penance brings. She did not perhaps consider sufficiently her
niece's guiltlessness in the expiation. Margaret was not with her at St.
Barnaby in the fatal fortnight she passed there, and never saw the
Leightons till she went to call upon them. She never complained: the
strain of asceticism, which mysteriously exists in us all, and makes us
put peas, boiled or unboiled, in our shoes, gave her patience with the
snub which the Leightons presented her for her aunt. But now she said,
with this in mind: "Nothing seems simpler than to get rid of people if
you don't want them. You merely have to let them alone."

"It isn't so pleasant, letting them alone," said Mrs. Horn.

"Or having them let you alone," said Margaret; for neither Mrs. Leighton
nor Alma had ever come to enjoy the belated hospitality of Mrs. Horn's
Thursdays.

"Yes, or having them let you alone," Mrs. Horn courageously consented.
"And all that I ask you, Margaret, is to be sure that you really want to
know these people."

"I don't," said the girl, seriously, "in the usual way."

"Then the question is whether you do in the un usual way. They will build
a great deal upon you," said Mrs. Horn, realizing how much the Leightons
must have built upon her, and how much out of proportion to her desert
they must now dislike her; for she seemed to have had them on her mind
from the time they came, and had always meant to recognize any reasonable
claim they had upon her.

"It seems very odd, very sad," Margaret returned, "that you never could
act unselfishly in society affairs. If I wished to go and see those girls
just to do them a pleasure, and perhaps because if they're strange and
lonely, I might do them good, even--it would be impossible."

"Quite," said her aunt. "Such a thing would be quixotic. Society doesn't
rest upon any such basis. It can't; it would go to pieces, if people
acted from unselfish motives."

"Then it's a painted savage!" said the girl. "All its favors are really
bargains. It's gifts are for gifts back again."

"Yes, that is true," said Mrs. Horn, with no more sense of wrong in the
fact than the political economist has in the fact that wages are the
measure of necessity and not of merit. "You get what you pay for. It's a
matter of business." She satisfied herself with this formula, which she
did not invent, as fully as if it were a reason; but she did not dislike
her niece's revolt against it. That was part of Margaret's originality,
whic