ou couldn't have known it before."

"Yes, that's what he says. He says it was such a waste of time. Oh,
everything he says is perfectly fascinating!"

Her mother laughed and laughed again.

"What is it, mamma? Are you laughing at me?"

"Oh no. What an idea!"

"He couldn't seem to understand why I didn't say Yes the first time, if
I meant it." She looked down dreamily at her hands in her lap, and
then she said, with a blush and a start, "They're very queer, don't you
think?"

"Who?"

"Young men."

"Oh, very."

"Yes," Alice went on musingly. "Their minds are so different. Everything
they say and do is so unexpected, and yet it seems to be just right."

Mrs. Pasmer asked herself if this single-mindedness was to go on for
ever, but she had not the heart to treat it with her natural levity.
Probably it was what charmed Mavering with the child. Mrs. Pasmer had
the firm belief that Mavering was not single-minded, and she respected
him for it. She would not spoil her daughter's perfect trust and hope by
any of the cynical suggestions of her own dark wisdom, but entered into
her mood, as such women are able to do, and flattered out of her every
detail of the morning's history. This was a feat which Mrs. Pasmer
enjoyed for its own sake, and it fully satisfied the curiosity which
she naturally felt to know all. She did not comment upon many of the
particulars; she opened her eyes a little at the notion of her daughter
sitting for two or three hours and talking with a young man in the
galleries of the Museum, and she asked if anybody they knew had come in.
When she heard that there were only strangers, and very few of them, she
said nothing; and she had the same consolation in regard to the walking
back and forth in the Garden. She was so full of potential escapades
herself, so apt to let herself go at times, that the fact of Alice's
innocent self-forgetfulness rather satisfied a need of her mother's
nature; she exulted in it when she learned that there were only nurses
and children in the Garden.

"And so you think you won't take up art this winter?" she said, when, in
the process of her cross-examination, Alice had left the sofa and got as
far as the door, with her hat in her hand and her sacque on her arm.

"No."

"And the Sisters of St. James--you won't join them either?"

The girl escaped from the room.

"Alice! Alice!" her mother called after her; she came back. "You haven't
told me how he happened to be t