Mrs. Bannister did mind it very much. She was, I learned afterward, introducing Miss Blight to the right people, and it was a violation of her contract with Rufus Blight to allow his niece to walk in the public eye with a man who might not be the kind of a person Miss Blight should be seen with at a time when her whole future depended on her following the narrow way which leads to the social heaven. Of course she would not mind driving home alone, but what about the hats? Mr. Malcolm would pardon her mentioning such intimate domestic matters, but Miss Blight had been away all summer and had not a hat of any kind fit to be seen in. "Bother the hats!" said Miss Blight. She laid a hand on her chaperon's arm and pushed her gently into the carriage. Mrs. Bannister made feeble protests. Penelope was the most wilful girl she had ever seen and knew perfectly well that she had not a thing to wear to the Perkins tea; if she had to go home she objected to being arrested this way and clapped into a prison van. The last was hurled at us as the footman was closing the door, and when Mrs. Bannister fell back in the seat, angry and silent, the Pomeranian projected his head from the window and snapped at us. "Mrs. Bannister is a good soul," Penelope said when, side by side, we were away on that wonderful walk uptown. "She has to be properly handled though or I should be her slave. Her husband was a broker, or something like that, and died during a panic, and as she was in straitened circumstances she came to us. You see, she knows everybody, and is awfully well connected. You must be very nice to her, David." She called me David as naturally as though it really had been yesterday that we went fishing in the meadow. My heart beat quicker. I laughed aloud for the sheer joy of living in the same world with her. I vowed that I should be very nice indeed to Mrs. Bannister. Had Penelope asked me to be very nice to her friend Medusa I should have given her my pledge. Subtly, by her admonition, she had conveyed to me the promise that this walk was to be but the first of many walks, the rambles of our childhood over again, but grown older and wiser and more sedate. Under what other circumstances could I be nice to Mrs. Bannister?