if she were one of themselves,
and socially as if she was not habitually the same, but a sort of guest
in Bohemia, a distinguished stranger. If it was Arcadia rather than
Bohemia, still she felt her quality of distinguished stranger. The
flattery of it touched her fancy, and not her vanity; she had very
little vanity. Beaton's devotion made the same sort of appeal; it was
not so much that she liked him as she liked being the object of his
admiration. She was a girl of genuine sympathies, intellectual rather
than sentimental. In fact, she was an intellectual person, whom
qualities of the heart saved from being disagreeable, as they saved her
on the other hand from being worldly or cruel in her fashionableness.
She had read a great many books, and had ideas about them, quite
courageous and original ideas; she knew about pictures--she had been in
Wetmore's class; she was fond of music; she was willing to understand
even politics; in Boston she might have been agnostic, but in New York
she was sincerely religious; she was very accomplished; and perhaps it
was her goodness that prevented her feeling what was not best in Beaton.

"Do you think," she said, after the retreat of one of the comers and
goers left her alone with him again, "that those young ladies would like
me to call on them?"

"Those young ladies?" Beaton echoed. "Miss Leighton and--"

"No; I have been there with my aunt's cards already."

"Oh yes," said Beaton, as if he had known of it; he admired the pluck
and pride with which Alma had refrained from ever mentioning the fact
to him, and had kept her mother from mentioning it, which must have been
difficult.

"I mean the Miss Dryfooses. It seems really barbarous, if nobody goes
near them. We do all kinds of things, and help all kinds of people in
some ways, but we let strangers remain strangers unless they know how to
make their way among us."

"The Dryfooses certainly wouldn't know how to make their way among you,"
said Beaton, with a sort of dreamy absence in his tone.

Miss Vance went on, speaking out the process of reasoning in her mind,
rather than any conclusions she had reached. "We defend ourselves by
trying to believe that they must have friends of their own, or that they
would think us patronizing, and wouldn't like being made the objects of
social charity; but they needn't really suppose anything of the kind."

"I don't imagine they would," said Beaton. "I think they'd be only
too happy to h