Mabel and Jean heard the soft words with surprise. It was a new light through which to look on Elsie. They had never quite dropped the pose of the benignant girls who had taken Elsie "out of herself." To them she was rather a protégé than a friend; much as Mabel at least would have despised herself for that attitude had she detected it in herself. She acknowledged an immediate drop in her calculations, when the fencing girl did not ask as most people did, "Who is that queer little thing?" It was difficult in one sudden moment to adjust oneself to introducing Elsie as "You beautiful wild anemone!" Jean, however, merely summed up the fencing girl as rather ignorant. "Why," she said frankly, "I declare it’s Elsie!" and in a whisper declared, "There’s nothing beautiful about Elsie." They welcomed her heartily, curiously, and wondered if Lance’s latest news of the family was true. "Mother Buttercluck," he had written, "has come in for a little legacy. It’s she who clucks now (grammar or no grammar) and the Professor chimes in as the butter portion merely. May heard about it. Can you imagine Mrs. C. saying, ’I’d love to have some one to lean on,’ and the Buttercluck, who would have declared before--’On whom to lean. Pray do be more careful of your English,’ not having a cluck left! Though I do think Elsie had knocked a little of the cluck out before the legacy arrived." Elsie did not seem to be bursting with news. She sat in rather a grown-up, reliable way, opening her furry coat at their orders, and drawing off her gloves. Her hair was up in loose, heavy coils on her neck, and it parted in front with that restless rippling appearance which made one think of the open air. The tip-tilted nose, which had seemed the principal fault in the face which had always been termed plain in childhood, seemed now to lend a piquancy to her features. These were delicately irregular, and her eyebrows were too high, if one might rely on the analysis of Jean. The fencing girl sat and stared at her with her foil balanced on a crossed knee. If one wanted to do the fencing girl a real kindness, to make her radiantly happy, then one introduced her to some one in whom she might be interested. Life was a garden to her, and the friends she made the flowers. She was not particular about plucking them either. "Oh, no indeed," she would say, "I’ve seen some one in the park to-day who is more sweet and lovely than any one human ought to be. I should love to know her, of course, but she was just as great a joy to look at. Why should you want to have everything that’s beautiful? It’s merely a form of selfishness." Mabel and Jean imagined that it was more a pose on the part of the fencing girl than any talent of Elsie’s which immediately impressed her on this afternoon. They were later to discover that a thrill of expectancy, of interest, was Elsie’s first gift to strangers.