llowed to mellow, to grey a little! But, newly cleaned, it stood
coldly immaculate in its yard of shaven lawn set about with clipped
shrubberies. As for her uncle, Alexina found herself applying the same
adjectives to him, shaven, immaculate, cold.

She wondered what he thought of her, but Uncle Austen never made
personal remarks.

Aunt Harriet, on joining her niece in the East early in the summer,
had looked at her consideringly. She seemed pleased.

"Why," she said, "Alexina, you are a Tennyson young person, tall and
most divinely--you are a little more intense in your colouring than is
usual with a Blair. I'm glad."

The somewhat doubtful smile on the girl's face deepened as if a sudden
radiance leaped into it. She seized her aunt's hand. "Oh," she said,
"you're very nice, Aunt Harriet."

Harriet laughed, rather pleased than not, but she still was studying
the girl. "She is impulsive and she doesn't look set," the aunt was
telling herself--was it gratefully? "perhaps she is less Blair than I
thought."

Austen Blair too, in fact, now viewed his niece with complacency--she
fulfilled the Blair requirements--but he talked of other things.

"It is the intention of your aunt and myself," he told her promptly,
"to introduce you at once to what will be your social world, for it is
well for everyone to have local attachment."

As the matter progressed it appeared that social introduction, as
Uncle Austen understood it, was largely a matter of expenditure. In
all investment it is the expected thing to place where there is
likeliest return. Therefore he scanned the invitation list earnestly.

"She can afford to do the thing as it should be done," he remarked to
Harriet.

"She? But Austen--" Harriet hesitated. "I supposed it was ours, this
affair; it seems the least--"

Austen looked at her. At first he did not comprehend, then he replied
with some asperity. "I have so far kept sentiment and business apart
in managing Alexina's affairs."

Harriet was silenced. It was becoming less and less wise to oppose
Austen. He had his own ideas about the matter. "The thing is to be
done handsomely," he set forth, "but," as qualification,
"judiciously."

Therefore he stopped an acquaintance on the street a day or two
before the affair. "Are we to have the pleasure of seeing you on
Tuesday?" he asked, even a little ostentatiously, for the young man
had neglected to accept or decline.

Austen reported the result to Harriet.