she would hardly give him time to pay for their tea, as she pulled him
impatiently to their carriage.

At last he got a chance to say, "I don't think I can quite promise that;
my mind's been veering round in the other direction. I think I shall tell
him."

"What! After you've seen him flirting with that girl? Very well, then,
you won't, my dear; that's all! He's behaving very basely to Agatha."

"What's his flirtation with all the girls in the universe to do with my
duty to him? He has a right to know what Stoller thinks. And as to his
behaving badly toward Miss Triscoe, how has he done it? So far as you
know, there is nothing whatever between them. She either refused him
outright, that last night in Carlsbad, or else she made impossible
conditions with him. Burnamy is simply consoling himself, and I don't
blame him."

"Consoling himself with a pivotal girl!" cried Mrs. March.

"Yes, with a pivotal girl. Her pivotality may be a nervous idiosyncrasy,
or it may be the effect of tight lacing; perhaps she has to keep turning
and twisting that way to get breath. But attribute the worst motive: say
it is to make people look at her! Well, Burnamy has a right to look with
the rest; and I am not going to renounce him because he takes refuge with
one pretty girl from another. It's what men have been doing from the
beginning of time."

"Oh, I dare say!"

"Men," he went on, "are very delicately constituted; very peculiarly.
They have been known to seek the society of girls in general, of any
girl, because some girl has made them happy; and when some girl has made
them unhappy, they are still more susceptible. Burnamy may be merely
amusing himself, or he may be consoling himself; but in either case I
think the pivotal girl has as much right to him as Miss Triscoe. She had
him first; and I'm all for her."

LXI.

Burnamy came away from seeing the pivotal girl and her mother off on the
train which they were taking that evening for Frankfort and Hombourg, and
strolled back through the Weimar streets little at ease with himself.
While he was with the girl and near her he had felt the attraction by
which youth impersonally draws youth, the charm which mere maid has for
mere man; but once beyond the range of this he felt sick at heart and
ashamed. He was aware of having used her folly as an anodyne for the pain
which was always gnawing at him, and he had managed to forget it in her
folly, but now it came back, and the se