“Mrs. Kenton, my mother’s got a bad headache, and I’ve come to ask a favor of you.  She can’t use her ticket for to-night, and I want you to let Miss Ellen come with me.  Will you?”

Bittridge had constituted himself an old friend of the whole family from the renewal of their acquaintance, and Mrs. Kenton was now made aware of his being her peculiar favorite, in spite of the instant repulsion she felt, she was not averse to what he proposed.  Her fear was that Ellen would be so, or that she could keep from influencing her to this test of her real feeling for Bittridge.  “I will ask her, Mr. Bittridge,” she said, with a severity which was a preliminary of the impartiality she meant to use with Ellen.

“Well, that’s right,” he answered, and while she went to the girl’s room he remained examining the details of the drawing-room decorations in easy security, which Mrs. Kenton justified on her return.

“Ellen will be ready to go with you, Mr. Bittridge.”

“Well, that’s good,” said the young man, and while he talked on she sat wondering at a nature which all modesty and deference seemed left out of, though he had sometimes given evidence of his intellectual appreciation of these things.  He talked to Mrs. Kenton not only as if they were in every-wise equal, but as if they were of the same age, almost of the same sex.

Ellen came in, cloaked and hatted, with her delicate face excited in prospect of the adventure; and her mother saw Bittridge look at her with more tenderness than she had ever seen in him before.  “I’ll take good care of her, Mrs. Kenton,” he said, and for the first time she felt herself relent a little towards him.

A minute after they were gone Lottie bounced into the room, followed by Boyne.

“Momma!” she shouted, “Ellen isn’t going to the theatre with that fellow?”

“Yes, she is.”

“And you let her, momma!  Without a chaperon?”

Boyne’s face had mirrored the indignation in his sister’s, but at this unprecedented burst of conventionality he forgot their momentary alliance.  “Well, you’re a pretty one to talk about chaperons!  Walking all over Tuskingum with fellows at night, and going buggy-riding with everybody, and out rowing, and here fairly begging Jim Plumpton to come down to the steamer and see you off again!”

“Shut up!” Lottie violently returned, “or I’ll tell momma how you’ve been behaving with Rita Plumpton yourself.”

“Well, tell!” Boyne defied her.

“Oh, it don’t matter what a brat of a boy says or does, anyway,” said Lottie.  “But I think Ellen is disgracing the family.  Everybody in the hotel is laughing at that wiggy old Mrs. Bittridge, with her wobbly eyes, and they can see that he’s just as green!  The Plumptons have been laughing so about them, and I told them that we had nothing to do with them at home, and had fairly turned Bittridge out of the house, but he had impudence enough for anything; and now to find Ellen going off to the theatre with him alone!”