e has no manners! That is, when he's himself. He has
pretty good ones when he's somebody else."

Miss Woodburn began, "Oh, mah-" and then stopped herself. Alma's mother
looked at her with distressed question, but the girl seemed perfectly
cool and contented; and she gave her mind provisionally to a point
suggested by Colonel Woodburn's talk.

"Still, I can't believe it was right to hold people in slavery, to whip
them and sell them. It never did seem right to me," she added, in apology
for her extreme sentiments to the gentleness of her adversary.

"I quite agree with you, madam," said the Colonel. "Those were the abuses
of the institution. But if we had not been vitiated on the one hand and
threatened on the other by the spirit of commercialism from the
North--and from Europe, too--those abuses could have been eliminated, and
the institution developed in the direction of the mild patriarchalism of
the divine intention." The Colonel hitched his chair, which figured a
hobby careering upon its hind legs, a little toward Mrs. Leighton and the
girls approached their heads and began to whisper; they fell
deferentially silent when the Colonel paused in his argument, and went on
again when he went on.

At last they heard Mrs. Leighton saying, "And have you heard from the
publishers about your book yet?"

Then Miss Woodburn cut in, before her father could answer: "The coase of
commercialism is on that, too. They are trahing to fahnd oat whethah it
will pay."

"And they are right-quite right," said the Colonel. "There is no longer
any other criterion; and even a work that attacks the system must be
submitted to the tests of the system."

"The system won't accept destruction on any othah tomes," said Miss
Woodburn, demurely.

XI.

At the reception, where two men in livery stood aside to let him pass up
the outside steps of the house, and two more helped him off with his
overcoat indoors, and a fifth miscalled his name into the drawing-room,
the Syracuse stone-cutter's son met the niece of Mrs. Horn, and began at
once to tell her about his evening at the Dryfooses'. He was in very good
spirits, for so far as he could have been elated or depressed by his
parting with Alma Leighton he had been elated; she had not treated his
impudence with the contempt that he felt it deserved; she must still be
fond of him; and the warm sense of this, by operation of an obscure but
well-recognized law of the masculine being, dispos