about them or wish to know; he was perhaps too near them.  Besides, there was an embarrassment, at least on her part, concerning the Dryfooses.  She was too high-minded to blame him for having tempted her to her failure with them by his talk about them; but she was conscious of avoiding them in her talk.  She had decided not to renew the effort she had made in the spring; because she could not do them good as fellow-creatures needing food and warmth and work, and she would not try to befriend them socially; she had a horror of any such futile sentimentality.  She would have liked to account to Beaton in this way for a course which she suspected he must have heard their comments upon, but she did not quite know how to do it; she could not be sure how much or how little he cared for them.  Some tentative approaches which she made toward explanation were met with such eager disclaim of personal interest that she knew less than before what to think; and she turned the talk from the sisters to the brother, whom it seemed she still continued to meet in their common work among the poor.

“He seems very different,” she ventured.

“Oh, quite,” said Beaton.  “He’s the kind of person that you might suppose gave the Catholics a hint for the cloistral life; he’s a cloistered nature—­the nature that atones and suffers for.  But he’s awfully dull company, don’t you think?  I never can get anything out of him.”

“He’s very much in earnest.”

“Remorselessly.  We’ve got a profane and mundane creature there at the office who runs us all, and it’s shocking merely to see the contact of the tyro natures.  When Fulkerson gets to joking Dryfoos—­he likes to put his joke in the form of a pretence that Dryfoos is actuated by a selfish motive, that he has an eye to office, and is working up a political interest for himself on the East Side—­it’s something inexpressible.”

“I should think so,” said Miss Vance, with such lofty disapproval that Beaton felt himself included in it for having merely told what caused it.  He could not help saying, in natural rebellion, “Well, the man of one idea is always a little ridiculous.”

“When his idea is right?” she demanded.  “A right idea can’t be ridiculous.”

“Oh, I only said the man that held it was.  He’s flat; he has no relief, no projection.”

She seemed unable to answer, and he perceived that he had silenced her to his own, disadvantage.  It appeared to Beaton that she was becoming a little too exacting for comfort in her idealism.  He put down the cup of tea he had been tasting, and said, in his solemn staccato:  “I must go.  Good-bye!” and got instantly away from her, with an effect he had of having suddenly thought of something imperative.