women of a resolute, intellectual
countenance, and a great crowd of youthful schoolmistresses, just on the
dividing line between domestic life and self-sacrifice, still full of
sentiment, and still leaning perhaps more to Tennyson and Lowell than to
mathematics and Old English.

"They have a curious, mingled air of primness and gayety, as if gayety
were not quite proper," the artist began. "Some of them look downright
interesting, and I've no doubt they are all excellent women."

"I've no doubt they are all good as gold," put in Mr. King. "These women
are the salt of New England." (Irene looked up quickly and
appreciatively at the speaker.) "No fashionable nonsense about them.
What's in you, Forbes, to shy so at a good woman?"

"I don't shy at a good woman--but three hundred of them! I don't want
all my salt in one place. And see here--I appeal to you, Miss Lamont
--why didn't these girls dress simply, as they do at home, and not
attempt a sort of ill-fitting finery that is in greater contrast to
Newport than simplicity would be?"

"If you were a woman," said Marion, looking demurely, not at Mr. Forbes,
but at Irene, "I could explain it to you. You don't allow anything for
sentiment and the natural desire to please, and it ought to be just
pathetic to you that these girls, obeying a natural instinct, missed the
expression of it a little."

"Men are such critics," and Irene addressed the remark to Marion, "they
pretend to like intellectual women, but they can pardon anything better
than an ill-fitting gown. Better be frivolous than badly dressed."

"Well," stoutly insisted Forbes, "I'll take my chance with the
well-dressed ones always; I don't believe the frumpy are the most
sensible."

"No; but you make out a prima facie case against a woman for want of
taste in dress, just as you jump at the conclusion that because a woman
dresses in such a way as to show she gives her mind to it she is of the
right sort. I think it's a relief to see a convention of women devoted
to other things who are not thinking of their clothes."

"Pardon me; the point I made was that they are thinking of their clothes,
and thinking erroneously."

"Why don't you ask leave to read a paper, Forbes, on the relation of
dress to education?" asked Mr. King.

They rose from the table just as Mrs. Benson was saying that for her part
she liked these girls, they were so homelike; she loved to hear them sing
college songs and hymns in the parlor