nts were
less mixed with better here than in many other of the city's circles,
of whose existence she had not even heard. However:

Society, at its very best, always needs, and at its best or worst
always contains, a few superior members, who make themselves a
blessing by working a constant, tactful redistribution of individuals
by their true values, across the unworthy lines upon which society
ever tends to stratify. Such a person, a matron, sat with Marguerite
one April evening under a Chinese lantern in the wide, curtained
veranda of an Esplanade-street house whose drawing-room and Spanish
garden were filled with company.

Marguerite was secretly cast down. This lady had brought her here,
having met her but a fortnight before and chosen her at once, in her
own private counsels, for social promotion. And Marguerite had played
the violin. In her four months' advanced training she had accomplished
wonders. Her German professor made the statement, while he warned her
against enthusiastic drawing-room flattery. This evening she had
gotten much praise and thanks. Yet these had a certain discriminative
moderation that was new to her ear, and confirmed to her, not in the
pleasantest way, the realization that this company was of higher
average intelligence and refinement than any she had met before. She
little guessed that the best impression she had ever made she made
here to-night.

Of course it was not merely on account of the violin. She had beauty,
not only of face and head, but of form and carriage. So that when she
stood with her instrument, turning, as it were, every breath of air
into music, and the growing volume of the strains called forth all her
good Acadian strength of arms and hand, she charmed not merely the
listening ear, but the eye, the reason, and the imagination in its
freest range.

But, indeed, it was not the limitations of her social triumphs
themselves that troubled her. Every experience of the evening had
helped to show her how much wider the world was than she had dreamed,
and had opened new distances on the right, on the left, and far ahead;
and nowhere in them all could eye see, or ear hear, aught of that one
without whom to go back to old things was misery, and to go on to new
was mere weariness. And the dear little mother at home!--worth nine
out of any ten of all this crowd--still at home in that old
tavern-keeping life, now intolerable to think of, and still writing
those yearning letter