But don't be the
first to move in the matter."

"I really believe," said his wife, with her mind taken off the point by
the attractiveness of a surmise which had just occurred to her, "that
Mrs. Pasmer would be capable of following him down if she knew he was in
Washington."

"Yes, if she know. But she probably doesn't."

"Yes," said Mrs. Brinkley disappointedly. "I think the sudden departure
of the Van Hooks must have had something to do with Dan Mavering."

"Seems a very influential young man," said her husband. "He attracts and
repels people right and left. Did you speak to the Pasmers?"

"No; you'd better, when you go down. They've just come into the
dining-room. The girl looks like death."

"Well, I'll talk to her about Mavering. That'll cheer her up."

Mrs. Brinkley looked at him for an instant as if she really thought him
capable of it. Then she joined him in his laugh.

Mrs. Brinkley had theorised Alice Pasmer as simply and primitively
selfish, like the rest of the Pasmers in whom the family traits
prevailed.

When Mavering stopped coming to her house after his engagement she
justly suspected that it was because Alice had forbidden him, and she
had rejoiced at the broken engagement as an escape for Dan; she had
frankly said so, and she had received him back into full favour at the
first moment in Washington. She liked Miss Anderson, and she had hoped,
with the interest which women feel in every such affair, that her
flirtation with him might become serious. But now this had apparently
not happened. Julia Anderson was gone with mystifying precipitation,
and Alice Pasmer had come with an unexpectedness which had the aspect of
fatality.

Mrs. Brinkley felt bound, of course, since there was no open enmity
between them, to meet the Pasmers on the neutral ground of the Hygeia
with conventional amiability. She was really touched by the absent
wanness of the girls look, and by the later-coming recognition which
shaped her mouth into a pathetic snide. Alice did not look like death
quite, as Mrs. Brinkley had told her husband, with the necessity her sex
has for putting its superlatives before its positives; but she was pale
and thin, and she moved with a languid step when they all met at night
after Mrs. Brinkley had kept out of the Pasmers' way during the day.

"She has been ill all the latter part of the winter," said Mrs. Pasmer
to Mrs. Brinkley that night in the corner of the spreading hotel
parlours, w