t see it, and would not
have known how to interpret it if she had seen it. She is safe, thought
Mrs. Wishart, as she noticed the calm unembarrassed air with which Lois
sat down to talk with the younger of her hostesses.

"You are making a long stay with Mrs. Wishart," was the unpromising
opening remark.

"Mrs. Wishart keeps me."

"Do you often come to visit her?"

"I was never here before."

"Then this is your first acquain'tance with New York?"

"Yes."

"How does it strike you? One loves to get at new impressions of what
one has known all one's life. Nothing strikes us here, I suppose. Do
tell me what strikes you."

"I might say, everything."

"How delightful! Nothing strikes me. I have seen it all five hundred
times. Nothing is new."

"But people are new," said Lois. "I mean they are different from one
another. There is continual variety there."

"To me there seems continual sameness!" said the other, with a half
shutting up of her eyes, as of one dazed with monotony. "They are all
alike. I know beforehand exactly what every one will say to me, and how
every one will behave."

"That is not how it is at home," returned Lois. "It is different there."

"People are _not_ all alike?"

"No indeed. Perfectly unlike, and individual."

"How agreeable! So that is one of the things that strike you here? the
contrast?"

"No," said Lois, laughing; "_I_ find here the same variety that I find
at home. People are not alike to me."

"But different, I suppose, from the varieties you are accustomed to at
home?"

Lois admitted that.

"Well, now tell me how. I have never travelled in New England; I have
travelled everywhere else. Tell me, won't you, how those whom you see
here differ from the people you see at home."

"In the same sort of way that a sea-gull differs from a land sparrow,"
Lois answered demurely.

"I don't understand. Are we like the sparrows, or like the gulls?"

"I do not know that. I mean merely that the different sorts are fitted
to different spheres and ways of life."

Miss Caruthers looked a little curiously at the girl. "I know _this_
sphere," she said. "I want you to tell me yours."

"It is free space instead of narrow streets, and clear air instead of
smoke. And the people all have something to do, and are doing it."

"And you think _we_ are doing nothing?" asked Miss Caruthers, laughing.

"Perhaps I am mistaken. It seems to me so."

"O, you are mistaken. We work hard. And yet,