Maria blushed.  “I don’t know,” said she; “there wasn’t any card with them.”  As she spoke she seemed to see the face of the young history teacher, Mr. Latimer, with his sparse, sandy beard, and she felt how very distasteful he was to her, even if gilded, so to speak, by roses.

“I think some enamoured boy in her class who was too shy to send his card with his floral offering was the one,” Ida said to Harry when Maria had gone out.  She laughed a softly sarcastic laugh.

Harry looked at her uneasily.

“Maria is too young to get such ideas into her head,” he said.

“My dear,” said Ida, “you forget that such ideas do not get into girls’ heads; they are born in them.”

“I presume one of the other girls sent them,” said Harry, almost angrily.

“Perhaps,” replied Ida, and again she laughed her soft, sarcastic laugh, which grated terribly on Harry.  It irritated him beyond measure that any boy should send roses to this little, delicate, fair girl of his.  For all he had spoken of her marriage, the very idea of confiding her to any other man than himself made him furious.  Especially the idea of some rough school-boy, who knew little else than to tumble about in a football game and was not his girl’s mental equal, irritated him.  He went over in his mind all the boys in her class.  The next morning, going to New York, Edwin Shaw, who had lost much of his uncouthness and had divorced himself entirely from his family in the matter of English, was on the train, and he scowled at him with such inscrutable fierceness that the boy fairly trembled.  He always bowed punctiliously to Maria’s father, and this morning Maria was with her father.  She was to have a day off:  sit in her father’s office and read a book until noon, then go to lunch with him at a French restaurant, then go to the matinee.  She wore a festive silk waist, and looked altogether lovely, the boy thought.

“Who is that great gawk of a fellow?” asked Harry of Maria.

“Edwin Shaw.  He was in my class,” replied Maria, and she blushed, for no earthly reason except that her father expected her to do so.  Young girls are sometimes very ready, even to deceit, to meet the emotional expectations of their elders.  Harry then and there made up his mind that Edwin Shaw was the sender of the basket of roses.

“He comes of a family below par, and he shows it,” he said, viciously, to Maria.  He scowled again at Edwin’s neck, which was awkwardly long above his collar, but the boy did not see it.  He sat on the opposite side of the car a seat in advance.

Harry said again to Maria, when they had left the train, and Edwin, conscious of his back, which he was straightening, was striding in front of them, what a great gawk of a fellow he was, and how he came of a family below par.  Maria assented indifferently.  She did not dream of her father’s state of mind, and, as for Edwin Shaw, he was no more to her than a set of car-steps, not so much, because the car-steps were of obvious use.