Dufour half turned about and cast a quick glance at the speakers. He did not say anything, however, but resumed his progress toward Miss Moyne, who had just been joined by Mrs. Nancy Jones Black, a stoutish and oldish woman very famous on account of having assumed much and done little. Mrs. Nancy Jones Black was from Boston. She was president of the Woman's Antiquarian Club, of the Ladies' Greek Association, of The Sappho Patriotic Club, of the Newport Fashionable Near-sighted Club for the study of Esoteric Transcendentalism, and it may not be catalogued how many more societies and clubs. She was a great poet who had never written any great poem, a great essayist whom publishers and editors avoided, whom critics regarded as below mediocrity, but of whom everybody stood in breathless awe, and she was an authority in many literary and philosophical fields of which she really knew absolutely nothing. She was a reformer and a person of influence who had made a large number of her kinsfolk famous as poets and novelists without any apparent relevancy between the fame and the literary work done. If your name were Jones and you could trace out your relationship to Mrs. Nancy Jones Black and could get Mrs. Nancy Jones Black interested in your behalf, you could write four novels a year with great profit ever afterward. As Dufour approached he heard Miss Moyne say: "I publish my poor little works with George Dunkirk & Co. and the firm has been very kind to me. I feel great encouragement, but I don't see how I can bear this horrible newspaper familiarity and vulgarity." "My dear child," said Mrs. Nancy Jones Black, placing her plump, motherly hand on the young woman's arm, "you must not appear to notice it. Do as did my daughter Lois when they assailed her first little novel with sugar-plum praise. Why, when it began to leak out that Lois was the author of _A Sea-Side Symphony_ the poor girl was almost smothered with praise. Of course I had to take the matter in hand and under my advice Lois went abroad for six months. When she returned she found herself famous." "Talking shop?" inquired Dufour, accepting the offer of a place on the bench beside Mrs. Black. "Yes," said she, with a comprehensive wave of her hand, "I am taking Miss Moyne under my wing, so to say, and am offering her the comfort of my experience. She is a genius whom it doesn't spoil to praise. She's going to be the next sensation in the East." "I suggested as much to her," said Dufour. "She is already on a strong wave, but she must try and avoid being refractory, you know." He said this in a straightforward, business way, but his voice was touched with a certain sort of admirable tenderness. Miss Moyne was looking out over the deep, hazy valley, her cheeks still warm with the thought of that newspaper portrait with its shabby clothes and towsled bangs. What was fame, bought at such a price! She bridled a little, but did not turn her head as she said.