“Beaton modelled it on them.  But you mustn’t suppose he does everything about ‘Every Other Week’; he’d like you to.  Beaton, you haven’t come up to that cover of your first number, since.  That was the design of one of my pupils, Miss Vance—­a little girl that Beaton discovered down in New Hampshire last summer.”

“Oh yes.  And have you great hopes of her, Mr. Wetmore?”

“She seems to have more love of it and knack for it than any one of her sex I’ve seen yet.  It really looks like a case of art for art’s sake, at times.  But you can’t tell.  They’re liable to get married at any moment, you know.  Look here, Beaton, when your natural-gas man gets to the picture-buying stage in his development, just remember your old friends, will you?  You know, Miss Vance, those new fellows have their regular stages.  They never know what to do with their money, but they find out that people buy pictures, at one point.  They shut your things up in their houses where nobody comes, and after a while they overeat themselves—­they don’t know what, else to do—­and die of apoplexy, and leave your pictures to a gallery, and then they see the light.  It’s slow, but it’s pretty sure.  Well, I see Beaton isn’t going to move on, as he ought to do; and so I must.  He always was an unconventional creature.”

Wetmore went away, but Beaton remained, and he outstayed several other people who came up to speak to Miss Vance.  She was interested in everybody, and she liked the talk of these clever literary, artistic, clerical, even theatrical people, and she liked the sort of court with which they recognized her fashion as well as her cleverness; it was very pleasant to be treated intellectually as if she were one of themselves, and socially as if she was not habitually the same, but a sort of guest in Bohemia, a distinguished stranger.  If it was Arcadia rather than Bohemia, still she felt her quality of distinguished stranger.  The flattery of it touched her fancy, and not her vanity; she had very little vanity.  Beaton’s devotion made the same sort of appeal; it was not so much that she liked him as she liked being the object of his admiration.  She was a girl of genuine sympathies, intellectual rather than sentimental.  In fact, she was an intellectual person, whom qualities of the heart saved from being disagreeable, as they saved her on the other hand from being worldly or cruel in her fashionableness.  She had read a great many books, and had ideas about them, quite courageous and original ideas; she knew about pictures—­she had been in Wetmore’s class; she was fond of music; she was willing to understand even politics; in Boston she might have been agnostic, but in New York she was sincerely religious; she was very accomplished; and perhaps it was her goodness that prevented her feeling what was not best in Beaton.

“Do you think,” she said, after the retreat of one of the comers and goers left her alone with him again, “that those young ladies would like me to call on them?”