In the mean time he felt the need of some present solace, such as only unqualified worship could give him; a cruel wish to feel his power in some direction where, even if it were resisted, it could not be overcome, drove him on.  That a woman who was to Beaton the embodiment of artificiality should intimate, however innocently—­the innocence made it all the worse—­that he was less honest than Wetmore, whom he knew to be so much more honest, was something that must be retaliated somewhere before his self-respect could be restored.  It was only five o’clock, and he went on up-town to the Dryfooses’, though he had been there only the night before last.  He asked for the ladies, and Mrs. Mandel received him.

“The young ladies are down-town shopping,” she said, “but I am very glad of the opportunity of seeing you alone, Mr. Beaton.  You know I lived several years in Europe.”

“Yes,” said Beaton, wondering what that could have to do with her pleasure in seeing him alone.  “I believe so?” He involuntarily gave his words the questioning inflection.

“You have lived abroad, too, and so you won’t find what I am going to ask so strange.  Mr. Beaton, why do you come so much to this house?” Mrs. Mandel bent forward with an aspect of ladylike interest and smiled.

Beaton frowned.  “Why do I come so much?”

“Yes.”

“Why do I—­Excuse me, Mrs. Mandel, but will you allow me to ask why you ask?”

“Oh, certainly.  There’s no reason why I shouldn’t say, for I wish you to be very frank with me.  I ask because there are two young ladies in this house; and, in a certain way, I have to take the place of a mother to them.  I needn’t explain why; you know all the people here, and you understand.  I have nothing to say about them, but I should not be speaking to you now if they were not all rather helpless people.  They do not know the world they have come to live in here, and they cannot help themselves or one another.  But you do know it, Mr. Beaton, and I am sure you know just how much or how little you mean by coming here.  You are either interested in one of these young girls or you are not.  If you are, I have nothing more to say.  If you are not—­” Mrs. Mandel continued to smile, but the smile had grown more perfunctory, and it had an icy gleam.

Beaton looked at her with surprise that he gravely kept to himself.  He had always regarded her as a social nullity, with a kind of pity, to be sure, as a civilized person living among such people as the Dryfooses, but not without a humorous contempt; he had thought of her as Mandel, and sometimes as Old Mandel, though she was not half a score of years his senior, and was still well on the sunny side of forty.  He reddened, and then turned an angry pallor.  “Excuse me again, Mrs. Mandel.  Do you ask this from the young ladies?”