Rumor had it (and it may have been well founded, it’s so difficult to tell what goes on in the minds of those small, meek men), that he had always wanted to discover an “Egeria-like woman,” and that, once he stepped into Mrs. Braxton’s drawing-room and saw—and heard—Miss Haviland discoursing on “The Overtones in Swinburne’s Prose,” his wildest hope was realized. Be that as it may, his recognition must have been overpowering to have won her attention so easily; for her standards wouldn’t have permitted her, by any stretch of imagination, to think of him as an Egeria’s man—however she may have felt she merited one. But she wasn’t, with her looks and distinction and learning, the sort to attract men readily. She was too self-sufficient and flagrant, to begin with. She left no medium of approach suggested. She offered no tender, winning moments. Her aspect for men, as well as for women, implied that she thought she knew their ways and methods better than they did.... It shows as a weakness in her stories, I think—the temerity with which she assumes the masculine role, the possible hollowness of her assumptions not once daunting her. Remember the one that begins, “I had just peeked into the bar of the Savoy Hotel”? I could never, when I read it, think of anything except just how Marian Haviland herself would look, in a black evening gown and her other regalia, “peeking”—as she no doubt longed to do. But I’m drifting again.... Her favor might have fired the heart of a _grand seigneur_, I don’t know; to the men of Newfair it was too much like a corrective. George Norton, I guess, was the only one who ever craved it. He courted the slavedom of learning to be her foremost satellite. His courting went on at all the assemblages. The moment he entered a room, you could see her drawing him like a magnet; and him drawn, atom-like, with his little round beard and swallow-tail coat and parsonish white cravat, to wherever she ensconced herself. No sooner would he get near than she’d address a remark almost lavishly to somebody on the other side, and not deign to notice until the topic had been well developed, and then she would only frown distantly and say: “Mr. Norton, how are _you_ this evening?” But he would bob, and smirk consciously, up and down on his toes, and slap one hand against the other in an appreciative manner; undismayed if she looked away to talk quite exclusively to somebody else for another five minutes, just perhaps glancing fugitively over at him again to suggest: “It’s too bad you must stand, Mr. Norton.” Or, when another pause came, “Can’t you find a chair?” But you could see her still holding him fast behind her while she finished her own chat, and before she had leisure to release him at last with some cue like: “That chair, perhaps, over there—no, _there_, Mr. Norton.”