ecite to a lady."

Trent laughed good-humouredly as he received his coffee cup.

"Well you can't point a moral with Miss Wilde," he rejoined, "you'd be
at liberty to recite her to anybody who had the sense to understand
her."

"Is she very deep?"

"She's profound--she's wonderful--she's a genius."

Mrs. Trent shook her head a little doubtfully. "I don't see that a woman
has any business to be a genius," she remarked. "And I can't help being
prejudiced against women writers, your father always was. It's as if
they really pretended to know as much as a man. When they publish books
I suppose they expect men to read them and that in itself is a kind of
conceit."

Trent yielded the point as he helped himself to the cakes brought in by
an old negro servant.

"Well, I shan't ask Miss Wilde to call on you," he laughed, "so you
won't be apt to run across the learned of your sex."

"Oh, I shouldn't mind myself," responded the old lady, with amiability,
"but I do hate to have you thrown with women that you wouldn't meet at
home."

"I certainly shouldn't meet Miss Wilde at home if that is what you
mean."

"It's bad enough to live in a partitioned cage like this," resumed Mrs.
Trent, in her soft, expressionless voice, "and to dry your clothes on
your neighbour's roofs, but I can bear anything so long as we are not
forced to associate with common people. Of course I don't expect to find
the manners of Virginia up here," she added as a last concession, "but I
may as well confess that the people I've come across don't seem to me to
be exactly civil."

"Just as we don't seem to them to be particularly worldly-wise, I dare
say."

She nodded her head, almost without hearing him, while her even tones
rippled on over her quaint ideas, which shone to her son's mind like
little silver pebbles beneath the shallow stream.

"I'm almost reconciled to the fact that old ladies wear colours and
flowers in their bonnets," she pursued, "to say nothing of low-neck
dresses, but it does seem to me that they might show a little ordinary
politeness. I met the doctor coming out of the apartment downstairs, so
in common decency I went immediately to enquire who was sick, and
carried along a glass of chicken jelly. The woman who opened the door
was rather rude," she finished with a sigh. "I don't believe such a
thing had ever happened to her before in the whole course of her life."

Trent gave her a tender glance across the coffee service.