Since you would insist on revolutionizing our house, you know"-- "But, Lillie, it was to please you." "Oh, I know it! but you know I begged you not to.

Well, John, I don't think I should like to go in and settle down on Grace; perhaps, as I am here, and the sea-air and bathing strengthens me so, we may as well put it through.

I will come home as soon as the house is done." "But perhaps you would want to go with me to New York to select the furniture ?" "Oh, the artist does all that! Charlie Ferrola will give his orders to Simon & Sauls, and they will do every thing up complete.

It's the way they all do--saves lots of trouble." John went home, after three days spent in Newport, feeling that Lillie was somehow an injured fair one, and that the envious world bore down always on beauty and prosperity.
But incidentally he heard and overheard much that made him uneasy.

He heard her admired as a "bully" girl, a "fast one;" he heard of her smoking, he overheard something about "painting." The time was that John thought Lillie an embryo angel,--an angel a little bewildered and gone astray, and with wings a trifle the worse for the world's wear,--but essentially an angel of the same nature with his own revered mother.
Gradually the mercury had been falling in the tube of his estimation.
He had given up the angel; and now to himself he called her "a silly little pussy," but he did it with a smile.