“Miss Minorkey,” said the fat gentleman checking a piece of pork in the middle of its mad career toward his lips, “Miss Minorkey, we should like to hear from you on this subject.”  In truth, the fat gentleman was very weary of Mr. Minorkey’s pitiful succession of diagnoses of the awful symptoms and fatal complications of which he had been cured by very allopathic doses of animal food.  So he appealed to Miss Minorkey for relief at a moment when her father had checked and choked his utterance with coffee.

Miss Minorkey was quite a different affair from her father.  She was thoroughly but not obtrusively healthy.  She had a high, white forehead, a fresh complexion, and a mouth which, if it was deficient in sweetness and warmth of expression, was also free from all bitterness and aggressiveness.  Miss Minorkey was an eminently well-educated young lady as education goes.  She was more—­she was a young lady of reading and of ideas.  She did not exactly defend Charlton’s theory in her reply, but she presented both sides of the controversy, and quoted some scientific authorities in such a way as to make it apparent that there were two sides.  This unexpected and rather judicial assistance called forth from Charlton a warm acknowledgment, his pale face flushed with modest pleasure, and as he noted the intellectuality of Miss Minorkey’s forehead he inwardly comforted himself that the only person of ideas in the whole company was not wholly against him.

Albert Charlton was far from being a “ladies’ man;” indeed, nothing was more despicable in his eyes than men who frittered away life in ladies’ company.  But this did not at all prevent him from being very human himself in his regard for ladies.  All the more that he had lived out of society all his life, did his heart flutter when he took his seat in the stage after dinner.  For Miss Minorkey’s father and the fat gentleman felt that they must have the back seat; there were two other gentlemen on the middle seat; and Albert Charlton, all unused to the presence of ladies, must needs sit on the front seat, alongside the gray traveling-dress of the intellectual Miss Minorkey, who, for her part, was not in the least bit nervous.  Young Charlton might have liked her better if she had been.

But if she was not shy, neither was she obtrusive.  When Mr. Charlton had grown weary of hearing Mr. Minorkey pity himself, and of hearing the fat gentleman boast of the excellence of the Minnesota climate, the dryness of the air, and the wonderful excess of its oxygen, and the entire absence of wintry winds, and the rapid development of the country, and when he had grown weary of discussions of investments at five per cent a month, he ventured to interrupt Miss Minorkey’s reverie by a remark to which she responded.  And he was soon in a current of delightful talk.  The young gentleman spoke with great enthusiasm; the young woman without warmth, but with a clear intellectual interest in literary subjects, that charmed her interlocutor.  I say literary subjects, though the range of the conversation was not very wide.  It was a great surprise to Charlton, however, to find in a new country a young woman so well informed.