terfield. She hadn't encouraged me, when I
spoke to her as we were leaving Boston, to go on with the history of my
acquaintance with this gentleman; and yet now, unexpectedly, she appeared
to imply--it was doubtless one of the disparities mentioned by Mrs.
Nettlepoint--that he might be glanced at without indelicacy.

"I see--you mean by letters," I remarked.

"We won't live in a good part. I know enough to know that," she went on.

"Well, it isn't as if there were any very bad ones," I answered
reassuringly.

"Why Mr. Nettlepoint says it's regular mean."

"And to what does he apply that expression?"

She eyed me a moment as if I were elegant at her expense, but she
answered my question. "Up there in the Batignolles. I seem to make out
it's worse than Merrimac Avenue."

"Worse--in what way?"

"Why, even less where the nice people live."

"He oughtn't to say that," I returned. And I ventured to back it up.
"Don't you call Mr. Porterfield a nice person?"

"Oh it doesn't make any difference." She watched me again a moment
through her veil, the texture of which gave her look a suffused
prettiness. "Do you know him very little?" she asked.

"Mr. Porterfield?"

"No, Mr. Nettlepoint."

"Ah very little. He's very considerably my junior, you see."

She had a fresh pause, as if almost again for my elegance; but she went
on: "He's younger than me too." I don't know what effect of the comic
there could have been in it, but the turn was unexpected and it made me
laugh. Neither do I know whether Miss Mavis took offence at my
sensibility on this head, though I remember thinking at the moment with
compunction that it had brought a flush to her cheek. At all events she
got up, gathering her shawl and her books into her arm. "I'm going
down--I'm tired."

"Tired of me, I'm afraid."

"No, not yet."

"I'm like you," I confessed. "I should like it to go on and on."

She had begun to walk along the deck to the companionway and I went with
her. "Well, I guess _I_ wouldn't, after all!"

I had taken her shawl from her to carry it, but at the top of the steps
that led down to the cabins I had to give it back. "Your mother would be
glad if she could know," I observed as we parted.

But she was proof against my graces. "If she could know what?"

"How well you're getting on." I refused to be discouraged. "And that
good Mrs. Allen."

"Oh mother, mother! She made me come, she pushed me off." And almost as