"I am sorry, since he is your friend, but I must say that I do think him very disagreeable. I did not know a man could be so unpleasant. I had rather he had not danced with me at all than to do it in that terribly dreary way, as if he were doing it because he had to." "You mustn't be hard on poor Ralph. He's a very good fellow, really, but he's almost beside himself just now. The very day of their dance, Kitty Chester's engagement came out. She had been keeping him hanging on for more than a year, and at one time he really thought she was going to have him; and not only that, but she and Frank Thomas actually came to his party, and they are here to-night. Ralph acts as if he had lost his senses, and his mother is almost wild about him. Why, after their dance, I was up all the rest of the night with him. He can't make any fight about it, and I think it would be better if he were to go away; but he won't--he just hangs about wherever she is to be seen. We all do all we can to get him to pluck up some spirit, but it's no go--yet." "I am very sorry for him," said Margaret, with all a girl's interest in a love story; and she cast an awe-struck glance toward the spot where Miss Chester was keeping half a dozen young men in conversation; "but he need not make everyone else so uncomfortable on account of it--need he?" "He needn't make himself so uncomfortable, you might say, for a girl who could treat him in that way; but it doesn't do to tell a man that. It doesn't seem to me that I should give up everything in the way he is doing; but then I was never in his place; of course, things are different for Ralph and me." "Yes, I am sure, you are different. I don't believe you would ever have behaved so ill to one girl in your own mother's house, because another hadn't treated you well." "I have had such a different experience of life; that was what I meant. It made me sympathise with you when you felt a little strange; though of course, it was only a mere accident that things happened so with you. Now, I was never brought up in society, and always feel a little out of place in it." "I don't know much about society either; we live very quietly at home, and when we do go out, why it is at home, you know, and that makes it different." "I suppose you live in a pretty place when you are at home?"