Millard purposely drew Miss Callender into talk about the work of the mission, and he was soon rewarded by seeing her break through her habitual restraint and reveal the enthusiastic self within. She told him of the reading-room at the mission, and of the coffee-room where rolls and hot coffee were served to men every day in the week, so as to keep them from the saloons. Her face was aglow with interest as she talked, but Millard would rather have drawn her to speak of her own relation to the work. This she avoided, beyond confessing that she took her turn with the other ladies in superintending the coffee-room. At length, however, as they passed one of those open stairways that lead to thronged tenements above,--like the entrance to a many-chambered ant-hill, save that this mounts and that descends,--she spoke to a lad on the sidewalk, telling him to give her love to his sister and say that she was coming in to see her the next day. To Millard she explained that the boy's sister was an invalid young woman on one of the upper floors, bed-ridden for many years. "And you visit her?" asked Millard, with a hardly concealed repulsion at the notion of Phillida climbing these populous stairs and threading the dingy and malodorous hallways above. "Yes; she thinks so much of seeing me--because I am well, I suppose. She says it makes her stronger just to look at me. And if I can take her a flower, or some little bit of outdoors, it is more in her life than a trip to the country would be in mine. Poor Wilhelmina Schulenberg has not been down the stairs for five years. We talk of trying to get an invalid's chair for her when the warm weather comes, so that her brother can wheel her in the Square." Millard turned and looked again at the stairway as though noticing all the particulars of its environment. It was a balmy day in the last of February, and they were soon crossing Tompkins Square diagonally towards Eighth street. He had caught the infection of Phillida's exaltation; instead of feeling repulsion at sight of the swarming children in cheap and often shabby clothes, racing madly up and down the broad asphalted walks, instead of turning in aversion from the commonplace people sitting talking, staring, smoking, sleeping, flirting, or courting on the benches, he was able to take Miss Callender's view of the matter and to feel gratified that the poor, and especially the little folk so long winter-cribbed in narrow tenements, were now able to get so much happiness in the open ground. IX. WASHINGTON SQUARE AND ELSEWHERE. Mrs. Gouverneur had invited both Phillida and Millard to a family dinner this evening with a notion of furthering their acquaintance and drawing her niece into society. She would not admit to herself any purpose or expectation ulterior. She had engaged each one to come two hours before dinner to make a quiet afternoon of it, and when she found them both unpunctual she wondered.