AFTER dropping Bartley Hubbard at the Events building,
Lapham drove on down Washington Street to Nankeen Square
at the South End, where he had lived ever since the
mistaken movement of society in that direction ceased.
He had not built, but had bought very cheap of a terrified
gentleman of good extraction who discovered too late that
the South End was not the thing, and who in the eagerness
of his flight to the Back Bay threw in his carpets and
shades for almost nothing. Mrs. Lapham was even better
satisfied with their bargain than the Colonel himself,
and they had lived in Nankeen Square for twelve years.
They had seen the saplings planted in the pretty oval
round which the houses were built flourish up into sturdy
young trees, and their two little girls in the same period
had grown into young ladies; the Colonel's tough frame had
expanded into the bulk which Bartley's interview indicated;
and Mrs. Lapham, while keeping a more youthful outline,
showed the sharp print of the crow's-foot at the corners
of her motherly eyes, and certain slight creases in
her wholesome cheeks. The fact that they lived in an
unfashionable neighbourhood was something that they had
never been made to feel to their personal disadvantage,
and they had hardly known it till the summer before
this story opens, when Mrs. Lapham and her daughter
Irene had met some other Bostonians far from Boston,
who made it memorable. They were people whom chance had
brought for the time under a singular obligation to the
Lapham ladies, and they were gratefully recognisant of it.