“Mrs. Grosvenor Green!” said Mrs. March.  “Which of the ten thousand flats is it, Basil?”

“The gimcrackery,” he answered.  “In the Xenophon, you know.”

“Well, she may save herself the trouble.  I shall not see her.  Or yes—­I must.  I couldn’t go away without seeing what sort of creature could have planned that fly-away flat.  She must be a perfect—­”

“Parachute,” March suggested.

“No! anybody so light as that couldn’t come down.”

“Well, toy balloon.”

“Toy balloon will do for the present,” Mrs. March admitted.  “But I feel that naught but herself can be her parallel for volatility.”

When Mrs. Grosvenor-Green’s card came up they both descended to the hotel parlor, which March said looked like the saloon of a Moorish day-boat; not that he knew of any such craft, but the decorations were so Saracenic and the architecture so Hudson Riverish.  They found there on the grand central divan a large lady whose vast smoothness, placidity, and plumpness set at defiance all their preconceptions of Mrs. Grosvenor Green, so that Mrs. March distinctly paused with her card in her hand before venturing even tentatively to address her.  Then she was astonished at the low, calm voice in which Mrs. Green acknowledged herself, and slowly proceeded to apologize for calling.  It was not quite true that she had taken her passage for Europe, but she hoped soon to do so, and she confessed that in the mean time she was anxious to let her flat.  She was a little worn out with the care of housekeeping—­Mrs. March breathed, “Oh yes!” in the sigh with which ladies recognize one another’s martyrdom—­and Mrs. Green had business abroad, and she was going to pursue her art studies in Paris; she drew in Mr. Ilcomb’s class now, but the instruction was so much better in Paris; and as the superintendent seemed to think the price was the only objection, she had ventured to call.

“Then we didn’t deceive him in the least,” thought Mrs. March, while she answered, sweetly:  “No; we were only afraid that it would be too small for our family.  We require a good many rooms.”  She could not forego the opportunity of saying, “My husband is coming to New York to take charge of a literary periodical, and he will have to have a room to write in,” which made Mrs. Green bow to March, and made March look sheepish.  “But we did think the apartment very charming”, (It was architecturally charming, she protested to her conscience), “and we should have been so glad if we could have got into it.”  She followed this with some account of their house-hunting, amid soft murmurs of sympathy from Mrs. Green, who said that she had been through all that, and that if she could have shown her apartment to them she felt sure that she could have explained it so that they would have seen its capabilities better, Mrs. March assented to this, and Mrs. Green added that if they found nothing exactly suitable she would be glad to have them look at it again; and then Mrs. March