came to Harvard. Mr. Saintsbury took a fancy to him from the start, and the boy was so fond of him that they were always insisting upon a visit; and last summer we stopped there on our way to the mountains.”
“And the sisters—do they stay there the whole year round? Are they countrified?”
“One doesn't live in the country without being countrified,” said Mrs. Saintsbury. “They're rather quiet girls, though they've been about a good deal—to Europe with friends, and to New York in the winter. They're older than Dan; they're more like their father. Are you afraid of that draught at the windows?”
“Oh no; it's delicious. And he's like the mother?”
“Yes.”
“Then it's the father who has the artistic taste—he gets that from him; and the mother who has the—”
“Temperament—yes.”
“How extremely interesting! And so he's going to be a lawyer. Why lawyer, if he's got the talent and the temperament of an artist? Does his father wish him to be a lawyer?”
“His father wishes him to be a wall-paper maker.”
“And the young man compromises on the law. I see,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “And you say he's been going into Boston a great deal? Where does he go?”
The ladies entered into this social inquiry with a zest which it would be hard to make the reader share, or perhaps to feel the importance of. It is enough that it ended in the social vindication of Dan Mavering. It would not have been enough for Mrs Pasmer that he was accepted in the best Cambridge houses; she knew of old how people were accepted in Cambridge for their intellectual brilliancy or solidity, their personal worth, and all sorts of things, without consideration of the mystical something which gives vogue in Boston.
“How superb Alice was!” Mrs. Saintsbury broke off abruptly. “She has such a beautiful manner. Such repose.”
“Repose! Yes,”
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