his mother and he had been nearly everywhere except at home, though
mostly in England; now they had come home to see where they should go
next or whether they should stay.

"That would never suit my daughter," Mrs. Forsyth lugged in, partly
because the talk had gone on away from her family as long as she could
endure, and partly because Charlotte's indecision always amused her.
"She can't bear to choose."

"Really?" the young man said. "I don't know whether I like it or not,
but I have had to do a lot of it. You mustn't think, though, that I
chose this magnificent furniture. My father bought an Italian palace
once, and as we couldn't live in it or move it we brought the
furniture here."

"It _is_ magnificent," Mrs. Forsyth said, looking down the long
stretches of it and eying and fingering her specific throne. "I wish
my husband could see it--I don't believe he remembers it from fourteen
years ago. It looks--excuse me!--very studio."

"Is he a painter? Not Mr. Forsyth the painter?"

"Yes," Mrs. Forsyth eagerly admitted, but wondering how he should know
her name, without reflecting that a score of trunk-tags proclaimed it
and that she had acquired his by like means.

"I like his things so much," he said. "I thought his three portraits
were the best things in the Salon last year."

"Oh, you _saw_ them?" Mrs. Forsyth laughed with pleasure and pride.
"Then," as if it necessarily followed, "you must come to us some
Sunday afternoon. You'll find a number of his new portraits and some
of the subjects; they like to see themselves framed." She tried for a
card in her hand-bag, but she had none, and she said, "Have you one
of my cards, my dear?" Charlotte had, and rendered it up with a
severity lost upon her for the moment. She held it toward him. "It's
Mr. _Peter_ Bream?" she smiled upon him, and he beamed back.

"Did you remember it from our first meeting?"

In their cab Mrs. Forsyth said, "I don't know whether he's what you
call rather fresh or not, Charlotte, and I'm not sure that I've been
very wise. But he is so nice, and he looked so _glad_ to be asked."

Charlotte did not reply at once, and her silent severity came to the
surface of her mother's consciousness so painfully that it was rather
a relief to have her explode, "Mother, I will thank you not to discuss
my temperament with people."

She gave Mrs. Forsyth her chance, and her mother was so happy in being
able to say, "I won't--your _temper_, my dear," t