such an air of knowing everything, and not caring about anything very much; so much mutual admiration and personal satisfaction!  She liked it, and perhaps was restless because she liked it.  To be admired, to be deferred to—­was there any harm in that?  Only, if one suffers admiration today, it becomes a necessity tomorrow.  She began to feel the influence of that life which will not let one stand still for a moment.  If it is not the opera, it is a charity; if it is not a lover, it is some endowed cot in a hospital.  There must be something going on every day, every hour.

Yes, she was restless, and could not read.  She thought of Mr. Henderson.  He had called formally.  She had seen him, here and there, again and again.  He had sought her out in all companies; his face had broken into a smile when he met her; he had talked with her lightly, gayly; she remembered the sound of his voice; she had learned to know his figure in a room among a hundred; and she blushed as she remembered that she had once or twice followed him with her eyes in a throng.  He was, to be sure, nothing to her; but he was friendly; he was certainly entertaining; he was a part, somehow, of this easy-flowing life.

Miss Eschelle was announced.  Margaret begged that she would come upstairs without ceremony.  The mutual taking-in of the pretty street costume and the pretty morning toilet was the work of a moment—­the photographer has invented no machine that equals a woman’s eyes for such a purpose.

“How delightful it is! how altogether charming!” and Margaret felt that she was included with the room in this admiration.  “I told mamma that I was coming to see you this morning, even if I missed the Nestors’ luncheon.  I like to please myself sometimes.  Mamma says I’m frivolous, but do you know”—­the girls were comfortably seated by the fire, and Carmen turned her sweet face and candid eyes to her companion—­“I get dreadfully tired of all this going round and round.  No, I don’t even go to the Indigent Mothers’ Home; it’s part of the same thing, but I haven’t any gift that way.  Ah, you were reading—­that novel.”

“Yes; I was trying to read it; I intend to read it.”

“Oh, we have had it!  It’s a little past now, but it has been all the rage.  Everybody has read it; that is, I don’t know that anybody has read it, but everybody has been talking about it.  Of course somebody must have read it, to set the thing agoing.  And it has been discussed to death.  I sometimes feel as if I had changed my religion half a dozen times in a fortnight.  But I haven’t heard anything about it for a week.  We have taken up the Hindoo widows now, you know.”  And the girl laughed, as if she knew she were talking nonsense.

“And you do not read much in the city?” Margaret asked, with an answering smile.

“Yes; in the summer.  That is, some do.  There is a reading set.  I don’t know that they read much, but there is a reading set.  You know, Miss Debree, that when a book is published—­really published, as Mr. Henderson says—­you don’t need to read it.  Somehow it gets into the air and becomes common property.  Everybody hears the whole thing.  You can talk about it from a notice.  Of course there are some novels that one must read in order to understand human nature.  Do you read French?”