Miss Swan found the poem as she had predicted, and, “Now all keep still,” she said, “and I'll read it.” But she suddenly added, “Or no; you read it, Mr. Barker, won't you?” “If Barker ain't just in voice to-night, I'll read it,” suggested Berry. But she would not let him make this diversion. She ignored his offer, and insisted upon Lemuel's reading. “Jessie says you read beautifully. That passage in _Romola_,” she reminded him; but Lemuel said it was only a few lines, and tried to excuse himself. At heart he was proud of his reading, and he ended by taking the book. When he had finished the two girls sighed. “Isn't it beautiful, Jessie?” said Miss Swan. “Beautiful!” answered her friend. Berry yawned. “Well, I don't see much difference between that and a poem of Longfellow's. Why wouldn't Longfellow have done just as well? Honestly, now! Why isn't one poem just as good as another, for all practical purposes?” “It is, for some people,” said Miss Swan. Berry figured an extreme anguish by writhing in his chair. Miss Swan laughed in spite of herself, and they began to talk in their usual banter, which Miss Carver never took part in, and which Lemuel was quite incapable of sharing. If it had come to savage sarcasm or a logical encounter, he could have held his own, but he had a natural weight and slowness that disabled him from keeping up with Berry's light talk; he envied it, because it seemed to make everybody like him, and Lemuel would willingly have been liked. Miss Carver began to talk to him about the book, and then about Mr. Evans. She asked him if he went much to his rooms, and Lemuel said no, not at all, since the first time Mr. Evans had asked him up. He said, after a pause, that he did not know whether he wanted him to come. “I should think he would,” said Miss Carver. “It must be very gloomy for him, with his wife such an invalid. He seems naturally such a gay person.” “Yes, that's what I think,” said Lemuel. “I wonder,” said the girl, “if it seems to you harder for a naturally cheerful person to bear things, than for one who has always been rather melancholy?” “Yes, it does!” he answered with the pleasure and surprise young people have in discovering any community of feeling; they have thought themselves so utterly unlike each other. “I wonder why it should?” “I don't know; perhaps it isn't so. But I always pity the cheerful person the most.” They recognised an amusing unreason in this, and laughed. Miss Swan across the room had caught the name. “Are you talking of Mrs. Evans?” Berry got his banjo down from the wall, where Miss Swan allowed him to keep it as bric-a-brac, and began to tune it.