The other surprise was the photographer who was a woman! It had never occurred to Beth that a woman could do more than take Brownie snap-shots, but this woman proved entirely capable. She posed the group of four skilfully, with the grace and dignity of a portrait by Reynolds. Then she photographed the three Cortlandts together, Beth insisting on a group without her. Then each one separately, till at least a dozen negatives had been made and the artist--for the name rightfully belonged to this photographer--expressed herself satisfied with her results. “Just one more--you with me, little Cozbeth!” cried Natalie. “I want it as a Christmas present to myself.” Beth willingly agreed, and for a moment the dark hair and the fair hair blended as the two girls were posed before the camera, Beth’s face upturned to Natalie, Natalie’s handsome head bent downward to the younger girl whom she was beginning to love with a fervor that surprised herself. “Now we part, Bethlein,” said Natalie, this picture taken. “Alys and I are going to lunch with Hedda Gabbler.” “With--what is her name?” cried Beth, emerging from the skirt Anna Mary threw over her head. Natalie laughed. “That’s the name of a play; we call Doris Belmar that because she’s such a talker,” she explained. “You’re going with Anna Mary, slumming. Don’t get stolen, or murdered or anything! Good-bye, Beth.” “Good-bye,” echoed Beth, and her cousins left her to follow them a few moments later, Dirk having taken himself off with evident relief the instant the last picture of himself had been secured. “It’s a taxicab we have to use to-day, Miss Beth; your uncle has the small car and your aunt is usin’ the horses, after the young ladies are left at Mrs. Belmar’s.” So saying Anna Mary handed Beth into a cab that they found waiting at the door, and then stepped in herself. She had sent the case containing the frocks home by a messenger. “I’d just as lief have a taxicab, Anna Mary. I think I like them better,” said Beth as theirs started. “I play I am in a boat and that the crowds are what the books call them, ‘a sea of faces,’ and we go plunging right through the waves. I’m always a dolphin or a mermaid.” “Well, Miss Beth, it’s not a play that I’d care for, both of them bein’ fishy and I’m not partial to fish, nor to the sea, for I was that sick when I came to America that I never went back, though my youngest brother do be still livin’ near by the city of Cork and I’ve plenty cousins at home in Ireland,” said Anna Mary, with her serious air of superiority. “This is gettin’ over to the poor parts, Miss Beth, which so far you’ve not seen,” she added. The cab was going eastward and then northward. “First we shall find that little Italian girl you saw in the park,” explained Anna Mary.