s
up the outside steps of the house, and two more helped him off with his
overcoat indoors, and a fifth miscalled his name into the drawing-room,
the Syracuse stone-cutter's son met the niece of Mrs. Horn, and began
at once to tell her about his evening at the Dryfooses'. He was in very
good spirits, for so far as he could have been elated or depressed by
his parting with Alma Leighton he had been elated; she had not treated
his impudence with the contempt that he felt it deserved; she must still
be fond of him; and the warm sense of this, by operation of an obscure
but well-recognized law of the masculine being, disposed him to be
rather fond of Miss Vance. She was a slender girl, whose semi-aesthetic
dress flowed about her with an accentuation of her long forms, and
redeemed them from censure by the very frankness with which it confessed
them; nobody could have said that Margaret Vance was too tall. Her
pretty little head, which she had an effect of choosing to have little
in the same spirit of judicious defiance, had a good deal of reading
in it; she was proud to know literary and artistic fashions as well as
society fashions. She liked being singled out by an exterior distinction
so obvious as Beaton's, and she listened with sympathetic interest to
his account of those people. He gave their natural history reality by
drawing upon his own; he reconstructed their plebeian past from the
experiences of his childhood and his youth of the pre-Parisian period;
and he had a pang of suicidal joy in insulting their ignorance of the
world.

"What different kinds of people you meet!" said the girl at last, with
an envious sigh. Her reading had enlarged the bounds of her imagination,
if not her knowledge; the novels nowadays dealt so much with very common
people, and made them seem so very much more worth while than the people
one met.

She said something like this to Beaton. He answered: "You can meet the
people I'm talking of very easily, if you want to take the trouble. It's
what they came to New York for. I fancy it's the great ambition of their
lives to be met."

"Oh yes," said Miss Vance, fashionably, and looked down; then she looked
up and said, intellectually: "Don't you think it's a great pity? How
much better for them to have stayed where they were and what they were!"

"Then you could never have had any chance of meeting them," said Beaton.
"I don't suppose you intend to go out to the gas country?"

"No," said M