ill be bad if he doesn't."

It was too soon for me to have the idea that it would be bad if he did:
that only came later. So I remarked that, not having seen him for so
many years, it was very possible I shouldn't know him.

"Well, I've not seen him for a considerable time, but I expect I shall
know him all the same."

"Oh with you it's different," I returned with harmlessly bright
significance. "Hasn't he been back since those days?"

"I don't know," she sturdily professed, "what days you mean."

"When I knew him in Paris--ages ago. He was a pupil of the Ecole des
Beaux Arts. He was studying architecture."

"Well, he's studying it still," said Grace Mavis.

"Hasn't he learned it yet?"

"I don't know what he has learned. I shall see." Then she added for the
benefit of my perhaps undue levity: "Architecture's very difficult and
he's tremendously thorough."

"Oh yes, I remember that. He was an admirable worker. But he must have
become quite a foreigner if it's so many years since he has been at
home."

She seemed to regard this proposition at first as complicated; but she
did what she could for me. "Oh he's not changeable. If he were
changeable--"

Then, however, she paused. I daresay she had been going to observe that
if he were changeable he would long ago have given her up. After an
instant she went on: "He wouldn't have stuck so to his profession. You
can't make much by it."

I sought to attenuate her rather odd maidenly grimness. "It depends on
what you call much."

"It doesn't make you rich."

"Oh of course you've got to practise it--and to practise it long."

"Yes--so Mr. Porterfield says."

Something in the way she uttered these words made me laugh--they were so
calm an implication that the gentleman in question didn't live up to his
principles. But I checked myself, asking her if she expected to remain
in Europe long--to what one might call settle.

"Well, it will be a good while if it takes me as long to come back as it
has taken me to go out."

"And I think your mother said last night that it was your first visit."

Miss Mavis, in her deliberate way, met my eyes. "Didn't mother talk!"

"It was all very interesting."

She continued to look at me. "You don't think that," she then simply
stated.

"What have I to gain then by saying it?"

"Oh men have always something to gain."

"You make me in that case feel a terrible failure! I hope at any rate
that it gives you