“Girls often put on that air,” she said.  “It’s one of their ways of teasing.  But then, if the man was really very much in love, and she was only enough in love to be uncertain of herself, she might very well seem troubled.  It would be a very serious question.  Girls often don’t know what to do in such a case.”

“Yes,” said March, “I’ve often been glad that I was not a girl, on that account.  But I guess that on general principles Beaton is not more in love than she is.  I couldn’t imagine that young man being more in love with anybody, unless it was himself.  He might be more in love with himself than any one else was.”

“Well, he doesn’t interest me a great deal, and I can’t say Miss Leighton does, either.  I think she can take care of herself.  She has herself very well in hand.”

“Why so censorious?” pleaded March.  “I don’t defend her for having herself in hand; but is it a fault?”

Mrs. March did not say.  She asked, “And how does Mr. Fulkerson’s affair get on?”

“His affair?  You really think it is one?  Well, I’ve fancied so myself, and I’ve had an idea of some time asking him; Fulkerson strikes one as truly domesticable, conjugable at heart; but I’ve waited for him to speak.”

“I should think so.”

“Yes.  He’s never opened on the subject yet.  Do you know, I think Fulkerson has his moments of delicacy.”

“Moments!  He’s all delicacy in regard to women.”

“Well, perhaps so.  There is nothing in them to rouse his advertising instincts.”

IV

The Dryfoos family stayed in town till August.  Then the father went West again to look after his interests; and Mrs. Mandel took the two girls to one of the great hotels in Saratoga.  Fulkerson said that he had never seen anything like Saratoga for fashion, and Mrs. Mandel remembered that in her own young ladyhood this was so for at least some weeks of the year.  She had been too far withdrawn from fashion since her marriage to know whether it was still so or not.  In this, as in so many other matters, the Dryfoos family helplessly relied upon Fulkerson, in spite of Dryfoos’s angry determination that he should not run the family, and in spite of Christine’s doubt of his omniscience; if he did not know everything, she was aware that he knew more than herself.  She thought that they had a right to have him go with them to Saratoga, or at least go up and engage their rooms beforehand; but Fulkerson did not offer to do either, and she did not quite see her way to commanding his services.  The young ladies took what Mela called splendid dresses with them; they sat in the park of tall, slim trees which the hotel’s quadrangle enclosed, and listened to the music in the morning, or on the long piazza in the afternoon and looked at the driving in the street, or in the vast parlors by night, where all the other ladies were, and they felt that they were of the best