"Picking-up is not the word that the most careful mothers employ, in reference to their daughters' attitude toward young men. Mother, don't you understand? I'm a democrat." "It is not a thing," said Mrs. Weyland, with some asperity, "for a lady to be." Sharlee, fixing her hair in the back before the mirror, laughed long and merrily. "Do you dare--do you _dare_ look your own daughter in the eye and say she is no lady?" "Do you like this young man?" Mrs. Weyland continued. "He interests me, heaps and heaps." Mrs. Weyland sighed. "I can only say," she observed, sinking into a chair and picking up her book, "that such goings on were never heard of in my day." XXII _In which Professor Nicolovius drops a Letter on the Floor, and Queed conjectures that Happiness sometimes comes to Men wearing a Strange Face._ Queed sat alone in the sitting-room of the Duke of Gloucester Street house. His afternoon's experiences had interested him largely. By subtle and occult processes which defied his analysis, what he had seen and heard had proved mysteriously disturbing--all this outpouring of irrational sentiment in which he had no share. So had his conversation with the girl disturbed him. He was in a condition of mental unrest, undefined but acute; odds and ends of curious thought kicked about within him, challenging him to follow them down to unexplored depths. But he was paying no attention to them now. He sat in the sitting-room, wondering how Nicolovius had ever happened to think of that story about the Fenian refugee. For Queed had been gradually driven to that unpleasant point. While living in the old man's house, he was, despite his conscientious efforts, virtually spying upon him. The Fenian story had always had its questionable points; but so long as the two men were merely chance fellow-boarders, it did as well as any other. Now that they lived together, however, the multiplying suggestions that the old professor was something far other than he pretended became rather important. The young man could not help being aware that Nicolovius neither looked nor talked in the slightest degree like an Irishman. He could not help being certain that an Irishman who had fled to escape punishment for a political crime, in 1882, could have safely returned to his country long ago; and would undoubtedly have kept up relations with his friends overseas in the meantime. Nor could he help being struck with such facts as that Nicolovius, while apparently little interested in the occasional cables about Irish affairs, had become seemingly absorbed in the three days' doings of the United Confederate Veterans.