and see uncle, I hope, Mr. Wainwright. Come
this afternoon." She even offered her hand, and offered it awkwardly. As
Wainwright's well-fitting, well-buttoned glove touched for an instant
the poor, cheap imitation, wrinkled and flabby, which covered her hand,
he devoutly hoped she would not see the contrast as he saw it. She did
not: a Dooris was a Dooris, and the varieties of kid-skin and rat-skin
could not alter that.

Brother Bethuel went on with Honor, but in the afternoon he came back to
the inn to pilot Stephen to the Eliot ravine. Stephen was reading a
letter from Adelaide Kellinger--a charming letter, full of society
events and amusing little comments, which were not rendered
unintelligible either by the lack of commas, semicolons, and
quotation-marks, and the substitution of the never-failing dash, dear to
the feminine pen. The sheets, exhaling the faintest reminiscence of
sandalwood, were covered with clear handwriting, which went straight
from page to page in the natural way, without crossing or doubling or
turning back. There was a date at the top; the weather was mentioned;
the exact time of arrival of Stephen's last letter told. It can be seen
from this that Adelaide was no ordinary correspondent.

Stephen, amused and back in New York, did not care much about the Eliot
visit; but Brother Bethuel cared, and so, with his usual philosophy,
Stephen went. They talked of the mountains, of the mountain-people, of
the villagers; then Brother Bethuel took up the subject of the Eliot
family, and declaimed their praises all the rest of the way. They were
extremely influential, they were excessively hot-tempered; the State was
in a peculiar condition at present, but the Eliots held still the old
wires, and it would be extremely dangerous to attack the family in any
way. Stephen walked along, and let the little man chant on. He had
heard, in this same manner, pages and volumes of talk from the persons
who insist upon telling you all about people in whom you have not the
remotest interest, even reading you their letters and branching off
farther and farther, until you come to regard those first mentioned as
quite near friends when the talker comes back to them (if he ever does),
being so much nearer than the outside circles into which he has tried to
convey you. Stephen never interrupted these talkers; so he was a
favorite prey of theirs. Only gradually did it dawn upon them that his
stillness was not exactly that of at