"Please! please!" she exclaimed, drawing away. "I did not sing to attract you, but to amuse myself." "Well, really you know, dash it, Mary, you do say the most cutting things sometimes. What have I done to deserve that?" "Now, Jemmie, don't pretend you mind whether I say cutting things or not. What do you care nowadays?" Jemmie sighed to himself and, deliberately omitting his good night kiss, turned over and buried his head ostentatiously in the pillow. "I'm not at all sure that she isn't jealous," he confided to himself, as he set out to keep an appointment with Maudie in dreamland. Mary lay for some time watching with a weary regard that amorphous back, like a wayfarer who sees another hill before him and the end of the journey not yet in sight. Mrs. Wryford's prophecy that Mary would derive much pleasure from getting to know individually the various girls in whom she avowed a general interest by the act of founding for them a club was fulfilled. Indeed it was more than fulfilled, for Mrs. Wryford certainly never expected that her friend would find romance for herself in the lives of French seamstresses, a vicarious romance it might be, but its effect was to mitigate for Mary much of the dreariness that she was beginning to think life ended in after one was thirty. Thirty! At this period the woman of thirty was not considered a romantic subject; indeed, if any woman of thirty had pretended to romance she would have been considered a reader of French novels, and as such faintly tinged with impropriety. However, it was not enough for Mary's philanthropic zeal to sit listening to the tale of Henri and Jeanne, or of Armand and Virginie. She must educate her girls. She must provide them with an outlook. She must widen their horizon. She must teach them that the world was not bounded by Oxford Street on the north and Shaftesbury Avenue on the south. With this purpose in view she took them on one Saturday afternoon to the Zoological Gardens, on another to the Egyptian Hall, and once again to hear Moore and Burgess Minstrels. Then Mrs. Wryford brought news of a series of lectures at which various distinguished travelers with the aid of a magic-lantern would personally conduct whosoever would fare with them to the uttermost parts of the earth. "Last week we went to Greenland, Labrador, and Alaska. I can assure you, my dear Mary, the tints upon the ice were exquisite. I rarely enjoyed an evening more. Why don't you take your girls next week? Madagascar is the subject. I hear that the lecturer, who is a Frenchman, speaks English with quite remarkable fluency." "What's his name?" "Now, my dear Mary, do you expect me to remember the name of a Frenchman?"