ir was gray, and the silvery lights
that glistened in it moved through the folds of a tiny lace object
which might, had it been developed, have proved to be a cap. To call
so filmy and nebulous a thing a garment of any kind was perhaps absurd;
but if this premise was once granted, it would have been correct to say
that Mrs. Maitland clung to caps. Certainly no article could have
better suited her, and in her single person she had done almost as much
as all the rest of Boston to revivify a dying but delightful
institution.

The little lady, for all her mildness of manner and appearance, proved
to be as wide awake as any one of the three. She even found a way to
discover, without Smith's being aware of it, whether he possessed the
typical New Yorker's attitude toward her native city. Mrs. Maitland
lived in the firm and fixed belief that all New Yorkers, dwelling as
they did in a restless and artificial milieu of restaurants and
theaters and dollars, had for Boston and Bostonians a kind of
patronizing pity. The fact that she herself regarded New Yorkers in
very much the same light had never occurred to her.

Smith, however, was not a typical New Yorker. He had too real and
intense an interest in all created things to fear Mrs. Maitland's
gently suspicious inquisition. In addition to this he was so genuinely
interested in at least one of the Bostonians before him that he
naturally and easily escaped the pitfalls into which another might have
tumbled. So thoroughly, indeed, did he win approval and disarm
suspicion that before very long he had his reward in being left, before
the small but cheerful fire, with the daughter of the house.

This tactful withdrawal did not lessen the attraction of Mrs. Maitland
in Smith's eyes, and it was with real admiration in his tone that he
said to Helen:--

"I think your mother is charming."

"I have thought so," returned Helen, with assumed loftiness, "for
thirty or forty years."

"So long?" queried Smith, thoughtfully. "That merely goes to show how
one can be deceived."

"Deceived!" said Miss Maitland. "Unless you mean self-deception, I
would like an explanation of that remark."

But her visitor said that in his opinion to explain anything, however
occult, to a Bostonian, savored of intellectual impudence, and was, at
the least, a piece of presumption of which he hoped he should never be
guilty.

"And yet I can remember," said the girl, laughing, "an occasion when
ex