It was doubtless not singular that the ladies from Merrimac Avenue shouldn’t feel they were importunate:  what was striking was that Mrs. Nettlepoint didn’t appear to suspect it.  However, she would in any case have thought it inhuman to show this—­though I could see that under the surface she was amused at everything the more expressive of the pilgrims from the South End took for granted.  I scarce know whether the attitude of the younger visitor added or not to the merit of her good nature.  Mr. Porterfield’s intended took no part in the demonstration, scarcely spoke, sat looking at the Back Bay and the lights on the long bridge.  She declined the lemonade and the other mixtures which, at Mrs. Nettlepoint’s request, I offered her, while her mother partook freely of everything and I reflected—­for I as freely drained a glass or two in which the ice tinkled—­that Mr. Jasper had better hurry back if he wished to enjoy these luxuries.

Was the effect of the young woman’s reserve meanwhile ungracious, or was it only natural that in her particular situation she shouldn’t have a flow of compliment at her command?  I noticed that Mrs. Nettlepoint looked at her often, and certainly though she was undemonstrative Miss Mavis was interesting.  The candlelight enabled me to see that though not in the very first flower of her youth she was still fresh and handsome.  Her eyes and hair were dark, her face was pale, and she held up her head as if, with its thick braids and everything else involved in it, it were an appurtenance she wasn’t ashamed of.  If her mother was excellent and common she was not common—­not at least flagrantly so—­and perhaps also not excellent.  At all events she wouldn’t be, in appearance at least, a dreary appendage; which in the case of a person “hooking on” was always something gained.  Was it because something of a romantic or pathetic interest usually attaches to a good creature who has been the victim of a “long engagement” that this young lady made an impression on me from the first—­favoured as I had been so quickly with this glimpse of her history?  I could charge her certainly with no positive appeal; she only held her tongue and smiled, and her smile corrected whatever suggestion might have forced itself upon me that the spirit within her was dead—­the spirit of that promise of which she found herself doomed to carry out the letter.

What corrected it less, I must add, was an odd recollection which gathered vividness as I listened to it—­a mental association evoked by the name of Mr. Porterfield.  Surely I had a personal impression, over-smeared and confused, of the gentleman who was waiting at Liverpool, or who presently would be, for Mrs. Nettlepoint’s protegee.  I had met him, known him, some time, somewhere, somehow, on the other side.  Wasn’t he studying something, very hard, somewhere—­probably in Paris—­ten years before, and didn’t he make extraordinarily neat drawings, linear and