"You may think it's pretty strange, Mr. Langbourne, but I want to talk
with you about Miss Simpson." She seemed to satisfy a duty to convention
by saying Miss Simpson at the outset, and after that she called her
friend Barbara. "I've brought you your letters to her," and she handed
him the packet she had been holding. "Have you got hers with you?"

"They are at the hotel," answered Langbourne.

"Well, that's right, then. I thought perhaps you had brought them. You
see," Miss Bingham continued, much more cold-bloodedly than Langbourne
thought she need, "we talked it over last night, and it's too silly.
That's the way Barbara feels herself. The fact is," she went on
confidingly, and with the air of saying something that he would
appreciate, "I always thought it was some _young_ man, and so did
Barbara; or I don't believe she would ever have answered your first
letter."

Langbourne knew that he was not a young man in a young girl's sense; but
no man likes to have it said that he is old. Besides, Miss Bingham
herself was not apparently in her first quarter of a century, and
probably Miss Simpson would not see the earliest twenties again. He
thought none the worse of her for that; but he felt that he was not so
unequally matched in time with her that she need take the attitude with
regard to him which Miss Bingham indicated. He was not the least gray
nor the least bald, and his tall figure had kept its youthful lines.

Perhaps his face manifested something of his suppressed resentment. At
any rate, Miss Bingham said apologetically, "I mean that if we had known
it was a _serious_ person we should have acted differently. I oughtn't
to have let her thank you for those seedsman's catalogues; but I thought
it couldn't do any harm. And then, after your letters began to come, we
didn't know just when to stop them. To tell you the truth, Mr.
Langbourne, we got so interested we couldn't _bear_ to stop them. You
wrote so much about your life in New York, that it was like a visit
there every week; and it's pretty quiet at Upper Ashton in the winter
time."

She seemed to refer this fact to Langbourne for sympathetic
appreciation; he said mechanically, "Yes."

She resumed: "But when your picture came, I said it had _got_ to stop;
and so we just sent back my picture,--or I don't know but what Barbara
did it without asking me,--and we did suppose that would be the last of
it; when you wrote back you were coming here, we didn't bel