But she turned the conversation at once to less personal channels.  The beauty of the country at this season seemed to offer her an inoffensive escape.  She felt that she could handle it at least with tolerable discretion.  She realized that she was not deep on the subject, but she did feel fluent.

“I suppose you take the same pride that we all do in such a beautiful country.”

Sunlight instantly shone out on Pansy’s face.  Dent was a geologist; and since she conceived herself to be on trial before Mrs. Meredith this morning, it was of the first importance that she demonstrate her sympathy and intelligent appreciation of his field of work.

“Indeed I do feel the greatest pride in it, Mrs. Meredith,” she replied.  “I study it a great deal.  But of course you know perfectly the whole formation of this region.”

Mrs. Meredith coughed with frank discouragement.

“I do not know it,” she admitted dryly.  “I suppose I ought to know it, but I do not.  I believe school-teachers understand these things.  I am afraid I am a very ignorant woman.  No one of my acquaintances is very learned.  We are not used to scholarship.”

“I know all the strata,” said Pansy.  “I tell the children stories of how the Mastodon once virtually lived in our stable, and that millions of years ago there were Pterodactyls under their bed.”

“I think it a misfortune for a young woman to have much to say to children about Pterodactyls under their bed—­is that the name?  Such things never seem to have troubled Solomon, and I believe he was reputed wise.”  She did not care for the old-fashioned reference herself, but she thought it would affect Pansy.

“The children in the public schools know things that Solomon never heard of,” said Pansy, contemptuously.

“I do not doubt it in the least, my dear.  I believe it was not his knowledge that made him rather celebrated, but his wisdom.  But I am not up in Solomon!” she admitted hastily, retreating from the subject in new dismay.

The time had arrived for Pansy to depart; but she reclined in her morocco alcove with somewhat the stiffness of a tilted bottle and somewhat the contour.  She felt extreme dissatisfaction with her visit and reluctance to terminate it.

Her idea of the difference between people in society and other people was that it hinged ornamentally upon inexhaustible and scanty knowledge.  If Mrs. Meredith was a social leader, and she herself had no social standing at all, it was mainly because that lady was publicly recognized as a learned woman, and the world had not yet found out that she herself was anything but ignorant.  Being ignorant was to her mind the quintessence of being common; and as she had undertaken this morning to prove to Dent’s mother that she was not common, she had only to prove that she was learned.  For days she had prepared for this interview with that conception of its meaning.  She had converted her mind into a kind of rapid-firing gun; she had condensed her knowledge into conversational cartridges.  No sooner had she taken up a mental position before Mrs. Meredith than the parlors resounded with light, rapid detonations of information.  That lady had but to release the poorest, most lifeless, little clay pigeon of a remark and Pansy shattered it in mid air and refixed suspicious eyes on the trap.