As Wilford's question concerning his sire had been the last one asked, so it was the last one answered, his mother parting his dark hair with her jeweled hand, and telling him first that with the exception of a cold taken at the park on Saturday afternoon when she drove out to try the new carriage, she was in usual health; second, that Jamie was very well, but impatient for his uncle's return; third, that Juno was spending a few days in Orange, and that Bell had gone to pass the night with her particular friend, Mrs. Meredith, the bluest, most bookish woman in New York.
"Your father," the lady added, "has not yet returned, but as the dinner is ready I think we will not wait."
She touched a silver bell beside her, and ordering dinner to be sent up at once, went on to ask her son concerning his journey, and the people he had met. But Wilford, though intending to tell her all, for he kept nothing from his mother, would wait till after dinner. So, offering her his arm, he led her out to where the table was spread, widely different from the table prepared for Katy Lennox away among the Silverton hills, for where at the farmhouse there had been only the homely wares common to the country, with Aunt Betsy's onions served in a bowl, there was here the finest of damask, the choicest of china, the costliest of cut-glass, and the heaviest of silver, with the well-trained waiter gliding in and out, himself the very personification of strict table etiquette, such as the Barlows had never dreamed about. There was no fricasseed chicken here, or flaky crust, with pickled beans and apple sauce; no custard pie with strawberries and rich, sweet cream, poured from a blue earthen pitcher, but there were soups, and fish, and roasted meats, and dishes with French names and taste, and desert elaborately gotten up and served with the utmost precision, and wines, with fruit and colored cloth, and handsome finger bowl; and Mrs. Cameron presiding over all, with the ladylike decorum so much a part of herself, her soft, glossy silk of brown, with her rich lace and diamond pin seeming in keeping with herself and her surroundings. And opposite to her Wilford sat, a tall, dark, handsome man of thirty or thereabouts--a man whose polished manners betokened at once a perfect knowledge of the world, and whose face to a close observer indicated how little satisfaction he had as yet found in that world. He had tried its pleasures, drinking the cup of freedom and happiness to its very dregs, and though he thought he liked it, he often found himself dissatisfied and reaching after something which should make life more real, more worth the living for. He had traveled all over Europe twice, had visited every spot worth visiting in his own country, had been a frequenter of every fashionable resort in New York, from the skating pond to the theatres, had been admitted as a lawyer, had opened an office on Broadway, acquiring some reputation in his profession, had looked at more than twenty girls with the view of making them his wife, and found them as he believed, alike fickle, selfish, artificial and hollow-hearted. In short, while thinking far more of family, and accomplishments, and style, than he ought, he was yet heartily tired of the butterflies who flitted so constantly around him, offering to be caught if he would but stretch out his hand to catch them. This he would not do, and disgusted with the world as he saw it in New York, he had gone to the Far West, roaming a while amid the solitude of the broad prairies, and finding there much that was soothing to him, but not discovering the fulfillment of the great want he was craving, until, coming back to Canandaigua, he met with Katy Lennox. He had smiled wearily when asked by Mrs. Woodhull to go with her to the examination then in progress at the seminary. There was nothing there to interest him, he thought, as Euclid and algebra, French and rhetoric were bygone things, while young school misses in braided hair and pantalets were shockingly insipid. Still, to be polite to Mrs. Woodhull, a childless, fashionable woman, who patronized Canandaigua generally, and Katy Lennox in particular, he consented to go, and soon found himself in the crowded room, the cynosure of many eyes as the whisper ran around that the fine-looking man with Mrs. Woodhull was the Wilford Cameron from New York, and brother to the proud, dashing Juno Cameron, who once spent a few weeks in town, Wilford knew they were talking about him, but he did not care, and assuming as easy an attitude as possible, he leaned hack in his chair, yawning indolently, and wishing the time away, until the class in algebra was called and Katy Lennox came tripping on to the stage, a pale blue ribbon in her golden hair and her simple dress of white relieved by no ornament except the cluster of wild flowers fastened in her belt and at her graceful throat. But Katy needed no ornaments to make her more beautiful than she was at the moment when, with glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes, modestly cast down for a moment as she took her place, and then as modestly uplifted to her teacher's face, she first burst upon Wilford's vision, a creature of rare, bewitching beauty, such as he had never dreamed about.