Seeing her, Gowan found himself smiling faintly. Mollie amused him just as she amused Dolly. It was so difficult a matter to assign her any settled position in the world; She was taller than the other girls, and far larger and more statuesque; indeed, there were moments when she seemed to be almost imposing in presence, but this only rendered her still more a charming incongruity. She might have carried herself like a royal princess, but she blushed up to the tips of her ears at a glance, and was otherwise as innocently awkward as a beauty may be. She was not fond of strangers either, and generally lapsed into silence when spoken to. Public admiration only disconcerted her, and made her pout, and the unceremonious but friendly compliments of Phil's brethren in art were her special grievance. “They stare at me, and stare at me, and stare at me,” she complained, pettishly, to Dolly, “and some of them say things to me. I wish they would attend to their pictures and leave me alone.” But she had never evinced any particular dislike to Ralph Gowan. She was overpowered by a secret sense of his vast superiority to the generality of mankind, but she rather admired him upon the whole. She liked to hear him talk to Dolly, and she approved of his style. It was such a novel sort of thing to meet with a man who was not shabby, and whose clothes seemed made for him and were worn with a grace. He was handsome, too, and witty and polite, and his cool, comfortable manner reminded her vaguely of Dolly's own. So she used to sit and listen to the two as they chatted, and in the end her guileless admiration of Dolly's eligible Philistine became pretty thoroughly established. When the sound of advancing footsteps roused her from her nap she woke with great tranquillity, and sat up rubbing her drowsy eyes serenely for a minute or so before she discovered that Phil had a companion. But when she did discover that such was the fact she blushed all over, and looked up at Ralph Gowan in some naïve distress. “I did n't know any one was coming,” she said, “and I was so comfortable that I fell asleep. It was the cushions, I think.” “I dare say it was,” answered Gowan, regarding her sleep-flushed cheeks and exquisite eyes with the pleasure he always felt in any beauty, animate or inanimate. “May I sit here, Mollie?” and then he looked at her again and decided that he was quite right in speaking to her as he would have spoken to a child, because she _was_ such a very child. “By me, on the sofa?” she answered. “Oh, yes.” “Are you going to talk business with Phil?” she asked him next, “or may I stay here? Griffith and Dolly won't want me in the parlor, and I don't want to go into the kitchen.” “I have no doubt you may stay here,” he said, quite seriously; “but why won't they want you in the parlor?” “They never want anybody,” astutely. “I dare say they are making love,--they generally are.”