less; had he really been at all
youthful, Mamma would have introduced him as "that extr'ornarily
intrusting man I've been telling you about, Ma'y, dear!"

But he was a nice-looking man, and a nice seeming man, except for his
evidently having flirted with Mamma, which proceeding Mary always held
slightly in contempt. Not that he seemed flirtatiously inclined at this
particular moment, but Mary could tell from her mother's manner that
their friendship had been one of those frothy surface affairs into
which Mamma seemed able to draw the soberest of men.

Mr. Venable sat down next to Mary, and they talked of the sea, in which
a few belated bathers were splashing, and of the hot and distant city,
and finally of Mary's work. These topics did not interest Mamma, who
carried on a few gay, restless conversations with various acquaintances
on the porch meanwhile, and retied her parasol bow several times.

Mamma, with her prettily arranged and only slightly retouched hair, her
dashing big hat and smart little gown, her red lips and black eyes, was
an extremely handsome woman, but Mr. Venable even now could not seem to
move his eyes from Mary's nondescript gray eyes, and rather colorless
fair skin, and indefinite, pleasant mouth. Mamma's lines were all
compact and trim. Mary was rather long of limb, even a little GAUCHE in
an attractive, unself-conscious sort of way. But something fine and
high, something fresh and young and earnest about her, made its instant
appeal to the man beside her.

"Isn't she just the biggest thing!" Mamma said finally, with a little
affectionate slap for Mary's hand. "Makes me feel so old, having a
great, big girl of twenty-three!"

This was three years short of the fact, but Mary never betrayed her
mother in these little weaknesses. Mr. Venable said, not very
spontaneously, that they could pass for sisters.

"Just hear him, will you!" said Mamma, in gay scorn. "Why there's
seventeen whole years between us! Ma'y was born on the day I was
seventeen. My first husband--dearest fellow ever WAS--used to say he
had two babies and no wife. I never shall forget," Mamma went on
youthfully, "one day when Ma'y was about two months old, and I had her
out in the garden. I always had a nurse,--smartest looking thing you
ever saw, in caps and ribbons!--but she was out, I forget where. Anyway
our old Doctor Wallis came in, and he saw me, with my hair all hanging
in curls, and a little blue dress on, and he called