Mrs. March felt her husband’s gaze following her own, and she had just time to press her finger firmly on his arm and reduce his cry of astonishment to the hoarse whisper in which he gasped, “Good gracious!  It’s the pivotal girl!”

At the same moment the girl rose with her mother, and with the young man, who had risen too, came directly toward the Marches on their way out of the place without noticing them, though Burnamy passed so near that Mrs. March could almost have touched him.

She had just strength to say, “Well, my dear!  That was the cut direct.”

She said this in order to have her husband reassure her.  “Nonsense!  He never saw us.  Why didn’t you speak to him?”

“Speak to him?  I never shall speak to him again.  No!  This is the last of Mr. Burnamy for me.  I shouldn’t have minded his not recognizing us, for, as you say, I don’t believe he saw us; but if he could go back to such a girl as that, and flirt with her, after Miss Triscoe, that’s all I wish to know of him.  Don’t you try to look him up, Basil!  I’m glad-yes, I’m glad he doesn’t know how Stoller has come to feel about him; he deserves to suffer, and I hope he’ll keep on suffering:  You were quite right, my dear—­and it shows how true your instinct is in such things (I don’t call it more than instinct)—­not to tell him what Stoller said, and I don’t want you ever should.”

She had risen in her excitement, and was making off in such haste that she would hardly give him time to pay for their tea, as she pulled him impatiently to their carriage.

At last he got a chance to say, “I don’t think I can quite promise that; my mind’s been veering round in the other direction.  I think I shall tell him.”

“What!  After you’ve seen him flirting with that girl?  Very well, then, you won’t, my dear; that’s all!  He’s behaving very basely to Agatha.”

“What’s his flirtation with all the girls in the universe to do with my duty to him?  He has a right to know what Stoller thinks.  And as to his behaving badly toward Miss Triscoe, how has he done it?  So far as you know, there is nothing whatever between them.  She either refused him outright, that last night in Carlsbad, or else she made impossible conditions with him.  Burnamy is simply consoling himself, and I don’t blame him.”

“Consoling himself with a pivotal girl!” cried Mrs. March.

“Yes, with a pivotal girl.  Her pivotality may be a nervous idiosyncrasy, or it may be the effect of tight lacing; perhaps she has to keep turning and twisting that way to get breath.  But attribute the worst motive:  say it is to make people look at her!  Well, Burnamy has a right to look with the rest; and I am not going to renounce him because he takes refuge with one pretty girl from another.  It’s what men have been doing from the beginning of time.”

“Oh, I dare say!”

“Men,” he went on, “are very delicately constituted; very peculiarly.  They have been known to seek the society of girls in general, of any girl, because some girl has made them happy; and when some girl has made them unhappy, they are still more susceptible.  Burnamy may be merely amusing himself, or he may be consoling himself; but in either case I think the pivotal girl has as much right to him as Miss Triscoe.  She had him first; and I’m all for her.”