“Those young ladies?” Beaton echoed.  “Miss Leighton and—­”

“No; I have been there with my aunt’s cards already.”

“Oh yes,” said Beaton, as if he had known of it; he admired the pluck and pride with which Alma had refrained from ever mentioning the fact to him, and had kept her mother from mentioning it, which must have been difficult.

“I mean the Miss Dryfooses.  It seems really barbarous, if nobody goes near them.  We do all kinds of things, and help all kinds of people in some ways, but we let strangers remain strangers unless they know how to make their way among us.”

“The Dryfooses certainly wouldn’t know how to make their way among you,” said Beaton, with a sort of dreamy absence in his tone.

Miss Vance went on, speaking out the process of reasoning in her mind, rather than any conclusions she had reached.  “We defend ourselves by trying to believe that they must have friends of their own, or that they would think us patronizing, and wouldn’t like being made the objects of social charity; but they needn’t really suppose anything of the kind.”

“I don’t imagine they would,” said Beaton.  “I think they’d be only too happy to have you come.  But you wouldn’t know what to do with each other, indeed, Miss Vance.”

“Perhaps we shall like each other,” said the girl, bravely, “and then we shall know.  What Church are they of?”

“I don’t believe they’re of any,” said Beaton.  “The mother was brought up a Dunkard.”

“A Dunkard?”

Beaton told what he knew of the primitive sect, with its early Christian polity, its literal interpretation of Christ’s ethics, and its quaint ceremonial of foot-washing; he made something picturesque of that.  “The father is a Mammon-worshipper, pure and simple.  I suppose the young ladies go to church, but I don’t know where.  They haven’t tried to convert me.”

“I’ll tell them not to despair—­after I’ve converted them,” said Miss Vance.  “Will you let me use you as a ‘point d’appui’, Mr. Beaton?”

“Any way you like.  If you’re really going to see them, perhaps I’d better make a confession.  I left your banjo with them, after I got it put in order.”

“How very nice!  Then we have a common interest already.”

“Do you mean the banjo, or—­”

“The banjo, decidedly.  Which of them plays?”

“Neither.  But the eldest heard that the banjo was ‘all the rage,’ as the youngest says.  Perhaps you can persuade them that good works are the rage, too.”

Beaton had no very lively belief that Margaret would go to see the Dryfooses; he did so few of the things he proposed that he went upon the theory that others must be as faithless.  Still, he had a cruel amusement in figuring the possible encounter between Margaret Vance, with her intellectual elegance, her eager sympathies and generous ideals, and those girls with their rude past, their false and distorted perspective, their sordid and hungry selfishness, and their faith in the omnipotence of their father’s wealth wounded by their experience of its present social impotence.  At the bottom of his heart he sympathized with them rather than with her; he was more like them.