en;
such an air of knowing everything, and not caring about anything very
much; so much mutual admiration and personal satisfaction! She liked it,
and perhaps was restless because she liked it. To be admired, to be
deferred to--was there any harm in that? Only, if one suffers admiration
today, it becomes a necessity tomorrow. She began to feel the influence
of that life which will not let one stand still for a moment. If it is
not the opera, it is a charity; if it is not a lover, it is some endowed
cot in a hospital. There must be something going on every day, every
hour.

Yes, she was restless, and could not read. She thought of Mr. Henderson.
He had called formally. She had seen him, here and there, again and
again. He had sought her out in all companies; his face had broken into a
smile when he met her; he had talked with her lightly, gayly; she
remembered the sound of his voice; she had learned to know his figure in
a room among a hundred; and she blushed as she remembered that she had
once or twice followed him with her eyes in a throng. He was, to be sure,
nothing to her; but he was friendly; he was certainly entertaining; he
was a part, somehow, of this easy-flowing life.

Miss Eschelle was announced. Margaret begged that she would come upstairs
without ceremony. The mutual taking-in of the pretty street costume and
the pretty morning toilet was the work of a moment--the photographer has
invented no machine that equals a woman's eyes for such a purpose.

"How delightful it is! how altogether charming!" and Margaret felt that
she was included with the room in this admiration. "I told mamma that I
was coming to see you this morning, even if I missed the Nestors'
luncheon. I like to please myself sometimes. Mamma says I'm frivolous,
but do you know"--the girls were comfortably seated by the fire, and
Carmen turned her sweet face and candid eyes to her companion--"I get
dreadfully tired of all this going round and round. No, I don't even go
to the Indigent Mothers' Home; it's part of the same thing, but I haven't
any gift that way. Ah, you were reading--that novel."

"Yes; I was trying to read it; I intend to read it."

"Oh, we have had it! It's a little past now, but it has been all the
rage. Everybody has read it; that is, I don't know that anybody has read
it, but everybody has been talking about it. Of course somebody must have
read it, to set the thing agoing. And it has been discussed to death. I
sometimes