lways has been.
He's perfectly devoted to her; and he hurried home yesterday, though
he wanted very much to stay for Commencement. He's never away from
her longer than he can help. She's bedridden; and you can see from the
moment you enter it that it's a man's house. Daughters can't change
that, you know."

"Have you been there?" asked Mrs. Pasmer, surprised that she was getting
so much information, but eager for more. "Why, how long have you known
them, Etta?"

"Only since Dan came to Harvard. Mr. Saintsbury took a fancy to him
from the start, and the boy was so fond of him that they were always
insisting upon a visit; and last summer we stopped there on our way to
the mountains."

"And the sisters--do they stay there the whole year round? Are they
countrified?"

"One doesn't live in the country without being countrified," said Mrs.
Saintsbury. "They're rather quiet girls, though they've been about
a good deal--to Europe with friends, and to New York in the winter.
They're older than Dan; they're more like their father. Are you afraid
of that draught at the windows?"

"Oh no; it's delicious. And he's like the mother?"

"Yes."

"Then it's the father who has the artistic taste--he gets that from him;
and the mother who has the--"

"Temperament--yes."

"How extremely interesting! And so he's going to be a lawyer. Why
lawyer, if he's got the talent and the temperament of an artist? Does
his father wish him to be a lawyer?"

"His father wishes him to be a wall-paper maker."

"And the young man compromises on the law. I see," said Mrs. Pasmer.
"And you say he's been going into Boston a great deal? Where does he
go?"

The ladies entered into this social inquiry with a zest which it would
be hard to make the reader share, or perhaps to feel the importance of.
It is enough that it ended in the social vindication of Dan Mavering.
It would not have been enough for Mrs Pasmer that he was accepted in
the best Cambridge houses; she knew of old how people were accepted in
Cambridge for their intellectual brilliancy or solidity, their personal
worth, and all sorts of things, without consideration of the mystical
something which gives vogue in Boston.

"How superb Alice was!" Mrs. Saintsbury broke off abruptly. "She has
such a beautiful manner. Such repose."

"Repose! Yes," said her mother, thoughtfully. "But she's very intense.
And I don't see where she gets it. Her father has repose enough, but he
has no intensit