At breakfast the party had topics enough in common to make conversation lively.  The artist was sure he should be delighted with the beauty and finish of Newport.  Miss Lamont doubted if she should enjoy it as much as the freedom and freshness of the Catskills.  Mr. King amused himself with drawing out Miss Benson on the contrast with Atlantic City.  The dining-room was full of members of the Institute, in attendance upon the annual meeting, graybearded, long-faced educators, devotees of theories and systems, known at a glance by a certain earnestness of manner and intensity of expression, middle-aged women of a resolute, intellectual countenance, and a great crowd of youthful schoolmistresses, just on the dividing line between domestic life and self-sacrifice, still full of sentiment, and still leaning perhaps more to Tennyson and Lowell than to mathematics and Old English.

“They have a curious, mingled air of primness and gayety, as if gayety were not quite proper,” the artist began.  “Some of them look downright interesting, and I’ve no doubt they are all excellent women.”

“I’ve no doubt they are all good as gold,” put in Mr. King.  “These women are the salt of New England.” (Irene looked up quickly and appreciatively at the speaker.) “No fashionable nonsense about them.  What’s in you, Forbes, to shy so at a good woman?”

“I don’t shy at a good woman—­but three hundred of them!  I don’t want all my salt in one place.  And see here—­I appeal to you, Miss Lamont —­why didn’t these girls dress simply, as they do at home, and not attempt a sort of ill-fitting finery that is in greater contrast to Newport than simplicity would be?”

“If you were a woman,” said Marion, looking demurely, not at Mr. Forbes, but at Irene, “I could explain it to you.  You don’t allow anything for sentiment and the natural desire to please, and it ought to be just pathetic to you that these girls, obeying a natural instinct, missed the expression of it a little.”

“Men are such critics,” and Irene addressed the remark to Marion, “they pretend to like intellectual women, but they can pardon anything better than an ill-fitting gown.  Better be frivolous than badly dressed.”

“Well,” stoutly insisted Forbes, “I’ll take my chance with the well-dressed ones always; I don’t believe the frumpy are the most sensible.”

“No; but you make out a prima facie case against a woman for want of taste in dress, just as you jump at the conclusion that because a woman dresses in such a way as to show she gives her mind to it she is of the right sort.  I think it’s a relief to see a convention of women devoted to other things who are not thinking of their clothes.”

“Pardon me; the point I made was that they are thinking of their clothes, and thinking erroneously.”

“Why don’t you ask leave to read a paper, Forbes, on the relation of dress to education?” asked Mr. King.

They rose from the table just as Mrs. Benson was saying that for her part she liked these girls, they were so homelike; she loved to hear them sing college songs and hymns in the parlor.  To sing the songs of the students is a wild, reckless dissipation for girls in the country.