tantly away from her, with an effect he had of
having suddenly thought of something imperative.

He went up to Mrs. Horn for a moment's hail and farewell, and felt
himself subtly detained by her through fugitive passages of conversation
with half a dozen other people. He fancied that at crises of this
strange interview Mrs. Horn was about to become confidential with him,
and confidential, of all things, about her niece. She ended by not
having palpably been so. In fact, the concern in her mind would have
been difficult to impart to a young man, and after several experiments
Mrs. Horn found it impossible to say that she wished Margaret could
somehow be interested in lower things than those which occupied her. She
had watched with growing anxiety the girl's tendency to various kinds
of self-devotion. She had dark hours in which she even feared her entire
withdrawal from the world in a life of good works. Before now, girls
had entered the Protestant sisterhoods, which appeal so potently to the
young and generous imagination, and Margaret was of just the temperament
to be influenced by them. During the past summer she had been unhappy
at her separation from the cares that had engrossed her more and more as
their stay in the city drew to an end in the spring, and she had hurried
her aunt back to town earlier in the fall than she would have chosen to
come. Margaret had her correspondents among the working-women whom she
befriended. Mrs. Horn was at one time alarmed to find that Margaret was
actually promoting a strike of the button-hole workers. This, of course,
had its ludicrous side, in connection with a young lady in good society,
and a person of even so little humor as Mrs. Horn could not help seeing
it. At the same time, she could not help foreboding the worst from it;
she was afraid that Margaret's health would give way under the strain,
and that if she did not go into a sisterhood she would at least go into
a decline. She began the winter with all such counteractive measures as
she could employ. At an age when such things weary, she threw herself
into the pleasures of society with the hope of dragging Margaret after
her; and a sympathetic witness must have followed with compassion
her course from ball to ball, from reception to reception, from
parlor-reading to parlor-reading, from musicale to musicale, from play
to play, from opera to opera. She tasted, after she had practically
renounced them, the bitter and the insip