A Transaction in Hearts by Edgar Saltus — Read

Claire transplanted took root at once. It was only now and then, in a bow not from the neck but from the waist, in an intonation, in a haphazard phrase, that you divined the foreign-bred girl. A month had not spent itself before she was in possession of a list. Each day was marked by scrawls from people she had met no one knew how or when. In the evening and in the late afternoons the sitting-room of the rectory, a room which Gonfallon in the earliest awkwardness of prosperity had fitted in that lovable Latin fashion which excludes everything but the necessary and inhibits every adornment introduced for ornament's sake -- the bare tableless sitting-room, with its infrequent chairs and pedestalled lamps, was peopled with guests astonished enough to find themselves in so sedate a home. Mrs. Manhattan, on the wing from Newport to New Jersey, had happened in twice, a signal mark of favor from one as socially occupied as she. And with her, or without her, yet inevitably in her train, were other ladies of lesser note -- Miss Nevers, for instance, a young woman who had preferences for everybody and attractions for none; Miss Pickett, whom Claire had encountered in that vague region which is known as Abroad; Mrs. Usselex, a parishioner of Gonfallon's, the bride of a year, more familiarly known as Eden; the Pondirs, mère et fille, recruiting, as usual, for their musicales; Miss Raritan, with whom scandal had been busy and who ignored that scandal as only the virtuous may; the Duchesse de la Dèche, born a Wainwaring, very fetching in her widow's weeds, now courted, it was rumored, by Mr. Incoul. And with these ladies there was a contingent of men -- Dugald Maule, a young lawyer who dreamed of the bench, famous for the art with which he abandoned a sweetheart and preserved her good will; Harry Tandem, a youth of such lively taste in dress that the previous winter on asking Nicholas Manhattan to suggest a costume that he might wear to the Amsterdams' fancy-ball he had been answered, "Go as you are, Harry; you are fancy enough as it is; " George Rerick, a young man so vacuous of expression that he had been nicknamed It; Trement Yarde, Claire's fellow-passenger on the voyage over, a scion of the house of Yarde and Company, bankers; and, last and least, Alphabet Jones the novelist.

The sudden infatuation of these people for his sister-in-law was a phenomenon which Christopher Gonfallon was at a loss to explain. Everything about her, the innocence of her eyes, the purity of her lips, the atmosphere which she exhaled, everything, even to the ripple of her laugh, seemed at variance with such as they. That she should be admired was a thing which he accepted as a matter of course: she was, he had already discovered, admirable in manifold respects. But she was not a catch; the recent disasters of her father must have bespattered her not a little; she was not, never had been, and in all probability never would be, in what is colloquially known as the swim; and yet, seemingly, without an effort on her part, a bouquet of the flowers of the upper four was claiming her as its own. Truly he could not make it clear. Now and then on returning to the rectory he had loitered a second at the sitting-room door, surprised at the murmur of voices, the hum of a conversation that seemed to flutter from ear to ear, interrupted, if at all, by a laugh, or the click of a fan furled suddenly; and through it he would catch Claire's intonation, undulatory yet vibrant as a child's, and he would see her, behind the teacups, in her face the flush of the rose, in her expression the guilelessness of one too young to be aware of wrong.