prompt:
Chapter: THE silken texture of the marriage tie bears a daily strain of wrong
and insult to which no other human relation can be subjected without
lesion; and sometimes the strength that knits society together might
appear to the eye of faltering faith the curse of those immediately
bound by it.  Two people by no means reckless of each other's rights
and feelings, but even tender of them for the most part, may tear at
each other's heart-strings in this sacred bond with perfect impunity;
though if they were any other two they would not speak or look at each
other again after the outrages they exchange.  It is certainly a
curious spectacle, and doubtless it ought to convince an observer of
the divinity of the institution.  If the husband and wife are blunt,
outspoken people like the Laphams, they do not weigh their words; if
they are more refined, they weigh them very carefully, and know
accurately just how far they will carry, and in what most sensitive
spot they may be planted with most effect.

Lapham was proud of his wife, and when he married her it had been a
rise in life for him.  For a while he stood in awe of his good fortune,
but this could not last, and he simply remained supremely satisfied
with it.  The girl who had taught school with a clear head and a strong
hand was not afraid of work; she encouraged and helped him from the
first, and bore her full share of the common burden.  She had health,
and she did not worry his life out with peevish complaints and
vagaries; she had sense and principle, and in their simple lot she did
what was wise and right.  Their marriage was hallowed by an early
sorrow: they lost their boy, and it was years before they could look
each other in the face and speak of him.  No one gave up more than they
when they gave up each other and Lapham went to the war.  When he came
back and began to work, her zeal and courage formed the spring of his
enterprise.  In that affair of the partnership she had tried to be his
conscience, but perhaps she would have defended him if he had accused
himself; it was one of those things in this life which seem destined to
await justice, or at least judgment, in the next.  As he said, Lapham
had dealt fairly by his partner in money; he had let Rogers take more
money out of the business than he put into it; he had, as he said,
simply forced out of it a timid and inefficient participant in
advantages which he had created.  But Lapham had not created them all.
He had been dependent at one time on his partner's capital.  It was a
moment of terrible trial.  Happy is the man for ever after who can
choose the ideal, the unselfish part in such an exigency! Lapham could
not rise to it.  He did what he could maintain to be perfectly fair.
The wrong, if any, seemed to be condoned to him, except when from time
to time his wife brought it up.  Then all the question stung and burned
anew, and had to be reasoned out and put away once more.  It seemed to
have an inextinguishable vitality.  It slept, but it did not die.

His course did not shake Mrs. Lapham's faith in him.  It astonished her
at first, and it always grieved her that he could not see that he was
acting solely in his own interest.  But she found excuses for him,
which at times she made reproaches.  She vaguely perceived that his
paint was something more than business to him; it was a sentiment,
almost a passion.  He could not share its management and its profit
with another without a measure of self-sacrifice far beyond that which
he must make with something less personal to him.  It was the poetry of
that nature, otherwise so intensely prosaic; and she understood this,
and for the most part forbore.  She knew him good and true and
blameless in all his life, except for this wrong, if it were a wrong;
and it was only when her nerves tingled intolerably with some chance
renewal of the pain she had suffered, that she shared her anguish with
him in true wifely fashion.

With those two there was never anything like an explicit
reconciliation.  They simply ignored a quarrel; and Mrs. Lapham had
only to say a few days after at breakfast, "I guess the girls would
like to go round with you this afternoon, and look at the new house,"
in order to make her husband grumble out as he looked down into his
coffee-cup. "I guess we better all go, hadn't we?"

"Well, I'll see," she said.

There was not really a great deal to look at when Lapham arrived on the
ground in his four-seated beach-wagon.  But the walls were up, and the
studding had already given skeleton shape to the interior.  The floors
were roughly boarded over, and the stairways were in place, with
provisional treads rudely laid.  They had not begun to lath and plaster
yet, but the clean, fresh smell of the mortar in the walls mingling
with the pungent fragrance of the pine shavings neutralised the
Venetian odour that drew in over the water.  It was pleasantly shady
there, though for the matter of that the heat of the morning had all
been washed out of the atmosphere by a tide of east wind setting in at
noon, and the thrilling, delicious cool of a Boston summer afternoon
bathed every nerve.

The foreman went about with Mrs. Lapham, showing her where the doors
were to be; but Lapham soon tired of this, and having found a pine
stick of perfect grain, he abandoned himself to the pleasure of
whittling it in what was to be the reception-room, where he sat looking
out on the street from what was to be the bay-window. Here he was
presently joined by his girls, who, after locating their own room on
the water side above the music-room, had no more wish to enter into
details than their father.

"Come and take a seat in the bay-window, ladies," he called out to
them, as they looked in at him through the ribs of the wall.  He
jocosely made room for them on the trestle on which he sat.

They came gingerly and vaguely forward, as young ladies do when they
wish not to seem to be going to do a thing they have made up their
minds to do.  When they had taken their places on their trestle, they
could not help laughing with scorn, open and acceptable to their
father; and Irene curled her chin up, in a little way she had, and
said, "How ridiculous!" to her sister.

"Well, I can tell you what," said the Colonel, in fond enjoyment of
their young ladyishness, "your mother wa'n't ashamed to sit with me on
a trestle when I called her out to look at the first coat of my paint
that I ever tried on a house."

"Yes; we've heard that story," said Penelope, with easy security of her
father's liking what she said.  "We were brought up on that story."

"Well, it's a good story," said her father.

At that moment a young man came suddenly in range, who began to look up
at the signs of building as he approached.  He dropped his eyes in
coming abreast of the bay-window, where Lapham sat with his girls, and
then his face lightened, and he took off his hat and bowed to Irene.
She rose mechanically from the trestle, and her face lightened too.

She was a very pretty figure of a girl, after our fashion of girls,
round and slim and flexible, and her face was admirably regular.  But
her great beauty--and it was very great--was in her colouring.  This
was of an effect for which there is no word but delicious, as we use it
of fruit or flowers.  She had red hair, like her father in his earlier
days, and the tints of her cheeks and temples were such as suggested
May-flowers and apple-blossoms and peaches.  Instead of the grey that
often dulls this complexion, her eyes were of a blue at once intense
and tender, and they seemed to burn on what they looked at with a soft,
lambent flame.  It was well understood by her sister and mother that
her eyes always expressed a great deal more than Irene ever thought or
felt; but this is not saying that she was not a very sensible girl and
very honest.

The young man faltered perceptibly, and Irene came a little forward,
and then there gushed from them both a smiling exchange of greeting, of
which the sum was that he supposed she was out of town, and that she
had not known that he had got back.  A pause ensued, and flushing again
in her uncertainty as to whether she ought or ought not to do it, she
said, "My father, Mr. Corey; and my sister."

The young man took off his hat again, showing his shapely head, with a
line of wholesome sunburn ceasing where the recently and closely
clipped hair began.  He was dressed in a fine summer check, with a blue
white-dotted neckerchief, and he had a white hat, in which he looked
very well when he put it back on his head.  His whole dress seemed very
fresh and new, and in fact he had cast aside his Texan habiliments only
the day before.

"How do you do, sir?" said the Colonel, stepping to the window, and
reaching out of it the hand which the young man advanced to take.
"Won't you come in? We're at home here.  House I'm building."

"Oh, indeed?" returned the young man; and he came promptly up the
steps, and through its ribs into the reception-room.

"Have a trestle?" asked the Colonel, while the girls exchanged little
shocks of terror and amusement at the eyes.

"Thank you," said the young man simply, and sat down.

"Mrs. Lapham is upstairs interviewing the carpenter, but she'll be down
in a minute."

"I hope she's quite well," said Corey.  "I supposed--I was afraid she
might be out of town."

"Well, we are off to Nantasket next week.  The house kept us in town
pretty late."

"It must be very exciting, building a house," said Corey to the elder
sister.

"Yes, it is," she assented, loyally refusing in Irene's interest the
opportunity of saying anything more.

Corey turned to the latter.  "I suppose you've all helped to plan it?"

"Oh no; the architect and mamma did that."

"But they allowed the rest of us to agree, when we were good," said
Penelope.

Corey looked at her, and saw that she was shorter than her sister, and
had a dark complexion.

"It's very exciting," said Irene.

"Come up," said the Colonel, rising, "and look round if you'd like to."

"I should like to, very much," said the young man.  He helped the young
ladies over crevasses of carpentry and along narrow paths of planking,
on which they had made their way unassisted before.  The elder sister
left the younger to profit solely by these offices as much as possible.
She walked between them and her father, who went before, lecturing on
each apartment, and taking the credit of the whole affair more and more
as he talked on.

"There!" he said, "we're going to throw out a bay-window here, so as
get the water all the way up and down.  This is my girls' room," he
added, looking proudly at them both.

It seemed terribly intimate.  Irene blushed deeply and turned her head
away.

But the young man took it all, apparently, as simply as their father.
"What a lovely lookout!" he said.  The Back Bay spread its glassy sheet
before them, empty but for a few small boats and a large schooner, with
her sails close-furled and dripping like snow from her spars, which a
tug was rapidly towing toward Cambridge.  The carpentry of that city,
embanked and embowered in foliage, shared the picturesqueness of
Charlestown in the distance.

"Yes," said Lapham, "I go in for using the best rooms in your house
yourself.  If people come to stay with you, they can put up with the
second best.  Though we don't intend to have any second best.  There
ain't going to be an unpleasant room in the whole house, from top to
bottom."

"Oh, I wish papa wouldn't brag so!" breathed Irene to her sister, where
they stood, a little apart, looking away together.

The Colonel went on.  "No, sir," he swelled out, "I have gone in for
making a regular job of it.  I've got the best architect in Boston, and
I'm building a house to suit myself.  And if money can do it, guess I'm
going to be suited."

"It seems very delightful," said Corey, "and very original."

"Yes, sir.  That fellow hadn't talked five minutes before I saw that he
knew what he was about every time."

"I wish mamma would come!" breathed Irene again.  "I shall certainly go
through the floor if papa says anything more."

"They are making a great many very pretty houses nowadays," said the
young man.  "It's very different from the old-fashioned building."

"Well," said the Colonel, with a large toleration of tone and a deep
breath that expanded his ample chest, "we spend more on our houses
nowadays.  I started out to build a forty-thousand-dollar house.  Well,
sir! that fellow has got me in for more than sixty thousand already,
and I doubt if I get out of it much under a hundred.  You can't have a
nice house for nothing.  It's just like ordering a picture of a
painter.  You pay him enough, and he can afford to paint you a
first-class picture; and if you don't, he can't. That's all there is of
it.  Why, they tell me that A. T. Stewart gave one of those French
fellows sixty thousand dollars for a little seven-by-nine picture the
other day.  Yes, sir, give an architect money enough, and he'll give
you a nice house every time."

"I've heard that they're sharp at getting money to realise their
ideas," assented the young man, with a laugh.

"Well, I should say so!" exclaimed the Colonel.  "They come to you with
an improvement that you can't resist.  It has good looks and
common-sense and everything in its favour, and it's like throwing money
away to refuse.  And they always manage to get you when your wife is
around, and then you're helpless."

The Colonel himself set the example of laughing at this joke, and the
young man joined him less obstreperously.  The girls turned, and he
said, "I don't think I ever saw this view to better advantage.  It's
surprising how well the Memorial Hall and the Cambridge spires work up,
over there.  And the sunsets must be magnificent."

Lapham did not wait for them to reply.

"Yes, sir, it's about the sightliest view I know of.  I always did like
the water side of Beacon.  Long before I owned property here, or ever
expected to, m'wife and I used to ride down this way, and stop the
buggy to get this view over the water.  When people talk to me about
the Hill, I can understand 'em. It's snug, and it's old-fashioned, and
it's where they've always lived.  But when they talk about Commonwealth
Avenue, I don't know what they mean.  It don't hold a candle to the
water side of Beacon.  You've got just as much wind over there, and
you've got just as much dust, and all the view you've got is the view
across the street.  No, sir! when you come to the Back Bay at all, give
me the water side of Beacon."

"Oh, I think you're quite right," said the young man.  "The view here
is everything."

Irene looked "I wonder what papa is going to say next!" at her sister,
when their mother's voice was heard overhead, approaching the opening
in the floor where the stairs were to be; and she presently appeared,
with one substantial foot a long way ahead.  She was followed by the
carpenter, with his rule sticking out of his overalls pocket, and she
was still talking to him about some measurements they had been taking,
when they reached the bottom, so that Irene had to say, "Mamma, Mr.
Corey," before Mrs. Lapham was aware of him.

He came forward with as much grace and speed as the uncertain footing
would allow, and Mrs. Lapham gave him a stout squeeze of her
comfortable hand.

"Why, Mr. Corey! When did you get back?"

"Yesterday. It hardly seems as if I HAD got back.  I didn't expect to
find you in a new house."

"Well, you are our first caller.  I presume you won't expect I should
make excuses for the state you find it in.  Has the Colonel been doing
the honours?"

"Oh yes.  And I've seen more of your house than I ever shall again, I
suppose."

"Well, I hope not," said Lapham.  "There'll be several chances to see
us in the old one yet, before we leave."

He probably thought this a neat, off-hand way of making the invitation,
for he looked at his woman-kind as if he might expect their admiration.

"Oh yes, indeed!" said his wife.  "We shall be very glad to see Mr.
Corey, any time."

"Thank you; I shall be glad to come."

He and the Colonel went before, and helped the ladies down the
difficult descent.  Irene seemed less sure-footed than the others; she
clung to the young man's hand an imperceptible moment longer than need
be, or else he detained her.  He found opportunity of saying, "It's so
pleasant seeing you again," adding, "all of you."

"Thank you," said the girl.  "They must all be glad to have you at home
again."

Corey laughed.

"Well, I suppose they would be, if they were at home to have me.  But
the fact is, there's nobody in the house but my father and myself, and
I'm only on my way to Bar Harbour."

"Oh! Are they there?"

"Yes; it seems to be the only place where my mother can get just the
combination of sea and mountain air that she wants."

"We go to Nantasket--it's convenient for papa; and I don't believe we
shall go anywhere else this summer, mamma's so taken up with building.
We do nothing but talk house; and Pen says we eat and sleep house.  She
says it would be a sort of relief to go and live in tents for a while."

"She seems to have a good deal of humour," the young man ventured, upon
the slender evidence.

The others had gone to the back of the house a moment, to look at some
suggested change.  Irene and Corey were left standing in the doorway.
A lovely light of happiness played over her face and etherealised its
delicious beauty.  She had some ado to keep herself from smiling
outright, and the effort deepened the dimples in her cheeks; she
trembled a little, and the pendants shook in the tips of her pretty
ears.

The others came back directly, and they all descended the front steps
together.  The Colonel was about to renew his invitation, but he caught
his wife's eye, and, without being able to interpret its warning
exactly, was able to arrest himself, and went about gathering up the
hitching-weight, while the young man handed the ladies into the
phaeton.  Then he lifted his hat, and the ladies all bowed, and the
Laphams drove off, Irene's blue ribbons fluttering backward from her
hat, as if they were her clinging thoughts.

"So that's young Corey, is it?" said the Colonel, letting the stately
stepping, tall coupe horse make his way homeward at will with the
beach-wagon. "Well, he ain't a bad-looking fellow, and he's got a good,
fair and square, honest eye.  But I don't see how a fellow like that,
that's had every advantage in this world, can hang round home and let
his father support him.  Seems to me, if I had his health and his
education, I should want to strike out and do something for myself."

The girls on the back seat had hold of each other's hands, and they
exchanged electrical pressures at the different points their father
made.

"I presume," said Mrs. Lapham, "that he was down in Texas looking after
something."

"He's come back without finding it, I guess."

"Well, if his father has the money to support him, and don't complain
of the burden, I don't see why WE should."

"Oh, I know it's none of my business, but I don't like the principle.
I like to see a man ACT like a man.  I don't like to see him taken care
of like a young lady.  Now, I suppose that fellow belongs to two or
three clubs, and hangs around 'em all day, lookin' out the
window,--I've seen 'em,--instead of tryin' to hunt up something to do
for an honest livin'."

"If I was a young man," Penelope struck in, "I would belong to twenty
clubs, if I could find them and I would hang around them all, and look
out the window till I dropped."

"Oh, you would, would you?" demanded her father, delighted with her
defiance, and twisting his fat head around over his shoulder to look at
her.  "Well, you wouldn't do it on my money, if you were a son of MINE,
young lady."

"Oh, you wait and see," retorted the girl.

This made them all laugh.  But the Colonel recurred seriously to the
subject that night, as he was winding up his watch preparatory to
putting it under his pillow.

"I could make a man of that fellow, if I had him in the business with
me.  There's stuff in him.  But I spoke up the way I did because I
didn't choose Irene should think I would stand any kind of a loafer
'round--I don't care who he is, or how well educated or brought up.
And I guess, from the way Pen spoke up, that 'Rene saw what I was
driving at."

The girl, apparently, was less anxious about her father's ideas and
principles than about the impression which he had made upon the young
man.  She had talked it over and over with her sister before they went
to bed, and she asked in despair, as she stood looking at Penelope
brushing out her hair before the glass--

"Do you suppose he'll think papa always talks in that bragging way?"

"He'll be right if he does," answered her sister.  "It's the way father
always does talk.  You never noticed it so much, that's all.  And I
guess if he can't make allowance for father's bragging, he'll be a
little too good.  I enjoyed hearing the Colonel go on."

"I know you did," returned Irene in distress.  Then she sighed.
"Didn't you think he looked very nice?"

"Who? The Colonel?" Penelope had caught up the habit of calling her
father so from her mother, and she used his title in all her jocose and
perverse moods.

"You know very well I don't mean papa," pouted Irene.  "Oh! Mr. Corey!
Why didn't you say Mr. Corey if you meant Mr. Corey? If I meant Mr.
Corey, I should say Mr. Corey.  It isn't swearing! Corey, Corey, Co----"

Her sister clapped her hand over her mouth "Will you HUSH, you wretched
thing?" she whimpered.  "The whole house can hear you."

"Oh yes, they can hear me all over the square.  Well, I think he looked
well enough for a plain youth, who hadn't taken his hair out of
curl-papers for some time."

"It WAS clipped pretty close," Irene admitted; and they both laughed at
the drab effect of Mr. Corey's skull, as they remembered it.  "Did you
like his nose?" asked Irene timorously.

"Ah, now you're COMING to something," said Penelope.  "I don't know
whether, if I had so much of a nose, I should want it all Roman."

"I don't see how you can expect to have a nose part one kind and part
another," argued Irene.

"Oh, I do.  Look at mine!" She turned aside her face, so as to get a
three-quarters view of her nose in the glass, and crossing her hands,
with the brush in one of them, before her, regarded it judicially.
"Now, my nose started Grecian, but changed its mind before it got over
the bridge, and concluded to be snub the rest of the way."

"You've got a very pretty nose, Pen," said Irene, joining in the
contemplation of its reflex in the glass.

"Don't say that in hopes of getting me to compliment HIS, Mrs."--she
stopped, and then added deliberately--"C.!"

Irene also had her hair-brush in her hand, and now she sprang at her
sister and beat her very softly on the shoulder with the flat of it.
"You mean thing!" she cried, between her shut teeth, blushing hotly.

"Well, D., then," said Penelope.  "You've nothing to say against D.?
Though I think C. is just as nice an initial."

"Oh!" cried the younger, for all expression of unspeakable things.

"I think he has very good eyes," admitted Penelope.

"Oh, he HAS! And didn't you like the way his sackcoat set? So close to
him, and yet free--kind of peeling away at the lapels?"

"Yes, I should say he was a young man of great judgment.  He knows how
to choose his tailor."

Irene sat down on the edge of a chair.  "It was so nice of you, Pen, to
come in, that way, about clubs."

"Oh, I didn't mean anything by it except opposition," said Penelope.
"I couldn't have father swelling on so, without saying something."

"How he did swell!" sighed Irene.  "Wasn't it a relief to have mamma
come down, even if she did seem to be all stocking at first?"

The girls broke into a wild giggle, and hid their faces in each other's
necks.  "I thought I SHOULD die," said Irene.

"'It's just like ordering a painting,'" said Penelope, recalling her
father's talk, with an effect of dreamy absent-mindedness. "'You give
the painter money enough, and he can afford to paint you a first-class
picture.  Give an architect money enough, and he'll give you a
first-class house, every time.'"

"Oh, wasn't it awful!" moaned her sister.  "No one would ever have
supposed that he had fought the very idea of an architect for weeks,
before he gave in."

Penelope went on.  "'I always did like the water side of Beacon,--long
before I owned property there.  When you come to the Back Bay at all,
give me the water side of Beacon.'"

"Ow-w-w-w!" shrieked Irene.  "DO stop!"

The door of their mother's chamber opened below, and the voice of the
real Colonel called, "What are you doing up there, girls? Why don't you
go to bed?"

This extorted nervous shrieks from both of them.  The Colonel heard a
sound of scurrying feet, whisking drapery, and slamming doors.  Then he
heard one of the doors opened again, and Penelope said, "I was only
repeating something you said when you talked to Mr. Corey."

"Very well, now," answered the Colonel.  "You postpone the rest of it
till to-morrow at breakfast, and see that you're up in time to let ME
hear it."

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

completion: Persis Lapham is soon reconciled to the building of the new home, and they visit the construction again. This time they are visited by Tom Corey, who has just returned from Texas. Lapham takes a liking to him, although he later says that he doesn't approve of a young man living off his parents. "I like to see a man act like a man. I don't like to see him being taken care of like a young lady."


prompt:
Chapter: AT the same moment young Corey let himself in at his own door with his
latch-key, and went to the library, where he found his father turning
the last leaves of a story in the Revue des Deux Mondes.  He was a
white-moustached old gentleman, who had never been able to abandon his
pince-nez for the superior comfort of spectacles, even in the privacy
of his own library.  He knocked the glasses off as his son came in and
looked up at him with lazy fondness, rubbing the two red marks that
they always leave on the side of the nose.

"Tom," he said, "where did you get such good clothes?"

"I stopped over a day in New York," replied the son, finding himself a
chair.  "I'm glad you like them."

"Yes, I always do like your clothes, Tom," returned the father
thoughtfully, swinging his glasses, "But I don't see how you can afford
'em, I can't."

"Well, sir," said the son, who dropped the "sir" into his speech with
his father, now and then, in an old-fashioned way that was rather
charming, "you see, I have an indulgent parent."

"Smoke?" suggested the father, pushing toward his son a box of
cigarettes, from which he had taken one.

"No, thank you," said the son.  "I've dropped that."

"Ah, is that so?" The father began to feel about on the table for
matches, in the purblind fashion of elderly men.  His son rose, lighted
one, and handed it to him.  "Well,--oh, thank you, Tom!--I believe some
statisticians prove that if you will give up smoking you can dress very
well on the money your tobacco costs, even if you haven't got an
indulgent parent.  But I'm too old to try.  Though, I confess, I should
rather like the clothes.  Whom did you find at the club?"

"There were a lot of fellows there," said young Corey, watching the
accomplished fumigation of his father in an absent way.

"It's astonishing what a hardy breed the young club-men are," observed
his father.  "All summer through, in weather that sends the sturdiest
female flying to the sea-shore, you find the clubs filled with young
men, who don't seem to mind the heat in the least."

"Boston isn't a bad place, at the worst, in summer," said the son,
declining to take up the matter in its ironical shape.

"I dare say it isn't, compared with Texas," returned the father,
smoking tranquilly on.  "But I don't suppose you find many of your
friends in town outside of the club."

"No; you're requested to ring at the rear door, all the way down Beacon
Street and up Commonwealth Avenue.  It's rather a blank reception for
the returning prodigal."

"Ah, the prodigal must take his chance if he comes back out of season.
But I'm glad to have you back, Tom, even as it is, and I hope you're
not going to hurry away.  You must give your energies a rest."

"I'm sure you never had to reproach me with abnormal activity,"
suggested the son, taking his father's jokes in good part.

"No, I don't know that I have," admitted the elder.  "You've always
shown a fair degree of moderation, after all.  What do you think of
taking up next? I mean after you have embraced your mother and sisters
at Mount Desert.  Real estate? It seems to me that it is about time for
you to open out as a real-estate broker.  Or did you ever think of
matrimony?"

"Well, not just in that way, sir," said the young man.  "I shouldn't
quite like to regard it as a career, you know."

"No, no.  I understand that.  And I quite agree with you.  But you know
I've always contended that the affections could be made to combine
pleasure and profit.  I wouldn't have a man marry for money,--that
would be rather bad,--but I don't see why, when it comes to falling in
love, a man shouldn't fall in love with a rich girl as easily as a poor
one.  Some of the rich girls are very nice, and I should say that the
chances of a quiet life with them were rather greater.  They've always
had everything, and they wouldn't be so ambitious and uneasy.  Don't
you think so?"

"It would depend," said the son, "upon whether a girl's people had been
rich long enough to have given her position before she married.  If
they hadn't, I don't see how she would be any better than a poor girl
in that respect."

"Yes, there's sense in that.  But the suddenly rich are on a level with
any of us nowadays.  Money buys position at once.  I don't say that it
isn't all right.  The world generally knows what it's about, and knows
how to drive a bargain.  I dare say it makes the new rich pay too much.
But there's no doubt but money is to the fore now.  It is the romance,
the poetry of our age.  It's the thing that chiefly strikes the
imagination.  The Englishmen who come here are more curious about the
great new millionaires than about any one else, and they respect them
more.  It's all very well.  I don't complain of it."

"And you would like a rich daughter-in-law, quite regardless, then?"

"Oh, not quite so bad as that, Tom," said his father.  "A little youth,
a little beauty, a little good sense and pretty behaviour--one mustn't
object to those things; and they go just as often with money as without
it.  And I suppose I should like her people to be rather grammatical."

"It seems to me that you're exacting, sir," said the son.  "How can you
expect people who have been strictly devoted to business to be
grammatical? Isn't that rather too much?"

"Perhaps it is.  Perhaps you're right.  But I understood your mother to
say that those benefactors of hers, whom you met last summer, were very
passably grammatical."

"The father isn't."

The elder, who had been smoking with his profile toward his son, now
turned his face full upon him.  "I didn't know you had seen him?"

"I hadn't until to-day," said young Corey, with a little heightening of
his colour.  "But I was walking down street this afternoon, and
happened to look round at a new house some one was putting up, and I
saw the whole family in the window.  It appears that Mr. Lapham is
building the house."

The elder Corey knocked the ash of his cigarette into the holder at his
elbow.  "I am more and more convinced, the longer I know you, Tom, that
we are descended from Giles Corey.  The gift of holding one's tongue
seems to have skipped me, but you have it in full force.  I can't say
just how you would behave under peine forte et dure, but under ordinary
pressure you are certainly able to keep your own counsel.  Why didn't
you mention this encounter at dinner? You weren't asked to plead to an
accusation of witchcraft."

"No, not exactly," said the young man.  "But I didn't quite see my way
to speaking of it.  We had a good many other things before us."

"Yes, that's true.  I suppose you wouldn't have mentioned it now if I
hadn't led up to it, would you?"

"I don't know, sir.  It was rather on my mind to do so.  Perhaps it was
I who led up to it."

His father laughed.  "Perhaps you did, Tom; perhaps you did.  Your
mother would have known you were leading up to something, but I'll
confess that I didn't. What is it?"

"Nothing very definite.  But do you know that in spite of his syntax I
rather liked him?"

The father looked keenly at the son; but unless the boy's full
confidence was offered, Corey was not the man to ask it.  "Well?" was
all that he said.

"I suppose that in a new country one gets to looking at people a little
out of our tradition; and I dare say that if I hadn't passed a winter
in Texas I might have found Colonel Lapham rather too much."

"You mean that there are worse things in Texas?"

"Not that exactly.  I mean that I saw it wouldn't be quite fair to test
him by our standards."

"This comes of the error which I have often deprecated," said the elder
Corey.  "In fact I am always saying that the Bostonian ought never to
leave Boston.  Then he knows--and then only--that there can BE no
standard but ours.  But we are constantly going away, and coming back
with our convictions shaken to their foundations.  One man goes to
England, and returns with the conception of a grander social life;
another comes home from Germany with the notion of a more searching
intellectual activity; a fellow just back from Paris has the absurdest
ideas of art and literature; and you revert to us from the cowboys of
Texas, and tell us to our faces that we ought to try Papa Lapham by a
jury of his peers.  It ought to be stopped--it ought, really.  The
Bostonian who leaves Boston ought to be condemned to perpetual exile."

The son suffered the father to reach his climax with smiling patience.
When he asked finally, "What are the characteristics of Papa Lapham
that place him beyond our jurisdiction?" the younger Corey crossed his
long legs, and leaned forward to take one of his knees between his
hands.

"Well, sir, he bragged, rather."

"Oh, I don't know that bragging should exempt him from the ordinary
processes.  I've heard other people brag in Boston."

"Ah, not just in that personal way--not about money."

"No, that was certainly different."

"I don't mean," said the young fellow, with the scrupulosity which
people could not help observing and liking in him, "that it was more
than an indirect expression of satisfaction in the ability to spend."

"No. I should be glad to express something of the kind myself, if the
facts would justify me."

The son smiled tolerantly again.  "But if he was enjoying his money in
that way, I didn't see why he shouldn't show his pleasure in it.  It
might have been vulgar, but it wasn't sordid.  And I don't know that it
was vulgar.  Perhaps his successful strokes of business were the
romance of his life----"

The father interrupted with a laugh.  "The girl must be uncommonly
pretty.  What did she seem to think of her father's brag?"

"There were two of them," answered the son evasively.

"Oh, two! And is the sister pretty too?"

"Not pretty, but rather interesting.  She is like her mother."

"Then the pretty one isn't the father's pet?"

"I can't say, sir.  I don't believe," added the young fellow, "that I
can make you see Colonel Lapham just as I did.  He struck me as very
simple-hearted and rather wholesome.  Of course he could be tiresome;
we all can; and I suppose his range of ideas is limited.  But he is a
force, and not a bad one.  If he hasn't got over being surprised at the
effect of rubbing his lamp."

"Oh, one could make out a case.  I suppose you know what you are about,
Tom.  But remember that we are Essex County people, and that in savour
we are just a little beyond the salt of the earth.  I will tell you
plainly that I don't like the notion of a man who has rivalled the hues
of nature in her wildest haunts with the tints of his mineral paint;
but I don't say there are not worse men.  He isn't to my taste, though
he might be ever so much to my conscience."

"I suppose," said the son, "that there is nothing really to be ashamed
of in mineral paint.  People go into all sorts of things."

His father took his cigarette from his mouth and once more looked his
son full in the face.  "Oh, is THAT it?"

"It has crossed my mind," admitted the son.  "I must do something.
I've wasted time and money enough.  I've seen much younger men all
through the West and South-west taking care of themselves.  I don't
think I was particularly fit for anything out there, but I am ashamed
to come back and live upon you, sir."

His father shook his head with an ironical sigh.  "Ah, we shall never
have a real aristocracy while this plebeian reluctance to live upon a
parent or a wife continues the animating spirit of our youth.  It
strikes at the root of the whole feudal system.  I really think you owe
me an apology, Tom.  I supposed you wished to marry the girl's money,
and here you are, basely seeking to go into business with her father."

Young Corey laughed again like a son who perceives that his father is a
little antiquated, but keeps a filial faith in his wit.  "I don't know
that it's quite so bad as that; but the thing had certainly crossed my
mind.  I don't know how it's to be approached, and I don't know that
it's at all possible.  But I confess that I 'took to' Colonel Lapham
from the moment I saw him.  He looked as if he 'meant business,' and I
mean business too."

The father smoked thoughtfully.  "Of course people do go into all sorts
of things, as you say, and I don't know that one thing is more ignoble
than another, if it's decent and large enough.  In my time you would
have gone into the China trade or the India trade--though I didn't; and
a little later cotton would have been your manifest destiny--though it
wasn't mine; but now a man may do almost anything.  The real-estate
business is pretty full.  Yes, if you have a deep inward vocation for
it, I don't see why mineral paint shouldn't do.  I fancy it's easy
enough approaching the matter.  We will invite Papa Lapham to dinner,
and talk it over with him."

"Oh, I don't think that would be exactly the way, sir," said the son,
smiling at his father's patrician unworldliness.

"No? Why not?"

"I'm afraid it would be a bad start.  I don't think it would strike him
as business-like."

"I don't see why he should be punctilious, if we're not."

"Ah, we might say that if he were making the advances."

"Well, perhaps you are right, Tom.  What is your idea?"

"I haven't a very clear one.  It seems to me I ought to get some
business friend of ours, whose judgment he would respect, to speak a
good word for me."

"Give you a character?"

"Yes. And of course I must go to Colonel Lapham.  My notion would be to
inquire pretty thoroughly about him, and then, if I liked the look of
things, to go right down to Republic Street and let him see what he
could do with me, if anything."

"That sounds tremendously practical to me, Tom, though it may be just
the wrong way.  When are you going down to Mount Desert?"

"To-morrow, I think, sir," said the young man.  "I shall turn it over
in my mind while I'm off."

The father rose, showing something more than his son's height, with a
very slight stoop, which the son's figure had not.  "Well," he said,
whimsically, "I admire your spirit, and I don't deny that it is
justified by necessity.  It's a consolation to think that while I've
been spending and enjoying, I have been preparing the noblest future
for you--a future of industry and self-reliance. You never could draw,
but this scheme of going into the mineral-paint business shows that you
have inherited something of my feeling for colour."

The son laughed once more, and waiting till his father was well on his
way upstairs, turned out the gas and then hurried after him and
preceded him into his chamber.  He glanced over it to see that
everything was there, to his father's hand.  Then he said, "Good night,
sir," and the elder responded, "Good night, my son," and the son went
to his own room.

Over the mantel in the elder Corey's room hung a portrait which he had
painted of his own father, and now he stood a moment and looked at this
as if struck by something novel in it.  The resemblance between his son
and the old India merchant, who had followed the trade from Salem to
Boston when the larger city drew it away from the smaller, must have
been what struck him.  Grandfather and grandson had both the Roman nose
which appears to have flourished chiefly at the formative period of the
republic, and which occurs more rarely in the descendants of the
conscript fathers, though it still characterises the profiles of a good
many Boston ladies.  Bromfield Corey had not inherited it, and he had
made his straight nose his defence when the old merchant accused him of
a want of energy.  He said, "What could a man do whose unnatural father
had left his own nose away from him?" This amused but did not satisfy
the merchant.  "You must do something," he said; "and it's for you to
choose.  If you don't like the India trade, go into something else.
Or, take up law or medicine.  No Corey yet ever proposed to do
nothing." "Ah, then, it's quite time one of us made a beginning," urged
the man who was then young, and who was now old, looking into the
somewhat fierce eyes of his father's portrait.  He had inherited as
little of the fierceness as of the nose, and there was nothing
predatory in his son either, though the aquiline beak had come down to
him in such force.  Bromfield Corey liked his son Tom for the
gentleness which tempered his energy.

"Well let us compromise," he seemed to be saying to his father's
portrait.  "I will travel." "Travel? How long?" the keen eyes demanded.
"Oh, indefinitely.  I won't be hard with you, father." He could see the
eyes soften, and the smile of yielding come over his father's face; the
merchant could not resist a son who was so much like his dead mother.
There was some vague understanding between them that Bromfield Corey
was to come back and go into business after a time, but he never did
so.  He travelled about over Europe, and travelled handsomely,
frequenting good society everywhere, and getting himself presented at
several courts, at a period when it was a distinction to do so.  He had
always sketched, and with his father's leave he fixed himself at Rome,
where he remained studying art and rounding the being inherited from
his Yankee progenitors, till there was very little left of the
ancestral angularities.  After ten years he came home and painted that
portrait of his father.  It was very good, if a little amateurish, and
he might have made himself a name as a painter of portraits if he had
not had so much money.  But he had plenty of money, though by this time
he was married and beginning to have a family.  It was absurd for him
to paint portraits for pay, and ridiculous to paint them for nothing;
so he did not paint them at all.  He continued a dilettante, never
quite abandoning his art, but working at it fitfully, and talking more
about it than working at it.  He had his theory of Titian's method; and
now and then a Bostonian insisted upon buying a picture of him.  After
a while he hung it more and more inconspicuously, and said
apologetically, "Oh yes! that's one of Bromfield Corey's things.  It
has nice qualities, but it's amateurish."

In process of time the money seemed less abundant.  There were
shrinkages of one kind and another, and living had grown much more
expensive and luxurious.  For many years he talked about going back to
Rome, but he never went, and his children grew up in the usual way.
Before he knew it his son had him out to his class-day spread at
Harvard, and then he had his son on his hands.  The son made various
unsuccessful provisions for himself, and still continued upon his
father's hands, to their common dissatisfaction, though it was chiefly
the younger who repined.  He had the Roman nose and the energy without
the opportunity, and at one of the reversions his father said to him,
"You ought not to have that nose, Tom; then you would do very well.
You would go and travel, as I did."

LAPHAM and his wife continued talking after he had quelled the
disturbance in his daughters' room overhead; and their talk was not
altogether of the new house.

"I tell you," he said, "if I had that fellow in the business with me I
would make a man of him."

"Well, Silas Lapham," returned his wife, "I do believe you've got
mineral paint on the brain.  Do you suppose a fellow like young Corey,
brought up the way he's been, would touch mineral paint with a ten-foot
pole?"

"Why not?" haughtily asked the Colonel.

"Well, if you don't know already, there's no use trying to tell you."

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

completion: Tom returns home to find his father, Bromfield Corey, home alone while his wife and daughters are at the seashore for the summer. They discuss Tom's desire to do something. Bromfield suggests marriage, but Tom does not regard it as an occupation. Bromfield goes on to suggest that Tom fall in love with a rich girl. Tom does not see how a poor girl would differ from a rich girl whose parents have not been wealthy long enough to give her position. Bromfield agrees that it is the age when the quickly rich are suddenly on the same level with the Coreys. Howells relates that Bromfield was a painter who traveled to Rome, painted, and lived off his father. He made money only painting portraits, but, since he was wealthy, "It was absurd," Howells tells us, "for him to paint portraits for pay and ridiculous to paint them for nothing; so he did not paint them at all." Instead, Bromfield lived a life of seclusion, occasionally expounding on the theories of painting rather than practicing them. The chapter ends with a few words between Mr. and Mrs. Lapham concerning Tom. "If I had that fellow in the business with me, I would make a man of him," Silas says. "Do you suppose a fellow like young Corey, brought up the way he's been, would touch mineral paint with a ten-foot pole?" Mrs. Lapham jeers. "Why not?" Silas haughtily replies.


prompt:
Chapter: THE Coreys had always had a house at Nahant, but after letting it for a
season or two they found they could get on without it, and sold it at
the son's instance, who foresaw that if things went on as they were
going, the family would be straitened to the point of changing their
mode of life altogether.  They began to be of the people of whom it was
said that they stayed in town very late; and when the ladies did go
away, it was for a brief summering in this place and that.  The father
remained at home altogether; and the son joined them in the intervals
of his enterprises, which occurred only too often.

At Bar Harbour, where he now went to find them, after his winter in
Texas, he confessed to his mother that there seemed no very good
opening there for him.  He might do as well as Loring Stanton, but he
doubted if Stanton was doing very well.  Then he mentioned the new
project which he had been thinking over.  She did not deny that there
was something in it, but she could not think of any young man who had
gone into such a business as that, and it appeared to her that he might
as well go into a patent medicine or a stove-polish.

"There was one of his hideous advertisements," she said, "painted on a
reef that we saw as we came down."

Corey smiled.  "Well, I suppose, if it was in a good state of
preservation, that is proof positive of the efficacy of the paint on
the hulls of vessels."

"It's very distasteful to me, Tom," said his mother; and if there was
something else in her mind, she did not speak more plainly of it than
to add: "It's not only the kind of business, but the kind of people you
would be mixed up with."

"I thought you didn't find them so very bad," suggested Corey.

"I hadn't seen them in Nankeen Square then."

"You can see them on the water side of Beacon Street when you go back."

Then he told of his encounter with the Lapham family in their new
house.  At the end his mother merely said, "It is getting very common
down there," and she did not try to oppose anything further to his
scheme.

The young man went to see Colonel Lapham shortly after his return to
Boston.  He paid his visit at Lapham's office, and if he had studied
simplicity in his summer dress he could not have presented himself in a
figure more to the mind of a practical man.  His hands and neck still
kept the brown of the Texan suns and winds, and he looked as
business-like as Lapham himself.

He spoke up promptly and briskly in the outer office, and caused the
pretty girl to look away from her copying at him.  "Is Mr. Lapham in?"
he asked; and after that moment for reflection which an array of
book-keepers so addressed likes to give the inquirer, a head was lifted
from a ledger and nodded toward the inner office.

Lapham had recognised the voice, and he was standing, in considerable
perplexity, to receive Corey, when the young man opened his painted
glass door.  It was a hot afternoon, and Lapham was in his shirt
sleeves.  Scarcely a trace of the boastful hospitality with which he
had welcomed Corey to his house a few days before lingered in his
present address.  He looked at the young man's face, as if he expected
him to despatch whatever unimaginable affair he had come upon.

"Won't you sit down? How are you? You'll excuse me," he added, in brief
allusion to the shirt-sleeves. "I'm about roasted."

Corey laughed.  "I wish you'd let me take off MY coat."

"Why, TAKE it off!" cried the Colonel, with instant pleasure.  There is
something in human nature which causes the man in his shirt-sleeves to
wish all other men to appear in the same deshabille.

"I will, if you ask me after I've talked with you two minutes," said
the young fellow, companionably pulling up the chair offered him toward
the desk where Lapham had again seated himself.  "But perhaps you
haven't got two minutes to give me?"

"Oh yes, I have," said the Colonel.  "I was just going to knock off.  I
can give you twenty, and then I shall have fifteen minutes to catch the
boat."

"All right," said Corey.  "I want you to take me into the mineral paint
business."

The Colonel sat dumb.  He twisted his thick neck, and looked round at
the door to see if it was shut.  He would not have liked to have any of
those fellows outside hear him, but there is no saying what sum of
money he would not have given if his wife had been there to hear what
Corey had just said.

"I suppose," continued the young man, "I could have got several people
whose names you know to back my industry and sobriety, and say a word
for my business capacity.  But I thought I wouldn't trouble anybody for
certificates till I found whether there was a chance, or the ghost of
one, of your wanting me.  So I came straight to you."

Lapham gathered himself together as well as he could.  He had not yet
forgiven Corey for Mrs. Lapham's insinuation that he would feel himself
too good for the mineral paint business; and though he was dispersed by
that astounding shot at first, he was not going to let any one even
hypothetically despise his paint with impunity.  "How do you think I am
going to take you on?" They took on hands at the works; and Lapham put
it as if Corey were a hand coming to him for employment.  Whether he
satisfied himself by this or not, he reddened a little after he had
said it.

Corey answered, ignorant of the offence: "I haven't a very clear idea,
I'm afraid; but I've been looking a little into the matter from the
outside."

"I hope you hain't been paying any attention to that fellow's stuff in
the Events?" Lapham interrupted.  Since Bartley's interview had
appeared, Lapham had regarded it with very mixed feelings.  At first it
gave him a glow of secret pleasure, blended with doubt as to how his
wife would like the use Bartley had made of her in it.  But she had not
seemed to notice it much, and Lapham had experienced the gratitude of
the man who escapes.  Then his girls had begun to make fun of it; and
though he did not mind Penelope's jokes much, he did not like to see
that Irene's gentility was wounded.  Business friends met him with the
kind of knowing smile about it that implied their sense of the
fraudulent character of its praise--the smile of men who had been there
and who knew how it was themselves.  Lapham had his misgivings as to
how his clerks and underlings looked at it; he treated them with
stately severity for a while after it came out, and he ended by feeling
rather sore about it.  He took it for granted that everybody had read
it.

"I don't know what you mean," replied Corey, "I don't see the Events
regularly."

"Oh, it was nothing.  They sent a fellow down here to interview me, and
he got everything about as twisted as he could."

"I believe they always do," said Corey.  "I hadn't seen it.  Perhaps it
came out before I got home."

"Perhaps it did."

"My notion of making myself useful to you was based on a hint I got
from one of your own circulars."

Lapham was proud of those circulars; he thought they read very well.
"What was that?"

"I could put a little capital into the business," said Corey, with the
tentative accent of a man who chances a thing.  "I've got a little
money, but I didn't imagine you cared for anything of that kind."

"No, sir, I don't," returned the Colonel bluntly.  "I've had one
partner, and one's enough."

"Yes," assented the young man, who doubtless had his own ideas as to
eventualities--or perhaps rather had the vague hopes of youth.  "I
didn't come to propose a partnership.  But I see that you are
introducing your paint into the foreign markets, and there I really
thought I might be of use to you, and to myself too."

"How?" asked the Colonel scantly.

"Well, I know two or three languages pretty well.  I know French, and I
know German, and I've got a pretty fair sprinkling of Spanish."

"You mean that you can talk them?" asked the Colonel, with the mingled
awe and slight that such a man feels for such accomplishments.  "Yes;
and I can write an intelligible letter in either of them."

Lapham rubbed his nose.  "It's easy enough to get all the letters we
want translated."

"Well," pursued Corey, not showing his discouragement if he felt any,
"I know the countries where you want to introduce this paint of yours.
I've been there.  I've been in Germany and France and I've been in
South America and Mexico; I've been in Italy, of course.  I believe I
could go to any of those countries and place it to advantage."

Lapham had listened with a trace of persuasion in his face, but now he
shook his head.

"It's placing itself as fast as there's any call for it.  It wouldn't
pay us to send anybody out to look after it.  Your salary and expenses
would eat up about all we should make on it."

"Yes," returned the young man intrepidly, "if you had to pay me any
salary and expenses."

"You don't propose to work for nothing?"

"I propose to work for a commission." The Colonel was beginning to
shake his head again, but Corey hurried on.  "I haven't come to you
without making some inquiries about the paint, and I know how it stands
with those who know best.  I believe in it."

Lapham lifted his head and looked at the young man, deeply moved.

"It's the best paint in God's universe," he said with the solemnity of
prayer.

"It's the best in the market," said Corey; and he repeated, "I believe
in it."

"You believe in it," began the Colonel, and then he stopped.  If there
had really been any purchasing power in money, a year's income would
have bought Mrs. Lapham's instant presence.  He warmed and softened to
the young man in every way, not only because he must do so to any one
who believed in his paint, but because he had done this innocent person
the wrong of listening to a defamation of his instinct and good sense,
and had been willing to see him suffer for a purely supposititious
offence.

Corey rose.

"You mustn't let me outstay my twenty minutes," he said, taking out his
watch.  "I don't expect you to give a decided answer on the spot.  All
that I ask is that you'll consider my proposition."

"Don't hurry," said Lapham.  "Sit still! I want to tell you about this
paint," he added, in a voice husky with the feeling that his hearer
could not divine.  "I want to tell you ALL about it."

"I could walk with you to the boat," suggested the young man.

"Never mind the boat! I can take the next one.  Look here!" The Colonel
pulled open a drawer, as Corey sat down again, and took out a
photograph of the locality of the mine.  "Here's where we get it.  This
photograph don't half do the place justice," he said, as if the
imperfect art had slighted the features of a beloved face.  "It's one
of the sightliest places in the country, and here's the very spot "--he
covered it with his huge forefinger--"where my father found that paint,
more than forty--years--ago. Yes, sir!"

He went on, and told the story in unsparing detail, while his chance
for the boat passed unheeded, and the clerks in the outer office hung
up their linen office coats and put on their seersucker or flannel
street coats.  The young lady went too, and nobody was left but the
porter, who made from time to time a noisy demonstration of fastening a
distant blind, or putting something in place.  At last the Colonel
roused himself from the autobiographical delight of the history of his
paint.  "Well, sir, that's the story."

"It's an interesting story," said Corey, with a long breath, as they
rose together, and Lapham put on his coat.

"That's what it is," said the Colonel.  "Well!" he added, "I don't see
but what we've got to have another talk about this thing.  It's a
surprise to me, and I don't see exactly how you're going to make it
pay."

"I'm willing to take the chances," answered Corey.  "As I said, I
believe in it.  I should try South America first.  I should try Chili."

"Look here!" said Lapham, with his watch in his hand.  "I like to get
things over.  We've just got time for the six o'clock boat.  Why don't
you come down with me to Nantasket? I can give you a bed as well as
not.  And then we can finish up."

The impatience of youth in Corey responded to the impatience of
temperament in his elder.  "Why, I don't see why I shouldn't," he
allowed himself to say.  "I confess I should like to have it finished
up myself, if it could be finished up in the right way."

"Well, we'll see.  Dennis!" Lapham called to the remote porter, and the
man came.  "Want to send any word home?" he asked Corey.

"No; my father and I go and come as we like, without keeping account of
each other.  If I don't come home, he knows that I'm not there.  That's
all."

"Well, that's convenient.  You'll find you can't do that when you're
married.  Never mind, Dennis," said the Colonel.

He had time to buy two newspapers on the wharf before he jumped on
board the steam-boat with Corey.  "Just made it," he said; "and that's
what I like to do.  I can't stand it to be aboard much more than a
minute before she shoves out." He gave one of the newspapers to Corey
as he spoke, and set him the example of catching up a camp-stool on
their way to that point on the boat which his experience had taught him
was the best.  He opened his paper at once and began to run over its
news, while the young man watched the spectacular recession of the
city, and was vaguely conscious of the people about him, and of the gay
life of the water round the boat.  The air freshened; the craft thinned
in number; they met larger sail, lagging slowly inward in the afternoon
light; the islands of the bay waxed and waned as the steamer approached
and left them behind.

"I hate to see them stirring up those Southern fellows again," said the
Colonel, speaking into the paper on his lap.  "Seems to me it's time to
let those old issues go."

"Yes," said the young man.  "What are they doing now?"

"Oh, stirring up the Confederate brigadiers in Congress.  I don't like
it.  Seems to me, if our party hain't got any other stock-in-trade, we
better shut up shop altogether." Lapham went on, as he scanned his
newspaper, to give his ideas of public questions, in a fragmentary way,
while Corey listened patiently, and waited for him to come back to
business.  He folded up his paper at last, and stuffed it into his coat
pocket.  "There's one thing I always make it a rule to do," he said,
"and that is to give my mind a complete rest from business while I'm
going down on the boat.  I like to get the fresh air all through me,
soul and body.  I believe a man can give his mind a rest, just the same
as he can give his legs a rest, or his back.  All he's got to do is to
use his will-power. Why, I suppose, if I hadn't adopted some such rule,
with the strain I've had on me for the last ten years, I should 'a'
been a dead man long ago.  That's the reason I like a horse.  You've
got to give your mind to the horse; you can't help it, unless you want
to break your neck; but a boat's different, and there you got to use
your will-power.  You got to take your mind right up and put it where
you want it.  I make it a rule to read the paper on the boat----Hold
on!" he interrupted himself to prevent Corey from paying his fare to
the man who had come round for it.  "I've got tickets.  And when I get
through the paper, I try to get somebody to talk to, or I watch the
people.  It's an astonishing thing to me where they all come from.
I've been riding up and down on these boats for six or seven years, and
I don't know but very few of the faces I see on board.  Seems to be a
perfectly fresh lot every time.  Well, of course! Town's full of
strangers in the summer season, anyway, and folks keep coming down from
the country.  They think it's a great thing to get down to the beach,
and they've all heard of the electric light on the water, and they want
to see it.  But you take faces now! The astonishing thing to me is not
what a face tells, but what it don't tell.  When you think of what a
man is, or a woman is, and what most of 'em have been through before
they get to be thirty, it seems as if their experience would burn right
through.  But it don't. I like to watch the couples, and try to make
out which are engaged, or going to be, and which are married, or better
be.  But half the time I can't make any sort of guess.  Of course,
where they're young and kittenish, you can tell; but where they're
anyways on, you can't.  Heigh?"

"Yes, I think you're right," said Corey, not perfectly reconciled to
philosophy in the place of business, but accepting it as he must.

"Well," said the Colonel, "I don't suppose it was meant we should know
what was in each other's minds.  It would take a man out of his own
hands.  As long as he's in his own hands, there's some hopes of his
doing something with himself; but if a fellow has been found out--even
if he hasn't been found out to be so very bad--it's pretty much all up
with him.  No, sir.  I don't want to know people through and through."

The greater part of the crowd on board--and, of course, the boat was
crowded--looked as if they might not only be easily but safely known.
There was little style and no distinction among them; they were people
who were going down to the beach for the fun or the relief of it, and
were able to afford it.  In face they were commonplace, with nothing
but the American poetry of vivid purpose to light them up, where they
did not wholly lack fire.  But they were nearly all shrewd and
friendly-looking, with an apparent readiness for the humorous intimacy
native to us all.  The women were dandified in dress, according to
their means and taste, and the men differed from each other in degrees
of indifference to it.  To a straw-hatted population, such as ours is
in summer, no sort of personal dignity is possible.  We have not even
the power over observers which comes from the fantasticality of an
Englishman when he discards the conventional dress.  In our straw hats
and our serge or flannel sacks we are no more imposing than a crowd of
boys.

"Some day," said Lapham, rising as the boat drew near the wharf of the
final landing, "there's going to be an awful accident on these boats.
Just look at that jam."

He meant the people thickly packed on the pier, and under strong
restraint of locks and gates, to prevent them from rushing on board the
boat and possessing her for the return trip before she had landed her
Nantasket passengers.

"Overload 'em every time," he continued, with a sort of dry, impersonal
concern at the impending calamity, as if it could not possibly include
him.  "They take about twice as many as they ought to carry, and about
ten times as many as they could save if anything happened.  Yes, sir,
it's bound to come.  Hello! There's my girl!" He took out his folded
newspaper and waved it toward a group of phaetons and barouches drawn
up on the pier a little apart from the pack of people, and a lady in
one of them answered with a flourish of her parasol.

When he had made his way with his guest through the crowd, she began to
speak to her father before she noticed Corey.  "Well, Colonel, you've
improved your last chance.  We've been coming to every boat since four
o'clock,--or Jerry has,--and I told mother that I would come myself
once, and see if I couldn't fetch you; and if I failed, you could walk
next time.  You're getting perfectly spoiled."

The Colonel enjoyed letting her scold him to the end before he said,
with a twinkle of pride in his guest and satisfaction in her probably
being able to hold her own against any discomfiture, "I've brought Mr.
Corey down for the night with me, and I was showing him things all the
way, and it took time."

The young fellow was at the side of the open beach-wagon, making a
quick bow, and Penelope Lapham was cozily drawling, "Oh, how do you do,
Mr. Corey?" before the Colonel had finished his explanation.

"Get right in there, alongside of Miss Lapham, Mr. Corey," he said,
pulling himself up into the place beside the driver.  "No, no," he had
added quickly, at some signs of polite protest in the young man, "I
don't give up the best place to anybody.  Jerry, suppose you let me
have hold of the leathers a minute."

This was his way of taking the reins from the driver; and in half the
time he specified, he had skilfully turned the vehicle on the pier,
among the crooked lines and groups of foot-passengers, and was spinning
up the road toward the stretch of verandaed hotels and restaurants in
the sand along the shore.  "Pretty gay down here," he said, indicating
all this with a turn of his whip, as he left it behind him.  "But I've
got about sick of hotels; and this summer I made up my mind that I'd
take a cottage.  Well, Pen, how are the folks?" He looked half-way
round for her answer, and with the eye thus brought to bear upon her he
was able to give her a wink of supreme content.  The Colonel, with no
sort of ulterior design, and nothing but his triumph over Mrs. Lapham
definitely in his mind, was feeling, as he would have said, about right.

The girl smiled a daughter's amusement at her father's boyishness.  "I
don't think there's much change since morning.  Did Irene have a
headache when you left?"

"No," said the Colonel.

"Well, then, there's that to report."

"Pshaw!" said the Colonel with vexation in his tone.

"I'm sorry Miss Irene isn't well," said Corey politely.

"I think she must have got it from walking too long on the beach.  The
air is so cool here that you forget how hot the sun is."

"Yes, that's true," assented Corey.

"A good night's rest will make it all right," suggested the Colonel,
without looking round.  "But you girls have got to look out."

"If you're fond of walking," said Corey, "I suppose you find the beach
a temptation."

"Oh, it isn't so much that," returned the girl.  "You keep walking on
and on because it's so smooth and straight before you.  We've been here
so often that we know it all by heart--just how it looks at high tide,
and how it looks at low tide, and how it looks after a storm.  We're as
well acquainted with the crabs and stranded jelly-fish as we are with
the children digging in the sand and the people sitting under
umbrellas.  I think they're always the same, all of them."

The Colonel left the talk to the young people.  When he spoke next it
was to say, "Well, here we are!" and he turned from the highway and
drove up in front of a brown cottage with a vermilion roof, and a group
of geraniums clutching the rock that cropped up in the loop formed by
the road.  It was treeless and bare all round, and the ocean,
unnecessarily vast, weltered away a little more than a stone's-cast
from the cottage.  A hospitable smell of supper filled the air, and
Mrs. Lapham was on the veranda, with that demand in her eyes for her
belated husband's excuses, which she was obliged to check on her tongue
at sight of Corey.

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

completion: Tom Corey visits his mother at Bar Harbor to tell her that he is thinking of going into the Lapham paint business. Like her husband, Mrs. Corey objects to Lapham's defacing the countryside with his advertisements. "There was one of his hideous advertisements painted on a reef that we saw as we came down," she says. Despite his mother's objections to this "common" man, Tom visits Lapham and offers to take over the selling of paint in foreign countries with his knowledge of French, German, and Spanish. He offers to sell on a commission, and Lapham decides to talk over the matter, taking Tom to his summer home. During the boat trip, Lapham says he likes to rest his mind by reading his newspaper and looking at the people, whose faces always seem fresh to him.


prompt:
Chapter: THE exultant Colonel swung himself lightly down from his seat.  "I've
brought Mr. Corey with me," he nonchalantly explained.

Mrs. Lapham made their guest welcome, and the Colonel showed him to his
room, briefly assuring himself that there was nothing wanting there.
Then he went to wash his own hands, carelessly ignoring the eagerness
with which his wife pursued him to their chamber.

"What gave Irene a headache?" he asked, making himself a fine lather
for his hairy paws.

"Never you mind Irene," promptly retorted his wife.  "How came he to
come? Did you press him? If you DID, I'll never forgive you, Silas!"

The Colonel laughed, and his wife shook him by the shoulder to make him
laugh lower.  "'Sh!" she whispered.  "Do you want him to hear EVERY
thing? DID you urge him?"

The Colonel laughed the more.  He was going to get all the good out of
this.  "No, I didn't urge him.  Seemed to want to come."

"I don't believe it.  Where did you meet him?"

"At the office."

"What office?"

"Mine."

"Nonsense! What was he doing there?"

"Oh, nothing much."

"What did he come for?" "Come for? Oh! he SAID he wanted to go into the
mineral paint business."

Mrs. Lapham dropped into a chair, and watched his bulk shaken with
smothered laughter.  "Silas Lapham," she gasped, "if you try to get off
any more of those things on me----"

The Colonel applied himself to the towel.  "Had a notion he could work
it in South America.  I don't know what he's up to."

"Never mind!" cried his wife.  "I'll get even with you YET."

"So I told him he had better come down and talk it over," continued the
Colonel, in well-affected simplicity.  "I knew he wouldn't touch it
with a ten-foot pole."

"Go on!" threatened Mrs. Lapham.

"Right thing to do, wa'n't it?"

A tap was heard at the door, and Mrs. Lapham answered it.  A maid
announced supper.  "Very well," she said, "come to tea now.  But I'll
make you pay for this, Silas."

Penelope had gone to her sister's room as soon as she entered the house.

"Is your head any better, 'Rene?" she asked.

"Yes, a little," came a voice from the pillows.  "But I shall not come
to tea.  I don't want anything.  If I keep still, I shall be all right
by morning."

"Well, I'm sorry," said the elder sister.  "He's come down with father."

"He hasn't! Who?" cried Irene, starting up in simultaneous denial and
demand.

"Oh, well, if you say he hasn't, what's the use of my telling you who?"

"Oh, how can you treat me so!" moaned the sufferer.  "What do you mean,
Pen?"

"I guess I'd better not tell you," said Penelope, watching her like a
cat playing with a mouse.  "If you're not coming to tea, it would just
excite you for nothing."

The mouse moaned and writhed upon the bed.

"Oh, I wouldn't treat YOU so!"

The cat seated herself across the room, and asked quietly--

"Well, what could you do if it WAS Mr. Corey? You couldn't come to tea,
you say.  But HE'LL excuse you.  I've told him you had a headache.
Why, of course you can't come! It would be too barefaced. But you
needn't be troubled, Irene; I'll do my best to make the time pass
pleasantly for him." Here the cat gave a low titter, and the mouse
girded itself up with a momentary courage and self-respect.

"I should think you would be ashamed to come here and tease me so."

"I don't see why you shouldn't believe me," argued Penelope.  "Why
shouldn't he come down with father, if father asked him? and he'd be
sure to if he thought of it.  I don't see any p'ints about that frog
that's any better than any other frog."

The sense of her sister's helplessness was too much for the tease; she
broke down in a fit of smothered laughter, which convinced her victim
that it was nothing but an ill-timed joke.

"Well, Pen, I wouldn't use you so," she whimpered.

Penelope threw herself on the bed beside her.

"Oh, poor Irene! He IS here.  It's a solemn fact." And she caressed and
soothed her sister, while she choked with laughter.  "You must get up
and come out.  I don't know what brought him here, but here he is."

"It's too late now," said Irene desolately.  Then she added, with a
wilder despair: "What a fool I was to take that walk!"

"Well," coaxed her sister, "come out and get some tea.  The tea will do
you good."

"No, no; I can't come.  But send me a cup here."

"Yes, and then perhaps you can see him later in the evening."

"I shall not see him at all."

An hour after Penelope came back to her sister's room and found her
before her glass.  "You might as well have kept still, and been well by
morning, 'Rene," she said.  "As soon as we were done father said,
'Well, Mr. Corey and I have got to talk over a little matter of
business, and we'll excuse you, ladies.' He looked at mother in a way
that I guess was pretty hard to bear.  'Rene, you ought to have heard
the Colonel swelling at supper.  It would have made you feel that all
he said the other day was nothing."

Mrs. Lapham suddenly opened the door.

"Now, see here, Pen," she said, as she closed it behind her, "I've had
just as much as I can stand from your father, and if you don't tell me
this instant what it all means----"

She left the consequences to imagination, and Penelope replied with her
mock soberness--

"Well, the Colonel does seem to be on his high horse, ma'am. But you
mustn't ask me what his business with Mr. Corey is, for I don't know.
All that I know is that I met them at the landing, and that they
conversed all the way down--on literary topics."

"Nonsense! What do you think it is?"

"Well, if you want my candid opinion, I think this talk about business
is nothing but a blind.  It seems a pity Irene shouldn't have been up
to receive him," she added.

Irene cast a mute look of imploring at her mother, who was too much
preoccupied to afford her the protection it asked.

"Your father said he wanted to go into the business with him."

Irene's look changed to a stare of astonishment and mystification, but
Penelope preserved her imperturbability.

"Well, it's a lucrative business, I believe."

"Well, I don't believe a word of it!" cried Mrs. Lapham.  "And so I
told your father."

"Did it seem to convince him?" inquired Penelope.

Her mother did not reply.  "I know one thing," she said.  "He's got to
tell me every word, or there'll be no sleep for him THIS night."

"Well, ma'am," said Penelope, breaking down in one of her queer laughs,
"I shouldn't be a bit surprised if you were right."

"Go on and dress, Irene," ordered her mother, "and then you and Pen
come out into the parlour.  They can have just two hours for business,
and then we must all be there to receive him.  You haven't got headache
enough to hurt you."

"Oh, it's all gone now," said the girl.

At the end of the limit she had given the Colonel, Mrs. Lapham looked
into the dining-room, which she found blue with his smoke.

"I think you gentlemen will find the parlour pleasanter now, and we can
give it up to you."

"Oh no, you needn't," said her husband.  "We've got about through."
Corey was already standing, and Lapham rose too.  "I guess we can join
the ladies now.  We can leave that little point till to-morrow."

Both of the young ladies were in the parlour when Corey entered with
their father, and both were frankly indifferent to the few books and
the many newspapers scattered about on the table where the large lamp
was placed.  But after Corey had greeted Irene he glanced at the novel
under his eye, and said, in the dearth that sometimes befalls people at
such times: "I see you're reading Middlemarch.  Do you like George
Eliot?"

"Who?" asked the girl.

Penelope interposed.  "I don't believe Irene's read it yet.  I've just
got it out of the library; I heard so much talk about it.  I wish she
would let you find out a little about the people for yourself," she
added.  But here her father struck in--

"I can't get the time for books.  It's as much as I can do to keep up
with the newspapers; and when night comes, I'm tired, and I'd rather go
out to the theatre, or a lecture, if they've got a good stereopticon to
give you views of the places.  But I guess we all like a play better
than 'most anything else.  I want something that'll make me laugh.  I
don't believe in tragedy.  I think there's enough of that in real life
without putting it on the stage.  Seen 'Joshua Whitcomb'?"

The whole family joined in the discussion, and it appeared that they
all had their opinions of the plays and actors.  Mrs. Lapham brought
the talk back to literature.  "I guess Penelope does most of our
reading."

"Now, mother, you're not going to put it all on me!" said the girl, in
comic protest.

Her mother laughed, and then added, with a sigh: "I used to like to get
hold of a good book when I was a girl; but we weren't allowed to read
many novels in those days.  My mother called them all LIES.  And I
guess she wasn't so very far wrong about some of them."

"They're certainly fictions," said Corey, smiling.

"Well, we do buy a good many books, first and last," said the Colonel,
who probably had in mind the costly volumes which they presented to one
another on birthdays and holidays.  "But I get about all the reading I
want in the newspapers.  And when the girls want a novel, I tell 'em to
get it out of the library.  That's what the library's for.  Phew!" he
panted, blowing away the whole unprofitable subject.  "How close you
women-folks like to keep a room! You go down to the sea-side or up to
the mountains for a change of air, and then you cork yourselves into a
room so tight you don't have any air at all.  Here! You girls get on
your bonnets, and go and show Mr. Corey the view of the hotels from the
rocks."

Corey said that he should be delighted.  The girls exchanged looks with
each other, and then with their mother.  Irene curved her pretty chin
in comment upon her father's incorrigibility, and Penelope made a droll
mouth, but the Colonel remained serenely content with his finesse.  "I
got 'em out of the way," he said, as soon as they were gone, and before
his wife had time to fall upon him, "because I've got through my talk
with him, and now I want to talk with YOU.  It's just as I said,
Persis; he wants to go into the business with me."

"It's lucky for you," said his wife, meaning that now he would not be
made to suffer for attempting to hoax her.  But she was too intensely
interested to pursue that matter further.  "What in the world do you
suppose he means by it?"

"Well, I should judge by his talk that he had been trying a good many
different things since he left college, and he hain't found just the
thing he likes--or the thing that likes him.  It ain't so easy.  And
now he's got an idea that he can take hold of the paint and push it in
other countries--push it in Mexico and push it in South America.  He's
a splendid Spanish scholar,"--this was Lapham's version of Corey's
modest claim to a smattering of the language,--"and he's been among the
natives enough to know their ways.  And he believes in the paint,"
added the Colonel.

"I guess he believes in something else besides the paint," said Mrs.
Lapham.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, Silas Lapham, if you can't see NOW that he's after Irene, I
don't know what ever CAN open your eyes.  That's all."

The Colonel pretended to give the idea silent consideration, as if it
had not occurred to him before.  "Well, then, all I've got to say is,
that he's going a good way round.  I don't say you're wrong, but if
it's Irene, I don't see why he should want to go off to South America
to get her.  And that's what he proposes to do.  I guess there's some
paint about it too, Persis.  He says he believes in it,"--the Colonel
devoutly lowered his voice,--"and he's willing to take the agency on
his own account down there, and run it for a commission on what he can
sell."

"Of course! He isn't going to take hold of it any way so as to feel
beholden to you.  He's got too much pride for that."

"He ain't going to take hold of it at all, if he don't mean paint in
the first place and Irene afterward.  I don't object to him, as I know,
either way, but the two things won't mix; and I don't propose he shall
pull the wool over my eyes--or anybody else.  But, as far as heard
from, up to date, he means paint first, last, and all the time.  At any
rate, I'm going to take him on that basis.  He's got some pretty good
ideas about it, and he's been stirred up by this talk, just now, about
getting our manufactures into the foreign markets.  There's an
overstock in everything, and we've got to get rid of it, or we've got
to shut down till the home demand begins again.  We've had two or three
such flurries before now, and they didn't amount to much.  They say we
can't extend our commerce under the high tariff system we've got now,
because there ain't any sort of reciprocity on our side,--we want to
have the other fellows show all the reciprocity,--and the English have
got the advantage of us every time.  I don't know whether it's so or
not; but I don't see why it should apply to my paint.  Anyway, he wants
to try it, and I've about made up my mind to let him.  Of course I
ain't going to let him take all the risk.  I believe in the paint TOO,
and I shall pay his expenses anyway."

"So you want another partner after all?" Mrs. Lapham could not forbear
saying.

"Yes, if that's your idea of a partner.  It isn't mine," returned her
husband dryly.

"Well, if you've made up your mind, Si, I suppose you're ready for
advice," said Mrs. Lapham.

The Colonel enjoyed this.  "Yes, I am.  What have you got to say
against it?"

"I don't know as I've got anything.  I'm satisfied if you are."

"Well?"

"When is he going to start for South America?"

"I shall take him into the office a while.  He'll get off some time in
the winter.  But he's got to know the business first."

"Oh, indeed! Are you going to take him to board in the family?"

"What are you after, Persis?"

"Oh, nothing! I presume he will feel free to visit in the family, even
if he don't board with us."

"I presume he will."

"And if he don't use his privileges, do you think he'll be a fit person
to manage your paint in South America?"

The Colonel reddened consciously.  "I'm not taking him on that basis."

"Oh yes, you are! You may pretend you ain't to yourself, but you
mustn't pretend so to me.  Because I know you."

The Colonel laughed.  "Pshaw!" he said.

Mrs. Lapham continued: "I don't see any harm in hoping that he'll take
a fancy to her.  But if you really think it won't do to mix the two
things, I advise you not to take Mr. Corey into the business.  It will
do all very well if he DOES take a fancy to her; but if he don't, you
know how you'll feel about it.  And I know you well enough, Silas, to
know that you can't do him justice if that happens.  And I don't think
it's right you should take this step unless you're pretty sure.  I can
see that you've set your heart on this thing."

"I haven't set my heart on it at all," protested Lapham.

"And if you can't bring it about, you're going to feel unhappy over
it," pursued his wife, regardless of his protest.

"Oh, very well," he said.  "If you know more about what's in my mind
than I do, there's no use arguing, as I can see."

He got up, to carry off his consciousness, and sauntered out of the
door on to his piazza.  He could see the young people down on the
rocks, and his heart swelled in his breast.  He had always said that he
did not care what a man's family was, but the presence of young Corey
as an applicant to him for employment, as his guest, as the possible
suitor of his daughter, was one of the sweetest flavours that he had
yet tasted in his success.  He knew who the Coreys were very well, and,
in his simple, brutal way, he had long hated their name as a symbol of
splendour which, unless he should live to see at least three
generations of his descendants gilded with mineral paint, he could not
hope to realise in his own.  He was acquainted in a business way with
the tradition of old Phillips Corey, and he had heard a great many
things about the Corey who had spent his youth abroad and his father's
money everywhere, and done nothing but say smart things.  Lapham could
not see the smartness of some of them which had been repeated to him.
Once he had encountered the fellow, and it seemed to Lapham that the
tall, slim, white-moustached man, with the slight stoop, was everything
that was offensively aristocratic.  He had bristled up aggressively at
the name when his wife told how she had made the acquaintance of the
fellow's family the summer before, and he had treated the notion of
young Corey's caring for Irene with the contempt which such a
ridiculous superstition deserved.  He had made up his mind about young
Corey beforehand; yet when he met him he felt an instant liking for
him, which he frankly acknowledged, and he had begun to assume the
burden of his wife's superstition, of which she seemed now ready to
accuse him of being the inventor.

Nothing had moved his thick imagination like this day's events since
the girl who taught him spelling and grammar in the school at
Lumberville had said she would have him for her husband.

The dark figures, stationary on the rocks, began to move, and he could
see that they were coming toward the house.  He went indoors, so as not
to appear to have been watching them.

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

completion: Lapham is bursting with pride when he tells his wife that Tom has come to him for a job. This completely contradicts her estimation of Tom the night before. Until now, Lapham had a definite dislike for the offensively aristocratic Coreys. He had treated the notion of Tom's affection for Irene with the contempt which such a ridiculous superstition deserved, Howells mentions. Yet, now as he watches the young people together, he is ready to accuse himself of being the inventor of a romance between the instantly liked Tom Corey and his beautiful daughter, Irene.