How could it be otherwise?  There were so many topics of conversation that we had to avoid.  Even light remarks on current news, comments that we used to make freely on the conduct of conspicuous persons, now carried condemnation that took a personal color.  The doubtful means of making money, the pace of fashionable life, the wasteful prodigality of the time, we instinctively shrank from speaking of before Margaret.  Perhaps we did her injustice.  She was never more gracious, never more anxious to please.  I fancied that there was at times something pathetic in her wistful desire for our affection and esteem.  She was always a generous girl, and I have no doubt she felt repelled at the quiet rejection of her well-meant efforts to play the Lady Bountiful.  There were moments during her brief visit when her face was very sad, but no doubt her predominant feeling escaped her in regard to the criticism quoted from somebody on Jerry Hollowell’s methods and motives.  “People are becoming very self-righteous,” she said.

My wife said to me that she was reminded of the gentle observation of Carmen Eschelle, “The people I cannot stand are those who pretend they are not wicked.”  If one does not believe in anybody his cynicism has usually a quality of contemptuous bitterness in it.  One brought up as Margaret had been could not very well come to her present view of life without a touch of this quality, but her disposition was so lovely —­perhaps there is no moral quality in a good temper—­that change of principle could not much affect it.  And then she was never more winning; perhaps her beauty had taken on a more refined quality from her illness abroad; perhaps it was that indefinable knowledge of the world, which is recognized as well in dress as in manner, which increased her attractiveness.  This was quite apart from the fact that she was not so sympathetically companionable to us as she once was, and it was this very attractiveness of the worldly sort, I fancied, that pained her aunt, and marked the separateness of their sympathies.

How could it be otherwise than that our interests should diverge?  It was a very busy summer with the Hendersons.  They were planning the New York house, which had been one of the objects of Henderson’s early ambition.  The sea-air had been prescribed for Margaret, and Henderson had built a steam-yacht, the equipment and furnishing of which had been a prolific newspaper topic.  It was greatly admired by yachtsmen for the beauty of its lines and its speed, and pages were written about its sumptuous and comfortable interior.  I never saw it, having little faith in the comfort of any structure that is not immovably reposeful, but from the descriptions it was a boudoir afloat.  In it short voyages were made during the summer all along the coast from New York to Maine, and the arrival and departure of the Henderson yacht was one of the telegraphic items we always looked for.  Carmen Eschelle was usually of the party on board, sometimes