erscription,
"It's from Pinney. You ought to know Pinney, Miss Hilary, if you want
the _true_ artistic point of view."

"Is he a literary man?"

"Pinney? Did you read the account of the defalcation in the
_Events_--when it first came out? All illustrations?"

"_That?_ I don't wonder you didn't care to read his letter! Or perhaps
he's your friend--"

"Pinney's everybody's friend," said Maxwell, with an odd sort of relish.
"He's delightful. I should like to do Pinney. He's a type." Louise stood
frowning at the mere notion of Pinney. "He's not a bad fellow, Miss
Hilary, though he _is_ a remorseless interviewer. He would be very good
material. He is a mixture of motives, like everybody else, but he has
only one ambition: he wants to be the greatest newspaper man of his
generation. The ladies nearly always like him. He never lets five
minutes pass without speaking of his wife; he's so proud of her he can't
keep still."

"I should think she would detest him."

"She doesn't. She's quite as proud of him as he is of her. It's
affecting to witness their devotion--or it would be if it were not such
a bore."

"I can't understand you," said Louise, leaving him to his letter.

XV.

Part of Matt Hilary's protest against the status in which he found
himself a swell was to wash his face for dinner in a tin basin on the
back porch, like the farm-hands. When he was alone at the farm he had
the hands eat with him; when his mother and sister were visiting him he
pretended that the table was too small for them all at dinner and tea,
though he continued to breakfast with the hands, because the ladies were
never up at his hour; the hands knew well enough what it meant, but they
liked Matt.

Louise found him at the roller-towel, after his emblematic ablutions.
"Oh, is it so near dinner?" she asked.

"Yes. Where is Maxwell?"

"I left him up at the camp." She walked a little way out into the
ground-ivy that matted the back-yard under the scattering spruce trees.

Matt followed, and watched the homing and departing bees around the
hives in the deep, red-clovered grass near the wall.

"Those fellows will be swarming before long," he said, with a measure of
the good comradeship he felt for all living things.

"I don't see," said Louise, plucking a tender, green shoot from one of
the fir boughs overhead, "why Mr. Maxwell is so hard."

"Is he hard?" asked Matt. "Well, perhaps he is."

"He is very sneering and bitter," sa