“I’m sure I don’t know, mother.  He paid her a great deal of attention, but you never can tell about men.”

“Julia Caperton told me, and, of course, she’s very intimate with George’s sister, that he went back to New York because he heard that Gabriella was engaged to Arthur.  Florrie, do you suppose she is really engaged to Arthur?”

Thus appealed to, Florrie removed the Leghorn hat from her head, and answered abstractedly:  “Jane thought so, but if she is engaged, I don’t see why she should have started to work.  I know Arthur would hate it.”

“But isn’t he too poor to marry?” inquired Mrs. Spencer, whose curiosity was as robust as her constitution.  “Haven’t you always understood that the Peytons were poor, Miss Lancaster, in spite of the lovely house they live in?”

Her large, good-humoured face, which had once been as delicate as a flower, but was now growing puffed and mottled under a plentiful layer of rice powder, became almost violently animated, while she adjusted her belt with a single effective jerk of her waist.  Though Bessie Spencer was admitted to have one of the kindest hearts in the world, she was chiefly remarkable for her unhappy faculty of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.  An inveterate, though benevolent, gossip, she would babble on for hours, reciting the private affairs of her relatives, her friends, and her neighbours.  Everybody feared her, and yet everybody was assured that “she never meant any harm.”  The secrets of the town flowed through her mind as grist flows through a mill, and though she was entirely without malice, she contrived, in the most innocent manner, to do an incalculable amount of injury.  Possessing a singularly active intelligence, and having reached middle-age without acquiring sufficient concentration to enjoy books, she directed a vigorous, if casual, understanding toward the human beings among whom she lived.  She knew everything that it was possible to know about the people who lived in Franklin Street, and yet her mind was so constituted that she never by any chance knew it correctly.  Though she was not old, she had already passed into a proverb.  To receive any statement with the remark, “You have heard that from Bessie Spencer,” was to cast doubt upon it.

“You don’t think I’m getting any stouter, do you, Miss Lancaster?” she inquired dubiously, with her hands on her hips and her eyes measuring the dimensions of her waist.  “I’m making up my mind to try one of those B. and T. corsets that Mrs. Murray is wearing.  She told me it reduced her waist at least three inches.”

“Oh, you aren’t like Mrs. Murray—­she didn’t measure a fraction under thirty inches,” replied Miss Lancaster, with her patient politeness.  Then, after a pause, which Mrs. Spencer’s nimble wit filled with a story about the amazing number of mint juleps Mrs. Murray was seen to drink at the White Sulphur Springs last summer, Florrie exclaimed eagerly: