and he thinks we’re all just lahke he was when he was young, with all those ahdeals of chivalry and family; but, mah goodness! it’s money that cyoants no’adays in the Soath, just lahke it does everywhere else.  Ah suppose, if we could have slavery back in the fawm mah fathaw thinks it could have been brought up to, when the commercial spirit wouldn’t let it alone, it would be the best thing; but we can’t have it back, and Ah tell him we had better have the commercial spirit as the next best thing.”

Miss Woodburn went on, with sufficient loyalty and piety, to expose the difference of her own and her father’s ideals, but with what Beaton thought less reference to his own unsympathetic attention than to a knowledge finally of the personnel and materiel of ‘Every Other Week.’ and Mr. Fulkerson’s relation to the enterprise.  “You most excuse my asking so many questions, Mr. Beaton.  You know it’s all mah doing that we awe heah in New York.  Ah just told mah fathaw that if he was evah goin’ to do anything with his wrahtings, he had got to come No’th, and Ah made him come.  Ah believe he’d have stayed in the Soath all his lahfe.  And now Mr. Fulkerson wants him to let his editor see some of his wrahtings, and Ah wanted to know something aboat the magazine.  We awe a great deal excited aboat it in this hoase, you know, Mr. Beaton,” she concluded, with a look that now transferred the interest from Fulkerson to Alma.  She led the way back to the room where they were sitting, and went up to triumph over Fulkerson with Beaton’s decision about the table-cover.

Alma was left with Beaton near the piano, and he began to talk about the Dryfooses as he sat down on the piano-stool.  He said he had been giving Miss Dryfoos a lesson on the banjo; he had borrowed the banjo of Miss Vance.  Then he struck the chord he had been trying to teach Christine, and played over the air he had sung.

“How do you like that?” he asked, whirling round.

“It seems rather a disrespectful little tune, somehow,” said Alma, placidly.

Beaton rested his elbow on the corner of the piano and gazed dreamily at her.  “Your perceptions are wonderful.  It is disrespectful.  I played it, up there, because I felt disrespectful to them.”

“Do you claim that as a merit?”

“No, I state it as a fact.  How can you respect such people?”

“You might respect yourself, then,” said the girl.  “Or perhaps that wouldn’t be so easy, either.”

“No, it wouldn’t.  I like to have you say these things to me,” said Beaton, impartially.

“Well, I like to say them,” Alma returned.

“They do me good.”

“Oh, I don’t know that that was my motive.”

“There is no one like you—­no one,” said Beaton, as if apostrophizing her in her absence.  “To come from that house, with its assertions of money—­you can hear it chink; you can smell the foul old banknotes; it stifles you—­into an atmosphere like this, is like coming into another world.”