on the piano
without remarking, "That woman has had the best masters of her time."
She could only play pieces that belonged to her generation. She had
learned nothing since. In short, the whole intellectual culture had come
to a dead stop long years ago, perhaps before Lily was born.

Now, while she is gazing into space Mrs. Braefield is announced. Mrs.
Cameron does not start from revery. She never starts. But she makes a
weary movement of annoyance, resettles herself, and lays the serious
book on the sofa table. Elsie enters, young, radiant, dressed in all the
perfection of the fashion, that is, as ungracefully as in the eyes of an
artist any gentlewoman can be; but rich merchants who are proud of their
wives so insist, and their wives, in that respect, submissively obey
them.

The ladies interchange customary salutations, enter into the customary
preliminaries of talk, and after a pause Elsie begins in earnest.

"But sha'n't I see Lily? Where is she?"

"I fear she has gone into the town. A poor little boy, who did our
errands, has met with an accident,--fallen from a cherry-tree."

"Which he was robbing?"

"Probably."

"And Lily has gone to lecture him?"

"I don't know as to that; but he is much hurt, and Lily has gone to see
what is the matter with him."

Mrs. Braefield, in her frank outspoken way,--"I don't take much to girls
of Lily's age in general, though I am passionately fond of children. You
know how I do take to Lily; perhaps because she is so like a child. But
she must be an anxious charge to you."

Mrs. Cameron replied by an anxious "No; she is still a child, a very
good one; why should I be anxious?"

Mrs. Braefield, impulsively,--"Why, your child must now be eighteen."

Mrs. Cameron,--"Eighteen--is it possible! How time flies! though in a
life so monotonous as mine, time does not seem to fly, it slips on
like the lapse of water. Let me think,--eighteen? No, she is but
seventeen,--seventeen last May."

Mrs. Braefield,--"Seventeen! A very anxious age for a girl; an age in
which dolls cease and lovers begin."

Mrs. Cameron, not so languidly, but still quietly,--"Lily never cared
much for dolls,--never much for lifeless pets; and as to lovers, she
does not dream of them."

Mrs. Braefield, briskly,--"There is no age after six in which girls do
not dream of lovers. And here another question arises. When a girl so
lovely as Lily is eighteen next birthday, may not a lover dream of her?"

Mrs.