, Si, that had
to make every inch of his own way, and she had to help him.  It's in
her!"

Lapham laughed aloud for pleasure in his wife's fondness; but neither
of them wished that he should respond directly to it.  "I guess, if it
wa'n't for me, he wouldn't have a much easier time.  But don't you
fret! It's all coming out right.  That dinner ain't a thing for you to
be uneasy about.  It'll pass off perfectly easy and natural."

Lapham did not keep his courageous mind quite to the end of the week
that followed.  It was his theory not to let Corey see that he was set
up about the invitation, and when the young man said politely that his
mother was glad they were able to come, Lapham was very short with him.
He said yes, he believed that Mrs. Lapham and the girls were going.
Afterward he was afraid Corey might not understand that he was coming
too; but he did not know how to approach the subject again, and Corey
did not, so he let it pass.  It worried him to see all the preparation
that his wife and Irene were making, and he tried to laugh at them for
it; and it worried him to find that Penelope was making no preparation
at all for herself, but only helping the others.  He asked her what
should she do if she changed her mind at the last moment and concluded
to go, and she said she guessed she should not change her mind, but if
she did, she would go to White's with him and get him to choose her an
imported dress, he seemed to like them so much.  He was too proud to
mention the subject again to her.

Finally, all that dress-making in the house began to scare him with
vague apprehensions in regard to his own dress.  As soon as he had
determined to go, an ideal of the figure in which he should go
presented itself to his mind.  He should not wear any dress-coat,
because, for one thing, he considered that a man looked like a fool in
a dress-coat, and, for another thing, he had none--had none on
principle.  He would go in a frock-coat and black pantaloons, and
perhaps a white waistcoat, but a black cravat anyway.  But as soon as
he developed this ideal to his family, which he did in pompous disdain
of their anxieties about their own dress, they said he should not go
so.  Irene reminded him that he was the only person without a
dress-coat at a corps reunion dinner which he had taken her to some
years before, and she remembered feeling awfully about it at the time.
Mrs. Lapham, who would perhaps have agreed of herself, shook her head
with misgiving.  "I don't see but what you'll have to get you one, Si,"
she said.  "I don't believe they ever go without 'em to a private
house."

He held out openly, but on his way home the next day, in a sudden
panic, he cast anchor before his tailor's door and got measured for a
dress-coat. After that he began to be afflicted about his waist-coat,
concerning which he had hitherto been airily indifferent.  He tried to
get opinion out of his family, but they were not so clear about it as
they were about the frock.  It ended in their buying a book of
etiquette, which settled the question adversely to a white waistcoat.
The author, however, after being very explicit in telling them not to
eat with their knives, and above all not to pick their teeth with their
forks,--a thing which he said no lady or gentleman ever did,--was still
far from decided as to the kind of cravat Colonel Lapham ought to wear:
shaken on other points, Lapham had begun to waver also concerning the
black cravat.  As to the question of gloves for the Colonel, which
suddenly flashed upon him one evening, it appeared never to have
entered the thoughts of the etiquette man, as Lapham called him.  Other
authors on the same subject were equally silent, and Irene could only
remember having heard, in some vague sort of way, that gentlemen did
not wear gloves so much any more.

Drops of perspiration gathered on Lapham's forehead in the anxiety of
the debate; he groaned, and he swore a little in the compromise
profanity which he used.

"I declare," said Penelope, where she sat purblindly sewing on a bit of
dress for Irene, "the Colonel's clothes are as much trouble as
anybody's. Why don't you go to Jordan & Marsh's and order one of the
imported dresses for yourself, father?" That gave them all the relief
of a laugh over it, the Colonel joining in piteously.

He had an awful longing to find out from Corey how he ought to go.  He
formulated and repeated over to himself an apparently careless
question, such as, "Oh, by the way, Corey, where do you get your
gloves?" This would naturally lead to some talk on the subject, which
would, if properly managed, clear up the whole trouble.  But Lapham
found that he would rather die than ask this question, or any question
that would bring up the dinner again.  Corey did not recur to it, and
Lapham avoided the matter with positive fierceness.  He shunned talking
with Corey at all, and suffered in grim silence.

One night, before they fell asleep, his wife said to him, "I was
reading in one of those books to-day, and I don't believe but what
we've made a mistake if Pen holds out that she won't go."

"Why?" demanded Lapham, in the dismay which beset him at every fresh
recurrence to the subject.

"The book says that it's very impolite not to answer a dinner
invitation promptly.  Well, we've done that all right,--at first I
didn't know but what we had been a little too quick, may be,--but then
it says if you're not going, that it's the height of rudeness not to
let them know at once, so that they can fill your place at the table."

The Colonel was silent for a while.  "Well, I'm dumned," he said
finally, "if there seems to be any end to this thing.  If it was to do
over again, I'd say no for all of us."

"I've wished a hundred times they hadn't asked us; but it's too late to
think about that now.  The question is, what are we going to do about
Penelope?"

"Oh, I guess she'll go, at the last moment."

"She says she won't. She took a prejudice against Mrs. Corey that day,
and she can't seem to get over it."

"Well, then, hadn't you better write in the morning, as soon as you're
up, that she ain't coming?"

Mrs. Lapham sighed helplessly.  "I shouldn't know how to get it in.
It's so late now; I don't see how I could have the face."

"Well, then, she's got to go, that's all."

"She's set she won't."

"And I'm set she shall," said Lapham with the loud obstinacy of a man
whose women always have their way.

Mrs. Lapham was not supported by the sturdiness of his proclamation.

But she did not know how to do what she knew she ought to do about
Penelope, and she let matters drift.  After all, the child had a right
to stay at home if she did not wish to go.  That was what Mrs. Lapham
felt, and what she said to her husband next morning, bidding him let
Penelope alone, unless she chose herself to go.  She said it was too
late now to do anything, and she must make the best excuse she could
when she saw Mrs. Corey.  She began to wish that Irene and her father
would go and excuse her too.  She could not help saying this, and then
she and Lapham had some unpleasant words.

"Look here!" he cried.  "Who wanted to go in for these people in the
first place? Didn't you come home full of 'em last year, and want me to
sell out here and move somewheres else because it didn't seem to suit
'em? And now you want to put it all on me! I ain't going to stand it."

"Hush!" said his wife.  "Do you want to raise the house? I didn't put
it on you, as you say.  You took it on yourself.  Ever since that
fellow happened to come into the new house that day, you've been
perfectly crazy to get in with them.  And now you're so afraid you
shall do something wrong before 'em, you don't hardly dare to say your
life's your own.  I declare, if you pester me any more about those
gloves, Silas Lapham, I won't go."

"Do you suppose I want to go on my own account?" he demanded furiously.

"No," she admitted.  "Of course I don't. I know very well that you're
doing it for Irene; but, for goodness gracious' sake, don't worry our
lives out, and make yourself a perfect laughing-stock before the
children."

With this modified concession from her, the quarrel closed in sullen
silence on Lapham's part.  The night before the dinner came, and the
question of his gloves was still unsettled, and in a fair way to remain
so.  He had bought a pair, so as to be on the safe side, perspiring in
company with the young lady who sold them, and who helped him try them
on at the shop; his nails were still full of the powder which she had
plentifully peppered into them in order to overcome the resistance of
his blunt fingers.  But he was uncertain whether he should wear them.
They had found a book at last that said the ladies removed their gloves
on sitting down at table, but it said nothing about gentlemen's gloves.
He left his wife where she stood half hook-and-eyed at her glass in her
new dress, and went down to his own den beyond the parlour.  Before he
shut his door he caught a glimpse of Irene trailing up and down before
the long mirror in HER new dress, followed by the seamstress on her
knees; the woman had her mouth full of pins, and from time to time she
made Irene stop till she could put one of the pins into her train;
Penelope sat in a corner criticising and counselling.  It made Lapham
sick, and he despised himself and all his brood for the trouble they
were taking.  But another glance gave him a sight of the young girl's
face in the mirror, beautiful and radiant with happiness, and his heart
melted again with paternal tenderness and pride.  It was going to be a
great pleasure to Irene, and Lapham felt that she was bound to cut out
anything there.  He was vexed with Penelope that she was not going too;
he would have liked to have those people hear her talk.  He held his
door a little open, and listened to the things she was "getting off"
there to Irene.  He showed that he felt really hurt and disappointed
about Penelope, and the girl's mother made her console him the next
evening before they all drove away without her.  "You try to look on
the bright side of it, father.  I guess you'll see that it's best I
didn't go when you get there.  Irene needn't open her lips, and they
can all see how pretty she is; but they wouldn't know how smart I was
unless I talked, and maybe then they wouldn't."

This thrust at her father's simple vanity in her made him laugh; and
then they drove away, and Penelope shut the door, and went upstairs
with her lips firmly shutting in a sob.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Mrs. Corey decides that a dinner including only close friends and relatives would be large enough to make the Laphams know that they are not ashamed of them and close enough to the Corey family to make the dinner insignificant to society. She tells Tom of the modest dinner party she has planned, and he realizes that his mother suspects the possibility of a romance deserving an appropriate dinner. He asks her not to give the party, but the invitations have been sent. Mrs. Lapham worries about how she will answer the invitation, how she will dress, and, most important, how her family will find something to talk about. Silas decides he must buy his first dress coat and debates over the need for gloves. Penelope refuses to go, believing it is a recognition dinner for Irene. She cries after they leave, revealing her disappointment in her inability to be attractive like Irene. She also feels badly because, as it is later revealed, she is attracted to Tom.


prompt:
Chapter: THE Coreys were one of the few old families who lingered in Bellingham
Place, the handsome, quiet old street which the sympathetic observer
must grieve to see abandoned to boarding-houses. The dwellings are
stately and tall, and the whole place wears an air of aristocratic
seclusion, which Mrs. Corey's father might well have thought assured
when he left her his house there at his death.  It is one of two
evidently designed by the same architect who built some houses in a
characteristic taste on Beacon Street opposite the Common.  It has a
wooden portico, with slender fluted columns, which have always been
painted white, and which, with the delicate mouldings of the cornice,
form the sole and sufficient decoration of the street front; nothing
could be simpler, and nothing could be better.  Within, the architect
has again indulged his preference for the classic; the roof of the
vestibule, wide and low, rests on marble columns, slim and fluted like
the wooden columns without, and an ample staircase climbs in a
graceful, easy curve from the tesselated pavement.  Some carved
Venetian scrigni stretched along the wall; a rug lay at the foot of the
stairs; but otherwise the simple adequacy of the architectural
intention had been respected, and the place looked bare to the eyes of
the Laphams when they entered.  The Coreys had once kept a man, but
when young Corey began his retrenchments the man had yielded to the
neat maid who showed the Colonel into the reception-room and asked the
ladies to walk up two flights.

He had his charges from Irene not to enter the drawing-room without her
mother, and he spent five minutes in getting on his gloves, for he had
desperately resolved to wear them at last.  When he had them on, and
let his large fists hang down on either side, they looked, in the
saffron tint which the shop-girl said his gloves should be of, like
canvased hams.  He perspired with doubt as he climbed the stairs, and
while he waited on the landing for Mrs. Lapham and Irene to come down
from above before going into the drawing-room, he stood staring at his
hands, now open and now shut, and breathing hard.  He heard quiet
talking beyond the portiere within, and presently Tom Corey came out.

"Ah, Colonel Lapham! Very glad to see you."

Lapham shook hands with him and gasped, "Waiting for Mis' Lapham," to
account for his presence.  He had not been able to button his right
glove, and he now began, with as much indifference as he could assume,
to pull them both off, for he saw that Corey wore none.  By the time he
had stuffed them into the pocket of his coat-skirt his wife and
daughter descended.

Corey welcomed them very cordially too, but looked a little mystified.
Mrs. Lapham knew that he was silently inquiring for Penelope, and she
did not know whether she ought to excuse her to him first or not.  She
said nothing, and after a glance toward the regions where Penelope
might conjecturably be lingering, he held aside the portiere for the
Laphams to pass, and entered the room with them.

Mrs. Lapham had decided against low-necks on her own responsibility,
and had entrenched herself in the safety of a black silk, in which she
looked very handsome.  Irene wore a dress of one of those shades which
only a woman or an artist can decide to be green or blue, and which to
other eyes looks both or neither, according to their degrees of
ignorance.  If it was more like a ball dress than a dinner dress, that
might be excused to the exquisite effect.  She trailed, a delicate
splendour, across the carpet in her mother's sombre wake, and the
consciousness of success brought a vivid smile to her face.  Lapham,
pallid with anxiety lest he should somehow disgrace himself, giving
thanks to God that he should have been spared the shame of wearing
gloves where no one else did, but at the same time despairing that
Corey should have seen him in them, had an unwonted aspect of almost
pathetic refinement.

Mrs. Corey exchanged a quick glance of surprise and relief with her
husband as she started across the room to meet her guests, and in her
gratitude to them for being so irreproachable, she threw into her
manner a warmth that people did not always find there.  "General
Lapham?" she said, shaking hands in quick succession with Mrs. Lapham
and Irene, and now addressing herself to him.

"No, ma'am, only Colonel," said the honest man, but the lady did not
hear him.  She was introducing her husband to Lapham's wife and
daughter, and Bromfield Corey was already shaking his hand and saying
he was very glad to see him again, while he kept his artistic eye on
Irene, and apparently could not take it off.  Lily Corey gave the
Lapham ladies a greeting which was physically rather than socially
cold, and Nanny stood holding Irene's hand in both of hers a moment,
and taking in her beauty and her style with a generous admiration which
she could afford, for she was herself faultlessly dressed in the quiet
taste of her city, and looking very pretty.  The interval was long
enough to let every man present confide his sense of Irene's beauty to
every other; and then, as the party was small, Mrs. Corey made
everybody acquainted.  When Lapham had not quite understood, he held
the person's hand, and, leaning urbanely forward, inquired, "What
name?" He did that because a great man to whom he had been presented on
the platform at a public meeting had done so to him, and he knew it
must be right.

A little lull ensued upon the introductions, and Mrs. Corey said
quietly to Mrs. Lapham, "Can I send any one to be of use to Miss
Lapham?" as if Penelope must be in the dressing-room.

Mrs. Lapham turned fire-red, and the graceful forms in which she had
been intending to excuse her daughter's absence went out of her head.
"She isn't upstairs," she said, at her bluntest, as country people are
when embarrassed.  "She didn't feel just like coming to-night.  I don't
know as she's feeling very well."

Mrs. Corey emitted a very small "O!"--very small, very cold,--which
began to grow larger and hotter and to burn into Mrs. Lapham's soul
before Mrs. Corey could add, "I'm very sorry.  It's nothing serious, I
hope?"

Robert Chase, the painter, had not come, and Mrs. James Bellingham was
not there, so that the table really balanced better without Penelope;
but Mrs. Lapham could not know this, and did not deserve to know it.
Mrs. Corey glanced round the room, as if to take account of her guests,
and said to her husband, "I think we are all here, then," and he came
forward and gave his arm to Mrs. Lapham.  She perceived then that in
their determination not to be the first to come they had been the last,
and must have kept the others waiting for them.

Lapham had never seen people go down to dinner arm-in-arm before, but
he knew that his wife was distinguished in being taken out by the host,
and he waited in jealous impatience to see if Tom Corey would offer his
arm to Irene.  He gave it to that big girl they called Miss Kingsbury,
and the handsome old fellow whom Mrs. Corey had introduced as her
cousin took Irene out.  Lapham was startled from the misgiving in which
this left him by Mrs. Corey's passing her hand through his arm, and he
made a sudden movement forward, but felt himself gently restrained.
They went out the last of all; he did not know why, but he submitted,
and when they sat down he saw that Irene, although she had come in with
that Mr. Bellingham, was seated beside young Corey, after all.

He fetched a long sigh of relief when he sank into his chair and felt
himself safe from error if he kept a sharp lookout and did only what
the others did.  Bellingham had certain habits which he permitted
himself, and one of these was tucking the corner of his napkin into his
collar; he confessed himself an uncertain shot with a spoon, and
defended his practice on the ground of neatness and common-sense.
Lapham put his napkin into his collar too, and then, seeing that no one
but Bellingham did it, became alarmed and took it out again slyly.  He
never had wine on his table at home, and on principle he was a
prohibitionist; but now he did not know just what to do about the
glasses at the right of his plate.  He had a notion to turn them all
down, as he had read of a well-known politician's doing at a public
dinner, to show that he did not take wine; but, after twiddling with
one of them a moment, he let them be, for it seemed to him that would
be a little too conspicuous, and he felt that every one was looking.
He let the servant fill them all, and he drank out of each, not to
appear odd.  Later, he observed that the young ladies were not taking
wine, and he was glad to see that Irene had refused it, and that Mrs.
Lapham was letting it stand untasted.  He did not know but he ought to
decline some of the dishes, or at least leave most of some on his
plate, but he was not able to decide; he took everything and ate
everything.

He noticed that Mrs. Corey seemed to take no more trouble about the
dinner than anybody, and Mr. Corey rather less; he was talking busily
to Mrs. Lapham, and Lapham caught a word here and there that convinced
him she was holding her own.  He was getting on famously himself with
Mrs. Corey, who had begun with him about his new house; he was telling
her all about it, and giving her his ideas.  Their conversation
naturally included his architect across the table; Lapham had been
delighted and secretly surprised to find the fellow there; and at
something Seymour said the talk spread suddenly, and the pretty house
he was building for Colonel Lapham became the general theme.  Young
Corey testified to its loveliness, and the architect said laughingly
that if he had been able to make a nice thing of it, he owed it to the
practical sympathy of his client.

"Practical sympathy is good," said Bromfield Corey; and, slanting his
head confidentially to Mrs. Lapham, he added, "Does he bleed your
husband, Mrs. Lapham? He's a terrible fellow for appropriations!"

Mrs. Lapham laughed, reddening consciously, and said she guessed the
Colonel knew how to take care of himself.  This struck Lapham, then
draining his glass of sauterne, as wonderfully discreet in his wife.
Bromfield Corey leaned back in his chair a moment.  "Well, after all,
you can't say, with all your modern fuss about it, that you do much
better now than the old fellows who built such houses as this."

"Ah," said the architect, "nobody can do better than well.  Your house
is in perfect taste; you know I've always admired it; and I don't think
it's at all the worse for being old-fashioned. What we've done is
largely to go back of the hideous style that raged after they forgot
how to make this sort of house.  But I think we may claim a better
feeling for structure.  We use better material, and more wisely; and by
and by we shall work out something more characteristic and original."

"With your chocolates and olives, and your clutter of bric-a-brac?"

"All that's bad, of course, but I don't mean that.  I don't wish to
make you envious of Colonel Lapham, and modesty prevents my saying,
that his house is prettier,--though I may have my convictions,--but
it's better built.  All the new houses are better built.  Now, your
house----"

"Mrs. Corey's house," interrupted the host, with a burlesque haste in
disclaiming responsibility for it that made them all laugh.  "My
ancestral halls are in Salem, and I'm told you couldn't drive a nail
into their timbers; in fact, I don't know that you would want to do it."

"I should consider it a species of sacrilege," answered Seymour, "and I
shall be far from pressing the point I was going to make against a
house of Mrs. Corey's."

This won Seymour the easy laugh, and Lapham silently wondered that the
fellow never got off any of those things to him.

"Well," said Corey, "you architects and the musicians are the true and
only artistic creators.  All the rest of us, sculptors, painters,
novelists, and tailors, deal with forms that we have before us; we try
to imitate, we try to represent.  But you two sorts of artists create
form.  If you represent, you fail.  Somehow or other you do evolve the
camel out of your inner consciousness."

"I will not deny the soft impeachment," said the architect, with a
modest air.

"I dare say.  And you'll own that it's very handsome of me to say this,
after your unjustifiable attack on Mrs. Corey's property."

Bromfield Corey addressed himself again to Mrs. Lapham, and the talk
subdivided itself as before.  It lapsed so entirely away from the
subject just in hand, that Lapham was left with rather a good idea, as
he thought it, to perish in his mind, for want of a chance to express
it.  The only thing like a recurrence to what they had been saying was
Bromfield Corey's warning Mrs. Lapham, in some connection that Lapham
lost, against Miss Kingsbury.  "She's worse," he was saying, "when it
comes to appropriations than Seymour himself.  Depend upon it, Mrs.
Lapham, she will give you no peace of your mind, now she's met you,
from this out.  Her tender mercies are cruel; and I leave you to supply
the content from your own scriptural knowledge.  Beware of her, and all
her works.  She calls them works of charity; but heaven knows whether
they are.  It don't stand to reason that she gives the poor ALL the
money she gets out of people.  I have my own belief"--he gave it in a
whisper for the whole table to hear--"that she spends it for champagne
and cigars."

Lapham did not know about that kind of talking; but Miss Kingsbury
seemed to enjoy the fun as much as anybody, and he laughed with the
rest.

"You shall be asked to the very next debauch of the committee, Mr.
Corey; then you won't dare expose us," said Miss Kingsbury.

"I wonder you haven't been down upon Corey to go to the Chardon Street
home and talk with your indigent Italians in their native tongue," said
Charles Bellingham.  "I saw in the Transcript the other night that you
wanted some one for the work."

"We did think of Mr. Corey," replied Miss Kingsbury; "but we reflected
that he probably wouldn't talk with them at all; he would make them
keep still to be sketched, and forget all about their wants."

Upon the theory that this was a fair return for Corey's pleasantry, the
others laughed again.

"There is one charity," said Corey, pretending superiority to Miss
Kingsbury's point, "that is so difficult, I wonder it hasn't occurred
to a lady of your courageous invention."

"Yes?" said Miss Kingsbury.  "What is that?"

"The occupation, by deserving poor of neat habits, of all the
beautiful, airy, wholesome houses that stand empty the whole summer
long, while their owners are away in their lowly cots beside the sea."

"Yes, that is terrible," replied Miss Kingsbury, with quick
earnestness, while her eyes grew moist.  "I have often thought of our
great, cool houses standing useless here, and the thousands of poor
creatures stifling in their holes and dens, and the little children
dying for wholesome shelter.  How cruelly selfish we are!"

"That is a very comfortable sentiment, Miss Kingsbury," said Corey,
"and must make you feel almost as if you had thrown open No. 31 to the
whole North End.  But I am serious about this matter.  I spend my
summers in town, and I occupy my own house, so that I can speak
impartially and intelligently; and I tell you that in some of my walks
on the Hill and down on the Back Bay, nothing but the surveillance of
the local policeman prevents my offering personal violence to those
long rows of close-shuttered, handsome, brutally insensible houses.  If
I were a poor man, with a sick child pining in some garret or cellar at
the North End, I should break into one of them, and camp out on the
grand piano."

"Surely, Bromfield," said his wife, "you don't consider what havoc such
people would make with the furniture of a nice house!"

"That is true," answered Corey, with meek conviction.  "I never thought
of that."

"And if you were a poor man with a sick child, I doubt if you'd have so
much heart for burglary as you have now," said James Bellingham.

"It's wonderful how patient they are," said the minister.  "The
spectacle of the hopeless comfort the hard-working poor man sees must
be hard to bear."

Lapham wanted to speak up and say that he had been there himself, and
knew how such a man felt.  He wanted to tell them that generally a poor
man was satisfied if he could make both ends meet; that he didn't envy
any one his good luck, if he had earned it, so long as he wasn't
running under himself.  But before he could get the courage to address
the whole table, Sewell added, "I suppose he don't always think of it."

"But some day he WILL think about it," said Corey.  "In fact, we rather
invite him to think about it, in this country."

"My brother-in-law," said Charles Bellingham, with the pride a man
feels in a mentionably remarkable brother-in-law, "has no end of
fellows at work under him out there at Omaha, and he says it's the
fellows from countries where they've been kept from thinking about it
that are discontented.  The Americans never make any trouble.  They
seem to understand that so long as we give unlimited opportunity,
nobody has a right to complain."

"What do you hear from Leslie?" asked Mrs. Corey, turning from these
profitless abstractions to Mrs. Bellingham.

"You know," said that lady in a lower tone, "that there is another
baby?"

"No! I hadn't heard of it!"

"Yes; a boy.  They have named him after his uncle."

"Yes," said Charles Bellingham, joining in.  "He is said to be a noble
boy, and to resemble me."

"All boys of that tender age are noble," said Corey, "and look like
anybody you wish them to resemble.  Is Leslie still home-sick for the
bean-pots of her native Boston?"

"She is getting over it, I fancy," replied Mrs. Bellingham.  "She's
very much taken up with Mr. Blake's enterprises, and leads a very
exciting life.  She says she's like people who have been home from
Europe three years; she's past the most poignant stage of regret, and
hasn't reached the second, when they feel that they must go again."

Lapham leaned a little toward Mrs. Corey, and said of a picture which
he saw on the wall opposite, "Picture of your daughter, I presume?"

"No; my daughter's grandmother.  It's a Stewart Newton; he painted a
great many Salem beauties.  She was a Miss Polly Burroughs.  My
daughter IS like her, don't you think?" They both looked at Nanny Corey
and then at the portrait.  "Those pretty old-fashioned dresses are
coming in again.  I'm not surprised you took it for her.  The
others"--she referred to the other portraits more or less darkling on
the walls--"are my people; mostly Copleys."

These names, unknown to Lapham, went to his head like the wine he was
drinking; they seemed to carry light for the moment, but a film of
deeper darkness followed.  He heard Charles Bellingham telling funny
stories to Irene and trying to amuse the girl; she was laughing, and
seemed very happy.  From time to time Bellingham took part in the
general talk between the host and James Bellingham and Miss Kingsbury
and that minister, Mr. Sewell.  They talked of people mostly; it
astonished Lapham to hear with what freedom they talked.  They
discussed these persons unsparingly; James Bellingham spoke of a man
known to Lapham for his business success and great wealth as not a
gentleman; his cousin Charles said he was surprised that the fellow had
kept from being governor so long.

When the latter turned from Irene to make one of these excursions into
the general talk, young Corey talked to her; and Lapham caught some
words from which it seemed that they were speaking of Penelope.  It
vexed him to think she had not come; she could have talked as well as
any of them; she was just as bright; and Lapham was aware that Irene
was not as bright, though when he looked at her face, triumphant in its
young beauty and fondness, he said to himself that it did not make any
difference.  He felt that he was not holding up his end of the line,
however.  When some one spoke to him he could only summon a few words
of reply, that seemed to lead to nothing; things often came into his
mind appropriate to what they were saying, but before he could get them
out they were off on something else; they jumped about so, he could not
keep up; but he felt, all the same, that he was not doing himself
justice.

At one time the talk ran off upon a subject that Lapham had never heard
talked of before; but again he was vexed that Penelope was not there,
to have her say; he believed that her say would have been worth hearing.

Miss Kingsbury leaned forward and asked Charles Bellingham if he had
read Tears, Idle Tears, the novel that was making such a sensation; and
when he said no, she said she wondered at him.  "It's perfectly
heart-breaking, as you'll imagine from the name; but there's such a
dear old-fashioned hero and heroine in it, who keep dying for each
other all the way through, and making the most wildly satisfactory and
unnecessary sacrifices for each other.  You feel as if you'd done them
yourself."

"Ah, that's the secret of its success," said Bromfield Corey.  "It
flatters the reader by painting the characters colossal, but with his
limp and stoop, so that he feels himself of their supernatural
proportions.  You've read it, Nanny?"

"Yes," said his daughter.  "It ought to have been called Slop, Silly
Slop."

"Oh, not quite SLOP, Nanny," pleaded Miss Kingsbury.

"It's astonishing," said Charles Bellingham, "how we do like the books
that go for our heart-strings. And I really suppose that you can't put
a more popular thing than self-sacrifice into a novel.  We do like to
see people suffering sublimely."

"There was talk some years ago," said James Bellingham, "about novels
going out." "They're just coming in!" cried Miss Kingsbury.

"Yes," said Mr. Sewell, the minister.  "And I don't think there ever
was a time when they formed the whole intellectual experience of more
people.  They do greater mischief than ever."

"Don't be envious, parson," said the host.

"No," answered Sewell.  "I should be glad of their help.  But those
novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them--excuse me, Miss
Kingsbury--are ruinous!"

"Don't you feel like a moral wreck, Miss Kingsbury?" asked the host.

But Sewell went on: "The novelists might be the greatest possible help
to us if they painted life as it is, and human feelings in their true
proportion and relation, but for the most part they have been and are
altogether noxious."

This seemed sense to Lapham; but Bromfield Corey asked: "But what if
life as it is isn't amusing? Aren't we to be amused?"

"Not to our hurt," sturdily answered the minister.  "And the
self-sacrifice painted in most novels like this----"

"Slop, Silly Slop?" suggested the proud father of the inventor of the
phrase.

"Yes--is nothing but psychical suicide, and is as wholly immoral as the
spectacle of a man falling upon his sword."

"Well, I don't know but you're right, parson," said the host; and the
minister, who had apparently got upon a battle-horse of his, careered
onward in spite of some tacit attempts of his wife to seize the bridle.

"Right? To be sure I am right.  The whole business of love, and
love-making and marrying, is painted by the novelists in a monstrous
disproportion to the other relations of life.  Love is very sweet, very
pretty----"

"Oh, THANK you, Mr. Sewell," said Nanny Corey, in a way that set them
all laughing.

"But it's the affair, commonly, of very young people, who have not yet
character and experience enough to make them interesting.  In novels
it's treated, not only as if it were the chief interest of life, but
the sole interest of the lives of two ridiculous young persons; and it
is taught that love is perpetual, that the glow of a true passion lasts
for ever; and that it is sacrilege to think or act otherwise." "Well,
but isn't that true, Mr. Sewell?" pleaded Miss Kingsbury.

"I have known some most estimable people who had married a second
time," said the minister, and then he had the applause with him.
Lapham wanted to make some open recognition of his good sense, but
could not.

"I suppose the passion itself has been a good deal changed," said
Bromfield Corey, "since the poets began to idealise it in the days of
chivalry."

"Yes; and it ought to be changed again," said Mr. Sewell.

"What! Back?"

"I don't say that.  But it ought to be recognised as something natural
and mortal, and divine honours, which belong to righteousness alone,
ought not to be paid it."

"Oh, you ask too much, parson," laughed his host, and the talk wandered
away to something else.

It was not an elaborate dinner; but Lapham was used to having
everything on the table at once, and this succession of dishes
bewildered him; he was afraid perhaps he was eating too much.  He now
no longer made any pretence of not drinking his wine, for he was
thirsty, and there was no more water, and he hated to ask for any.  The
ice-cream came, and then the fruit.  Suddenly Mrs. Corey rose, and said
across the table to her husband, "I suppose you will want your coffee
here." And he replied, "Yes; we'll join you at tea."

The ladies all rose, and the gentlemen got up with them.  Lapham
started to follow Mrs. Corey, but the other men merely stood in their
places, except young Corey, who ran and opened the door for his mother.
Lapham thought with shame that it was he who ought to have done that;
but no one seemed to notice, and he sat down again gladly, after
kicking out one of his legs which had gone to sleep.

They brought in cigars with coffee, and Bromfield Corey advised Lapham
to take one that he chose for him.  Lapham confessed that he liked a
good cigar about as well as anybody, and Corey said: "These are new.  I
had an Englishman here the other day who was smoking old cigars in the
superstition that tobacco improved with age, like wine."

"Ah," said Lapham, "anybody who had ever lived off a tobacco country
could tell him better than that." With the fuming cigar between his
lips he felt more at home than he had before.  He turned sidewise in
his chair and, resting one arm on the back, intertwined the fingers of
both hands, and smoked at large ease.  James Bellingham came and sat
down by him.  "Colonel Lapham, weren't you with the 96th Vermont when
they charged across the river in front of Pickensburg, and the rebel
battery opened fire on them in the water?"

Lapham slowly shut his eyes and slowly dropped his head for assent,
letting out a white volume of smoke from the corner of his mouth.

"I thought so," said Bellingham.  "I was with the 85th Massachusetts,
and I sha'n't forget that slaughter.  We were all new to it still.
Perhaps that's why it made such an impression."

"I don't know," suggested Charles Bellingham.  "Was there anything much
more impressive afterward? I read of it out in Missouri, where I was
stationed at the time, and I recollect the talk of some old army men
about it.  They said that death-rate couldn't be beaten.  I don't know
that it ever was."

"About one in five of us got out safe," said Lapham, breaking his
cigar-ash off on the edge of a plate.  James Bellingham reached him a
bottle of Apollinaris.  He drank a glass, and then went on smoking.

They all waited, as if expecting him to speak, and then Corey said:
"How incredible those things seem already!  You gentlemen KNOW that
they happened; but are you still able to believe it?"

"Ah, nobody FEELS that anything happened," said Charles Bellingham.
"The past of one's experience doesn't differ a great deal from the past
of one's knowledge.  It isn't much more probable; it's really a great
deal less vivid than some scenes in a novel that one read when a boy."

"I'm not sure of that," said James Bellingham.

"Well, James, neither am I," consented his cousin, helping himself from
Lapham's Apollinaris bottle.  "There would be very little talking at
dinner if one only said the things that one was sure of."

The others laughed, and Bromfield Corey remarked thoughtfully, "What
astonishes the craven civilian in all these things is the
abundance--the superabundance--of heroism.  The cowards were the
exception; the men that were ready to die, the rule."

"The woods were full of them," said Lapham, without taking his cigar
from his mouth.

"That's a nice little touch in School," interposed Charles Bellingham,
"where the girl says to the fellow who was at Inkerman, 'I should think
you would be so proud of it,' and he reflects a while, and says, 'Well,
the fact is, you know, there were so many of us.'"

"Yes, I remember that," said James Bellingham, smiling for pleasure in
it.  "But I don't see why you claim the credit of being a craven
civilian, Bromfield," he added, with a friendly glance at his
brother-in-law, and with the willingness Boston men often show to turn
one another's good points to the light in company; bred so intimately
together at school and college and in society, they all know these
points.  "A man who was out with Garibaldi in '48," continued James
Bellingham.

"Oh, a little amateur red-shirting," Corey interrupted in deprecation.
"But even if you choose to dispute my claim, what has become of all the
heroism? Tom, how many club men do you know who would think it sweet
and fitting to die for their country?"

"I can't think of a great many at the moment, sir," replied the son,
with the modesty of his generation.

"And I couldn't in '61," said his uncle.  "Nevertheless they were
there."

"Then your theory is that it's the occasion that is wanting," said
Bromfield Corey.  "But why shouldn't civil service reform, and the
resumption of specie payment, and a tariff for revenue only, inspire
heroes? They are all good causes."

"It's the occasion that's wanting," said James Bellingham, ignoring the
persiflage.  "And I'm very glad of it."

"So am I," said Lapham, with a depth of feeling that expressed itself
in spite of the haze in which his brain seemed to float.  There was a
great deal of the talk that he could not follow; it was too quick for
him; but here was something he was clear of.  "I don't want to see any
more men killed in my time." Something serious, something sombre must
lurk behind these words, and they waited for Lapham to say more; but
the haze closed round him again, and he remained silent, drinking
Apollinaris.

"We non-combatants were notoriously reluctant to give up fighting,"
said Mr. Sewell, the minister; "but I incline to think Colonel Lapham
and Mr. Bellingham may be right.  I dare say we shall have the heroism
again if we have the occasion.  Till it comes, we must content
ourselves with the every-day generosities and sacrifices.  They make up
in quantity what they lack in quality, perhaps." "They're not so
picturesque," said Bromfield Corey.  "You can paint a man dying for his
country, but you can't express on canvas a man fulfilling the duties of
a good citizen."

"Perhaps the novelists will get at him by and by," suggested Charles
Bellingham.  "If I were one of these fellows, I shouldn't propose to
myself anything short of that."

"What? the commonplace?" asked his cousin.

"Commonplace? The commonplace is just that light, impalpable, aerial
essence which they've never got into their confounded books yet.  The
novelist who could interpret the common feelings of commonplace people
would have the answer to 'the riddle of the painful earth' on his
tongue."

"Oh, not so bad as that, I hope," said the host; and Lapham looked from
one to the other, trying to make out what they were at.  He had never
been so up a tree before.

"I suppose it isn't well for us to see human nature at white heat
habitually," continued Bromfield Corey, after a while.  "It would make
us vain of our species.  Many a poor fellow in that war and in many
another has gone into battle simply and purely for his country's sake,
not knowing whether, if he laid down his life, he should ever find it
again, or whether, if he took it up hereafter, he should take it up in
heaven or hell.  Come, parson!" he said, turning to the minister, "what
has ever been conceived of omnipotence, of omniscience, so sublime, so
divine as that?"

"Nothing," answered the minister quietly.  "God has never been imagined
at all.  But if you suppose such a man as that was Authorised, I think
it will help you to imagine what God must be."

"There's sense in that," said Lapham.  He took his cigar out of his
mouth, and pulled his chair a little toward the table, on which he
placed his ponderous fore-arms.  "I want to tell you about a fellow I
had in my own company when we first went out.  We were all privates to
begin with; after a while they elected me captain--I'd had the tavern
stand, and most of 'em knew me.  But Jim Millon never got to be
anything more than corporal; corporal when he was killed." The others
arrested themselves in various attitudes of attention, and remained
listening to Lapham with an interest that profoundly flattered him.
Now, at last, he felt that he was holding up his end of the rope.  "I
can't say he went into the thing from the highest motives, altogether;
our motives are always pretty badly mixed, and when there's such a
hurrah-boys as there was then, you can't tell which is which.  I
suppose Jim Millon's wife was enough to account for his going, herself.
She was a pretty bad assortment," said Lapham, lowering his voice and
glancing round at the door to make sure that it was shut, "and she used
to lead Jim ONE kind of life.  Well, sir," continued Lapham,
synthetising his auditors in that form of address, "that fellow used to
save every cent of his pay and send it to that woman.  Used to get me
to do it for him.  I tried to stop him.  'Why, Jim,' said I, 'you know
what she'll do with it.' 'That's so, Cap,' says he, 'but I don't know
what she'll do without it.' And it did keep her straight--straight as a
string--as long as Jim lasted.  Seemed as if there was something
mysterious about it.  They had a little girl,--about as old as my
oldest girl,--and Jim used to talk to me about her.  Guess he done it
as much for her as for the mother; and he said to me before the last
action we went into, 'I should like to turn tail and run, Cap.  I ain't
comin' out o' this one.  But I don't suppose it would do.' 'Well, not
for you, Jim,' said I. 'I want to live,' he says; and he bust out
crying right there in my tent.  'I want to live for poor Molly and
Zerrilla'--that's what they called the little one; I dunno where they
got the name.  'I ain't ever had half a chance; and now she's doing
better, and I believe we should get along after this.' He set there
cryin' like a baby.  But he wa'n't no baby when he went into action.  I
hated to look at him after it was over, not so much because he'd got a
ball that was meant for me by a sharpshooter--he saw the devil takin'
aim, and he jumped to warn me--as because he didn't look like Jim; he
looked like--fun; all desperate and savage.  I guess he died hard."

The story made its impression, and Lapham saw it.  "Now I say," he
resumed, as if he felt that he was going to do himself justice, and say
something to heighten the effect his story had produced.  At the same
time he was aware of a certain want of clearness.  He had the idea, but
it floated vague, elusive, in his brain.  He looked about as if for
something to precipitate it in tangible shape.

"Apollinaris?" asked Charles Bellingham, handing the bottle from the
other side.  He had drawn his chair closer than the rest to Lapham's,
and was listening with great interest.  When Mrs. Corey asked him to
meet Lapham, he accepted gladly.  "You know I go in for that sort of
thing, Anna.  Since Leslie's affair we're rather bound to do it.  And I
think we meet these practical fellows too little.  There's always
something original about them." He might naturally have believed that
the reward of his faith was coming.

"Thanks, I will take some of this wine," said Lapham, pouring himself a
glass of Madeira from a black and dusty bottle caressed by a label
bearing the date of the vintage.  He tossed off the wine, unconscious
of its preciousness, and waited for the result.  That cloudiness in his
brain disappeared before it, but a mere blank remained.  He not only
could not remember what he was going to say, but he could not recall
what they had been talking about.  They waited, looking at him, and he
stared at them in return.  After a while he heard the host saying,
"Shall we join the ladies?"

Lapham went, trying to think what had happened.  It seemed to him a
long time since he had drunk that wine.

Miss Corey gave him a cup of tea, where he stood aloof from his wife,
who was talking with Miss Kingsbury and Mrs. Sewell; Irene was with
Miss Nanny Corey.  He could not hear what they were talking about; but
if Penelope had come, he knew that she would have done them all credit.
He meant to let her know how he felt about her behaviour when he got
home.  It was a shame for her to miss such a chance.  Irene was looking
beautiful, as pretty as all the rest of them put together, but she was
not talking, and Lapham perceived that at a dinner-party you ought to
talk.  He was himself conscious of having, talked very well.  He now
wore an air of great dignity, and, in conversing with the other
gentlemen, he used a grave and weighty deliberation.  Some of them
wanted him to go into the library.  There he gave his ideas of books.
He said he had not much time for anything but the papers; but he was
going to have a complete library in his new place.  He made an
elaborate acknowledgment to Bromfield Corey of his son's kindness in
suggesting books for his library; he said that he had ordered them all,
and that he meant to have pictures.  He asked Mr. Corey who was about
the best American painter going now.  "I don't set up to be a judge of
pictures, but I know what I like," he said.  He lost the reserve which
he had maintained earlier, and began to boast.  He himself introduced
the subject of his paint, in a natural transition from pictures; he
said Mr. Corey must take a run up to Lapham with him some day, and see
the Works; they would interest him, and he would drive him round the
country; he kept most of his horses up there, and he could show Mr.
Corey some of the finest Jersey grades in the country.  He told about
his brother William, the judge at Dubuque; and a farm he had out there
that paid for itself every year in wheat.  As he cast off all fear, his
voice rose, and he hammered his arm-chair with the thick of his hand
for emphasis.  Mr. Corey seemed impressed; he sat perfectly quiet,
listening, and Lapham saw the other gentlemen stop in their talk every
now and then to listen.  After this proof of his ability to interest
them, he would have liked to have Mrs. Lapham suggest again that he was
unequal to their society, or to the society of anybody else.  He
surprised himself by his ease among men whose names had hitherto
overawed him.  He got to calling Bromfield Corey by his surname alone.
He did not understand why young Corey seemed so preoccupied, and he
took occasion to tell the company how he had said to his wife the first
time he saw that fellow that he could make a man of him if he had him
in the business; and he guessed he was not mistaken.  He began to tell
stories of the different young men he had had in his employ.  At last
he had the talk altogether to himself; no one else talked, and he
talked unceasingly.  It was a great time; it was a triumph.

He was in this successful mood when word came to him that Mrs. Lapham
was going; Tom Corey seemed to have brought it, but he was not sure.
Anyway, he was not going to hurry.  He made cordial invitations to each
of the gentlemen to drop in and see him at his office, and would not be
satisfied till he had exacted a promise from each.  He told Charles
Bellingham that he liked him, and assured James Bellingham that it had
always been his ambition to know him, and that if any one had said when
he first came to Boston that in less than ten years he should be
hobnobbing with Jim Bellingham, he should have told that person he
lied.  He would have told anybody he lied that had told him ten years
ago that a son of Bromfield Corey would have come and asked him to take
him into the business.  Ten years ago he, Silas Lapham, had come to
Boston a little worse off than nothing at all, for he was in debt for
half the money that he had bought out his partner with, and here he was
now worth a million, and meeting you gentlemen like one of you.  And
every cent of that was honest money,--no speculation,--every copper of
it for value received.  And here, only the other day, his old partner,
who had been going to the dogs ever since he went out of the business,
came and borrowed twenty thousand dollars of him! Lapham lent it
because his wife wanted him to: she had always felt bad about the
fellow's having to go out of the business.

He took leave of Mr. Sewell with patronising affection, and bade him
come to him if he ever got into a tight place with his parish work; he
would let him have all the money he wanted; he had more money than he
knew what to do with.  "Why, when your wife sent to mine last fall," he
said, turning to Mr. Corey, "I drew my cheque for five hundred dollars,
but my wife wouldn't take more than one hundred; said she wasn't going
to show off before Mrs. Corey.  I call that a pretty good joke on Mrs.
Corey.  I must tell her how Mrs. Lapham done her out of a cool four
hundred dollars."

He started toward the door of the drawing-room to take leave of the
ladies; but Tom Corey was at his elbow, saying, "I think Mrs. Lapham is
waiting for you below, sir," and in obeying the direction Corey gave
him toward another door he forgot all about his purpose, and came away
without saying good-night to his hostess.

Mrs. Lapham had not known how soon she ought to go, and had no idea
that in her quality of chief guest she was keeping the others.  She
stayed till eleven o'clock, and was a little frightened when she found
what time it was; but Mrs. Corey, without pressing her to stay longer,
had said it was not at all late.  She and Irene had had a perfect time.
Everybody had been very polite, on the way home they celebrated the
amiability of both the Miss Coreys and of Miss Kingsbury.  Mrs. Lapham
thought that Mrs. Bellingham was about the pleasantest person she ever
saw; she had told her all about her married daughter who had married an
inventor and gone to live in Omaha--a Mrs. Blake.

"If it's that car-wheel Blake," said Lapham proudly, "I know all about
him.  I've sold him tons of the paint."

"Pooh, papa! How you do smell of smoking!" cried Irene.

"Pretty strong, eh?" laughed Lapham, letting down a window of the
carriage.  His heart was throbbing wildly in the close air, and he was
glad of the rush of cold that came in, though it stopped his tongue,
and he listened more and more drowsily to the rejoicings that his wife
and daughter exchanged.  He meant to have them wake Penelope up and
tell her what she had lost; but when he reached home he was too sleepy
to suggest it.  He fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow,
full of supreme triumph.

But in the morning his skull was sore with the unconscious, night-long
ache; and he rose cross and taciturn.  They had a silent breakfast.  In
the cold grey light of the morning the glories of the night before
showed poorer.  Here and there a painful doubt obtruded itself and
marred them with its awkward shadow.  Penelope sent down word that she
was not well, and was not coming to breakfast, and Lapham was glad to
go to his office without seeing her.

He was severe and silent all day with his clerks, and peremptory with
customers.  Of Corey he was slyly observant, and as the day wore away
he grew more restively conscious.  He sent out word by his office-boy
that he would like to see Mr. Corey for a few minutes after closing.
The type-writer girl had lingered too, as if she wished to speak with
him, and Corey stood in abeyance as she went toward Lapham's door.

"Can't see you to-night, Zerrilla," he said bluffly, but not unkindly.
"Perhaps I'll call at the house, if it's important."

"It is," said the girl, with a spoiled air of insistence.

"Well," said Lapham, and, nodding to Corey to enter, he closed the door
upon her.  Then he turned to the young, man and demanded: "Was I drunk
last night?"

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The Laphams' arrival at the Coreys' house in an aristocratic, secluded neighborhood opens Chapter XIV. Silas' problems with gloves, which no one else wears, with the wine he drinks like the ice water served at his home table, and with the conversation he cannot follow and enter into are all brought out during the dinner party. Bromfield Corey brings up the first topic of discussion -- art. "You architects," he says to Mr. Seymour, Silas' architect, "and the musicians are the true and only artistic creators. All the rest of us, sculptors, painters, novelists, and tailors, deal with forms that we have before us; we try to imitate." Bromfield instigates the next short discussion, also. He maintains that the rich ought to let the poor use their houses while they are absent during the summer. "Surely, Bromfield," his wife says, "you don't consider what havoc such people would make with the furniture of a nice house!" To this Bromfield weakly submits. They continue by discussing the latest novel, Tears, Idle Tears, which is retitled "Slop, Silly Slop" by Nanny Corey. "There's such a dear old-fashioned hero and heroine in it, who keep dying for each other all the way through, and making the most wildly satisfactory and unnecessary sacrifices for each other. You feel as if you'd done them yourself," Miss Kingsbury says. "Such old fashioned heroines are ruinous," Minister Sewell states. "The novelists might be the greatest possible help to us if they painted life as it is and human feelings in their true proportion." When the men are alone, they talk of the need for more patriotic feelings among the young men. It is suggested that an occasion is needed. Bromfield Corey sees a need for good citizenship. "You can paint a man dying for his country, but you can't express on canvas a man fulfilling his duties as a good citizen," he points out. "Perhaps the novelists will get him by and by," someone else suggests. At this point Lapham finds occasion to enter the conversation and tells his war story. He speaks of Jim Millon's bravery in action when he saved Lapham by taking a bullet meant for him. Millon wanted to live for his wife Molly and his daughter Zerrilla, Lapham points out, but, like a real hero, he took an active part in the battle. Silas has drunk too much wine, but he feels that now he has successfully talked and continues to tell Bromfield Corey about his paint. He continues drinking and expounding on different subjects until he has the talk altogether to himself; no one else talks, and he talks unceasingly.


prompt:
Chapter: LAPHAM'S strenuous face was broken up with the emotions that had forced
him to this question: shame, fear of the things that must have been
thought of him, mixed with a faint hope that he might be mistaken,
which died out at the shocked and pitying look in Corey's eyes.

"Was I drunk?" he repeated.  "I ask you, because I was never touched by
drink in my life before, and I don't know." He stood with his huge
hands trembling on the back of his chair, and his dry lips apart, as he
stared at Corey.

"That is what every one understood, Colonel Lapham," said the young
man.  "Every one saw how it was.  Don't----"

"Did they talk it over after I left?" asked Lapham vulgarly.

"Excuse me," said Corey, blushing, "my father doesn't talk his guests
over with one another." He added, with youthful superfluity, "You were
among gentlemen."

"I was the only one that wasn't a gentleman there!" lamented Lapham.
"I disgraced you! I disgraced my family! I mortified your father before
his friends!" His head dropped.  "I showed that I wasn't fit to go with
you.  I'm not fit for any decent place.  What did I say? What did I
do?" he asked, suddenly lifting his head and confronting Corey.  "Out
with it! If you could bear to see it and hear it, I had ought to bear
to know it!"

"There was nothing--really nothing," said Corey.  "Beyond the fact that
you were not quite yourself, there was nothing whatever.  My father DID
speak of it to me," he confessed, "when we were alone.  He said that he
was afraid we had not been thoughtful of you, if you were in the habit
of taking only water; I told him I had not seen wine at your table.
The others said nothing about you."

"Ah, but what did they think?"

"Probably what we did: that it was purely a misfortune--an accident."

"I wasn't fit to be there," persisted Lapham.  "Do you want to leave?"
he asked, with savage abruptness.

"Leave?" faltered the young man.

"Yes; quit the business? Cut the whole connection?"

"I haven't the remotest idea of it!" cried Corey in amazement.  "Why in
the world should I?" "Because you're a gentleman, and I'm not, and it
ain't right I should be over you.  If you want to go, I know some
parties that would be glad to get you.  I will give you up if you want
to go before anything worse happens, and I shan't blame you.  I can
help you to something better than I can offer you here, and I will."

"There's no question of my going, unless you wish it," said Corey.  "If
you do----"

"Will you tell your father," interrupted Lapham, "that I had a notion
all the time that I was acting the drunken blackguard, and that I've
suffered for it all day? Will you tell him I don't want him to notice
me if we ever meet, and that I know I'm not fit to associate with
gentlemen in anything but a business way, if I am that?"

"Certainly I shall do nothing of the kind," retorted Corey.  "I can't
listen to you any longer.  What you say is shocking to me--shocking in
a way you can't think."

"Why, man!" exclaimed Lapham, with astonishment; "if I can stand it,
YOU can!"

"No," said Corey, with a sick look, "that doesn't follow.  You may
denounce yourself, if you will; but I have my reasons for refusing to
hear you--my reasons why I CAN'T hear you.  If you say another word I
must go away."

"I don't understand you," faltered Lapham, in bewilderment, which
absorbed even his shame.

"You exaggerate the effect of what has happened," said the young man.
"It's enough, more than enough, for you to have mentioned the matter to
me, and I think it's unbecoming in me to hear you."

He made a movement toward the door, but Lapham stopped him with the
tragic humility of his appeal.  "Don't go yet! I can't let you.  I've
disgusted you,--I see that; but I didn't mean to.  I--I take it back."

"Oh, there's nothing to take back," said Corey, with a repressed
shudder for the abasement which he had seen.  "But let us say no more
about it--think no more.  There wasn't one of the gentlemen present
last night who didn't understand the matter precisely as my father and
I did, and that fact must end it between us two."

He went out into the larger office beyond, leaving Lapham helpless to
prevent his going.  It had become a vital necessity with him to think
the best of Lapham, but his mind was in a whirl of whatever thoughts
were most injurious.  He thought of him the night before in the company
of those ladies and gentlemen, and he quivered in resentment of his
vulgar, braggart, uncouth nature.  He recognised his own allegiance to
the exclusiveness to which he was born and bred, as a man perceives his
duty to his country when her rights are invaded.  His eye fell on the
porter going about in his shirt-sleeves to make the place fast for the
night, and he said to himself that Dennis was not more plebeian than
his master; that the gross appetites, the blunt sense, the purblind
ambition, the stupid arrogance were the same in both, and the
difference was in a brute will that probably left the porter the
gentler man of the two.  The very innocence of Lapham's life in the
direction in which he had erred wrought against him in the young man's
mood: it contained the insult of clownish inexperience.  Amidst the
stings and flashes of his wounded pride, all the social traditions, all
the habits of feeling, which he had silenced more and more by force of
will during the past months, asserted their natural sway, and he rioted
in his contempt of the offensive boor, who was even more offensive in
his shame than in his trespass.  He said to himself that he was a
Corey, as if that were somewhat; yet he knew that at the bottom of his
heart all the time was that which must control him at last, and which
seemed sweetly to be suffering his rebellion, secure of his submission
in the end.  It was almost with the girl's voice that it seemed to
plead with him, to undo in him, effect by effect, the work of his
indignant resentment, to set all things in another and fairer light, to
give him hopes, to suggest palliations, to protest against injustices.
It WAS in Lapham's favour that he was so guiltless in the past, and now
Corey asked himself if it were the first time he could have wished a
guest at his father's table to have taken less wine; whether Lapham was
not rather to be honoured for not knowing how to contain his folly
where a veteran transgressor might have held his tongue.  He asked
himself, with a thrill of sudden remorse, whether, when Lapham humbled
himself in the dust so shockingly, he had shown him the sympathy to
which such ABANDON had the right; and he had to own that he had met him
on the gentlemanly ground, sparing himself and asserting the
superiority of his sort, and not recognising that Lapham's humiliation
came from the sense of wrong, which he had helped to accumulate upon
him by superfinely standing aloof and refusing to touch him.

He shut his desk and hurried out into the early night, not to go
anywhere, but to walk up and down, to try to find his way out of the
chaos, which now seemed ruin, and now the materials out of which fine
actions and a happy life might be shaped.  Three hours later he stood
at Lapham's door.

At times what he now wished to do had seemed for ever impossible, and
again it had seemed as if he could not wait a moment longer.  He had
not been careless, but very mindful of what he knew must be the
feelings of his own family in regard to the Laphams, and he had not
concealed from himself that his family had great reason and justice on
their side in not wishing him to alienate himself from their common
life and associations.  The most that he could urge to himself was that
they had not all the reason and justice; but he had hesitated and
delayed because they had so much.  Often he could not make it appear
right that he should merely please himself in what chiefly concerned
himself.  He perceived how far apart in all their experiences and
ideals the Lapham girls and his sisters were; how different Mrs. Lapham
was from his mother; how grotesquely unlike were his father and Lapham;
and the disparity had not always amused him.

He had often taken it very seriously, and sometimes he said that he
must forego the hope on which his heart was set.  There had been many
times in the past months when he had said that he must go no further,
and as often as he had taken this stand he had yielded it, upon this or
that excuse, which he was aware of trumping up.  It was part of the
complication that he should be unconscious of the injury he might be
doing to some one besides his family and himself; this was the defect
of his diffidence; and it had come to him in a pang for the first time
when his mother said that she would not have the Laphams think she
wished to make more of the acquaintance than he did; and then it had
come too late.  Since that he had suffered quite as much from the fear
that it might not be as that it might be so; and now, in the mood,
romantic and exalted, in which he found himself concerning Lapham, he
was as far as might be from vain confidence.  He ended the question in
his own mind by affirming to himself that he was there, first of all,
to see Lapham and give him an ultimate proof of his own perfect faith
and unabated respect, and to offer him what reparation this involved
for that want of sympathy--of humanity--which he had shown.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: In this brief chapter, Lapham apologizes to Tom Corey the day after the dinner party for his drunken behavior. Corey is more repulsed by his apology than by his behavior of the night before. After considering the Laphams' position, however, he decides that not only the Coreys but the Laphams could be hurt by the social fiasco, and he resolves to show them sympathy and respect.