wife’s question of mind at a temporary phase of Alice’s development when she showed a decided inclination for a religious life.  He had apparently not observed that the girl had a pensive temperament in spite of the effect of worldly splendour which her mother contrived for her, and that this pensiveness occasionally deepened to gloom.  He had certainly never seen that in a way of her own she was very romantic.  Mrs. Pasmer had seen it, with amusement sometimes, and sometimes with anxiety, but always with the courage to believe that she could cope with it when it was necessary.

Whenever it was necessary she had all the moral courage she wanted; it seemed as if she could have it or not as she liked; and in coming home she had taken a flat instead of a house, though she had not talked with her friends three minutes without perceiving that the moment when flats had promised to assert their social equality with houses in Boston was past for ever.  There were, of course, cases in which there could be no question of them; but for the most part they were plainly regarded as makeshifts, the resorts of people of small means, or the defiances or errors of people who had lived too much abroad.  They stamped their occupants as of transitory and fluctuant character; good people might live in them, and did, as good people sometimes boarded; but they could not be regarded as forming a social base, except in rare instances.  They presented peculiar difficulties in calling, and for any sort of entertainment they were too—­not public, perhaps, but—­evident.

In spite of these objections Mrs. Pasmer took a flat in the Cavendish, and she took it furnished from people who were going abroad for a year.

X.

Mrs. Pasmer stood at the drawing-room window of this apartment, the morning after her call upon Mrs. Saintsbury, looking out on the passage of an express-wagon load of trunks through Cavendish Square, and commenting the fact with the tacit reflection that it was quite time she should be getting away from Boston too, when her daughter, who was looking out of the other window, started significantly back.

“What is it, Alice?”

“Nothing!  Mr. Mavering, I think, and that friend of his——­”

“Which friend?  But where?  Don’t look!  They will think we were watching them.  I can’t see them at all.  Which way were they going?” Mrs. Pasmer dramatised a careless unconsciousness to the square, while vividly betraying this anxiety to her daughter.

Alice walked away to the furthest part of the room.  “They are coming this way,” she said indifferently.

Before Mrs. Pasmer had time to prepare a conditional mood, adapted either to their coming that way or going some other, she heard the janitor below in colloquy with her maid in the kitchen, and then the maid came in to ask if she should say the ladies were at home.  “Oh, certainly,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a caressing politeness that anticipated the tone she meant to use with Mavering and his friend.  “Were you going, Alice?  Better stay.  It would be awkward sending out for you.  You look well enough.”