, skill in an art. You never doubt that he is
performing in a play for the entertainment of an audience. You have the
same enjoyment of it that you have of a picture--a picture, I mean, full
of character and sentiment, not a photograph. But I don't think of Denman
Thompson as an actor trained to perfection in a dramatic school, but as a
New Hampshire farmer. I don't admire his skill; I admire him. There is
plenty that is artificial, vulgarly conventional, in his play, plenty of
imitation of the rustic that shows it is imitation, but he is the natural
man. If he is a stage illusion, he does not seem so to me." "Probably to
an American audience only he does not," Mr. Lyon remarked.

"Well, that is getting to be a tolerably large audience."

"I doubt if you will change the laws of art," said Mr. Lyon, rising to
go.

"We shall hope to see you again at our house," my wife said.

"You are very good. I should like it; but my time is running out."

"If you cannot come, you may leave your adieus with Miss Debree, who is
staying some time in the city," my wife said, evidently to Margaret's
annoyance. But she could do no less than give him her city address,
though the information was not accompanied by any invitation in her
manner.

Margaret was to stay some time with two maiden ladies, old friends of her
mother, the Misses Arbuser. The Arbusers were people of consequence in
their day, with a certain social prestige; in fact, the excellent ladies
were two generations removed from successful mercantile life, which in
the remote prospective took on an old-family solidity. Nowhere else in
the city could Margaret have come closer in contact with a certain phase
of New York life in which women are the chief actors--a phase which may
be a transition, and may be only a craze. It is not so much a
condescension of society to literature as it is a discovery that
literature and art, in the persons of those who produce both, may be
sources of amusement, or perhaps, to be just, of the enlargement of the
horizon and the improvement of the mind. The society mind was never
before so hospitable to new ideas and new sensations. Charities, boards
of managers, missions, hospitals, news-rooms, and lodging-houses for the
illiterate and the homeless--these are not sufficient, even with balls,
dancing classes, and teas, for the superfluous energies of this restless,
improving generation; there must be also radical clubs, reading classes,
study clas