nsible. Old Bolivar Kent, eighty-six and shuffling his short
steps to the grave not far ahead, understood her with one look; the but
adolescent Guy McCormick, hovering tragically on the verge of his first
public shave, divined her quite as capably; the middle-yeared Westley
Keyts read her so unerringly on a day when she first regaled his vision
that he toiled for half an hour as one entranced, disengaging what he
believed to be porter-house steaks long after the porter-house line in
the beef under his hand had been passed.

In short, Miss Lansdale was understood spontaneously--to borrow a phrase
from the _Argus_--"by each and all who had the good fortune to be
present," for she was dowered with that quick-drawing charm which has
worked a familiar spell upon the sons of men in all times. She was
incontestably feminine. She gave the woman-call. That she seemed to give
it against her wish,--without intention,--that I was alone in detecting
this, were trifles beside the point. Masculine Little Arcady cared not
that she had been less successful than the late Colonel Potts, for
example, in preserving the truly Greek spirit--cared naught for this so
long as, meaningly or otherwise, she uttered the immemorial woman-call
in its true note wheresoever she fared.

And, curiously, since Miss Lansdale did not appear formidable to
masculine Little Arcady--with one negligible exception--she seemed to
try perversely not to be so. She was amazingly gracious to it--still
with one exception. She melted to frivolity and the dance of mirth. She
affected joy in its music and confessed to a new feeling for Jerusalem
after attending a lawn party at which Eustace Eubanks did his best to
please. She spoke of this to Eustace with a crafty implication that it
had remained for him to interpret the antique graces of that storied
place to a world all too heedless. Eustace himself felt not only a
renewed interest in the land exploited by his magic lantern, but he
began to view all the rest of the world in a new and rosy light, of
which Miss Lansdale was the iridescent globe that diffused and subdued
it to the mellow hue of romance.

It is impossible to believe that Eustace was ever at any pains to
conceal the effects of this astral phenomenon from his family, for its
members were very quickly excited. If in that vale the woman-call could
be heard by ears attuned to its haunting cadences, so also did the
frightened mother-call echo its equally primiti