noticed the same thing in Miss Vance when she came to call that day; and when the young man owned that he came rather a good deal to Mrs. Horn’s house, she asked him, Well, what sort of a girl was Miss Vance, anyway, and where did he suppose she had met her brother?  The student of human nature could not say as to this, and as to Miss Vance he judged it safest to treat of the non-society side of her character, her activity in charity, her special devotion to the work among the poor on the East Side, which she personally engaged in.

“Oh, that’s where Conrad goes, too!” Mela interrupted.  “I’ll bet anything that’s where she met him.  I wisht I could tell Christine!  But I suppose she would want to kill me, if I was to speak to her now.”

The student of human nature said, politely, “Oh, shall I take you to her?”

Mela answered, “I guess you better not!” with a laugh so significant that he could not help his inferences concerning both Christine’s absorption in the person she was talking with and the habitual violence of her temper.  He made note of how Mela helplessly spoke of all her family by their names, as if he were already intimate with them; he fancied that if he could get that in skillfully, it would be a valuable color in his study; the English lord whom she should astonish with it began to form himself out of the dramatic nebulosity in his mind, and to whirl on a definite orbit in American society.  But he was puzzled to decide whether Mela’s willingness to take him into her confidence on short notice was typical or personal:  the trait of a daughter of the natural-gas millionaire, or a foible of her own.

Beaton talked with Christine the greater part of the evening that was left after the concert.  He was very grave, and took the tone of a fatherly friend; he spoke guardedly of the people present, and moderated the severity of some of Christine’s judgments of their looks and costumes.  He did this out of a sort of unreasoned allegiance to Margaret, whom he was in the mood of wishing to please by being very kind and good, as she always was.  He had the sense also of atoning by this behavior for some reckless things he had said before that to Christine; he put on a sad, reproving air with her, and gave her the feeling of being held in check.

She chafed at it, and said, glancing at Margaret in talk with her brother, “I don’t think Miss Vance is so very pretty, do you?”

“I never think whether she’s pretty or not,” said Becton, with dreamy, affectation.  “She is merely perfect.  Does she know your brother?”

“So she says.  I didn’t suppose Conrad ever went anywhere, except to tenement-houses.”

“It might have been there,” Becton suggested.  “She goes among friendless people everywhere.”

“Maybe that’s the reason she came to see us!” said Christine.

Becton looked at her with his smouldering eyes, and felt the wish to say, “Yes, it was exactly that,” but he only allowed himself to deny the possibility of any such motive in that case.  He added:  “I am so glad you know her, Miss Dryfoos.  I never met Miss Vance without feeling myself better and truer, somehow; or the wish to be so.”