whatever kind,
in some one else. What followed, had followed naturally. Unless she had
been quite a simpleton she could not have met his provisional love-making
on any other terms; and the reason why Beaton chiefly liked Alma Leighton
was that she was not a simpleton. Even up in the country, when she was
overawed by his acquaintance, at first, she was not very deeply overawed,
and at times she was not overawed at all. At such times she astonished
him by taking his most solemn histrionics with flippant incredulity, and
even burlesquing them. But he could see, all the same, that he had caught
her fancy, and he admired the skill with which she punished his neglect
when they met in New York. He had really come very near forgetting the
Leightons; the intangible obligations of mutual kindness which hold some
men so fast, hung loosely upon him; it would not have hurt him to break
from them altogether; but when he recognized them at last, he found that
it strengthened them indefinitely to have Alma ignore them so completely.
If she had been sentimental, or softly reproachful, that would have been
the end; he could not have stood it; he would have had to drop her. But
when she met him on his own ground, and obliged him to be sentimental,
the game was in her hands. Beaton laughed, now, when he thought of that,
and he said to himself that the girl had grown immensely since she had
come to New York; nothing seemed to have been lost upon her; she must
have kept her eyes uncommonly wide open. He noticed that especially in
their talks over her work; she had profited by everything she had seen
and heard; she had all of Wetmore's ideas pat; it amused Beaton to see
how she seized every useful word that he dropped, too, and turned him to
technical account whenever she could. He liked that; she had a great deal
of talent; there was no question of that; if she were a man there could
be no question of her future. He began to construct a future for her; it
included provision for himself, too; it was a common future, in which
their lives and work were united.

He was full of the glow of its prosperity when he met Margaret Vance at
the reception.

The house was one where people might chat a long time together without
publicly committing themselves to an interest in each other except such a
grew out of each other's ideas. Miss Vance was there because she united
in her catholic sympathies or ambitions the objects of the fashionable
people and of