“What is the matter?” asked his aunt, looking after him.

Bessie shrugged, but she said, presently, with her lips more than her voice:  “I don’t think he feels very well.”

“Do you think he—­”

The girl frowned assent, and the meal went on to its end.  Then she and her aunt went into the large, dull library, where they passed the evenings which Bessie did not spend in some social function.  These evenings were growing rather more frequent, with her advancing years, for she was now nearly twenty-five, and there were few Seniors so old.  She was not the kind of girl to renew her youth with the Sophomores and Freshmen in the classes succeeding the class with which she had danced through college; so far as she had kept up the old relation with students, she continued it with the men who had gone into the law-school.  But she saw less and less of these without seeing more of other men, and perhaps in the last analysis she was not a favorite.  She was allowed to be fascinating, but she was not felt to be flattering, and people would rather be flattered than fascinated.  In fact, the men were mostly afraid of her; and it has been observed of girls of this kind that the men who are not afraid of them are such as they would do well to be afraid of.  Whether that was quite the case with Bessie Lynde or not, it was certain that she who was always the cleverest girl in the room, and if not the prettiest, then the most effective, had not the best men about her.  Her men were apt to be those whom the other girls called stupid or horrid, and whom it would not be easy, though it might be more just, to classify otherwise.  The other girls wondered what she could see in them; but perhaps it was not necessary that she should see anything in them, if they could see all she wished them to see, and no more, in her.

The room where tea was now brought and put before her was volumed round by the collections of her grandfather, except for the spaces filled by his portrait and that of earlier ancestors, going back to the time when Copley made masterpieces of his fellow-Bostonians.  Her aunt herself looked a family portrait of the middle period, a little anterior to her father’s, but subsequent to her great-grandfather’s.  She had a comely face, with large, smooth cheeks and prominent eyes; the edges of her decorous brown wig were combed rather near their corners, and a fitting cap palliated but did not deny the wig.  She had the quiet but rather dull look of people slightly deaf, and she had perhaps been stupefied by a life of unalloyed prosperity and propriety.  She had grown an old maid naturally, but not involuntarily, and she was without the sadness or the harshness of disappointment.  She had never known much of the world, though she had always lived in it.  She knew that it was made up of two kinds of people—­people who were like her and people who were not like her; and she had lived solely in the society of people who were