The little lady, for all her mildness of manner and appearance, proved to be as wide awake as any one of the three. She even found a way to discover, without Smith's being aware of it, whether he possessed the typical New Yorker's attitude toward her native city. Mrs. Maitland lived in the firm and fixed belief that all New Yorkers, dwelling as they did in a restless and artificial milieu of restaurants and theaters and dollars, had for Boston and Bostonians a kind of patronizing pity. The fact that she herself regarded New Yorkers in very much the same light had never occurred to her. Smith, however, was not a typical New Yorker. He had too real and intense an interest in all created things to fear Mrs. Maitland's gently suspicious inquisition. In addition to this he was so genuinely interested in at least one of the Bostonians before him that he naturally and easily escaped the pitfalls into which another might have tumbled. So thoroughly, indeed, did he win approval and disarm suspicion that before very long he had his reward in being left, before the small but cheerful fire, with the daughter of the house. This tactful withdrawal did not lessen the attraction of Mrs. Maitland in Smith's eyes, and it was with real admiration in his tone that he said to Helen:-- "I think your mother is charming." "I have thought so," returned Helen, with assumed loftiness, "for thirty or forty years." "So long?" queried Smith, thoughtfully. "That merely goes to show how one can be deceived." "Deceived!" said Miss Maitland. "Unless you mean self-deception, I would like an explanation of that remark." But her visitor said that in his opinion to explain anything, however occult, to a Bostonian, savored of intellectual impudence, and was, at the least, a piece of presumption of which he hoped he should never be guilty. "And yet I can remember," said the girl, laughing, "an occasion when explanations _were_ made to a young lady from Boston--and explanations that took some time, too. I--even I--can bear witness to that." "My life," Smith rejoined, "has been like that of a candidate for office, such that he who runs may read--and he need not necessarily be a ten-second sprinter, either. Only one dark, shameful page is in it, and that is the record of the day when I talked deaf, dumb, and blind the helpless stranger within the Guardian's gates." "Are you really sorry?" Helen asked more seriously. Smith looked at her. "It has been more than three months since you left New York," he said. "I have been glad of it--and sorry for it--every day of that time." "And which are you now?" inquired the girl, with interest. "If I should start on that subject, I should probably regret it. Hadn't we better talk of something else?"