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Chapter: WHEN Bartley Hubbard went to interview Silas Lapham for the "Solid Men
of Boston" series, which he undertook to finish up in The Events, after
he replaced their original projector on that newspaper, Lapham received
him in his private office by previous appointment.

"Walk right in!" he called out to the journalist, whom he caught sight
of through the door of the counting-room.

He did not rise from the desk at which he was writing, but he gave
Bartley his left hand for welcome, and he rolled his large head in the
direction of a vacant chair.  "Sit down! I'll be with you in just half
a minute."

"Take your time," said Bartley, with the ease he instantly felt.  "I'm
in no hurry." He took a note-book from his pocket, laid it on his knee,
and began to sharpen a pencil.

"There!" Lapham pounded with his great hairy fist on the envelope he
had been addressing.

"William!" he called out, and he handed the letter to a boy who came to
get it.  "I want that to go right away.  Well, sir," he continued,
wheeling round in his leather-cushioned swivel-chair, and facing
Bartley, seated so near that their knees almost touched, "so you want
my life, death, and Christian sufferings, do you, young man?"

"That's what I'm after," said Bartley.  "Your money or your life."

"I guess you wouldn't want my life without the money," said Lapham, as
if he were willing to prolong these moments of preparation.

"Take 'em both," Bartley suggested.  "Don't want your money without
your life, if you come to that.  But you're just one million times more
interesting to the public than if you hadn't a dollar; and you know
that as well as I do, Mr. Lapham.  There's no use beating about the
bush."

"No," said Lapham, somewhat absently.  He put out his huge foot and
pushed the ground-glass door shut between his little den and the
book-keepers, in their larger den outside.

"In personal appearance," wrote Bartley in the sketch for which he now
studied his subject, while he waited patiently for him to continue,
"Silas Lapham is a fine type of the successful American.  He has a
square, bold chin, only partially concealed by the short reddish-grey
beard, growing to the edges of his firmly closing lips.  His nose is
short and straight; his forehead good, but broad rather than high; his
eyes blue, and with a light in them that is kindly or sharp according
to his mood.  He is of medium height, and fills an average arm-chair
with a solid bulk, which on the day of our interview was
unpretentiously clad in a business suit of blue serge.  His head droops
somewhat from a short neck, which does not trouble itself to rise far
from a pair of massive shoulders."

"I don't know as I know just where you want me to begin," said Lapham.

"Might begin with your birth; that's where most of us begin," replied
Bartley.

A gleam of humorous appreciation shot into Lapham's blue eyes.

"I didn't know whether you wanted me to go quite so far back as that,"
he said.  "But there's no disgrace in having been born, and I was born
in the State of Vermont, pretty well up under the Canada line--so well
up, in fact, that I came very near being an adoptive citizen; for I was
bound to be an American of SOME sort, from the word Go! That was
about--well, let me see!--pretty near sixty years ago: this is '75, and
that was '20. Well, say I'm fifty-five years old; and I've LIVED 'em,
too; not an hour of waste time about ME, anywheres! I was born on a
farm, and----"

"Worked in the fields summers and went to school winters: regulation
thing?" Bartley cut in.

"Regulation thing," said Lapham, accepting this irreverent version of
his history somewhat dryly.

"Parents poor, of course," suggested the journalist.  "Any barefoot
business? Early deprivations of any kind, that would encourage the
youthful reader to go and do likewise? Orphan myself, you know," said
Bartley, with a smile of cynical good-comradery.

Lapham looked at him silently, and then said with quiet self-respect,
"I guess if you see these things as a joke, my life won't interest you."

"Oh yes, it will," returned Bartley, unabashed.  "You'll see; it'll
come out all right." And in fact it did so, in the interview which
Bartley printed.

"Mr. Lapham," he wrote, "passed rapidly over the story of his early
life, its poverty and its hardships, sweetened, however, by the
recollections of a devoted mother, and a father who, if somewhat her
inferior in education, was no less ambitious for the advancement of his
children.  They were quiet, unpretentious people, religious, after the
fashion of that time, and of sterling morality, and they taught their
children the simple virtues of the Old Testament and Poor Richard's
Almanac."

Bartley could not deny himself this gibe; but he trusted to Lapham's
unliterary habit of mind for his security in making it, and most other
people would consider it sincere reporter's rhetoric.

"You know," he explained to Lapham, "that we have to look at all these
facts as material, and we get the habit of classifying them.  Sometimes
a leading question will draw out a whole line of facts that a man
himself would never think of." He went on to put several queries, and
it was from Lapham's answers that he generalised the history of his
childhood.  "Mr. Lapham, although he did not dwell on his boyish trials
and struggles, spoke of them with deep feeling and an abiding sense of
their reality." This was what he added in the interview, and by the
time he had got Lapham past the period where risen Americans are all
pathetically alike in their narrow circumstances, their sufferings, and
their aspirations, he had beguiled him into forgetfulness of the check
he had received, and had him talking again in perfect enjoyment of his
autobiography.

"Yes, sir," said Lapham, in a strain which Bartley was careful not to
interrupt again, "a man never sees all that his mother has been to him
till it's too late to let her know that he sees it.  Why, my mother--"
he stopped.  "It gives me a lump in the throat," he said
apologetically, with an attempt at a laugh.  Then he went on: "She was
a little frail thing, not bigger than a good-sized intermediate
school-girl; but she did the whole work of a family of boys, and
boarded the hired men besides.  She cooked, swept, washed, ironed, made
and mended from daylight till dark--and from dark till daylight, I was
going to say; for I don't know how she got any time for sleep.  But I
suppose she did.  She got time to go to church, and to teach us to read
the Bible, and to misunderstand it in the old way.  She was GOOD.  But
it ain't her on her knees in church that comes back to me so much like
the sight of an angel as her on her knees before me at night, washing
my poor, dirty little feet, that I'd run bare in all day, and making me
decent for bed.  There were six of us boys; it seems to me we were all
of a size; and she was just so careful with all of us.  I can feel her
hands on my feet yet!" Bartley looked at Lapham's No. 10 boots, and
softly whistled through his teeth.  "We were patched all over; but we
wa'n't ragged.  I don't know how she got through it.  She didn't seem
to think it was anything; and I guess it was no more than my father
expected of her.  HE worked like a horse in doors and out--up at
daylight, feeding the stock, and groaning round all day with his
rheumatism, but not stopping."

Bartley hid a yawn over his note-book, and probably, if he could have
spoken his mind, he would have suggested to Lapham that he was not
there for the purpose of interviewing his ancestry.  But Bartley had
learned to practise a patience with his victims which he did not always
feel, and to feign an interest in their digressions till he could bring
them up with a round turn.

"I tell you," said Lapham, jabbing the point of his penknife into the
writing-pad on the desk before him, "when I hear women complaining
nowadays that their lives are stunted and empty, I want to tell 'em
about my MOTHER'S life.  I could paint it out for 'em."

Bartley saw his opportunity at the word paint, and cut in.  "And you
say, Mr. Lapham, that you discovered this mineral paint on the old farm
yourself?"

Lapham acquiesced in the return to business.  "I didn't discover it,"
he said scrupulously.  "My father found it one day, in a hole made by a
tree blowing down.  There it was, lying loose in the pit, and sticking
to the roots that had pulled up a big, cake of dirt with 'em. I don't
know what give him the idea that there was money in it, but he did
think so from the start.  I guess, if they'd had the word in those
days, they'd considered him pretty much of a crank about it.  He was
trying as long as he lived to get that paint introduced; but he
couldn't make it go.  The country was so poor they couldn't paint their
houses with anything; and father hadn't any facilities.  It got to be a
kind of joke with us; and I guess that paint-mine did as much as any
one thing to make us boys clear out as soon as we got old enough.  All
my brothers went West, and took up land; but I hung on to New England
and I hung on to the old farm, not because the paint-mine was on it,
but because the old house was--and the graves.  Well," said Lapham, as
if unwilling to give himself too much credit, "there wouldn't been any
market for it, anyway.  You can go through that part of the State and
buy more farms than you can shake a stick at for less money than it
cost to build the barns on 'em. Of course, it's turned out a good
thing.  I keep the old house up in good shape, and we spend a month or
so there every summer.  M' wife kind of likes it, and the girls.
Pretty place; sightly all round it.  I've got a force of men at work
there the whole time, and I've got a man and his wife in the house.
Had a family meeting there last year; the whole connection from out
West.  There!" Lapham rose from his seat and took down a large warped,
unframed photograph from the top of his desk, passing his hand over it,
and then blowing vigorously upon it, to clear it of the dust.  "There
we are, ALL of us."

"I don't need to look twice at YOU," said Bartley, putting his finger
on one of the heads.

"Well, that's Bill," said Lapham, with a gratified laugh.  "He's about
as brainy as any of us, I guess.  He's one of their leading lawyers,
out Dubuque way; been judge of the Common Pleas once or twice.  That's
his son--just graduated at Yale--alongside of my youngest girl.
Good-looking chap, ain't he?"

"SHE'S a good-looking chap," said Bartley, with prompt irreverence.  He
hastened to add, at the frown which gathered between Lapham's eyes,
"What a beautiful creature she is! What a lovely, refined, sensitive
face! And she looks GOOD, too."

"She is good," said the father, relenting.

"And, after all, that's about the best thing in a woman," said the
potential reprobate.  "If my wife wasn't good enough to keep both of us
straight, I don't know what would become of me." "My other daughter,"
said Lapham, indicating a girl with eyes that showed large, and a face
of singular gravity.  "Mis' Lapham," he continued, touching his wife's
effigy with his little finger.  "My brother Willard and his
family--farm at Kankakee.  Hazard Lapham and his wife--Baptist preacher
in Kansas.  Jim and his three girls--milling business at Minneapolis.
Ben and his family--practising medicine in Fort Wayne."

The figures were clustered in an irregular group in front of an old
farm-house, whose original ugliness had been smartened up with a coat
of Lapham's own paint, and heightened with an incongruous piazza.  The
photographer had not been able to conceal the fact that they were all
decent, honest-looking, sensible people, with a very fair share of
beauty among the young girls; some of these were extremely pretty, in
fact.  He had put them into awkward and constrained attitudes, of
course; and they all looked as if they had the instrument of torture
which photographers call a head-rest under their occiputs.  Here and
there an elderly lady's face was a mere blur; and some of the younger
children had twitched themselves into wavering shadows, and might have
passed for spirit-photographs of their own little ghosts.  It was the
standard family-group photograph, in which most Americans have figured
at some time or other; and Lapham exhibited a just satisfaction in it.
"I presume," he mused aloud, as he put it back on top of his desk,
"that we sha'n't soon get together again, all of us."

"And you say," suggested Bartley, "that you stayed right along on the
old place, when the rest cleared out West?"

"No o-o-o," said Lapham, with a long, loud drawl; "I cleared out West
too, first off.  Went to Texas.  Texas was all the cry in those days.
But I got enough of the Lone Star in about three months, and I come
back with the idea that Vermont was good enough for me."

"Fatted calf business?" queried Bartley, with his pencil poised above
his note-book.

"I presume they were glad to see me," said Lapham, with dignity.
"Mother," he added gently, "died that winter, and I stayed on with
father.  I buried him in the spring; and then I came down to a little
place called Lumberville, and picked up what jobs I could get.  I
worked round at the saw-mills, and I was ostler a while at the hotel--I
always DID like a good horse.  Well, I WA'N'T exactly a college
graduate, and I went to school odd times.  I got to driving the stage
after while, and by and by I BOUGHT the stage and run the business
myself.  Then I hired the tavern-stand, and--well to make a long story
short, then I got married.  Yes," said Lapham, with pride, "I married
the school-teacher. We did pretty well with the hotel, and my wife she
was always at me to paint up.  Well, I put it off, and PUT it off, as a
man will, till one day I give in, and says I, 'Well, let's paint up.
Why, Pert,'--m'wife's name's Persis,--'I've got a whole paint-mine out
on the farm.  Let's go out and look at it.' So we drove out.  I'd let
the place for seventy-five dollars a year to a shif'less kind of a
Kanuck that had come down that way; and I'd hated to see the house with
him in it; but we drove out one Saturday afternoon, and we brought back
about a bushel of the stuff in the buggy-seat, and I tried it crude,
and I tried it burnt; and I liked it.  M'wife she liked it too.  There
wa'n't any painter by trade in the village, and I mixed it myself.
Well, sir, that tavern's got that coat of paint on it yet, and it
hain't ever had any other, and I don't know's it ever will.  Well, you
know, I felt as if it was a kind of harumscarum experiment, all the
while; and I presume I shouldn't have tried it but I kind of liked to
do it because father'd always set so much store by his paint-mine. And
when I'd got the first coat on,"--Lapham called it CUT,--"I presume I
must have set as much as half an hour; looking at it and thinking how
he would have enjoyed it.  I've had my share of luck in this world, and
I ain't a-going to complain on my OWN account, but I've noticed that
most things get along too late for most people.  It made me feel bad,
and it took all the pride out my success with the paint, thinking of
father.  Seemed to me I might 'a taken more interest in it when he was
by to see; but we've got to live and learn.  Well, I called my wife
out,--I'd tried it on the back of the house, you know,--and she left
her dishes,--I can remember she came out with her sleeves rolled up and
set down alongside of me on the trestle,--and says I, 'What do you
think, Persis?' And says she, 'Well, you hain't got a paint-mine, Silas
Lapham; you've got a GOLD-mine.' She always was just so enthusiastic
about things.  Well, it was just after two or three boats had burnt up
out West, and a lot of lives lost, and there was a great cry about
non-inflammable paint, and I guess that was what was in her mind.
'Well, I guess it ain't any gold-mine, Persis,' says I; 'but I guess it
IS a paint-mine. I'm going to have it analysed, and if it turns out
what I think it is, I'm going to work it.  And if father hadn't had
such a long name, I should call it the Nehemiah Lapham Mineral Paint.
But, any rate, every barrel of it, and every keg, and every bottle, and
every package, big or little, has got to have the initials and figures
N.L.f. 1835, S.L.t. 1855, on it.  Father found it in 1835, and I tried
it in 1855.'"

"'S.T.--1860--X.' business," said Bartley.

"Yes," said Lapham, "but I hadn't heard of Plantation Bitters then, and
I hadn't seen any of the fellow's labels.  I set to work and I got a
man down from Boston; and I carried him out to the farm, and he
analysed it--made a regular Job of it.  Well, sir, we built a kiln, and
we kept a lot of that paint-ore red-hot for forty-eight hours; kept the
Kanuck and his family up, firing.  The presence of iron in the ore
showed with the magnet from the start; and when he came to test it, he
found out that it contained about seventy-five per cent. of the
peroxide of iron."

Lapham pronounced the scientific phrases with a sort of reverent
satisfaction, as if awed through his pride by a little lingering
uncertainty as to what peroxide was.  He accented it as if it were
purr-ox-EYED; and Bartley had to get him to spell it.

"Well, and what then?" he asked, when he had made a note of the
percentage.

"What then?" echoed Lapham.  "Well, then, the fellow set down and told
me, 'You've got a paint here,' says he, 'that's going to drive every
other mineral paint out of the market.  Why' says he, 'it'll drive 'em
right into the Back Bay!' Of course, I didn't know what the Back Bay
was then, but I begun to open my eyes; thought I'd had 'em open before,
but I guess I hadn't. Says he, 'That paint has got hydraulic cement in
it, and it can stand fire and water and acids;' he named over a lot of
things.  Says he, 'It'll mix easily with linseed oil, whether you want
to use it boiled or raw; and it ain't a-going to crack nor fade any;
and it ain't a-going to scale.  When you've got your arrangements for
burning it properly, you're going to have a paint that will stand like
the everlasting hills, in every climate under the sun.' Then he went
into a lot of particulars, and I begun to think he was drawing a
long-bow, and meant to make his bill accordingly.  So I kept pretty
cool; but the fellow's bill didn't amount to anything hardly--said I
might pay him after I got going; young chap, and pretty easy; but every
word he said was gospel.  Well, I ain't a-going to brag up my paint; I
don't suppose you came here to hear me blow."

"Oh yes, I did," said Bartley.  "That's what I want.  Tell all there is
to tell, and I can boil it down afterward.  A man can't make a greater
mistake with a reporter than to hold back anything out of modesty.  It
may be the very thing we want to know.  What we want is the whole
truth; and more; we've got so much modesty of our own that we can
temper almost any statement."

Lapham looked as if he did not quite like this tone, and he resumed a
little more quietly.  "Oh, there isn't really very much more to say
about the paint itself.  But you can use it for almost anything where a
paint is wanted, inside or out.  It'll prevent decay, and it'll stop
it, after it's begun, in tin or iron.  You can paint the inside of a
cistern or a bath-tub with it, and water won't hurt it; and you can
paint a steam-boiler with it, and heat won't.  You can cover a brick
wall with it, or a railroad car, or the deck of a steamboat, and you
can't do a better thing for either."

"Never tried it on the human conscience, I suppose," suggested Bartley.

"No, sir," replied Lapham gravely.  "I guess you want to keep that as
free from paint as you can, if you want much use of it.  I never cared
to try any of it on mine." Lapham suddenly lifted his bulk up out of
his swivel-chair, and led the way out into the wareroom beyond the
office partitions, where rows and ranks of casks, barrels, and kegs
stretched dimly back to the rear of the building, and diffused an
honest, clean, wholesome smell of oil and paint.  They were labelled
and branded as containing each so many pounds of Lapham's Mineral
Paint, and each bore the mystic devices, N.L.f. 1835--S.L.t. 1855.
"There!" said Lapham, kicking one of the largest casks with the toe of
his boot, "that's about our biggest package; and here," he added,
laying his hand affectionately on the head of a very small keg, as if
it were the head of a child, which it resembled in size, "this is the
smallest.  We used to put the paint on the market dry, but now we grind
every ounce of it in oil--very best quality of linseed oil--and warrant
it.  We find it gives more satisfaction.  Now, come back to the office,
and I'll show you our fancy brands."

It was very cool and pleasant in that dim wareroom, with the rafters
showing overhead in a cloudy perspective, and darkening away into the
perpetual twilight at the rear of the building; and Bartley had found
an agreeable seat on the head of a half-barrel of the paint, which he
was reluctant to leave.  But he rose and followed the vigorous lead of
Lapham back to the office, where the sun of a long summer afternoon was
just beginning to glare in at the window.  On shelves opposite Lapham's
desk were tin cans of various sizes, arranged in tapering cylinders,
and showing, in a pattern diminishing toward the top, the same label
borne by the casks and barrels in the wareroom.  Lapham merely waved
his hand toward these; but when Bartley, after a comprehensive glance
at them, gave his whole attention to a row of clean, smooth jars, where
different tints of the paint showed through flawless glass, Lapham
smiled, and waited in pleased expectation.

"Hello!" said Bartley.  "That's pretty!"

"Yes," assented Lapham, "it is rather nice.  It's our latest thing, and
we find it takes with customers first-rate. Look here!" he said, taking
down one of the jars, and pointing to the first line of the label.

Bartley read, "THE PERSIS BRAND," and then he looked at Lapham and
smiled.

"After HER, of course," said Lapham.  "Got it up and put the first of
it on the market her last birthday.  She was pleased."

"I should think she might have been," said Bartley, while he made a
note of the appearance of the jars.

"I don't know about your mentioning it in your interview," said Lapham
dubiously.

"That's going into the interview, Mr. Lapham, if nothing else does.
Got a wife myself, and I know just how you feel." It was in the dawn of
Bartley's prosperity on the Boston Events, before his troubles with
Marcia had seriously begun.

"Is that so?" said Lapham, recognising with a smile another of the vast
majority of married Americans; a few underrate their wives, but the
rest think them supernal in intelligence and capability.  "Well," he
added, "we must see about that.  Where'd you say you lived?"

"We don't live; we board.  Mrs. Nash, 13 Canary Place."

"Well, we've all got to commence that way," suggested Lapham
consolingly.

"Yes; but we've about got to the end of our string.  I expect to be
under a roof of my own on Clover Street before long.  I suppose," said
Bartley, returning to business, "that you didn't let the grass grow
under your feet much after you found out what was in your paint-mine?"

"No, sir," answered Lapham, withdrawing his eyes from a long stare at
Bartley, in which he had been seeing himself a young man again, in the
first days of his married life.  "I went right back to Lumberville and
sold out everything, and put all I could rake and scrape together into
paint.  And Mis' Lapham was with me every time.  No hang back about
HER.  I tell you she was a WOMAN!"

Bartley laughed.  "That's the sort most of us marry."

"No, we don't," said Lapham.  "Most of us marry silly little girls
grown up to LOOK like women."

"Well, I guess that's about so," assented Bartley, as if upon second
thought.

"If it hadn't been for her," resumed Lapham, "the paint wouldn't have
come to anything.  I used to tell her it wa'n't the seventy-five per
cent. of purr-ox-eyed of iron in the ORE that made that paint go; it
was the seventy-five per cent. of purr-ox-eyed of iron in HER."

"Good!" cried Bartley.  "I'll tell Marcia that."

"In less'n six months there wa'n't a board-fence, nor a bridge-girder,
nor a dead wall, nor a barn, nor a face of rock in that whole region
that didn't have 'Lapham's Mineral Paint--Specimen' on it in the three
colours we begun by making." Bartley had taken his seat on the
window-sill, and Lapham, standing before him, now put up his huge foot
close to Bartley's thigh; neither of them minded that.

"I've heard a good deal of talk about that S.T.--1860--X. man, and the
stove-blacking man, and the kidney-cure man, because they advertised in
that way; and I've read articles about it in the papers; but I don't
see where the joke comes in, exactly.  So long as the people that own
the barns and fences don't object, I don't see what the public has got
to do with it.  And I never saw anything so very sacred about a big
rock, along a river or in a pasture, that it wouldn't do to put mineral
paint on it in three colours.  I wish some of the people that talk
about the landscape, and WRITE about it, had to bu'st one of them rocks
OUT of the landscape with powder, or dig a hole to bury it in, as we
used to have to do up on the farm; I guess they'd sing a little
different tune about the profanation of scenery.  There ain't any man
enjoys a sightly bit of nature--a smooth piece of interval with half a
dozen good-sized wine-glass elms in it--more than I do.  But I ain't
a-going to stand up for every big ugly rock I come across, as if we
were all a set of dumn Druids.  I say the landscape was made for man,
and not man for the landscape."

"Yes," said Bartley carelessly; "it was made for the stove-polish man
and the kidney-cure man."

"It was made for any man that knows how to use it," Lapham returned,
insensible to Bartley's irony.  "Let 'em go and live with nature in the
WINTER, up there along the Canada line, and I guess they'll get enough
of her for one while.  Well--where was I?"

"Decorating the landscape," said Bartley.

"Yes, sir; I started right there at Lumberville, and it give the place
a start too.  You won't find it on the map now; and you won't find it
in the gazetteer.  I give a pretty good lump of money to build a
town-hall, about five years back, and the first meeting they held in it
they voted to change the name,--Lumberville WA'N'T a name,--and it's
Lapham now."

"Isn't it somewhere up in that region that they get the old Brandon
red?" asked Bartley.

"We're about ninety miles from Brandon.  The Brandon's a good paint,"
said Lapham conscientiously.  "Like to show you round up at our place
some odd time, if you get off."

"Thanks.  I should like it first-rate.  WORKS there?"

"Yes; works there.  Well, sir, just about the time I got started, the
war broke out; and it knocked my paint higher than a kite.  The thing
dropped perfectly dead.  I presume that if I'd had any sort of
influence, I might have got it into Government hands, for gun-carriages
and army wagons, and may be on board Government vessels.  But I hadn't,
and we had to face the music.  I was about broken-hearted, but m'wife
she looked at it another way.  'I guess it's a providence,' says she.
'Silas, I guess you've got a country that's worth fighting for.  Any
rate, you better go out and give it a chance.' Well, sir, I went.  I
knew she meant business.  It might kill her to have me go, but it would
kill her sure if I stayed.  She was one of that kind.  I went.  Her
last words was, 'I'll look after the paint, Si.' We hadn't but just one
little girl then,--boy'd died,--and Mis' Lapham's mother was livin'
with us; and I knew if times DID anyways come up again, m'wife'd know
just what to do.  So I went.  I got through; and you can call me
Colonel, if you want to.  Feel there!" Lapham took Bartley's thumb and
forefinger and put them on a bunch in his leg, just above the knee.
"Anything hard?"

"Ball?"

Lapham nodded.  "Gettysburg. That's my thermometer.  If it wa'n't for
that, I shouldn't know enough to come in when it rains."

Bartley laughed at a joke which betrayed some evidences of wear.  "And
when you came back, you took hold of the paint and rushed it."

"I took hold of the paint and rushed it--all I could," said Lapham,
with less satisfaction than he had hitherto shown in his autobiography.
"But I found that I had got back to another world.  The day of small
things was past, and I don't suppose it will ever come again in this
country.  My wife was at me all the time to take a partner--somebody
with capital; but I couldn't seem to bear the idea.  That paint was
like my own blood to me.  To have anybody else concerned in it was
like--well, I don't know what.  I saw it was the thing to do; but I
tried to fight it off, and I tried to joke it off.  I used to say, 'Why
didn't you take a partner yourself, Persis, while I was away?' And
she'd say, 'Well, if you hadn't come back, I should, Si.' Always DID
like a joke about as well as any woman I ever saw.  Well, I had to come
to it.  I took a partner." Lapham dropped the bold blue eyes with which
he had been till now staring into Bartley's face, and the reporter knew
that here was a place for asterisks in his interview, if interviews
were faithful.  "He had money enough," continued Lapham, with a
suppressed sigh; "but he didn't know anything about paint.  We hung on
together for a year or two.  And then we quit."

"And he had the experience," suggested Bartley, with companionable ease.

"I had some of the experience too," said Lapham, with a scowl; and
Bartley divined, through the freemasonry of all who have sore places in
their memories, that this was a point which he must not touch again.

"And since that, I suppose, you've played it alone."

"I've played it alone."

"You must ship some of this paint of yours to foreign countries,
Colonel?" suggested Bartley, putting on a professional air.

"We ship it to all parts of the world.  It goes to South America, lots
of it.  It goes to Australia, and it goes to India, and it goes to
China, and it goes to the Cape of Good Hope.  It'll stand any climate.
Of course, we don't export these fancy brands much.  They're for home
use.  But we're introducing them elsewhere.  Here." Lapham pulled open
a drawer, and showed Bartley a lot of labels in different
languages--Spanish, French, German, and Italian.  "We expect to do a
good business in all those countries.  We've got our agencies in Cadiz
now, and in Paris, and in Hamburg, and in Leghorn.  It's a thing that's
bound to make its way.  Yes, sir.  Wherever a man has got a ship, or a
bridge, or a lock, or a house, or a car, or a fence, or a pig-pen
anywhere in God's universe to paint, that's the paint for him, and he's
bound to find it out sooner or later.  You pass a ton of that paint dry
through a blast-furnace, and you'll get a quarter of a ton of pig-iron.
I believe in my paint.  I believe it's a blessing to the world.  When
folks come in, and kind of smell round, and ask me what I mix it with,
I always say, 'Well, in the first place, I mix it with FAITH, and after
that I grind it up with the best quality of boiled linseed oil that
money will buy.'"

Lapham took out his watch and looked at it, and Bartley perceived that
his audience was drawing to a close.  "'F you ever want to run down and
take a look at our works, pass you over the road,"--he called it
RUD--"and it sha'n't cost you a cent." "Well, may be I shall,
sometime," said Bartley.  "Good afternoon, Colonel."

"Good afternoon.  Or--hold on! My horse down there yet, William?" he
called to the young man in the counting-room who had taken his letter
at the beginning of the interview.  "Oh! All right!" he added, in
response to something the young man said.

"Can't I set you down somewhere, Mr. Hubbard? I've got my horse at the
door, and I can drop you on my way home.  I'm going to take Mis' Lapham
to look at a house I'm driving piles for, down on the New Land."

"Don't care if I do," said Bartley.

Lapham put on a straw hat, gathered up some papers lying on his desk,
pulled down its rolling cover, turned the key in it, and gave the
papers to an extremely handsome young woman at one of the desks in the
outer office.  She was stylishly dressed, as Bartley saw, and her
smooth, yellow hair was sculpturesquely waved over a low, white
forehead.  "Here," said Lapham, with the same prompt gruff kindness
that he had used in addressing the young man, "I want you should put
these in shape, and give me a type-writer copy to-morrow."

"What an uncommonly pretty girl!" said Bartley, as they descended the
rough stairway and found their way out to the street, past the dangling
rope of a block and tackle wandering up into the cavernous darkness
overhead.

"She does her work," said Lapham shortly.

Bartley mounted to the left side of the open buggy standing at the
curb-stone, and Lapham, gathering up the hitching-weight, slid it under
the buggy-seat and mounted beside him.

"No chance to speed a horse here, of course," said Lapham, while the
horse with a spirited gentleness picked her way, with a high, long
action, over the pavement of the street.  The streets were all narrow,
and most of them crooked, in that quarter of the town; but at the end
of one the spars of a vessel pencilled themselves delicately against
the cool blue of the afternoon sky.  The air was full of a smell
pleasantly compounded of oakum, of leather, and of oil.  It was not the
busy season, and they met only two or three trucks heavily straggling
toward the wharf with their long string teams; but the cobble-stones of
the pavement were worn with the dint of ponderous wheels, and
discoloured with iron-rust from them; here and there, in wandering
streaks over its surface, was the grey stain of the salt water with
which the street had been sprinkled.

After an interval of some minutes, which both men spent in looking
round the dash-board from opposite sides to watch the stride of the
horse, Bartley said, with a light sigh, "I had a colt once down in
Maine that stepped just like that mare."

"Well!" said Lapham, sympathetically recognising the bond that this
fact created between them.  "Well, now, I tell you what you do.  You
let me come for you 'most any afternoon, now, and take you out over the
Milldam, and speed this mare a little.  I'd like to show you what this
mare can do.  Yes, I would."

"All right," answered Bartley; "I'll let you know my first day off."

"Good," cried Lapham.

"Kentucky?" queried Bartley.

"No, sir.  I don't ride behind anything but Vermont; never did.  Touch
of Morgan, of course; but you can't have much Morgan in a horse if you
want speed.  Hambletonian mostly.  Where'd you say you wanted to get
out?"

"I guess you may put me down at the Events Office, just round the
corner here.  I've got to write up this interview while it's fresh."

"All right," said Lapham, impersonally assenting to Bartley's use of
him as material.

He had not much to complain of in Bartley's treatment, unless it was
the strain of extravagant compliment which it involved.  But the
flattery was mainly for the paint, whose virtues Lapham did not believe
could be overstated, and himself and his history had been treated with
as much respect as Bartley was capable of showing any one.  He made a
very picturesque thing of the discovery of the paint-mine. "Deep in the
heart of the virgin forests of Vermont, far up toward the line of the
Canadian snows, on a desolate mountain-side, where an autumnal storm
had done its wild work, and the great trees, strewn hither and thither,
bore witness to its violence, Nehemiah Lapham discovered, just forty
years ago, the mineral which the alchemy of his son's enterprise and
energy has transmuted into solid ingots of the most precious of metals.
The colossal fortune of Colonel Silas Lapham lay at the bottom of a
hole which an uprooted tree had dug for him, and which for many years
remained a paint-mine of no more appreciable value than a soap-mine."

Here Bartley had not been able to forego another grin; but he
compensated for it by the high reverence with which he spoke of Colonel
Lapham's record during the war of the rebellion, and of the motives
which impelled him to turn aside from an enterprise in which his whole
heart was engaged, and take part in the struggle.  "The Colonel bears
embedded in the muscle of his right leg a little memento of the period
in the shape of a minie-ball, which he jocularly referred to as his
thermometer, and which relieves him from the necessity of reading 'The
Probabilities' in his morning paper.  This saves him just so much time;
and for a man who, as he said, has not a moment of waste time on him
anywhere, five minutes a day are something in the course of a year.
Simple, clear, bold, and straightforward in mind and action, Colonel
Silas Lapham, with a prompt comprehensiveness and a never-failing
business sagacity, is, in the best sense of that much-abused term, one
of nature's noblemen, to the last inch of his five eleven and a half.
His life affords an example of single-minded application and unwavering
perseverance which our young business men would do well to emulate.
There is nothing showy or meretricious about the man.  He believes in
mineral paint, and he puts his heart and soul into it.  He makes it a
religion; though we would not imply that it IS his religion.  Colonel
Lapham is a regular attendant at the Rev. Dr. Langworthy's church.  He
subscribes liberally to the Associated Charities, and no good object or
worthy public enterprise fails to receive his support.  He is not now
actively in politics, and his paint is not partisan; but it is an open
secret that he is, and always has been, a staunch Republican.  Without
violating the sanctities of private life, we cannot speak fully of
various details which came out in the free and unembarrassed interview
which Colonel Lapham accorded our representative.  But we may say that
the success of which he is justly proud he is also proud to attribute
in great measure to the sympathy and energy of his wife--one of those
women who, in whatever walk of life, seem born to honour the name of
American Woman, and to redeem it from the national reproach of Daisy
Millerism.  Of Colonel Lapham's family, we will simply add that it
consists of two young lady daughters.

"The subject of this very inadequate sketch is building a house on the
water side of Beacon Street, after designs by one of our leading
architectural firms, which, when complete, will be one of the finest
ornaments of that exclusive avenue.  It will, we believe, be ready for
the occupancy of the family sometime in the spring."

When Bartley had finished his article, which he did with a good deal of
inward derision, he went home to Marcia, still smiling over the thought
of Lapham, whose burly simplicity had peculiarly amused him.  "He
regularly turned himself inside out to me," he said, as he sat
describing his interview to Marcia.

"Then I know you could make something nice out of it," said his wife;
"and that will please Mr. Witherby."

"Oh yes, I've done pretty well; but I couldn't let myself loose on him
the way I wanted to.  Confound the limitations of decency, anyway! I
should like to have told just what Colonel Lapham thought of landscape
advertising in Colonel Lapham's own words.  I'll tell you one thing,
Marsh: he had a girl there at one of the desks that you wouldn't let ME
have within gunshot of MY office.  Pretty? It ain't any name for it!"
Marcia's eyes began to blaze, and Bartley broke out into a laugh, in
which he arrested himself at sight of a formidable parcel in the corner
of the room.

"Hello! What's that?"

"Why, I don't know what it is," replied Marcia tremulously.  "A man
brought it just before you came in, and I didn't like to open it."

"Think it was some kind of infernal machine?" asked Bartley, getting
down on his knees to examine the package.  "MRS. B. Hubbard, heigh?" He
cut the heavy hemp string with his penknife.  "We must look into this
thing.  I should like to know who's sending packages to Mrs. Hubbard in
my absence." He unfolded the wrappings of paper, growing softer and
finer inward, and presently pulled out a handsome square glass jar,
through which a crimson mass showed richly.  "The Persis Brand!" he
yelled.  "I knew it!"

"Oh, what is it, Bartley?" quavered Marcia.  Then, courageously drawing
a little nearer: "Is it some kind of jam?" she implored.  "Jam? No!"
roared Bartley.  "It's PAINT! It's mineral paint--Lapham's paint!"

"Paint?" echoed Marcia, as she stood over him while he stripped their
wrappings from the jars which showed the dark blue, dark green, light
brown, dark brown, and black, with the dark crimson, forming the gamut
of colour of the Lapham paint.  "Don't TELL me it's paint that I can
use, Bartley!"

"Well, I shouldn't advise you to use much of it--all at once," replied
her husband.  "But it's paint that you can use in moderation."

Marcia cast her arms round his neck and kissed him.  "O Bartley, I
think I'm the happiest girl in the world!  I was just wondering what I
should do.  There are places in that Clover Street house that need
touching up so dreadfully.  I shall be very careful.  You needn't be
afraid I shall overdo.  But, this just saves my life.  Did you BUY it,
Bartley? You know we couldn't afford it, and you oughtn't to have done
it! And what does the Persis Brand mean?"

"Buy it?" cried Bartley.  "No! The old fool's sent it to you as a
present.  You'd better wait for the facts before you pitch into me for
extravagance, Marcia.  Persis is the name of his wife; and he named it
after her because it's his finest brand.  You'll see it in my
interview.  Put it on the market her last birthday for a surprise to
her."

"What old fool?" faltered Marcia.

"Why, Lapham--the mineral paint man."

"Oh, what a good man!" sighed Marcia from the bottom of her soul.
"Bartley! you WON'T make fun of him as you do of some of those people?
WILL you?"

"Nothing that HE'LL ever find out," said Bartley, getting up and
brushing off the carpet-lint from his knees.

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

completion: Bartley Hubbard has come to Silas Lapham's office to interview him for the "Solid Men of Boston" series in the Boston Events newspaper. Hubbard tells Silas, a nineteenth-century millionaire, that he wants his money or his life. "I guess you wouldn't want my life without the money," Lapham replies. "Take 'em both," Bartley suggests. Born on a northern Vermont farm near the Canadian border in 1820, Lapham was the son of poor and unpretentious, religious parents possessing sterling morality. Lapham, however, admired his mother more when she knelt before him at night washing his feet than when she knelt at prayer. In 1835, his father discovered mineral paint on their farm in a pit left by an uprooted tree. Because of poverty, buildings were not being painted at that time. It was not until 1855, after his brothers had left the farm and Silas had returned from a three-month stay in Texas to operate a nearby tavern-stand, that he decided to mine and sell the paint. He married a schoolteacher, Persis, and together they built a fortune in paint that withstood sun and rain, not fading, chipping, or scaling. Lapham shows his storeroom of paint, which is stocked in many sizes and colors. He shows Hubbard his first-rate paint, the Persis Brand. He continues to tell him of the advertisement for his paint on board fences, barns, and even large rocks, arguing that he does not understand why people object to this altering of the landscape. "I say the landscape was made for the man, and not the man for the landscape." Lapham tells Hubbard that he did not have any influence in the government during the Civil War so he could not speculate by selling his paint for war supplies. Instead, at the insistence of his wife, he fought and returned a colonel. When he returned, he rushed the paint during the postwar boom with the help of a partner, who had the capital to back him. "He didn't know anything about paint," Lapham says. Silas bought his partner out in two years. Leaving Lapham's office, Hubbard notices his attractive typist. "What an uncommonly pretty girl!" Hubbard comments. "She does her work," Lapham replies. Hubbard is given a ride back to the Events office in Lapham's buggy and learns of Silas' love for a fast horse. Writing a subtly cutting account of Lapham, Hubbard uses a tone that Silas will never detect.


prompt:
Chapter: AFTER dropping Bartley Hubbard at the Events building, Lapham drove on
down Washington Street to Nankeen Square at the South End, where he had
lived ever since the mistaken movement of society in that direction
ceased.  He had not built, but had bought very cheap of a terrified
gentleman of good extraction who discovered too late that the South End
was not the thing, and who in the eagerness of his flight to the Back
Bay threw in his carpets and shades for almost nothing.  Mrs. Lapham
was even better satisfied with their bargain than the Colonel himself,
and they had lived in Nankeen Square for twelve years.  They had seen
the saplings planted in the pretty oval round which the houses were
built flourish up into sturdy young trees, and their two little girls
in the same period had grown into young ladies; the Colonel's tough
frame had expanded into the bulk which Bartley's interview indicated;
and Mrs. Lapham, while keeping a more youthful outline, showed the
sharp print of the crow's-foot at the corners of her motherly eyes, and
certain slight creases in her wholesome cheeks.  The fact that they
lived in an unfashionable neighbourhood was something that they had
never been made to feel to their personal disadvantage, and they had
hardly known it till the summer before this story opens, when Mrs.
Lapham and her daughter Irene had met some other Bostonians far from
Boston, who made it memorable.  They were people whom chance had
brought for the time under a singular obligation to the Lapham ladies,
and they were gratefully recognisant of it.  They had ventured--a
mother and two daughters--as far as a rather wild little Canadian
watering-place on the St. Lawrence, below Quebec, and had arrived some
days before their son and brother was expected to join them.  Two of
their trunks had gone astray, and on the night of their arrival the
mother was taken violently ill.  Mrs. Lapham came to their help, with
her skill as nurse, and with the abundance of her own and her
daughter's wardrobe, and a profuse, single-hearted kindness.  When a
doctor could be got at, he said that but for Mrs. Lapham's timely care,
the lady would hardly have lived.  He was a very effusive little
Frenchman, and fancied he was saying something very pleasant to
everybody.

A certain intimacy inevitably followed, and when the son came he was
even more grateful than the others.  Mrs. Lapham could not quite
understand why he should be as attentive to her as to Irene; but she
compared him with other young men about the place, and thought him
nicer than any of them.  She had not the means of a wider comparison;
for in Boston, with all her husband's prosperity, they had not had a
social life.  Their first years there were given to careful getting on
Lapham's part, and careful saving on his wife's.  Suddenly the money
began to come so abundantly that she need not save; and then they did
not know what to do with it.  A certain amount could be spent on
horses, and Lapham spent it; his wife spent on rich and rather ugly
clothes and a luxury of household appointments.  Lapham had not yet
reached the picture-buying stage of the rich man's development, but
they decorated their house with the costliest and most abominable
frescoes; they went upon journeys, and lavished upon cars and hotels;
they gave with both hands to their church and to all the charities it
brought them acquainted with; but they did not know how to spend on
society.  Up to a certain period Mrs. Lapham had the ladies of her
neighbourhood in to tea, as her mother had done in the country in her
younger days.  Lapham's idea of hospitality was still to bring a
heavy-buying customer home to pot-luck; neither of them imagined
dinners.

Their two girls had gone to the public schools, where they had not got
on as fast as some of the other girls; so that they were a year behind
in graduating from the grammar-school, where Lapham thought that they
had got education enough.  His wife was of a different mind; she would
have liked them to go to some private school for their finishing.  But
Irene did not care for study; she preferred house-keeping, and both the
sisters were afraid of being snubbed by the other girls, who were of a
different sort from the girls of the grammar-school; these were mostly
from the parks and squares, like themselves.  It ended in their going
part of a year.  But the elder had an odd taste of her own for reading,
and she took some private lessons, and read books out of the
circulating library; the whole family were amazed at the number she
read, and rather proud of it.

They were not girls who embroidered or abandoned themselves to
needle-work. Irene spent her abundant leisure in shopping for herself
and her mother, of whom both daughters made a kind of idol, buying her
caps and laces out of their pin-money, and getting her dresses far
beyond her capacity to wear.  Irene dressed herself very stylishly, and
spent hours on her toilet every day.  Her sister had a simpler taste,
and, if she had done altogether as she liked, might even have slighted
dress.  They all three took long naps every day, and sat hours together
minutely discussing what they saw out of the window.  In her
self-guided search for self-improvement, the elder sister went to many
church lectures on a vast variety of secular subjects, and usually came
home with a comic account of them, and that made more matter of talk
for the whole family.  She could make fun of nearly everything; Irene
complained that she scared away the young men whom they got acquainted
with at the dancing-school sociables.  They were, perhaps, not the
wisest young men.

The girls had learned to dance at Papanti's; but they had not belonged
to the private classes.  They did not even know of them, and a great
gulf divided them from those who did.  Their father did not like
company, except such as came informally in their way; and their mother
had remained too rustic to know how to attract it in the sophisticated
city fashion.  None of them had grasped the idea of European travel;
but they had gone about to mountain and sea-side resorts, the mother
and the two girls, where they witnessed the spectacle which such
resorts present throughout New England, of multitudes of girls, lovely,
accomplished, exquisitely dressed, humbly glad of the presence of any
sort of young man; but the Laphams had no skill or courage to make
themselves noticed, far less courted by the solitary invalid, or
clergyman, or artist.  They lurked helplessly about in the hotel
parlours, looking on and not knowing how to put themselves forward.
Perhaps they did not care a great deal to do so.  They had not a
conceit of themselves, but a sort of content in their own ways that one
may notice in certain families.  The very strength of their mutual
affection was a barrier to worldly knowledge; they dressed for one
another; they equipped their house for their own satisfaction; they
lived richly to themselves, not because they were selfish, but because
they did not know how to do otherwise.  The elder daughter did not care
for society, apparently.  The younger, who was but three years younger,
was not yet quite old enough to be ambitious of it.  With all her
wonderful beauty, she had an innocence almost vegetable.  When her
beauty, which in its immaturity was crude and harsh, suddenly ripened,
she bloomed and glowed with the unconsciousness of a flower; she not
merely did not feel herself admired, but hardly knew herself
discovered.  If she dressed well, perhaps too well, it was because she
had the instinct of dress; but till she met this young man who was so
nice to her at Baie St. Paul, she had scarcely lived a detached,
individual life, so wholly had she depended on her mother and her
sister for her opinions, almost her sensations.  She took account of
everything he did and said, pondering it, and trying to make out
exactly what he meant, to the inflection of a syllable, the slightest
movement or gesture.  In this way she began for the first time to form
ideas which she had not derived from her family, and they were none the
less her own because they were often mistaken.

Some of the things that he partly said, partly looked, she reported to
her mother, and they talked them over, as they did everything relating
to these new acquaintances, and wrought them into the novel point of
view which they were acquiring.  When Mrs. Lapham returned home, she
submitted all the accumulated facts of the case, and all her own
conjectures, to her husband, and canvassed them anew.

At first he was disposed to regard the whole affair as of small
importance, and she had to insist a little beyond her own convictions
in order to counteract his indifference.

"Well, I can tell you," she said, "that if you think they were not the
nicest people you ever saw, you're mightily mistaken.  They had about
the best manners; and they had been everywhere, and knew everything.  I
declare it made me feel as if we had always lived in the backwoods.  I
don't know but the mother and the daughters would have let you feel so
a little, if they'd showed out all they thought; but they never did;
and the son--well, I can't express it, Silas! But that young man had
about perfect ways."

"Seem struck up on Irene?" asked the Colonel.

"How can I tell? He seemed just about as much struck up on me.  Anyway,
he paid me as much attention as he did her.  Perhaps it's more the way,
now, to notice the mother than it used to be."

Lapham ventured no conjecture, but asked, as he had asked already, who
the people were.

Mrs. Lapham repeated their name.  Lapham nodded his head.  "Do you know
them? What business is he in?"

"I guess he ain't in anything," said Lapham.

"They were very nice," said Mrs. Lapham impartially.

"Well, they'd ought to be," returned the Colonel.  "Never done anything
else."

"They didn't seem stuck up," urged his wife.

"They'd no need to--with you.  I could buy him and sell him, twice
over."

This answer satisfied Mrs. Lapham rather with the fact than with her
husband.  "Well, I guess I wouldn't brag, Silas," she said.

In the winter the ladies of this family, who returned to town very
late, came to call on Mrs. Lapham.  They were again very polite.  But
the mother let drop, in apology for their calling almost at nightfall,
that the coachman had not known the way exactly.

"Nearly all our friends are on the New Land or on the Hill."

There was a barb in this that rankled after the ladies had gone; and on
comparing notes with her daughter, Mrs. Lapham found that a barb had
been left to rankle in her mind also.

"They said they had never been in this part of the town before."

Upon a strict search of her memory, Irene could not report that the
fact had been stated with anything like insinuation, but it was that
which gave it a more penetrating effect.

"Oh, well, of course," said Lapham, to whom these facts were referred.
"Those sort of people haven't got much business up our way, and they
don't come.  It's a fair thing all round.  We don't trouble the Hill or
the New Land much."

"We know where they are," suggested his wife thoughtfully.

"Yes," assented the Colonel.  "I know where they are.  I've got a lot
of land over on the Back Bay."

"You have?" eagerly demanded his wife.

"Want me to build on it?" he asked in reply, with a quizzical smile.

"I guess we can get along here for a while."

This was at night.  In the morning Mrs. Lapham said--

"I suppose we ought to do the best we can for the children, in every
way."

"I supposed we always had," replied her husband.

"Yes, we have, according to our light."

"Have you got some new light?"

"I don't know as it's light.  But if the girls are going to keep on
living in Boston and marry here, I presume we ought to try to get them
into society, some way; or ought to do something."

"Well, who's ever done more for their children than we have?" demanded
Lapham, with a pang at the thought that he could possibly have been
out-done. "Don't they have everything they want? Don't they dress just
as you say? Don't you go everywhere with 'em? Is there ever anything
going on that's worth while that they don't see it or hear it? I don't
know what you mean.  Why don't you get them into society? There's money
enough!"

"There's got to be something besides money, I guess," said Mrs. Lapham,
with a hopeless sigh.  "I presume we didn't go to work just the right
way about their schooling.  We ought to have got them into some school
where they'd have got acquainted with city girls--girls who could help
them along."

"Nearly everybody at Miss Smillie's was from some where else."

"Well, it's pretty late to think about that now," grumbled Lapham.

"And we've always gone our own way, and not looked out for the future.
We ought to have gone out more, and had people come to the house.
Nobody comes."

"Well, is that my fault? I guess nobody ever makes people welcomer."

"We ought to have invited company more."

"Why don't you do it now? If it's for the girls, I don't care if you
have the house full all the while."

Mrs. Lapham was forced to a confession full of humiliation.  "I don't
know who to ask."

"Well, you can't expect me to tell you."

"No; we're both country people, and we've kept our country ways, and we
don't, either of us, know what to do.  You've had to work so hard, and
your luck was so long coming, and then it came with such a rush, that
we haven't had any chance to learn what to do with it.  It's just the
same with Irene's looks; I didn't expect she was ever going to have
any, she WAS such a plain child, and, all at once, she's blazed out
this way.  As long as it was Pen that didn't seem to care for society,
I didn't give much mind to it.  But I can see it's going to be
different with Irene.  I don't believe but what we're in the wrong
neighbourhood."

"Well," said the Colonel, "there ain't a prettier lot on the Back Bay
than mine.  It's on the water side of Beacon, and it's twenty-eight
feet wide and a hundred and fifty deep.  Let's build on it."

Mrs. Lapham was silent a while.  "No," she said finally; "we've always
got along well enough here, and I guess we better stay."

At breakfast she said casually: "Girls, how would you like to have your
father build on the New Land?"

The girls said they did not know.  It was more convenient to the
horse-cars where they were.

Mrs. Lapham stole a look of relief at her husband, and nothing more was
said of the matter.

The mother of the family who had called upon Mrs. Lapham brought her
husband's cards, and when Mrs. Lapham returned the visit she was in
some trouble about the proper form of acknowledging the civility.  The
Colonel had no card but a business card, which advertised the principal
depot and the several agencies of the mineral paint; and Mrs. Lapham
doubted, till she wished to goodness that she had never seen nor heard
of those people, whether to ignore her husband in the transaction
altogether, or to write his name on her own card.  She decided finally
upon this measure, and she had the relief of not finding the family at
home.  As far as she could judge, Irene seemed to suffer a little
disappointment from the fact.

For several months there was no communication between the families.
Then there came to Nankeen Square a lithographed circular from the
people on the Hill, signed in ink by the mother, and affording Mrs.
Lapham an opportunity to subscribe for a charity of undeniable merit
and acceptability.  She submitted it to her husband, who promptly drew
a cheque for five hundred dollars.

She tore it in two.  "I will take a cheque for a hundred, Silas," she
said.

"Why?" he asked, looking up guiltily at her.

"Because a hundred is enough; and I don't want to show off before them."

"Oh, I thought may be you did.  Well, Pert," he added, having satisfied
human nature by the preliminary thrust, "I guess you're about right.
When do you want I should begin to build on Beacon Street?" He handed
her the new cheque, where she stood over him, and then leaned back in
his chair and looked up at her.

"I don't want you should begin at all.  What do you mean, Silas?" She
rested against the side of his desk.

"Well, I don't know as I mean anything.  But shouldn't you like to
build? Everybody builds, at least once in a lifetime."

"Where is your lot? They say it's unhealthy, over there."

Up to a certain point in their prosperity Mrs. Lapham had kept strict
account of all her husband's affairs; but as they expanded, and ceased
to be of the retail nature with which women successfully grapple, the
intimate knowledge of them made her nervous.  There was a period in
which she felt that they were being ruined, but the crash had not come;
and, since his great success, she had abandoned herself to a blind
confidence in her husband's judgment, which she had hitherto felt
needed her revision.  He came and went, day by day, unquestioned.  He
bought and sold and got gain.  She knew that he would tell her if ever
things went wrong, and he knew that she would ask him whenever she was
anxious.

"It ain't unhealthy where I've bought," said Lapham, rather enjoying
her insinuation.  "I looked after that when I was trading; and I guess
it's about as healthy on the Back Bay as it is here, anyway.  I got
that lot for you, Pert; I thought you'd want to build on the Back Bay
some day."

"Pshaw!" said Mrs. Lapham, deeply pleased inwardly, but not going to
show it, as she would have said.  "I guess you want to build there
yourself." She insensibly got a little nearer to her husband.  They
liked to talk to each other in that blunt way; it is the New England
way of expressing perfect confidence and tenderness.

"Well, I guess I do," said Lapham, not insisting upon the unselfish
view of the matter.  "I always did like the water side of Beacon.
There ain't a sightlier place in the world for a house.  And some day
there's bound to be a drive-way all along behind them houses, between
them and the water, and then a lot there is going to be worth the gold
that will cover it--COIN.  I've had offers for that lot, Pert, twice
over what I give for it.  Yes, I have.  Don't you want to ride over
there some afternoon with me and see it?" "I'm satisfied where we be,
Si," said Mrs. Lapham, recurring to the parlance of her youth in her
pathos at her husband's kindness.  She sighed anxiously, for she felt
the trouble a woman knows in view of any great change.  They had often
talked of altering over the house in which they lived, but they had
never come to it; and they had often talked of building, but it had
always been a house in the country that they had thought of.  "I wish
you had sold that lot."

"I hain't," said the colonel briefly.

"I don't know as I feel much like changing our way of living."

"Guess we could live there pretty much as we live here.  There's all
kinds of people on Beacon Street; you mustn't think they're all
big-bugs. I know one party that lives in a house he built to sell, and
his wife don't keep any girl.  You can have just as much style there as
you want, or just as little.  I guess we live as well as most of 'em
now, and set as good a table.  And if you come to style, I don't know
as anybody has got more of a right to put it on than what we have."

"Well, I don't want to build on Beacon Street, Si," said Mrs. Lapham
gently.

"Just as you please, Persis.  I ain't in any hurry to leave."

Mrs. Lapham stood flapping the cheque which she held in her right hand
against the edge of her left.

The Colonel still sat looking up at her face, and watching the effect
of the poison of ambition which he had artfully instilled into her mind.

She sighed again--a yielding sigh.  "What are you going to do this
afternoon?"

"I'm going to take a turn on the Brighton road," said the Colonel.

"I don't believe but what I should like to go along," said his wife.

"All right.  You hain't ever rode behind that mare yet, Pert, and I
want you should see me let her out once.  They say the snow's all
packed down already, and the going is A 1."

At four o'clock in the afternoon, with a cold, red winter sunset before
them, the Colonel and his wife were driving slowly down Beacon Street
in the light, high-seated cutter, where, as he said, they were a pretty
tight fit.  He was holding the mare in till the time came to speed her,
and the mare was springily jolting over the snow, looking intelligently
from side to side, and cocking this ear and that, while from her
nostrils, her head tossing easily, she blew quick, irregular whiffs of
steam.

"Gay, ain't she?" proudly suggested the Colonel.

"She IS gay," assented his wife.

They met swiftly dashing sleighs, and let them pass on either hand,
down the beautiful avenue narrowing with an admirably even sky-line in
the perspective.  They were not in a hurry.  The mare jounced easily
along, and they talked of the different houses on either side of the
way.  They had a crude taste in architecture, and they admired the
worst.  There were women's faces at many of the handsome windows, and
once in a while a young man on the pavement caught his hat suddenly
from his head, and bowed in response to some salutation from within.

"I don't think our girls would look very bad behind one of those big
panes," said the Colonel.

"No," said his wife dreamily.

"Where's the YOUNG man? Did he come with them?"

"No; he was to spend the winter with a friend of his that has a ranch
in Texas.  I guess he's got to do something."

"Yes; gentlemaning as a profession has got to play out in a generation
or two."

Neither of them spoke of the lot, though Lapham knew perfectly well
what his wife had come with him for, and she was aware that he knew it.
The time came when he brought the mare down to a walk, and then slowed
up almost to a stop, while they both turned their heads to the right
and looked at the vacant lot, through which showed the frozen stretch
of the Back Bay, a section of the Long Bridge, and the roofs and
smoke-stacks of Charlestown.

"Yes, it's sightly," said Mrs. Lapham, lifting her hand from the reins,
on which she had unconsciously laid it.

Lapham said nothing, but he let the mare out a little.

The sleighs and cutters were thickening round them.  On the Milldam it
became difficult to restrict the mare to the long, slow trot into which
he let her break.  The beautiful landscape widened to right and left of
them, with the sunset redder and redder, over the low, irregular hills
before them.  They crossed the Milldam into Longwood; and here, from
the crest of the first upland, stretched two endless lines, in which
thousands of cutters went and came.  Some of the drivers were already
speeding their horses, and these shot to and fro on inner lines,
between the slowly moving vehicles on either side of the road.  Here
and there a burly mounted policeman, bulging over the pommel of his
M'Clellan saddle, jolted by, silently gesturing and directing the
course, and keeping it all under the eye of the law.  It was what
Bartley Hubbard called "a carnival of fashion and gaiety on the
Brighton road," in his account of it.  But most of the people in those
elegant sleighs and cutters had so little the air of the great world
that one knowing it at all must have wondered where they and their
money came from; and the gaiety of the men, at least, was expressed,
like that of Colonel Lapham, in a grim almost fierce, alertness; the
women wore an air of courageous apprehension.  At a certain point the
Colonel said, "I'm going to let her out, Pert," and he lifted and then
dropped the reins lightly on the mare's back.

She understood the signal, and, as an admirer said, "she laid down to
her work." Nothing in the immutable iron of Lapham's face betrayed his
sense of triumph as the mare left everything behind her on the road.
Mrs. Lapham, if she felt fear, was too busy holding her flying wraps
about her, and shielding her face from the scud of ice flung from the
mare's heels, to betray it; except for the rush of her feet, the mare
was as silent as the people behind her; the muscles of her back and
thighs worked more and more swiftly, like some mechanism responding to
an alien force, and she shot to the end of the course, grazing a
hundred encountered and rival sledges in her passage, but unmolested by
the policemen, who probably saw that the mare and the Colonel knew what
they were about, and, at any rate, were not the sort of men to
interfere with trotting like that.  At the end of the heat Lapham drew
her in, and turned off on a side street into Brookline.

"Tell you what, Pert," he said, as if they had been quietly jogging
along, with time for uninterrupted thought since he last spoke, "I've
about made up my mind to build on that lot."

"All right, Silas," said Mrs. Lapham; "I suppose you know what you're
about.  Don't build on it for me, that's all."

When she stood in the hall at home, taking off her things, she said to
the girls, who were helping her, "Some day your father will get killed
with that mare."

"Did he speed her?" asked Penelope, the elder.

She was named after her grandmother, who had in her turn inherited from
another ancestress the name of the Homeric matron whose peculiar merits
won her a place even among the Puritan Faiths, Hopes, Temperances, and
Prudences.  Penelope was the girl whose odd serious face had struck
Bartley Hubbard in the photograph of the family group Lapham showed him
on the day of the interview.  Her large eyes, like her hair, were
brown; they had the peculiar look of near-sighted eyes which is called
mooning; her complexion was of a dark pallor.

Her mother did not reply to a question which might be considered
already answered.  "He says he's going to build on that lot of his,"
she next remarked, unwinding the long veil which she had tied round her
neck to hold her bonnet on.  She put her hat and cloak on the hall
table, to be carried upstairs later, and they all went in to tea:
creamed oysters, birds, hot biscuit, two kinds of cake, and dishes of
stewed and canned fruit and honey.  The women dined alone at one, and
the Colonel at the same hour down-town. But he liked a good hot meal
when he got home in the evening.  The house flared with gas; and the
Colonel, before he sat down, went about shutting the registers, through
which a welding heat came voluming up from the furnace.

"I'll be the death of that darkey YET," he said, "if he don't stop
making on such a fire.  The only way to get any comfort out of your
furnace is to take care of it yourself."

"Well," answered his wife from behind the teapot, as he sat down at
table with this threat, "there's nothing to prevent you, Si.  And you
can shovel the snow too, if you want to--till you get over to Beacon
Street, anyway."

"I guess I can keep my own sidewalk on Beacon Street clean, if I take
the notion."

"I should like to see you at it," retorted his wife.

"Well, you keep a sharp lookout, and may be you will."

Their taunts were really expressions of affectionate pride in each
other.  They liked to have it, give and take, that way, as they would
have said, right along.

"A man can be a man on Beacon Street as well as anywhere, I guess."

"Well, I'll do the wash, as I used to in Lumberville," said Mrs.
Lapham.  "I presume you'll let me have set tubs, Si.  You know I ain't
so young any more." She passed Irene a cup of Oolong tea,--none of them
had a sufficiently cultivated palate for Sou-chong,--and the girl
handed it to her father.  "Papa," she asked, "you don't really mean
that you're going to build over there?"

"Don't I? You wait and see," said the Colonel, stirring his tea.

"I don't believe you do," pursued the girl.

"Is that so? I presume you'd hate to have me.  Your mother does." He
said DOOS, of course.

Penelope took the word.  "I go in for it.  I don't see any use in not
enjoying money, if you've got it to enjoy.  That's what it's for, I
suppose; though you mightn't always think so." She had a slow, quaint
way of talking, that seemed a pleasant personal modification of some
ancestral Yankee drawl, and her voice was low and cozy, and so far from
being nasal that it was a little hoarse.

"I guess the ayes has it, Pen," said her father.  "How would it do to
let Irene and your mother stick in the old place here, and us go into
the new house?" At times the Colonel's grammar failed him.

The matter dropped, and the Laphams lived on as before, with joking
recurrences to the house on the water side of Beacon.  The Colonel
seemed less in earnest than any of them about it; but that was his way,
his girls said; you never could tell when he really meant a thing.

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

completion: Lapham returns to his home in the unfashionable South End section of Boston. The Laphams, who have come from the country, are unaware of the need of an acceptable location to help them gain social approval. They are not made aware of their poor location until Mrs. Corey calls on them to thank Mrs. Lapham for caring for her during an accidental meeting, when Mrs. Corey had become violently ill. She says that her driver had a difficult time finding the Lapham home. "Nearly all our friends are on the New Land or on the Hill," Mrs. Corey says. Not only do the Laphams live in a socially unacceptable neighborhood, but also they have not educated their daughters to perform well in social functions; afraid of being snubbed by the other girls, the Lapham sisters dropped out of finishing school after attending part of a year. When Mrs. Corey's son joins his mother at the Canadian watering place where she has fallen ill, he impresses Mrs. Lapham with his good manners. Persis sees a possible love affair between him and Irene, but she realizes that her daughters have not been brought up to match the Coreys socially. The Laphams have spent their money on rich, ugly clothes, costly, abominable frescoes, hotel rooms, and trips. They have never thought of traveling to Europe, of giving dinner parties instead of treating an occasional businessman to potluck, or of building on their land in the better part of town. "I declare," Mrs. Lapham says, "it made me feel as if we had always lived in the backwoods." Silas tells her he owns some property in the fashionable part of town; he asks Persis if she wants to build on it. She says she does not, but inwardly she is pleased and dreams of seeing her daughters behind the windowpanes of a house on the New Land. Despite Persis' protests, Silas decides to come out of the backwoods and build on the land he owns, bringing his socially unacceptable daughters out with him.


prompt:
Chapter: TOWARD the end of the winter there came a newspaper, addressed to Miss
Irene Lapham; it proved to be a Texas newspaper, with a complimentary
account of the ranch of the Hon. Loring G. Stanton, which the
representative of the journal had visited.

"It must be his friend," said Mrs. Lapham, to whom her daughter brought
the paper; "the one he's staying with."

The girl did not say anything, but she carried the paper to her room,
where she scanned every line of it for another name.  She did not find
it, but she cut the notice out and stuck it into the side of her
mirror, where she could read it every morning when she brushed her
hair, and the last thing at night when she looked at herself in the
glass just before turning off the gas.  Her sister often read it aloud,
standing behind her and rendering it with elocutionary effects.

"The first time I ever heard of a love-letter in the form of a puff to
a cattle-ranch. But perhaps that's the style on the Hill."

Mrs. Lapham told her husband of the arrival of the paper, treating the
fact with an importance that he refused to see in it.

"How do you know the fellow sent it, anyway?" he demanded.

"Oh, I know he did."

"I don't see why he couldn't write to 'Rene, if he really meant
anything."

"Well, I guess that wouldn't be their way," said Mrs. Lapham; she did
not at all know what their way would be.

When the spring opened Colonel Lapham showed that he had been in
earnest about building on the New Land.  His idea of a house was a
brown-stone front, four stories high, and a French roof with an
air-chamber above.  Inside, there was to be a reception-room on the
street and a dining-room back.  The parlours were to be on the second
floor, and finished in black walnut or party-coloured paint.  The
chambers were to be on the three floors above, front and rear, with
side-rooms over the front door.  Black walnut was to be used everywhere
except in the attic, which was to be painted and grained to look like
black walnut.  The whole was to be very high-studded, and there were to
be handsome cornices and elaborate centre-pieces throughout, except,
again, in the attic.

These ideas he had formed from the inspection of many new buildings
which he had seen going up, and which he had a passion for looking
into.  He was confirmed in his ideas by a master builder who had put up
a great many houses on the Back Bay as a speculation, and who told him
that if he wanted to have a house in the style, that was the way to
have it.

The beginnings of the process by which Lapham escaped from the master
builder and ended in the hands of an architect are so obscure that it
would be almost impossible to trace them.  But it all happened, and
Lapham promptly developed his ideas of black walnut finish, high
studding, and cornices.  The architect was able to conceal the shudder
which they must have sent through him.  He was skilful, as nearly all
architects are, in playing upon that simple instrument Man.  He began
to touch Colonel Lapham's stops.

"Oh, certainly, have the parlours high-studded. But you've seen some of
those pretty old-fashioned country-houses, haven't you, where the
entrance-story is very low-studded?" "Yes," Lapham assented.

"Well, don't you think something of that kind would have a very nice
effect? Have the entrance-story low-studded, and your parlours on the
next floor as high as you please.  Put your little reception-room here
beside the door, and get the whole width of your house frontage for a
square hall, and an easy low-tread staircase running up three sides of
it.  I'm sure Mrs. Lapham would find it much pleasanter." The architect
caught toward him a scrap of paper lying on the table at which they
were sitting and sketched his idea.  "Then have your dining-room behind
the hall, looking on the water."

He glanced at Mrs. Lapham, who said, "Of course," and the architect
went on--

"That gets you rid of one of those long, straight, ugly
staircases,"--until that moment Lapham had thought a long, straight
staircase the chief ornament of a house,--"and gives you an effect of
amplitude and space."

"That's so!" said Mrs. Lapham.  Her husband merely made a noise in his
throat.

"Then, were you thinking of having your parlours together, connected by
folding doors?" asked the architect deferentially.

"Yes, of course," said Lapham.  "They're always so, ain't they?"

"Well, nearly," said the architect.  "I was wondering how would it do
to make one large square room at the front, taking the whole breadth of
the house, and, with this hall-space between, have a music-room back
for the young ladies?"

Lapham looked helplessly at his wife, whose quicker apprehension had
followed the architect's pencil with instant sympathy.  "First-rate!"
she cried.

The Colonel gave way.  "I guess that would do.  It'll be kind of odd,
won't it?"

"Well, I don't know," said the architect.  "Not so odd, I hope, as the
other thing will be a few years from now." He went on to plan the rest
of the house, and he showed himself such a master in regard to all the
practical details that Mrs. Lapham began to feel a motherly affection
for the young man, and her husband could not deny in his heart that the
fellow seemed to understand his business.  He stopped walking about the
room, as he had begun to do when the architect and Mrs. Lapham entered
into the particulars of closets, drainage, kitchen arrangements, and
all that, and came back to the table.  "I presume," he said, "you'll
have the drawing-room finished in black walnut?"

"Well, yes," replied the architect, "if you like.  But some less
expensive wood can be made just as effective with paint.  Of course you
can paint black walnut too."

"Paint it?" gasped the Colonel.

"Yes," said the architect quietly.  "White, or a little off white."

Lapham dropped the plan he had picked up from the table.  His wife made
a little move toward him of consolation or support.

"Of course," resumed the architect, "I know there has been a great
craze for black walnut.  But it's an ugly wood; and for a drawing-room
there is really nothing like white paint.  We should want to introduce
a little gold here and there.  Perhaps we might run a painted frieze
round under the cornice--garlands of roses on a gold ground; it would
tell wonderfully in a white room."

The Colonel returned less courageously to the charge.  "I presume
you'll want Eastlake mantel-shelves and tiles?" He meant this for a
sarcastic thrust at a prevailing foible of the profession.

"Well, no," gently answered the architect.  "I was thinking perhaps a
white marble chimney-piece, treated in the refined Empire style, would
be the thing for that room."

"White marble!" exclaimed the Colonel.  "I thought that had gone out
long ago."

"Really beautiful things can't go out.  They may disappear for a little
while, but they must come back.  It's only the ugly things that stay
out after they've had their day."

Lapham could only venture very modestly, "Hard-wood floors?"

"In the music-room, of course," consented the architect.

"And in the drawing-room?"

"Carpet. Some sort of moquette, I should say.  But I should prefer to
consult Mrs. Lapham's taste in that matter."

"And in the other rooms?"

"Oh, carpets, of course."

"And what about the stairs?"

"Carpet. And I should have the rail and banisters white--banisters
turned or twisted."

The Colonel said under his breath, "Well, I'm dumned!" but he gave no
utterance to his astonishment in the architect's presence.  When he
went at last,--the session did not end till eleven o'clock,--Lapham
said, "Well, Pert, I guess that fellow's fifty years behind, or ten
years ahead.  I wonder what the Ongpeer style is?"

"I don't know.  I hated to ask.  But he seemed to understand what he
was talking about.  I declare, he knows what a woman wants in a house
better than she does herself."

"And a man's simply nowhere in comparison," said Lapham.  But he
respected a fellow who could beat him at every point, and have a reason
ready, as this architect had; and when he recovered from the daze into
which the complete upheaval of all his preconceived notions had left
him, he was in a fit state to swear by the architect.  It seemed to him
that he had discovered the fellow (as he always called him) and owned
him now, and the fellow did nothing to disturb this impression.  He
entered into that brief but intense intimacy with the Laphams which the
sympathetic architect holds with his clients.  He was privy to all
their differences of opinion and all their disputes about the house.
He knew just where to insist upon his own ideas, and where to yield.
He was really building several other houses, but he gave the Laphams
the impression that he was doing none but theirs.

The work was not begun till the frost was thoroughly out of the ground,
which that year was not before the end of April.  Even then it did not
proceed very rapidly.  Lapham said they might as well take their time
to it; if they got the walls up and the thing closed in before the snow
flew, they could be working at it all winter.  It was found necessary
to dig for the kitchen; at that point the original salt-marsh lay near
the surface, and before they began to put in the piles for the
foundation they had to pump.  The neighbourhood smelt like the hold of
a ship after a three years' voyage.  People who had cast their fortunes
with the New Land went by professing not to notice it; people who still
"hung on to the Hill" put their handkerchiefs to their noses, and told
each other the old terrible stories of the material used in filling up
the Back Bay.

Nothing gave Lapham so much satisfaction in the whole construction of
his house as the pile-driving. When this began, early in the summer, he
took Mrs. Lapham every day in his buggy and drove round to look at it;
stopping the mare in front of the lot, and watching the operation with
even keener interest than the little loafing Irish boys who
superintended it in force.  It pleased him to hear the portable engine
chuckle out a hundred thin whiffs of steam in carrying the big iron
weight to the top of the framework above the pile, then seem to
hesitate, and cough once or twice in pressing the weight against the
detaching apparatus.  There was a moment in which the weight had the
effect of poising before it fell; then it dropped with a mighty whack
on the iron-bound head of the pile, and drove it a foot into the earth.

"By gracious!" he would say, "there ain't anything like that in THIS
world for BUSINESS, Persis!"

Mrs. Lapham suffered him to enjoy the sight twenty or thirty times
before she said, "Well, now drive on, Si."

By the time the foundation was in and the brick walls had begun to go
up, there were so few people left in the neighbourhood that she might
indulge with impunity her husband's passion for having her clamber over
the floor-timbers and the skeleton stair-cases with him.  Many of the
householders had boarded up their front doors before the buds had begun
to swell and the assessor to appear in early May; others had followed
soon; and Mrs. Lapham was as safe from remark as if she had been in the
depth of the country.  Ordinarily she and her girls left town early in
July, going to one of the hotels at Nantasket, where it was convenient
for the Colonel to get to and from his business by the boat.  But this
summer they were all lingering a few weeks later, under the novel
fascination of the new house, as they called it, as if there were no
other in the world.

Lapham drove there with his wife after he had set Bartley Hubbard down
at the Events office, but on this day something happened that
interfered with the solid pleasure they usually took in going over the
house.  As the Colonel turned from casting anchor at the mare's head
with the hitching-weight, after helping his wife to alight, he
encountered a man to whom he could not help speaking, though the man
seemed to share his hesitation if not his reluctance at the necessity.
He was a tallish, thin man, with a dust-coloured face, and a dead,
clerical air, which somehow suggested at once feebleness and tenacity.

Mrs. Lapham held out her hand to him.

"Why, Mr. Rogers!" she exclaimed; and then, turning toward her husband,
seemed to refer the two men to each other.  They shook hands, but
Lapham did not speak.  "I didn't know you were in Boston," pursued Mrs.
Lapham.  "Is Mrs. Rogers with you?"

"No," said Mr. Rogers, with a voice which had the flat, succinct sound
of two pieces of wood clapped together.  "Mrs. Rogers is still in
Chicago."

A little silence followed, and then Mrs Lapham said--

"I presume you are quite settled out there."

"No; we have left Chicago.  Mrs. Rogers has merely remained to finish
up a little packing."

"Oh, indeed! Are you coming back to Boston?"

"I cannot say as yet.  We sometimes think of so doing."

Lapham turned away and looked up at the building.  His wife pulled a
little at her glove, as if embarrassed, or even pained.  She tried to
make a diversion.

"We are building a house," she said, with a meaningless laugh.

"Oh, indeed," said Mr. Rogers, looking up at it.

Then no one spoke again, and she said helplessly--

"If you come to Boston, I hope I shall see Mrs. Rogers."

"She will be happy to have you call," said Mr Rogers.

He touched his hat-brim, and made a bow forward rather than in Mrs.
Lapham's direction.

She mounted the planking that led into the shelter of the bare brick
walls, and her husband slowly followed.  When she turned her face
toward him her cheeks were burning, and tears that looked hot stood in
her eyes.

"You left it all to me!" she cried.  "Why couldn't you speak a word?"

"I hadn't anything to say to him," replied Lapham sullenly.

They stood a while, without looking at the work which they had come to
enjoy, and without speaking to each other.

"I suppose we might as well go on," said Mrs. Lapham at last, as they
returned to the buggy.  The Colonel drove recklessly toward the
Milldam.  His wife kept her veil down and her face turned from him.
After a time she put her handkerchief up under her veil and wiped her
eyes, and he set his teeth and squared his jaw.

"I don't see how he always manages to appear just at the moment when he
seems to have gone fairly out of our lives, and blight everything," she
whimpered.

"I supposed he was dead," said Lapham.

"Oh, don't SAY such a thing! It sounds as if you wished it."

"Why do you mind it? What do you let him blight everything for?"

"I can't help it, and I don't believe I ever shall.  I don't know as
his being dead would help it any.  I can't ever see him without feeling
just as I did at first."

"I tell you," said Lapham, "it was a perfectly square thing.  And I
wish, once for all, you would quit bothering about it.  My conscience
is easy as far as he is concerned, and it always was."

"And I can't look at him without feeling as if you'd ruined him, Silas."

"Don't look at him, then," said her husband, with a scowl.  "I want you
should recollect in the first place, Persis, that I never wanted a
partner."

"If he hadn't put his money in when he did, you'd 'a' broken down."

"Well, he got his money out again, and more, too," said the Colonel,
with a sulky weariness.

"He didn't want to take it out."

"I gave him his choice: buy out or go out."

"You know he couldn't buy out then.  It was no choice at all."

"It was a business chance."

"No; you had better face the truth, Silas.  It was no chance at all.
You crowded him out.  A man that had saved you! No, you had got greedy,
Silas.  You had made your paint your god, and you couldn't bear to let
anybody else share in its blessings."

"I tell you he was a drag and a brake on me from the word go.  You say
he saved me.  Well, if I hadn't got him out he'd 'a' ruined me sooner
or later.  So it's an even thing, as far forth as that goes."

"No, it ain't an even thing, and you know it, Silas.  Oh, if I could
only get you once to acknowledge that you did wrong about it, then I
should have some hope.  I don't say you meant wrong exactly, but you
took an advantage.  Yes, you took an advantage! You had him where he
couldn't help himself, and then you wouldn't show him any mercy."

"I'm sick of this," said Lapham.  "If you'll 'tend to the house, I'll
manage my business without your help."

"You were very glad of my help once."

"Well, I'm tired of it now.  Don't meddle."

"I WILL meddle.  When I see you hardening yourself in a wrong thing,
it's time for me to meddle, as you call it, and I will.  I can't ever
get you to own up the least bit about Rogers, and I feel as if it was
hurting you all the while."

"What do you want I should own up about a thing for when I don't feel
wrong? I tell you Rogers hain't got anything to complain of, and that's
what I told you from the start.  It's a thing that's done every day.  I
was loaded up with a partner that didn't know anything, and couldn't do
anything, and I unloaded; that's all."

"You unloaded just at the time when you knew that your paint was going
to be worth about twice what it ever had been; and you wanted all the
advantage for yourself."

"I had a right to it.  I made the success."

"Yes, you made it with Rogers's money; and when you'd made it you took
his share of it.  I guess you thought of that when you saw him, and
that's why you couldn't look him in the face."

At these words Lapham lost his temper.

"I guess you don't want to ride with me any more to-day," he said,
turning the mare abruptly round.

"I'm as ready to go back as what you are," replied his wife.  "And
don't you ask me to go to that house with you any more.  You can sell
it, for all me.  I sha'n't live in it.  There's blood on it."

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

completion: Irene receives a Texas newspaper containing an account of the Honorable Loring G. Stanton ranch. Her mother suspects that it is a love token from Tom Corey, who is spending the winter on a Texas ranch. Irene clips the account from the paper and saves it. Lapham begins to build his house. His plan is the epitome of ugliness, and his architect is able to persuade him to make changes. When Silas visits the site with his wife, his old partner, Rogers, pays an unexpected call. Lapham will not speak to him and leaves the conversation which amounts to nothing, to Mrs. Lapham. Mrs. Lapham is reminded that the house is being constructed with part of a fortune amassed from capital Rogers originally put into Lapham's paint business. "I sha'n't live in it. There's blood on it" she says. Persis firmly believes that Silas took advantage of Rogers by giving him the choice of either buying out or going out of the paint business. "You know he couldn't buy then. It was no choice at all. You unloaded just at the time when you knew that your paint was going to be worth about twice what it ever had been; and you wanted all the advantage yourself. You crowded him out. A man that had saved you! No, you had got greedy, Silas. You had made your paint your god, and you couldn't bear to let anybody else share in its blessings." Silas maintains that he never wanted a partner in the first place. "If he hadn't put his money in when he did, you'd 'a' broken down," she retorts. When Silas states that Rogers took more money out of the business than he put in, Persis reminds him that Rogers did not want to take his money out at all.