He made a gesture intended, in the American manner, to be at once polite and jocose, and was gone, leaving Mrs. Pasmer a little surprised, and Mr. Mavering in some misgiving, which he tried to overcome pressing his jaws together two or three times without speaking. She had no trouble in getting in the first remark. “Isn't all this charming, Mr. Mavering?” She spoke in a deep low voice, with a caressing manner, and stood looking up, at Mr. Mavering with one shoulder shrugged and the other drooped, and a tasteful composition of her fan and hands and handkerchief at her waist. “Yes, ma'am, it is,” said Mr. Mavering. He seemed to say ma'am to her with a public or official accent, which sent Mrs. Primer's mind fluttering forth to poise briefly at such conjectures as, “Congressman from a country district? judge of the Common Pleas? bank president? railroad superintendent? leading physician in a large town?--no, Mr. Munt said Mister,” and then to return to her pretty blue eyes, and to centre there in that pseudo-respectful attention under the arch of her neat brows and her soberly crinkled grey-threaded brown hair and her very appropriate bonnet. A bonnet, she said, was much more than half the battle after forty, and it was now quite after forty with Mrs. Pasmer; but she was very well dressed otherwise. Mr. Mavering went on to say, with a deliberation that seemed an element of his unknown dignity, whatever it might be, “A number of the young fellows together can give a much finer spread, and make more of the day, in a place like this, than we used to do in our rooms.” “Ah, then you're a Harvard man too!” said Mrs. Primer to herself, with surprise, which she kept to herself, and she said to Mavering: “Oh yes, indeed! It's altogether better. Aren't they nice looking fellows?” she said, putting up her glass to look at the promenaders. “Yes,” Mr. Mavering assented. “I suppose,” he added, out of the consciousness of his own relation to the affair--“I suppose you've a son somewhere here?” “Oh dear, no!” cried Mrs. Primer, with a mingling, superhuman, but for her of ironical deprecation and derision. “Only a daughter, Mr. Mavering.” At this feat of Mrs. Pasmer's, Mr. Mavering looked at her with question as to her precise intention, and ended by repeating, hopelessly, “Only a daughter?” “Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a sigh of the same irony, “only a poor, despised young girl, Mr. Mavering.” “You speak,” said Mr. Mavering, beginning to catch on a little, “as if it were a misfortune,” and his, dignity broke up into a smile that had its queer fascination. “Why, isn't it?” asked Mrs. Pasmer. “Well, I shouldn't have thought so.” “Then you don't believe that all that old-fashioned chivalry and devotion have gone out? You don't think the young men are all spoiled nowadays, and expect the young ladies to offer them attentions?” “No,” said Mr. Mavering slowly, as if recovering from the shock of the novel ideas. “Do you?”