where two men in livery stood aside to let him pass up
the outside steps of the house, and two more helped him off with his
overcoat indoors, and a fifth miscalled his name into the drawing-room,
the Syracuse stone-cutter's son met the niece of Mrs. Horn, and began at
once to tell her about his evening at the Dryfooses'. He was in very good
spirits, for so far as he could have been elated or depressed by his
parting with Alma Leighton he had been elated; she had not treated his
impudence with the contempt that he felt it deserved; she must still be
fond of him; and the warm sense of this, by operation of an obscure but
well-recognized law of the masculine being, disposed him to be rather
fond of Miss Vance. She was a slender girl, whose semi-aesthetic dress
flowed about her with an accentuation of her long forms, and redeemed
them from censure by the very frankness with which it confessed them;
nobody could have said that Margaret Vance was too tall. Her pretty
little head, which she had an effect of choosing to have little in the
same spirit of judicious defiance, had a good deal of reading in it; she
was proud to know literary and artistic fashions as well as society
fashions. She liked being singled out by an exterior distinction so
obvious as Beaton's, and she listened with sympathetic interest to his
account of those people. He gave their natural history reality by drawing
upon his own; he reconstructed their plebeian past from the experiences
of his childhood and his youth of the pre-Parisian period; and he had a
pang of suicidal joy in insulting their ignorance of the world.

"What different kinds of people you meet!" said the girl at last, with an
envious sigh. Her reading had enlarged the bounds of her imagination, if
not her knowledge; the novels nowadays dealt so much with very common
people, and made them seem so very much more worth while than the people
one met.

She said something like this to Beaton. He answered: "You can meet the
people I'm talking of very easily, if you want to take the trouble. It's
what they came to New York for. I fancy it's the great ambition of their
lives to be met."

"Oh yes," said Miss Vance, fashionably, and looked down; then she looked
up and said, intellectually: "Don't you think it's a great pity? How much
better for them to have stayed where they were and what they were!"

"Then you could never have had any chance of meeting them," said Beaton.
"I don't suppose you inte