“Where do we dine to-night?” I asked Evan, as he was giving unmistakable signs of “meditation,” and I heard by the footsteps overhead that Miss Lavinia was stirring.

“At the Art and Nature Club.  You can dress as much or as little as you please, and we can get a table in a cosey corner, and afterward sit about upstairs for an hour, for there will be music to-night.  I have asked Martin Cortright to join us.  It has its interesting side, this—­a transplanted Englishman married to a country girl introducing old bred-in-the-bone New Yorkers to New Manhattan.”

When I go to town my costuming consists merely in change of waists, as street and public conveyances alike are a perpetual menace to one’s best petticoats, so in a few moments we were on our way uptown.

We did not tell Miss Lavinia where we were going until we were almost there, and she was quite upset, as dining at the two or three hotels and other places affected by the Whirlpoolers implies a careful and special toilet to run the gantlet of society reporters, for every one is somebody in one sense, though in another “nobody is really any one.”

She was reassured, however, the moment that she drew her high-backed oak chair up to the table that Evan had reserved in a little alcove near the fireplace.  Before the oysters arrived, and Martin Cortright appeared to fill the fourth seat, she had completely relaxed, and was beaming at the brass jugs and pottery beakers ranged along a shelf above the dark wainscot, and at the general company, while the warmth from the fire logs gave her really a very pretty colour, and she began to question Martin as to who all these people, indicating the rapidly filling-up tables, were.  But Martin gazed serenely about and confessed he did not know.

The people came singly, or in twos and threes, men and women together or alone, a fact at which Miss Lavinia greatly marvelled.  Greetings were exchanged, and there was much visiting from table to table, as if the footing was that of a private house.

“Nice-looking people,” said Miss Lavinia, meditatively scrutinizing the room through her lorgnette without a trace of snobbery in her voice or attitude, yet I was aware that she was mentally drawing herself apart.  “Some of them quite unusual, but there is not a face here that I ever saw in society.  Are they members of the Club?  Where do they come from?  Where do they live?”

Evan’s lips shut together a moment before he answered, and I saw a certain steely gleam in his eye that I always regarded as a danger signal.

“Perhaps they might ask the same questions about you,” he answered; “though they are not likely to, their world is so much broader.  They are men and women chiefly having an inspiration, an art or craft, or some vital reason for living besides the mere fact that it has become a habit.  They are none of them rich enough to be disagreeable or feel that they own the right to trample on their fellows.  They all live either in or near New York, as best suits their means, vocations, and temperaments.  Men and women together, they represent, as well as a gathering can, the hopeful spirit of our New York of New Manhattan that does not grovel to mere money power.”