“Ah!  You or Alice!” A shade of disappointment came over her face as she dropped his hand.  But she rallied in a moment.

“Poor boy!  You ought to have a guardian.  What heroine of romance are you running after now?”

“In my new story?”

“Of course.”

“She isn’t very well defined in my mind yet.  But a lovely girl, without anything peculiar, no education to speak of, or career, fascinating in her womanhood, such as might walk out of the Bible.  Don’t you think that would be a novelty?  But it is the most difficult to do.”

“Negative.  That sort has gone out.  Philip, why don’t you take the heroine of the Mavick ball?  There is a theme.”  She was watching him shrewdly, and saw the flush in his face as he hurriedly asked,

“Did you ever see her?”

“Only at a distance.  But you must know her well enough for a literary purpose.  The reports of the ball give you the setting of the drama.”

“Did you read them?”

“I should say I did.  Most amusing.”

“Celia, don’t you think it would be an ungentlemanly thing to take a social event like that?”

“Why, you must take life as it is.  Of course you would change the details.  You could lay the scene in Philadelphia.  Nobody would suspect you then.”

Philip shook his head.  The conversation was not taking the turn that was congenial to him.  The ball seemed to him a kind of maelstrom in which all his hopes were likely to be wrecked.  And here was his old friend, the keenest-sighted woman he knew, looking upon it simply as literary material—­a ridiculous social event.  He had better change the subject.

“So the college is not open yet?”

“No, I came back because I had a new idea, and wanted time to look around.  We haven’t got quite the right idea in our city missions.  They have another side.  We need country missions.”

“Aren’t they that now?”

“No, I mean for the country.  I’ve been about a good deal all this vacation, and my ideas are confirmed.  The country towns and villages are full of young hoodlums and toughs, and all sorts of wickedness.  They could be improved by sending city boys up there—­yes, and girls of tender age.  I don’t mean the worst ones, not altogether.  The young of a certain low class growing up in the country are even worse than the same class in the city, and they lack a civility of manner which is pretty sure to exist in a city-bred person.”

“If the country is so bad, why send any more unregenerates into it?”

“How do you know that anybody is always to be unregenerate?  But I wouldn’t send thieves and imbeciles.  I would select children of some capacity, whose circumstances are against them where they are, and I am sure they would make better material than a good deal of the young generation in country villages now.  This is what I mean by a mission for the country.  We have been bending all our efforts to the reformation of the cities.  What we need to go at now is the reforming of the country.”