“You might ask Miss Anderson,” said Mrs. Brinkley.

“Oh, do you think they tell her?”

“Not that exactly,” said Mrs. Brinkley, shaking with good-humoured pleasure in her joke.

“Her voice—­oh yes.  She and Alice are great friends, of course.”

“I should think,” said Mrs. Stamwell, the second speaker, “that Mr. Mavering would be jealous sometimes—­till he looked twice.”

“Yes,” said Miss Cotton, obliged to admit the force of the remark, but feeling that Mr. Mavering had been carried out of the field of her vision by the turn of the talk.  “I suppose,” she continued, “that he wouldn’t be so well liked by other young men as she is by other girls, do you think?”

“I don’t think, as a rule,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “that men are half so appreciative of one another as women are.  It’s most amusing to see the open scorn with which two young fellows treat each other if a pretty girl introduces them.”

All the ladies joined in the laugh with which Mrs. Brinkley herself led off.  But Miss Cotton stopped laughing first.

“Do you mean,”, she asked, “that if a gentleman were generally popular with gentlemen it would be—­”

“Because he wasn’t generally so with women?  Something like that—­if you’ll leave Mr. Mavering out of the question.  Oh, how very good of them!” she broke off, and all the ladies glanced at Mavering and Alice where they had stopped at the further end of the piazza, and were looking off.  “Now I can probably finish before they get back here again.  What I do mean, Miss Cotton, is that neither sex willingly accepts the favourites of the other.”

“Yes,” said Miss Cotton admissively.

“And all that saves Miss Pasmer is that she has not only the qualities that women like in women, but some of the qualities that men, like in them.  She’s thoroughly human.”

A little sensation, almost a murmur, not wholly of assent, went round that circle which had so nearly voted Alice a saint.

“In the first place, she likes to please men.”

“Oh!” came from the group.

“And that makes them like her—­if it doesn’t go too far, as her mother says.”

The ladies all laughed, recognising a common turn of phrase in Mrs. Pasmer.

“I should think,” said Mrs. Stamwell, “that she would believe a little in heredity if she noticed that in her daughter;” and the ladies laughed again.

“Then,” Mrs. Brinkley resumed concerning Alice, “she has a very pretty face—­an extremely pretty face; she has a tender voice, and she’s very, very graceful—­in rather an odd way; perhaps it’s only a fascinating awkwardness.  Then she dresses—­or her mother dresses her—­exquisitely.”  The ladies, with another sensation, admitted the perfect accuracy with which these points had been touched.

“That’s what men like, what they fall in love with, what Mr. Mavering’s in love with this instant.  It’s no use women’s flattering themselves that they don’t, for they do.  The rest of the virtues and graces and charms are for women.  If that serious girl could only know the silly things that that amiable simpleton is taken with in her, she’d—­”