Jewel Weed

"I am grateful for your decision. Permit me to see you to your carriage,

Miss Madeline."

Lena, watching hungrily from her vantage post, noted Mr. Early's

obsequious courtesies, Madeline's flushed face, and drew angry

conclusions. Nevertheless, she leaned forward and bowed graciously as

Madeline drove past.

"If she should marry Mr. Early, I shouldn't feel as if I had triumphed a

bit in getting Dick away from her," she said to herself, with a bald

comprehension of her true state of mind. For Lena made up for her pose

toward others by a certain unimaginative frankness in her

self-communings.

Then, catching a glimpse of another figure, she exclaimed, "Oh, there

comes Miss Huntress!" and immediately settled herself with an air of

elegant leisure to receive her former superior. Miss Huntress was a

source of continual satisfaction to Lena, the opposite of a skeleton at

the feast, a continual reminder of present prosperity as compared with

past nonentity. To meet her gave Madame Cecropia the same thrill of

satisfaction that it still did to draw her dainty skirts around her and

step into her carriage, half hoping that some envious girl was viewing

her perfections as she had once eyed those of others. On the other hand,

Miss Huntress derived almost equal pleasure out of her acquaintance with

Lena, whose littleness she measured, and whose small successes she

looked upon with amusement, unflecked by envy. Emily Huntress was a

plodding person, with much business on hand and an earnest necessity for

earning money, and though her canons were not over fine, still she had

her standards and lived up to them. She found Lena useful as a source of

social information.

"You want to know what is going on?" inquired Mrs. Percival. "Well, of

course you know it's Lent, and there isn't anything much. But if you

will come up to my boudoir, I will look over my engagement book, and

perhaps I can help you to a paragraph or two."

The word boudoir was a sweetmeat to Lena's palate, combined, as it was,

with the knowledge that her visitor, with a sister, kept house in three

rooms.

So they went up stairs, and Lena babbled and preened herself, while Miss

Huntress frowned and pondered on the difficulties of making anything

readable out of her small kernel of information. The arrival of a cup of

tea, Miss Huntress, being a woman as well as a reporter, found

mollifying to the hardness of life.

"I see," she said with an acid little laugh, "you have the Chatterer

up here in your unholy of unholies." Her eyes fell on a small magazine

which made a speciality of besmirching the good names of the entire

country. "Everybody reads it, and everybody pretends to despise it."

"It's awfully interesting," said Lena, and she went on with a little

giggle, "I think I'll just tuck it away before my husband comes in. He

doesn't approve of it, you know. Men don't care for gossip. I think it

is perfectly wonderful what an amount of scandal it gets hold of. I

don't see how they do it. And they've such a naughty way of writing it

up, too."