ge from her excess.

"Intellectually and morally," repeated Mrs. Brinkley, with the mounting
conviction which ladies seem to get from mere persistence. "I saw that
girl at Campobello; I watched her."

"I never felt that you did her justice!" cried Miss Cotton, with the
valour of a hen-sparrow. "There was an antipathy."

"There certainly wasn't a sympathy, I'm happy to say," retorted Mrs.
Brinkley. "I know her, and I know her family, root and branch. The
Pasmers are the dullest and most selfish people in the world."

"Oh, I don't think that's her character," said Miss Cotton, ruffling her
feathers defensively.

"Neither do I. She has no fixed character. No girl has. Nobody has. We
all have twenty different characters--more characters than gowns--and we
put them on and take them off just as often for different occasions.
I know you think each person is permanently this or that; but my
experience is that half the time they're the other thing."

"Then why," said Miss Cotton, winking hard, as some weak people do when
they thick they are making a point, "do you say that Alice is dull and
selfish?"

"I don't--not always, or not simply so. That's the character of the
Pasmer blood, but it's crossed with twenty different currents in her;
and from some body that the Pasmer dulness and selfishness must have
driven mad she got a crazy streak of piety; and that's got mixed up in
her again with a nonsensical ideal of duty; and everything she does she
not only thinks is right, but she thinks it's religious, and she thinks
it's unselfish."

"If you'd seen her, if you'd heard her, this morning," said Miss Cotton,
"you wouldn't say that, Mrs. Brinkley."

Mrs. Brinkley refused this with an impatient gesture. "It isn't what
she is now, or seems to be, or thinks she is. It's what she's going to
finally harden into--what's going to be her prevailing character. Now
Dan Mavering has just the faults that will make such a girl think her
own defects are virtues, because they're so different. I tell you Alice
Pasmer has neither the head nor the heart to appreciate the goodness,
the loveliness, of a fellow like Dan Mavering."

"I think she feels his sweetness fully," urged Miss Cotton. "But she
couldn't endure his uncertainty. With her the truth is first of all
things."

"Then she's a little goose. If she had the sense to know it, she would
know that he might delay and temporise and beat about the bush, but he
would be true when it was