"And when I come again," amended Preciosa, rising, "I might bring grandpa with me. I'm sure all this would be new to him." "Do, by all means," cried Virgilia. "And don't be too long doing it. _We_ won't keep him from his food and drink; _we_ won't worry his poor tired brain, if we can help it; _we_ won't give him ladies seated beneath factory chimneys; _we_ won't----You are going? Goodbye, dear. So glad to have met you here. Aunt and I drop in quite frequently, and you should learn to do so too." She gave Preciosa a parting smile, then composed her features to a look of grave intentness and turned about to impose this look upon Daffingdon Dill wherever found. Her eyes found him on the opposite side of the room, in company with her aunt. Both of them were studying her with some seriousness and some surprise. Virgilia, having already resumed her customary facial expression, now took on her usual self-contained manner as well and crossed over to them. IV "Well, well, Virgilia," said her aunt, as the door closed on Preciosa, "you see more in that girl than I do." "I see her grandfather," whispered Virgilia, with the obscure brevity of an oracle. She drew down her brows and looked at the wondering Dill,--or rather, through him, past him. "Oh," replied her aunt softly. It was impossible that she should misunderstand; McNulty and Hill and the rest of them had just been in her own thoughts, on her own tongue. "I _shall_ be responsible, after all," she said within herself. Then she gave Virgilia a slight frown of disapproval: it was not precisely a maidenly part that her niece had chosen to play; neither did it show the degree of deference due to an elder, a chaperon and--if you came right at it--to a stock-holder. "If this thing must be engineered," thought Eudoxia, "I think I should prefer to engineer it myself." Heaven pardon her, though, for ever having brought Virgilia Jeffreys to Daffingdon Dill's studio! She herself had come there full of Jeremiah McNulty and Andrew P. Hill and Roscoe Orlando Gibbons. "It's a big undertaking," she had told Dill. "They're struggling with it now, poor things. They need expert advice. If I were only one of the board of directors!" Dill came up to the mark gingerly. "The air has been full of it for the last fortnight," he said, struggling between eagerness and professional dignity. "I know a number of fellows who have thought of going in for it." "I suppose _you_ haven't thought of going in?" Dill drew himself up. "How can I?" He suggested the young physician who will starve but who will not infringe the Code by any practice that savours in the least of advertising, of soliciting. However, he was a thousand miles farther away from starvation than was Ignace Prochnow, for example; much better could he afford to await the arrival of an embassy.