She could not say anything, but her mother asked, with an effort at self-denial:  “Do you think so really?  It’s one of those London things.  They have so much taste there now,” she added yielding to her own pride in the dress.

“Yes; I supposed it must be,” said Mrs. Saintsbury, “We used to come in muslins and tremendous hoops—­don’t you remember?”

“Did you look like your photographs?” asked young Mavering, over his shoulder.

“Yes; but we didn’t know it then,” said the Professor’s wife.

“Neither did we,” said the Professor.  “We supposed that there had never been anything equal to those hoops and white muslins.”

“Thank you, my dear,” said his wife, tapping him between the shoulders with her fan.  “Now don’t go any further.”

“Do you mean about our first meeting here on Class Day?” asked her husband.

“They’ll think so now,” said Mrs. Saintsbury patiently, with a playful threat of consequences in her tone.

“When I first saw the present Mrs. Saintsbury,” pursued the Professor—­it was his joking way, of describing her, as if there had been several other Mrs. Saintsburys—­“she was dancing on the green here.”

“Ah, they don’t dance on the green any more, I hear,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer.

“No, they don’t,” said the other lady; “and I think it’s just as well.  It was always a ridiculous affectation of simplicity.”

“It must have been rather public,” said young Mavering, in a low voice, to Miss Pasmer.

“It doesn’t seem as if it could ever have been in character quite,” she answered.

“We’re a thoroughly indoors people,” said the Professor.  “And it seems as if we hadn’t really begun to get well as a race till we had come in out of the weather.”

“How can you say that on a day like this?” cried Mrs. Pasmer.  “I didn’t suppose any one could be so unromantic.”

“Don’t flatter him,” cried his wife.

“Does he consider that a compliment?”

“Not personally,” he answered:  “But it’s the first duty of a Professor of Comparative Literature to be unromantic.”

“I don’t understand,” faltered Mrs. Pasmer.

“He will be happy to explain, at the greatest possible length,” said Mrs. Saintsbury.  “But you shan’t spoil our pleasure now, John.”

They all laughed, and the Professor looked proud of the wit at his expense; the American husband is so, and the public attitude of the American husband and wife toward each other is apt to be amiably satirical; their relation seems never to have lost its novelty, or to lack droll and surprising contrasts for them.

Besides these passages with her husband, Mrs. Saintsbury kept up a full flow of talk with the elder Mavering, which Mrs. Pasmer did her best to overhear, for it related largely to his son, whom, it seemed, from the father’s expressions, the Saintsburys had been especially kind to.