nds. They declared that they had not seen each other for
twenty years, or, at any rate, not since '59. She listened while they
disputed about the exact date, and looked from time to time at Mr. Munt,
as if for some explanation of Mr. Mavering; but Munt himself, when she
saw him last, had only just begun to commend himself to society, which
had since so fully accepted him, and she had so suddenly, the moment
before, found her self hand in glove with him that she might well have
appealed to a third person for some explanation of Munt. But she was not
a woman to be troubled much by this momentary mystification, and she
was not embarrassed at all when Munt said, as if it had all been
pre-arranged, "Well, now, Mrs. Pasmer, if you'll let me leave you with
Mr. Mavering a moment, I'll go off and bring that unnatural child to
you; no use dragging you round through this crowd longer."

He made a gesture intended, in the American manner, to be at once polite
and jocose, and was gone, leaving Mrs. Pasmer a little surprised, and
Mr. Mavering in some misgiving, which he tried to overcome pressing his
jaws together two or three times without speaking. She had no trouble
in getting in the first remark. "Isn't all this charming, Mr. Mavering?"
She spoke in a deep low voice, with a caressing manner, and stood
looking up, at Mr. Mavering with one shoulder shrugged and the
other drooped, and a tasteful composition of her fan and hands and
handkerchief at her waist.

"Yes, ma'am, it is," said Mr. Mavering. He seemed to say ma'am to
her with a public or official accent, which sent Mrs. Primer's mind
fluttering forth to poise briefly at such conjectures as, "Congressman
from a country district? judge of the Common Pleas? bank president?
railroad superintendent? leading physician in a large town?--no, Mr.
Munt said Mister," and then to return to her pretty blue eyes, and to
centre there in that pseudo-respectful attention under the arch of her
neat brows and her soberly crinkled grey-threaded brown hair and her
very appropriate bonnet. A bonnet, she said, was much more than half the
battle after forty, and it was now quite after forty with Mrs. Pasmer;
but she was very well dressed otherwise. Mr. Mavering went on to say,
with a deliberation that seemed an element of his unknown dignity,
whatever it might be, "A number of the young fellows together can give a
much finer spread, and make more of the day, in a place like this, than
we used to do