soberly crinkled grey-threaded brown hair and her very appropriate bonnet.  A bonnet, she said, was much more than half the battle after forty, and it was now quite after forty with Mrs. Pasmer; but she was very well dressed otherwise.  Mr. Mavering went on to say, with a deliberation that seemed an element of his unknown dignity, whatever it might be, “A number of the young fellows together can give a much finer spread, and make more of the day, in a place like this, than we used to do in our rooms.”

“Ah, then you’re a Harvard man too!” said Mrs. Primer to herself, with surprise, which she kept to herself, and she said to Mavering:  “Oh yes, indeed!  It’s altogether better.  Aren’t they nice looking fellows?” she said, putting up her glass to look at the promenaders.

“Yes,” Mr. Mavering assented.  “I suppose,” he added, out of the consciousness of his own relation to the affair—­“I suppose you’ve a son somewhere here?”

“Oh dear, no!” cried Mrs. Primer, with a mingling, superhuman, but for her of ironical deprecation and derision.  “Only a daughter, Mr. Mavering.”

At this feat of Mrs. Pasmer’s, Mr. Mavering looked at her with question as to her precise intention, and ended by repeating, hopelessly, “Only a daughter?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a sigh of the same irony, “only a poor, despised young girl, Mr. Mavering.”

“You speak,” said Mr. Mavering, beginning to catch on a little, “as if it were a misfortune,” and his, dignity broke up into a smile that had its queer fascination.

“Why, isn’t it?” asked Mrs. Pasmer.

“Well, I shouldn’t have thought so.”

“Then you don’t believe that all that old-fashioned chivalry and devotion have gone out?  You don’t think the young men are all spoiled nowadays, and expect the young ladies to offer them attentions?”

“No,” said Mr. Mavering slowly, as if recovering from the shock of the novel ideas.  “Do you?”

“Oh, I’m such a stranger in Boston—­I’ve lived abroad so long—­that I don’t know.  One hears all kinds of things.  But I’m so glad you’re not one of those—­pessimists!”

“Well,” said Mr. Mavering, still thoughtfully, “I don’t know that I can speak by the card exactly.  I can’t say how it is now.  I haven’t been at a Class Day spread since my own Class Day; I haven’t even been at Commencement more than once or twice.  But in my time here we didn’t expect the young ladies to show us attentions; at any rate, we didn’t wait for them to do it.  We were very glad, to be asked to meet them, and we thought it an honour if the young ladies would let us talk or dance with them, or take them to picnics.  I don’t think that any of them could complain of want of attention.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, “that’s what I preached, that’s what I prophesied, when I brought my daughter home from Europe.  I told her that a girl’s life in America was one long triumph; but they say now that girls have more attention in London even than in Cambridge.  One hears such dreadful things!”