th it; and Mrs. Lapham."

"Mrs. Lapham, yes. I don't think the young ladies care so much about
it."

"It must be for them. Aren't they ambitious?" asked Mrs. Corey,
delicately feeling her way.

Her son thought a while. Then he answered with a smile--

"No, I don't really think they are. They are unambitious, I should
say." Mrs. Corey permitted herself a long breath. But her son added,
"It's the parents who are ambitious for them," and her respiration
became shorter again.

"Yes," she said.

"They're very simple, nice girls," pursued Corey. "I think you'll like
the elder, when you come to know her."

When you come to know her. The words implied an expectation that the
two families were to be better acquainted.

"Then she is more intellectual than her sister?" Mrs. Corey ventured.

"Intellectual?" repeated her son. "No; that isn't the word, quite.
Though she certainly has more mind."

"The younger seemed very sensible."

"Oh, sensible, yes. And as practical as she's pretty. She can do all
sorts of things, and likes to be doing them. Don't you think she's an
extraordinary beauty?"

"Yes--yes, she is," said Mrs. Corey, at some cost.

"She's good, too," said Corey, "and perfectly innocent and transparent.
I think you will like her the better the more you know her."

"I thought her very nice from the beginning," said the mother
heroically; and then nature asserted itself in her. "But I should be
afraid that she might perhaps be a little bit tiresome at last; her
range of ideas seemed so extremely limited."

"Yes, that's what I was afraid of. But, as a matter of fact, she
isn't. She interests you by her very limitations. You can see the
working of her mind, like that of a child. She isn't at all conscious
even of her beauty."

"I don't believe young men can tell whether girls are conscious or
not," said Mrs. Corey. "But I am not saying the Miss Laphams are
not----" Her son sat musing, with an inattentive smile on his face.
"What is it?"

"Oh! nothing. I was thinking of Miss Lapham and something she was
saying. She's very droll, you know."

"The elder sister? Yes, you told me that. Can you see the workings of
her mind too?"

"No; she's everything that's unexpected." Corey fell into another
reverie, and smiled again; but he did not offer to explain what amused
him, and his mother would not ask.

"I don't know what to make of his admiring the girl so frankly," she
said afterward to h