uld
turn to her for consolation, that she knew. It was a matter of common
experience that gentlemen's hearts were thus caught on the rebound.
But if that Miss Harden carried off Rickman, there would be nothing
left for Flossie but to marry Spinks, for the preservation of her
trousseau and her dignity. Therefore Miss Bishop was more than ever
set on Flossie's marrying Mr. Rickman.

They were turning over the trousseau, the trousseau which might play
such a disastrous part in the final adjustment of Flossie's mind.

"Your dresses are orfully smart and that," said Ada; "and yet somehow
they don't seem to do you justice. It would have been worth your while
to go to a tip-top dressmaker, my dear. You'd have a better chance
than that Miss Harden any day. No, I don't like you in that powder
blue; I don't, really." Miss Bishop was nothing if not frank.

"I never go wrong about a colour," said Flossie passionately.

"No. It isn't the colour. It's the cut. It makes her look as if she
'ad a better figure than you; and that's nonsense. You've got a bust,
and she hasn't. Gentlemen don't care to look at a girl who's as flat
as two boards back and front. That's what I say, it's the cut that
gives her her style."

"No, it isn't. It isn't her clothes at all; it's the way she carries
them. She may look as if she was well dressed; but she isn't."

"Anyhow I like that coat of hers better than yours."

"It hasn't got the new sleeves," said Flossie, fondling her
powder-blue.

It was this immobile complacency of hers in the face of his own
profound and sundering agitations that stirred in Rickman the first
stinging of remorse. For he could see that the poor Beaver, with her
blind and ineradicable instinct, was going on building--you couldn't
call them castles in the air--but houses such as Beavers build, houses
of mud in running water. Her ceaseless winding in and out of shops,
her mad and furious buying of furniture, her wild grasping at any
loose articles that came in her way, from rugs to rolling-pins,
appeared to him as so many futile efforts to construct a dam. Over and
over again the insane impulse came on him to seize her little hands
and stop her; to tell her that it was no good, that the absurd thing
could never stand, that he alone knew the strength of the stream, its
sources and its currents. But he hadn't the heart to tell her, and the
Beaver went on constructing her dam, without knowing that it was a
dam, because she wa