aid you might forget us, after
all. Let me introduce you to my cousin, Mrs. Dunham; Cousin Jeannette,
this is Mr. Brockway."

Brockway bent low in the direction of an elderly lady with a motherly
face; bowed to the Misses Beaswicke and to Fleetwell, and acknowledged
the President's nod.

"I'm only too happy to be permitted to come," he said to Gertrude,
drawing up a chair to make a group of three with the chaperon. "The
social side of a business man's life is so nearly a minus quantity that
your thoughtfulness takes rank as an act of Christian charity."

Gertrude laughed softly. "Tell me how a business man finds time to
acquire the art of turning compliments," she said; but Mrs. Dunham came
to his rescue.

"I suppose your occupation keeps you away from home a great deal,
doesn't it?" she asked.

"It certainly would if I had a home," Brockway replied.

"Do you have to travel all the time?"

"Rather more than nine-tenths of it, I should say."

"How dreadfully tiresome it must become! Of course, when one is seeing
things for the first time it is very interesting; but I should imagine
the car-window point of view would become hackneyed in a very little
while."

"It does; and it is pathetically unsatisfying if one care for anything
more than a glimpse of things. I have gone up and down in my district
for four years, and yet I know nothing of the country or the people
outside of a narrow ribbon here and there with a railway line in the
centre."

"That is a good thought," Gertrude said. "I have often boasted of having
seen the West, but I believe I have only threaded it back and forth a
few times."

"That is all any of us do," Brockway asserted. "Our knowledge of the
people outside of the railway towns is very limited. I once made a
horseback trip through the back counties of East Tennessee, and it was a
revelation to me. I never understood until then the truth of the
assertion that people who live within sight of a railway all have the
'railway diathesis'."

"Meaning that they lose in originality what they gain in
sophistication?" said Gertrude.

"Just that. They become a part of the moving world; and as the railway
civilizing process is much the same the country over, they lose their
identity as sectional types."

Mrs. Dunham leaned back in her chair and began to make mental notes with
queries after them. Mr. Vennor had given her to understand that they
were to have a _rara avis_, served underdone, for di