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."

 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."

