"Yes; I often wonder what her career will be, and sometimes it comes home to me that it must be art. The child can't help it--she gets it straight from me. But there were no art classes in my day." Mrs. Bell's tone implied a large measure of what the world had lost in consequence. "Mr. Bell doesn't agree with me about Elfrida's being predestined for art," she went on, smiling; "his whole idea is that she'll marry like other people." "Well, if she goes on improving in looks at the rate she has, you'll find it difficult to _prevent_, I should think, Mrs. Bell." Miss Kimpsey began to wonder at her own temerity in staying so long. "Should you be opposed to it?" "Oh, I shouldn't be _opposed_ to it exactly. I won't say I don't expect it. I think she might do better, myself; but I dare say matrimony will swallow her up as it does everybody--almost everybody--else." A finer ear than Miss Kimpsey's might have heard in this that to overcome Mrs. Bell's objections matrimony must take a very attractive form indeed, and that she had no doubt it would. Elfrida's instructress did not hear it; she might have been less overcome with the quality of these latter-day sentiments if she had. Little Miss Kimpsey, whom matrimony had not swallowed up, had risen to go. "Oh, I'm sure the most gifted couldn't do _better_!" she said, hardily, in departing, with a blush that turned her from buff-and-gray to brick color. Mrs. Bell picked up the _Revue_ after she had gone, and read three lines of a paper on the climate and the soil of Poland. Then she laid it down again at the same angle with the corner of the table which it had described before. "Rousseau!" she said aloud to herself. "_C'est un peu fort mais--_" and paused, probably for maturer reflection upon the end of her sentence. CHAPTER II. "Leslie." said Mrs. Bell, making the unnecessary feminine twist to get a view of her back hair from the mirror with a hand-glass, "aren't you _delighted?_ Try to be candid with yourself now, and own that she's tremendously improved."