He went up to Mrs. Horn for a moment’s hail and farewell, and felt himself subtly detained by her through fugitive passages of conversation with half a dozen other people.  He fancied that at crises of this strange interview Mrs. Horn was about to become confidential with him, and confidential, of all things, about her niece.  She ended by not having palpably been so.  In fact, the concern in her mind would have been difficult to impart to a young man, and after several experiments Mrs. Horn found it impossible to say that she wished Margaret could somehow be interested in lower things than those which occupied her.  She had watched with growing anxiety the girl’s tendency to various kinds of self-devotion.  She had dark hours in which she even feared her entire withdrawal from the world in a life of good works.  Before now, girls had entered the Protestant sisterhoods, which appeal so potently to the young and generous imagination, and Margaret was of just the temperament to be influenced by them.  During the past summer she had been unhappy at her separation from the cares that had engrossed her more and more as their stay in the city drew to an end in the spring, and she had hurried her aunt back to town earlier in the fall than she would have chosen to come.  Margaret had her correspondents among the working-women whom she befriended.  Mrs. Horn was at one time alarmed to find that Margaret was actually promoting a strike of the button-hole workers.  This, of course, had its ludicrous side, in connection with a young lady in good society, and a person of even so little humor as Mrs. Horn could not help seeing it.  At the same time, she could not help foreboding the worst from it; she was afraid that Margaret’s health would give way under the strain, and that if she did not go into a sisterhood she would at least go into a decline.  She began the winter with all such counteractive measures as she could employ.  At an age when such things weary, she threw herself into the pleasures of society with the hope of dragging Margaret after her; and a sympathetic witness must have followed with compassion her course from ball to ball, from reception to reception, from parlor-reading to parlor-reading, from musicale to musicale, from play to play, from opera to opera.  She tasted, after she had practically renounced them, the bitter and the insipid flavors of fashionable amusement, in the hope that Margaret might find them sweet, and now at the end she had to own to herself that she had failed.  It was coming Lent again, and the girl had only grown thinner and more serious with the diversions that did not divert her from the baleful works of beneficence on which Mrs. Horn felt that she was throwing her youth away.  Margaret could have borne either alone, but together they were wearing her out.  She felt it a duty to undergo the pleasures her aunt appointed for her, but she could not forego the other duties in which she found her only pleasure.