graciously received him; a tall gentleman, with
a gray mustache, shook hands with him; and then, as he vaguely heard
young Ogilvie, at the other end of the room, relate the incident of the
upsetting of the cab, he found himself seated next to this benign lady,
and apparently in a bewildering paradise of beautiful lights and colors
and delicious odors. Asparagus soup? Yes, he would take that; but for a
second or two this spacious and darkened room, with its stained glass
and its sombre walls, and the table before him, with its masses of roses
and lilies-of-the-valley, its silver, its crystal, its nectarines, and
cherries, and pineapples, seemed some kind of enchanted place. And then
the people talked in a low and hushed fashion, and the servants moved
silently and mysteriously, and the air was languid with the scents of
fruits and flowers. They gave him some wine in a tall green glass that
had transparent lizards crawling up its stem; he had never drunk out of
a thing like that before.

"It was very kind of Mr. Ogilvie to get you to come; he is a very good
boy; he forgets nothing," said Mrs. Ross to him; and as he became aware
that she was a pleasant-looking lady of middle age, who regarded him
with very friendly and truthful eyes, he vowed to himself that he would
bring Mr. Ogilvie to task for representing this decent and respectable
woman as a graceless and dangerous coquette. No doubt she was the mother
of children. At her time of life she was better employed in the nursery
or in the kitchen than in flirting with young men; and could he doubt
that she was a good house-mistress when he saw with his own eyes how
spick and span everything was, and how accurately everything was served?
Even if his cousin Janet lived in the south, with all these fine flowers
and hot-house fruits to serve her purpose, she could not have done
better. He began to like this pleasant-eyed woman, though she seemed
delicate, and a trifle languid, and in consequence he sometimes could
not quite make out what she said. But then he noticed that the other
people talked in this limp fashion too: there was no precision about
their words; frequently they seemed to leave you to guess the end of
their sentences. As for the young lady next him, was she not very
delicate also? He had never seen such hands--so small, and fine, and
white. And although she talked only to her neighbor on the other side of
her, he could hear that her voice, low and musical as it