en making in society, and
when Alice showed her inclination for it, she felt that it was not at
all as if she had developed a taste for orthodoxy; when finally it did
not seem likely to go too far, it amused Mrs. Pasmer that her daughter
should have taken so intensely to the Anglican rite.

In the hotel it attached to her by a common interest several of
the ladies who had seen her earnestly responsive at the little Owen
chapel--ladies left to that affectional solitude which awaits long
widowhood through the death or marriage of children; and other ladies,
younger, but yet beginning to grow old with touching courage. Alice
was especially a favourite with the three or four who represented their
class and condition at the Ty'n-y Coed, and who read the best books read
there, and had the gentlest manners. There was a tacit agreement
among these ladies, who could not help seeing the difference in the
temperaments of the mother and daughter, that Mrs. Pasmer did not
understand Alice; but probably there were very few people except herself
whom Mrs. Pasmer did not understand quite well. She understood these
ladies and their compassion for Alice, and she did not in the least
resent it. She was willing that people should like Alice for any reason
they chose, if they did not go too far. With her little flutter of
futile deceits, her irreverence for every form of human worth and her
trust in a providence which had seldom failed her, she smiled at the
cult of Alice's friends, as she did at the girl's seriousness, which
also she felt herself able to keep from going too far.

While she did not object to the sympathy of these ladies, whatever
inspired it, she encouraged another intimacy which grew up
contemporaneously with theirs, and which was frankly secular and
practical, though the girl who attached herself to Alice with one of
those instant passions of girlhood was also in every exterior observance
a strict and diligent Churchwoman. The difference was through the
difference of Boston and New York in everything: the difference between
idealising and the realising tendency. The elderly and middle-aged
Boston women who liked Alice had been touched by something high yet sad
in the beauty of her face at church; the New York girl promptly owned
that she had liked her effect the first Sunday she saw her there,
and she knew in a minute she never got those things on this side; her
obeisances and genuflections throughout the service, much m