among the working-women whom she befriended.  Mrs. Horn was at one time alarmed to find that Margaret was actually promoting a strike of the button-hole workers.  This, of course, had its ludicrous side, in connection with a young lady in good society, and a person of even so little humor as Mrs. Horn could not help seeing it.  At the same time, she could not help foreboding the worst from it; she was afraid that Margaret’s health would give way under the strain, and that if she did not go into a sisterhood she would at least go into a decline.  She began the winter with all such counteractive measures as she could employ.  At an age when such things weary, she threw herself into the pleasures of society with the hope of dragging Margaret after her; and a sympathetic witness must have followed with compassion her course from ball to ball, from reception to reception, from parlor-reading to parlor-reading, from musicale to musicale, from play to play, from opera to opera.  She tasted, after she had practically renounced them, the bitter and the insipid flavors of fashionable amusement, in the hope that Margaret might find them sweet, and now at the end she had to own to herself that she had failed.  It was coming Lent again, and the girl had only grown thinner and more serious with the diversions that did not divert her from the baleful works of beneficence on which Mrs. Horn felt that she was throwing her youth away.  Margaret could have borne either alone, but together they were wearing her out.  She felt it a duty to undergo the pleasures her aunt appointed for her, but she could not forego the other duties in which she found her only pleasure.

She kept up her music still because she could employ it at the meetings for the entertainment, and, as she hoped, the elevation of her working-women; but she neglected the other aesthetic interests which once occupied her; and, at sight of Beaton talking with her, Mrs. Horn caught at the hope that he might somehow be turned to account in reviving Margaret’s former interest in art.  She asked him if Mr. Wetmore had his classes that winter as usual; and she said she wished Margaret could be induced to go again:  Mr. Wetmore always said that she did not draw very well, but that she had a great deal of feeling for it, and her work was interesting.  She asked, were the Leightons in town again; and she murmured a regret that she had not been able to see anything of them, without explaining why; she said she had a fancy that if Margaret knew Miss Leighton, and what she was doing, it might stimulate her, perhaps.  She supposed Miss Leighton was still going on with her art?  Beaton said, Oh yes, he believed so.

But his manner did not encourage Mrs. Horn to pursue her aims in that direction, and she said, with a sigh, she wished he still had a class; she always fancied that Margaret got more good from his instruction than from any one else’s.