of her long forms, and redeemed them from censure by the very frankness with which it confessed them; nobody could have said that Margaret Vance was too tall.  Her pretty little head, which she had an effect of choosing to have little in the same spirit of judicious defiance, had a good deal of reading in it; she was proud to know literary and artistic fashions as well as society fashions.  She liked being singled out by an exterior distinction so obvious as Beaton’s, and she listened with sympathetic interest to his account of those people.  He gave their natural history reality by drawing upon his own; he reconstructed their plebeian past from the experiences of his childhood and his youth of the pre-Parisian period; and he had a pang of suicidal joy in insulting their ignorance of the world.

“What different kinds of people you meet!” said the girl at last, with an envious sigh.  Her reading had enlarged the bounds of her imagination, if not her knowledge; the novels nowadays dealt so much with very common people, and made them seem so very much more worth while than the people one met.

She said something like this to Beaton.  He answered:  “You can meet the people I’m talking of very easily, if you want to take the trouble.  It’s what they came to New York for.  I fancy it’s the great ambition of their lives to be met.”

“Oh yes,” said Miss Vance, fashionably, and looked down; then she looked up and said, intellectually:  “Don’t you think it’s a great pity?  How much better for them to have stayed where they were and what they were!”

“Then you could never have had any chance of meeting them,” said Beaton.  “I don’t suppose you intend to go out to the gas country?”

“No,” said Miss Vance, amused.  “Not that I shouldn’t like to go.”

“What a daring spirit!  You ought to be on the staff of ’Every Other Week,’” said Beaton.

“The staff-Every Other Week?  What is it?”

“The missing link; the long-felt want of a tie between the Arts and the Dollars.”  Beaton gave her a very picturesque, a very dramatic sketch of the theory, the purpose, and the personnel of the new enterprise.

Miss Vance understood too little about business of any kind to know how it differed from other enterprises of its sort.  She thought it was delightful; she thought Beaton must be glad to be part of it, though he had represented himself so bored, so injured, by Fulkerson’s insisting upon having him.  “And is it a secret?  Is it a thing not to be spoken of?”

“‘Tutt’ altro’!  Fulkerson will be enraptured to have it spoken of in society.  He would pay any reasonable bill for the advertisement.”

“What a delightful creature!  Tell him it shall all be spent in charity.”

“He would like that.  He would get two paragraphs out of the fact, and your name would go into the ‘Literary Notes’ of all the newspapers.”

“Oh, but I shouldn’t want my name used!” cried the girl, half horrified into fancying the situation real.