“I've been terribly rude,” she told him, “I have hardly spoken. I have been busy studying you.” “There's not much to study,” he disclaimed; “Mrs. Bosbyshell thinks I'm marked for failure.” In reply to her demand he gave a brief and diffident account of that eccentric old woman. “But,” Eliza discerned among the meagre details, “she trusts you, she lets you into her house. And you are perfect to her, of course. “Any one could trust you, I think. Yet you are not a particle tiresome; most trustworthy people are so--so unexciting. But monotony is far as possible from your vicinity. What did you do, for instance, this morning?” He described to her the advent of the circus, the labor in the obscurity. “I was surprised to see the old thing up,” he ended: “it seemed so hopeless at first.” “How wonderfully poetic!” she cried. Until that moment poetry had occupied in his thoughts a place analogous to tea.--In his brief passage through the last school he had been forcibly fed with Gray's Elegy, discovering it unmitigated and sickening rot. When now, in view of her obvious pleasure, he would have to reconsider his judgment. “That blind effort,” she continued, leaning forward, flushed with the warmth of her image, “all those men struggling, building in the dark, unable to see what they were accomplishing, or what part the others had. And then--oh! don't you see!--the great, snowy tent in the morning sun--a figure of the success, the reward, of all labor, all living.” “How about the ones that loafed--didn't pull, or were drunk?” “For all,” she insisted, “sober and drunk and shrinking. Can you think that any supreme judgment would be cheaply material, or in need of any of our penny abilities? do you suppose the supreme beauty has no standard higher than those practical minds that hold out heaven as a sort of reward for washed faces? Anthony,” it was the first time she had called him that, and it rang in his brain in a long peal of rapture, “if there isn't a heaven for every one, there isn't any at all. You, singing an idle song, must be as valuable as the greatest apostle to any supreme love, or else it isn't supreme, it isn't love.” “You are so wonderfully good,” he muttered, “that you think every one else is good too.” “But I'm hardly a bit good,” she assured him, “and I wouldn't be good if I could--in the Christian kind of way.” She gazed about with an affectation of secretiveness, then leaned across her coffee cup. “It would bore me horribly,” she confided, “that 'other cheek' thing; I'm not a grain humble; and I spend a criminal amount of money on my clothes. I have even put a patch upon my cheek to be a gin and stumbling-block to a young man.” She had!