ers of all sorts upon terms of
friendly confidence. He reported their different theories of themselves
to his family with the same simple-hearted interest that he criticised
the song and dance artists of the vaudeville theatres. He became an
innocent but by no means uncritical connoisseur of their attractions,
and he surprised with the constancy and variety of his experience in
them a gentleman who sat next him one night. Boyne thought him a person
of cultivation, and consulted him upon the opinion he had formed that
there was not so much harm in such places as people said. The gentleman
distinguished in saying that he thought you would not find more harm in
them, if you did not bring it with you, than you would in the legitimate
theatres; and in the hope of further wisdom from him, Boyne followed him
out of the theatre and helped him on with his overcoat. The gentleman
walked home to his hotel with him, and professed a pleasure in his
acquaintance which he said he trusted they might sometime renew.

All at once the Kentons began to be acquainted in the hotel, as often
happens with people after they have long ridden up and down in the
elevator together in bonds of apparently perpetual strangeness. From
one friendly family their acquaintance spread to others until they were,
almost without knowing it, suddenly and simultaneously on smiling and
then on speaking terms with the people of every permanent table in the
dining-room. Lottie and Boyne burst the chains of the unnatural kindness
which bound them, and resumed their old relations of reciprocal censure.
He found a fellow of his own age in the apartment below, who had the
same country traditions and was engaged in a like inspection of the
city; and she discovered two girls on another floor, who said they
received on Saturdays and wanted her to receive with them. They made
a tea for her, and asked some real New Yorkers; and such a round of
pleasant little events began for her that Boyne was forced to call his
mother's attention to the way Charlotte was going on with the young men
whom she met and frankly asked to call upon her without knowing anything
about them; you could not do that in New York, he said.

But by this time New York had gone to Mrs. Kenton's head, too, and
she was less fitted to deal with Lottie than at home. Whether she had
succeeded or not in helping Ellen take her mind off herself, she had
certainly freed her own from introspection in a dream of thin