a charitable deed.
Beside her, in an invalid's chair, a young girl, scarcely eighteen, of
quite another sort, pale, slight, delicate, with a lovely face and large
sentimental eyes, all nerves, the product, perhaps, of a fashionable
school, who in one season in New York, her first, had utterly broken
down into what is called nervous prostration. In striking contrast was
Miss Nettie Sumner, perhaps twenty-one, who corresponded more nearly to
what the internationalists call the American type; had evidently taken
school education as a duck takes water, and danced along in society into
apparent robustness of person and knowledge of the world. A handsome
girl, she would be a comely woman, good-natured, quick at repartee,
confining her knowledge of books to popular novels, too natural
and frank to be a flirt, an adept in all the nice slang current in
fashionable life, caught up from collegians and brokers, accustomed to
meet men in public life, in hotels, a very "jolly" companion, with a
fund of good sense that made her entirely capable of managing her own
affairs. Mr. King was at the moment conversing with still another young
lady, who had more years than the last-named-short, compact figure,
round girlish face, good, strong, dark eyes, modest in bearing,
self-possessed in manner, sensible-who made ready and incisive comments,
and seemed to have thought deeply on a large range of topics, but had
a sort of downright practicality and cool independence, with all
her femininity of bearing, that rather, puzzled her interlocutor. It
occurred to Mr. King to guess that Miss Selina Morton might be from
Boston, which she was not, but it was with a sort of shock of surprise
that he learned later that this young girl, moving about in society in
the innocent panoply of girlhood, was a young doctor, who had no doubt
looked through and through him with her keen eyes, studied him in the
light of heredity, constitutional tendencies, habits, and environment,
as a possible patient. It almost made him ill to think of it. Here were
types enough for one morning; but there was still another.

The artist had seated himself on a rock a little distance from the
house, and was trying to catch some of the figures as they appeared up
the path, and a young girl was looking over his shoulder with an amused
face, just as he was getting an elderly man in a long flowing duster,
straggling gray hair, hat on the back of his head, large iron-rimmed
spectacles, w