is face had broken into
a smile when he met her; he had talked with her lightly, gayly; she
remembered the sound of his voice; she had learned to know his figure in
a room among a hundred; and she blushed as she remembered that she had
once or twice followed him with her eyes in a throng. He was, to
be sure, nothing to her; but he was friendly; he was certainly
entertaining; he was a part, somehow, of this easy-flowing life.

Miss Eschelle was announced. Margaret begged that she would come
upstairs without ceremony. The mutual taking-in of the pretty street
costume and the pretty morning toilet was the work of a moment--the
photographer has invented no machine that equals a woman's eyes for such
a purpose.

"How delightful it is! how altogether charming!" and Margaret felt that
she was included with the room in this admiration. "I told mamma that
I was coming to see you this morning, even if I missed the Nestors'
luncheon. I like to please myself sometimes. Mamma says I'm frivolous,
but do you know"--the girls were comfortably seated by the fire, and
Carmen turned her sweet face and candid eyes to her companion--"I get
dreadfully tired of all this going round and round. No, I don't even
go to the Indigent Mothers' Home; it's part of the same thing, but I
haven't any gift that way. Ah, you were reading--that novel."

"Yes; I was trying to read it; I intend to read it."

"Oh, we have had it! It's a little past now, but it has been all the
rage. Everybody has read it; that is, I don't know that anybody has read
it, but everybody has been talking about it. Of course somebody must
have read it, to set the thing agoing. And it has been discussed to
death. I sometimes feel as if I had changed my religion half a dozen
times in a fortnight. But I haven't heard anything about it for a week.
We have taken up the Hindoo widows now, you know." And the girl laughed,
as if she knew she were talking nonsense.

"And you do not read much in the city?" Margaret asked, with an
answering smile.

"Yes; in the summer. That is, some do. There is a reading set. I don't
know that they read much, but there is a reading set. You know,
Miss Debree, that when a book is published--really published, as Mr.
Henderson says--you don't need to read it. Somehow it gets into the air
and becomes common property. Everybody hears the whole thing. You can
talk about it from a notice. Of course there are some novels that one
must read in order to understa