the feminine heads at the windows, he might have heard the quaver of Miss Bessy Dicky’s voice over the club report; but he saw and heard nothing, and now he was seated in the midst of the feminine throng, and Miss Bessy Dicky’s voice quavered more, and she assumed a slightly mincing attitude.  Her thin hands trembled more, the hot, red spots on her thin cheeks deepened.  Reading the club reports before the minister was an epoch in an epochless life, but Karl von Rosen was oblivious of her except as a disturbing element rather more insistent than the others in which he was submerged.

[Illustration:  He was doomed by his own lack of thought to sit through an especially long session]

He sat straight and grave, his eyes retrospective.  He was constantly getting into awkward situations, and acquitting himself in them with marvellous dignity and grace.  Even Mrs. Sarah Joy Snyder, astute as she was, regarded him keenly, and could not for the life of her tell whether he had come premeditatedly or not.  She only discovered one thing, that poor Miss Bessy Dicky was reading at him and posing at him and trembling her hands at him, and that she was throwing it all away, for Von Rosen heard no more of her report than if he had been in China when she was reading it.  Mrs. Snyder realised that hardly anything in nature could be so totally uninteresting to the young man as the report of a woman’s club.  Inasmuch as she herself was devoted to such things, she regarded him with disapproval, although with a certain admiration.  Karl von Rosen always commanded admiration, although often of a grudging character, from women.  His utter indifference to them as women was the prime factor in this; next to that his really attractive, even distinguished, personality.  He was handsome after the fashion which usually accompanies devotion to women.  He was slight, but sinewy, with a gentle, poetical face and great black eyes, into which women were apt to project tenderness merely from their own fancy.  It seemed ridiculous and anomalous that a man of Von Rosen’s type should not be a lover of ladies, and the fact that he was most certainly not was both fascinating and exasperating.

Now Mrs. George B. Slade, magnificent matron, as she was, moreover one who had inhaled the perfume of adulation from her youth up, felt a calm malice.  She knew that he had entered her parlour after the manner of the spider and fly rhyme of her childhood; she knew that the other ladies would infer that he had come upon her invitation, and her soul was filled with one of the petty triumphs of petty Fairbridge.