When Mrs. Newbolt got back from Europe, Maurice was introduced to this
circle at a small dinner given to the bride and groom to indicate family
forgiveness. The guests were elderly people, who talked politics and
surgical operations, and didn't know what to say to Maurice, whose
blond hair and good-humored blue eyes made him seem distressingly young.
Nor did Maurice know what to say to them.

"I'd have gone to sleep," he told Eleanor, in exploding mirth, on their
way home, "if it hadn't been that the food was so mighty good! I kept
awake, in spite of that ancient dame who hashed up the Civil War, just
to see what the next course would be!"

It was about this time that Maurice began to show a little longing for
companionship (outside the office) of a kind which did not remember the
Civil War. His evenings of solitaire and music were awfully nice, but--

"Brown and Hastings are in college," he told his wife; "and Mort's on a
job at his father's mills. I miss 'em like the devil."

"_I_ don't want anyone but you," she said, and the tears started to her
eyes; he asked her what she was crying about, and she said, "Oh,
nothing." But of course he knew what it was, and he had to remind
himself that "she had nervous prostration"; otherwise that terrible,
hidden word "silly" would have been on his lips.

Eleanor, too, had a hidden word; it was the word "boy." It was Mrs.
Newbolt who thrust it at her, in those first days of settling down into
the new house. She had come in, waddling ponderously on her weak ankles,
to see, she said, how the young people were getting along: "At least,