times she was not overawed at all. At such times
she astonished him by taking his most solemn histrionics with flippant
incredulity, and even burlesquing them. But he could see, all the same,
that he had caught her fancy, and he admired the skill with which she
punished his neglect when they met in New York. He had really come very
near forgetting the Leightons; the intangible obligations of mutual
kindness which hold some men so fast, hung loosely upon him; it would
not have hurt him to break from them altogether; but when he recognized
them at last, he found that it strengthened them indefinitely to have
Alma ignore them so completely. If she had been sentimental, or softly
reproachful, that would have been the end; he could not have stood it;
he would have had to drop her. But when she met him on his own ground,
and obliged him to be sentimental, the game was in her hands. Beaton
laughed, now, when he thought of that, and he said to himself that the
girl had grown immensely since she had come to New York; nothing seemed
to have been lost upon her; she must have kept her eyes uncommonly wide
open. He noticed that especially in their talks over her work; she had
profited by everything she had seen and heard; she had all of Wetmore's
ideas pat; it amused Beaton to see how she seized every useful word that
he dropped, too, and turned him to technical account whenever she could.
He liked that; she had a great deal of talent; there was no question
of that; if she were a man there could be no question of her future. He
began to construct a future for her; it included provision for himself,
too; it was a common future, in which their lives and work were united.

He was full of the glow of its prosperity when he met Margaret Vance at
the reception.

The house was one where people might chat a long time together without
publicly committing themselves to an interest in each other except
such a grew out of each other's ideas. Miss Vance was there because
she united in her catholic sympathies or ambitions the objects of the
fashionable people and of the aesthetic people who met there on common
ground. It was almost the only house in New York where this happened
often, and it did not happen very often there. It was a literary house,
primarily, with artistic qualifications, and the frequenters of it
were mostly authors and artists; Wetmore, who was always trying to
fit everything with a phrase, said it was the unfrequenters who wer