and for good or for ill Miss Anderson was decided and original.  She carried her figure, which was no great things of a figure as to height, with vigorous erectness; she walked with long strides, knocking her skirts into fine eddies and tangles as she went; and she spoke in a bold, deep voice, with tones like a man in it, all the more amusing and fascinating because of the perfectly feminine eyes with which she looked at you, and the nervous, feminine gestures which she used while she spoke.

She took Mrs. Pasmer into her confidence with regard to Alice at an early stage of their acquaintance, which from the first had a patronising or rather protecting quality in it; if she owned herself less fine, she knew herself shrewder, and more capable of coping with actualities.

“I think she’s moybid, Alice is,” she said.  “She isn’t moybid in the usual sense of the word, but she expects more of herself and of the woyld generally than anybody’s going to get out of it.  She thinks she’s going to get as much as she gives, and that’s a great mistake, Mrs. Pasmer,” she said, with that peculiar liquefaction of the canine letter which the New-Yorkers alone have the trick of, and which it would be tiresome and futile to try to represent throughout her talk.

“Oh yes, I quite agree with you,” said Mrs. Pasmer, deep in her throat, and reserving deeper still her enjoyment of this early wisdom of Miss Anderson’s.

“Now, even at church—­she carries the same spirit into the church.  She doesn’t make allowance for human nature, and the church does.”

“Oh, certainly!” Mrs. Pasmer agreed.

“She isn’t like a person that’s been brought up in the church.  It’s more like the old Puritan spirit.—­Excuse me, Mrs. Pasmer!”

“Yes, indeed!  Say anything you like about the Puritans!” said Mrs. Pasmer, delighted that, as a Bostonian, she should be thought to care for them.

“I always forget that you’re a Bostonian,” Miss Anderson apologized.

“Oh, thank you!” cried Mrs. Pasmer.

“I’m going to try to make her like other girls,” continued Miss Anderson.

“Do,” said Alice’s mother, with the effect of wishing her joy of the undertaking.

“If there were a few young men about, a little over seventeen and a little under fifty, it would be easier,” said Miss Anderson thoughtfully.  “But how are you going to make a girl like other girls when there are no young men?”

“That’s very true,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with an interest which she of course did her best to make impersonal.  “Do you think there will be more, later on?”

“They will have to Huey up if they are comin’,” said Miss Anderson.  “It’s the middle of August now, and the hotel closes the second week in September.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, vaguely looking at Alice.  She had just appeared over the brow of the precipice, along whose face the arrivals and departures by the ferry-boat at Campobello obliquely ascend and descend.