Part 3

"Splendid--hope you'll ask me!"

"And I'm going to invite Satty Morrison, and Julia Grant, and Hetty Van Buren, and Maisie Smith, and the two Patterson girls, and perhaps Alicia Stewart--and we are going to have ice-cream, and lady's-fingers, and chocolate-cake, and Christmas crackers, if I can buy them this time of year--and, Papa, it's going to be a hat-party."

"Oh, a hat-party, goodness me, what's that?"

"To give away all the silly, extravagant hats I've bought--though I'll have to get two new ones to make them go round--but you won't mind that, will you?"

"No, indeed--not for a hat-party."

And next day the invitations were out.

This scandalous way of bringing up an only daughter caused many people to shake their heads.

"It'll end in a peck of trouble for Mr. Ladd some day," said the old cats, with which Carthage was as liberally stocked as any other great and flourishing American city. "Mark my words, my dear, no good can come of bringing up a girl like a wild Indian, and he'll have nobody to blame but himself if she goes headlong to the bad."

*CHAPTER II*

At twenty, Phyllis Ladd was one of the prettiest girls in Carthage. A little above medium height, slim, dark, and glowing like a rose, she moved with that charming consciousness of beauty that is in itself almost a distinction. The French and Spanish in her mother's southern blood showed itself in her slender feet and hands, in her grace, her voice, her gentle, gracious, and engaging manners. One could not long talk to her without realizing that behind those sparkling eyes there was a fine and highly-sensitive nature, whimsical, original and intrepid; and to know her well was to perceive that she was one of those women who would love with rare intensity; and whose future, for good or evil, for happiness or disaster, was irretrievably dependent on the heart.

In a dim sort of way she had the consciousness of this herself; her flirtations went no further than to dance with the same partner three or four times in the course of the same evening; and Carthage, which gave its young people a great deal of innocent liberty--and which its young people took with the greediness of children--in time got to consider her, in spite of deceptive appearances, as being cold, proud, and "exclusive." Certainly her exclusiveness drew the line at being kissed by boisterous young men, and though their company pleased and amused her, she refused to single out one of them for any special favor.

"They are all such idiots, Papa," she said plaintively. "Aren't there any real men anywhere--real men that a girl could love?"

"I'm sure I don't know," returned Mr. Ladd. "I haven't come across one I'd trust a yellow dog to, let alone my daughter. But, frankly, I'm prejudiced on the young-man question--anybody would be who has to run a railroad with them!"

"Papa," she cried, throwing her arms around his neck, and her mood changing to one of her gayest phantasies, "let's go away together, you and I, and see if we can't find him. The Quest of the Golden Young Man! There must be one somewhere, and we'll look for him in every hidy-hole in the world--in street-cars and banks, and ice-cream places, and cellars, and factories, and mountains, and ships--just you and me, with a little steamer-trunk--and we'll run across him in the unlikeliest spot--and he may be a bandit in a cave, or a wild, roystering cow-boy shooting up one of those awful little western towns--but we'll know right off that he's our Golden Young Man--and we'll take him, and put him in a crate, and bring him home in the baggage-car, and poke him with a long sharp stick till he's willing to marry me!"

The Quest of the Golden Young Man! It began sooner than Phyllis could ever have believed possible, and with a companion she would have been the last to dream of. Mr. Ladd had a married sister in Washington, the wife of a highly-placed treasury official. Mrs. Sam Fensham was a very fashionable, energetic, pushing woman, wholly absorbed in the task of pulling competitors off the social ladder, and planting her own faultless French shoes on the empty rung. Brother and sister had about as much in common as you could spread on a dime; but Robert Ladd had all the American's admiration of ability, no matter in what direction it was exercised; and Sally Fensham dearly loved her fraternal relationship to the K. B. and O.

This social strategist had volunteered one of her rare visits to Carthage under the stress of bad financial weather. Brother Bob, who regularly brightened her Christmas with a check in four figures, had some peculiarities of purse and heart that Mrs. Fensham was well acquainted with. You might dash him off a letter, slashed with underlining, and piteous in the extremity of its cri de coeur, and get nothing in reply but two pages of humorous typewriting, wanting to know why two people, without children, could not manage to scrape along in Washington on sixteen thousand dollars a year?

But Brother Bob, face to face, was a very different person. If you sat on the arm of his chair, and talked of pa and ma and the old days, and perhaps cried a little, not altogether insincerely, over faces and things long since vanished--if, indeed, under the spell of that grave, kindly brother, you somehow shed your cares into an infinite tenderness, and forgot everything save that you loved him best of any one on earth--if--but it always happened--you did not need to give another thought, to what, after all, was the real object of your visit.

In a day or two, Brother Bob would say; "Sally, just how many dollars would make you feel eighteen again, and as though you were waiting for Elmer Boyd to take you out sleighing?"

You could answer thirty-seven hundred, and get it as readily as a postage stamp; and with it a look of such honest affection, such a glisten in those fine eyes, that your words of thanks stammered a little on your tongue.

Well, here was Aunt Sally again--arm-chair--pa and ma--the old days--check--and in her restless, scheming eyes the birth of a vague idea that grew ever more and more alluring,--nothing else than to take this very pretty niece of hers back to Washington, and enhance the Fensham position by a splendid marriage. She had a vision of balls and dinner-parties, all paid for by her millionaire brother; a showy French limousine; unlimited boxes at the theater and opera; and a powerful nephew-to-be, with a name to hoist the portcullis of many a proud social stronghold, and allow the wife of a highly-placed treasury official to squeeze in. The Motts, the Glendennings, the Pastors, the Van Schaicks--the Port Arthurs of Washington society--Sarah Fensham would assail all of them, holding before her one of their cherished sons, and defying them to shoot. A fascinating prospect indeed, and one not beyond realization, considering the girl's beauty, and her father's money.

On the subject being broached to Brother Bob, it was met with a hostility only comparable to a Polar bear being robbed of its cub. The whole marriage-market business nauseated him, he declared; his daughter should never be set up on the counter to be priced and pawed over; not only would her natural refinement revolt at it, but he inconsistently and with much warmth announced that Carthage was full of splendid young men, the sons of his old associates, amongst whom Phyllis should find her husband when the time came, and a fellow worth fifty of those Washington dudes and dough-heads.

"It's all very well for you to talk," said Sally coldly, "but I should say it was more for Phyllis to decide than for you."

"She wouldn't hear of such a thing," protested Mr. Ladd heatedly. "She is a quiet, home-loving girl, and wouldn't put herself in a show-window for anything on earth."

"My house is not a show-window; and what is there immodest or wrong in her meeting the nicest men in America?"

"Besides, she wouldn't care to leave me."

Angry as she was, there was something in this remark that suddenly touched Sally Fensham. She was hard and aggressive, but her heart was not altogether withered, and under extraordinary circumstances could even be moved.

"My poor Bob," she said, holding the lapels of his coat, and looking up at him; "do you not know that Phyllis may meet a man to-day at dinner, and to-morrow at tea, and the day after drive with him for an hour in the Park--and then what's father or mother or anything in the world if she loves him? Bob, dear, just get it out of your head that you are going to keep Phyllis. When the right man comes you will no more count to her than--than that chair!--Oh, yes, of course, every girl loves her father in a way--but you have only been keeping her heart warm--and once it's set on fire--good-by! And, Bob, dear, listen, is it not common sense to let her see the right kind of young men; to sift them and weigh them a bit? Is it a marriage-market to admit none but those who are presentable and well-bred and come of nice people? Is that a show-window? No, it's giving a girl a chance to choose--the chance I wish to Heaven I'd had. We simply try to get the nicest man there is, and you are more apt to get a prize from a hundred than from six!"

"That applies just as much to Carthage as to Washington."