he brass-band,
set, many people considered her a very agreeable woman. She had amusing
things to say, and she said them in the Heth drawing-room with no air of
awkwardness. Carlisle, somewhat against her will, was soon thinking her
extremely attractive. But the thawing out went further than that.

Talk turned by chance--or perhaps it was not chance exactly--on those
growing currents of feminine activity which had nothing to do with
dinners and dances: and here the visitor expressed ideas which did not
seem old-school in the least. It appeared that she, Mary Page, in the
period of her spinsterhood, for she hadn't been married till she was
twenty-six, a thoroughgoing old maid in those days,--had also wearied of
the gay round; she had desired to _do something_. But alas, she had
suddenly discovered that she wasn't fitted to do one earthly thing,
having been trained only to be a trimming. She said, smiling, that she
had cried all one day about it....

"Why is it assumed, really," said she, "that women are such poor little
butterflies that amusing and being amused should absorb all their
energies? I don't think of myself as a pet, do you, Miss Heth? Give us
something solid to do, and the world wouldn't be so full of discontented
women. Do you know, if I had a daughter," said Mrs. Page, "and she
wasn't married after three years 'out,' and hadn't developed any special
talent, I should send her straight down to Hartman's Business College,
and have her learn typewriting. Yes, I should!--and make her get a place
in an office, too, at five dollars a week!..."

The distinguished visitor remained twenty minutes in the improbable
drawing-room, and contrived to make herself interesting. When she rose
to go, she mentioned that she was staying at her mother's place in the
country till after Thanksgiving, and was only in town for the day. And
then, as she held out her hand, smiling in a simple and friendly way,
her expression changed, and she brought up her other hand and laid it
over Carlisle's.

"My dear," she began, with some embarrassment, "I wonder if you will let
a much older woman say how truly she has sympathized with you in--all
this trouble--and how much she has admired you, too?..."

Cally's eyes wavered and fell. And suddenly she divined that this, and
nothing else, was what Mrs. Page had come to say.

"All of us make mistakes in this world," went on the kind voice--"all
that I know do wrong. But not all of us, I'm afra