it was so late. It
must have been nearly half past seven before we got away from the
Beck Hall spread, and then by the time we had walked round the college
grounds--how extremely pretty the lanterns were, and how charming the
whole effect was!--it must have been nine before the dancing began.
Well, we owe it all to you, Etta."

"I don't know what you mean by owing. I'm always glad of an excuse for
Class Day. And it was Dan Mavering who really managed the affair."

"He was very kind," said Mrs. Pasmer, with a feeling which was chiefly
gratitude to her friend for bringing in his name so soon. Now that
it had been spoken, she felt it decorous to throw aside the outer
integument of pretense, which if it could have been entirely exfoliated
would have caused Mrs. Pasmer morally to disappear, like an onion
stripped of its successive laminae.

"What did you mean," she asked, leaning forward, with, her face averted,
"about his having the artistic temperament? Is he going to be an artist?
I should hope not." She remembered without shame that she had strongly
urged him to consider how much better it would be to be a painter than a
lawyer, in the dearth of great American painters.

"He could be a painter if he liked--up to a certain point," said Mrs.
Saintsbury. "Or he could be any one of half-a-dozen other things--his
last craze was journalism; but you know what I mean by the artistic
temperament: it's that inability to be explicit; that habit of leaving
things vague and undefined, and hoping they'll somehow come out as you
want them of themselves; that way of taking the line of beauty to get
at what you wish to do or say, and of being very finicking about little
things and lag about essentials. That's what I mean by the artistic
temperament."

"Yes; that's terrible," sighed Mrs. Pasmer, with the abstractly severe
yet personally pitying perception of one whose every word and act was
sincere and direct. "I know just what you mean. But how does it apply to
Mr. Mavering?"

"It doesn't, exactly," returned her friend. "And I'm always ashamed
when I say, or even think, anything against Dan Mavering. He's sweetness
itself. We've known him ever since he came to Harvard, and I must say
that a more constant and lovely follow I never saw. It wasn't merely
when he was a Freshman, and he had that home feeling hanging about him
still that makes all the Freshmen so appreciative of anything you do for
them; but all through the Sophomore a