Her mother laughed at her simplicity.  “No, when it begins once, nothing can stop it.  But you’ve really known each other a good while, and for the last six weeks at least you’ve known you own mind about him pretty clearly.  It’s a pity you couldn’t have known it before.”

“Yes, that’s what he says.  He says it was such a waste of time.  Oh, everything he says is perfectly fascinating!”

Her mother laughed and laughed again.

“What is it, mamma?  Are you laughing at me?”

“Oh no.  What an idea!”

“He couldn’t seem to understand why I didn’t say Yes the first time, if I meant it.”  She looked down dreamily at her hands in her lap, and then she said, with a blush and a start, “They’re very queer, don’t you think?”

“Who?”

“Young men.”

“Oh, very.”

“Yes,” Alice went on musingly.  “Their minds are so different.  Everything they say and do is so unexpected, and yet it seems to be just right.”

Mrs. Pasmer asked herself if this single-mindedness was to go on for ever, but she had not the heart to treat it with her natural levity.  Probably it was what charmed Mavering with the child.  Mrs. Pasmer had the firm belief that Mavering was not single-minded, and she respected him for it.  She would not spoil her daughter’s perfect trust and hope by any of the cynical suggestions of her own dark wisdom, but entered into her mood, as such women are able to do, and flattered out of her every detail of the morning’s history.  This was a feat which Mrs. Pasmer enjoyed for its own sake, and it fully satisfied the curiosity which she naturally felt to know all.  She did not comment upon many of the particulars; she opened her eyes a little at the notion of her daughter sitting for two or three hours and talking with a young man in the galleries of the Museum, and she asked if anybody they knew had come in.  When she heard that there were only strangers, and very few of them, she said nothing; and she had the same consolation in regard to the walking back and forth in the Garden.  She was so full of potential escapades herself, so apt to let herself go at times, that the fact of Alice’s innocent self-forgetfulness rather satisfied a need of her mother’s nature; she exulted in it when she learned that there were only nurses and children in the Garden.

“And so you think you won’t take up art this winter?” she said, when, in the process of her cross-examination, Alice had left the sofa and got as far as the door, with her hat in her hand and her sacque on her arm.

“No.”

“And the Sisters of St. James—­you won’t join them either?”

The girl escaped from the room.

“Alice!  Alice!” her mother called after her; she came back.  You haven’t told me how he happened to be there.”

“Oh, that was the most amusing part of it.  He had gone there to keep an appointment with two ladies from Portland.  They were to take him up in their carriage and drive out to Cambridge, and when he saw me he forgot all about them.”