She was too high-minded to blame him for
having tempted her to her failure with them by his talk about them; but
she was conscious of avoiding them in her talk. She had decided not to
renew the effort she had made in the spring; because she could not do
them good as fellow-creatures needing food and warmth and work, and she
would not try to befriend them socially; she had a horror of any such
futile sentimentality. She would have liked to account to Beaton in this
way for a course which she suspected he must have heard their comments
upon, but she did not quite know how to do it; she could not be sure how
much or how little he cared for them. Some tentative approaches which
she made toward explanation were met with such eager disclaim of
personal interest that she knew less than before what to think; and
she turned the talk from the sisters to the brother, whom it seemed she
still continued to meet in their common work among the poor.

"He seems very different," she ventured.

"Oh, quite," said Beaton. "He's the kind of person that you might
suppose gave the Catholics a hint for the cloistral life; he's a
cloistered nature--the nature that atones and suffers for. But he's
awfully dull company, don't you think? I never can get anything out of
him."

"He's very much in earnest."

"Remorselessly. We've got a profane and mundane creature there at the
office who runs us all, and it's shocking merely to see the contact of
the tyro natures. When Fulkerson gets to joking Dryfoos--he likes to put
his joke in the form of a pretence that Dryfoos is actuated by a selfish
motive, that he has an eye to office, and is working up a political
interest for himself on the East Side--it's something inexpressible."

"I should think so," said Miss Vance, with such lofty disapproval that
Beaton felt himself included in it for having merely told what caused
it. He could not help saying, in natural rebellion, "Well, the man of
one idea is always a little ridiculous."

"When his idea is right?" she demanded. "A right idea can't be
ridiculous."

"Oh, I only said the man that held it was. He's flat; he has no relief,
no projection."

She seemed unable to answer, and he perceived that he had silenced her
to his own, disadvantage. It appeared to Beaton that she was becoming a
little too exacting for comfort in her idealism. He put down the cup of
tea he had been tasting, and said, in his solemn staccato: "I must go.
Good-bye!" and got ins