ite Boston. He's just
turned his back on it."

"Oh, I hope not!" said Miss Vance. "I can't imagine anybody voluntarily
leaving Boston."

"I don't say he's so bad as that," said the host, committing March to
her. "He came to New York because he couldn't help it--like the rest of
us. I never know whether that's a compliment to New York or not."

They talked Boston a little while, without finding that they had common
acquaintance there; Miss Vance must have concluded that society was much
larger in Boston than she had supposed from her visits there, or else
that March did not know many people in it. But she was not a girl to
care much for the inferences that might be drawn from such conclusions;
she rather prided herself upon despising them; and she gave herself to
the pleasure of being talked to as if she were of March's own age. In
the glow of her sympathetic beauty and elegance he talked his best, and
tried to amuse her with his jokes, which he had the art of tingeing with
a little seriousness on one side. He made her laugh; and he flattered
her by making her think; in her turn she charmed him so much by enjoying
what he said that he began to brag of his wife, as a good husband always
does when another woman charms him; and she asked, Oh was Mrs. March
there; and would he introduce her?

She asked Mrs. March for her address, and whether she had a day; and she
said she would come to see her, if she would let her. Mrs. March could
not be so enthusiastic about her as March was, but as they walked home
together they talked the girl over, and agreed about her beauty and her
amiability. Mrs. March said she seemed very unspoiled for a person who
must have been so much spoiled. They tried to analyze her charm, and
they succeeded in formulating it as a combination of intellectual
fashionableness and worldly innocence. "I think," said Mrs. March,
"that city girls, brought up as she must have been, are often the most
innocent of all. They never imagine the wickedness of the world, and
if they marry happily they go through life as innocent as children.
Everything combines to keep them so; the very hollowness of society
shields them. They are the loveliest of the human race. But perhaps the
rest have to pay too much for them."

"For such an exquisite creature as Miss Vance," said March, "we couldn't
pay too much."

A wild laughing cry suddenly broke upon the air at the street-crossing
in front of them. A girl's voice called o