“One doesn’t live in the country without being countrified,” said Mrs. Saintsbury.  “They’re rather quiet girls, though they’ve been about a good deal—­to Europe with friends, and to New York in the winter.  They’re older than Dan; they’re more like their father.  Are you afraid of that draught at the windows?”

“Oh no; it’s delicious.  And he’s like the mother?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s the father who has the artistic taste—­he gets that from him; and the mother who has the—­”

“Temperament—­yes.”

“How extremely interesting!  And so he’s going to be a lawyer.  Why lawyer, if he’s got the talent and the temperament of an artist?  Does his father wish him to be a lawyer?”

“His father wishes him to be a wall-paper maker.”

“And the young man compromises on the law.  I see,” said Mrs. Pasmer.  “And you say he’s been going into Boston a great deal?  Where does he go?”

The ladies entered into this social inquiry with a zest which it would be hard to make the reader share, or perhaps to feel the importance of.  It is enough that it ended in the social vindication of Dan Mavering.  It would not have been enough for Mrs Pasmer that he was accepted in the best Cambridge houses; she knew of old how people were accepted in Cambridge for their intellectual brilliancy or solidity, their personal worth, and all sorts of things, without consideration of the mystical something which gives vogue in Boston.

“How superb Alice was!” Mrs. Saintsbury broke off abruptly.  “She has such a beautiful manner.  Such repose.”

“Repose!  Yes,” said her mother, thoughtfully.  “But she’s very intense.  And I don’t see where she gets it.  Her father has repose enough, but he has no intensity; and I’m all intensity, and no repose.  But I’m no more like my mother than Alice is like me.”

“I think she has the Hibbins face,” said Mrs. Saintsbury.

“Oh! she’s got the Hibbins face,” said Mrs Pasmer, with a disdain of tone which she did not at all feel; the tone was mere absent-mindedness.

She was about to revert to the question of Mavering’s family, when the door-bell rang, and another visitor interrupted her talk with Mrs. Saintsbury.

IX.

Mrs. Pasmer’s husband looked a great deal older than herself, and, by operation of a well-known law of compensation, he was lean and silent, while she was plump and voluble.  He had thick eyebrows, which remained black after his hair and beard had become white, and which gave him an aspect of fierceness, expressive of nothing in his character.  It was from him that their daughter got her height, and, as Mrs. Pasmer freely owned, her distinction.