"Not when he's got a good place offered him--and a nice girl to take, with a brand-new dress of just the right sort to go in? I should want a beau of mine to have a little more spunk than that." "How can you talk that way?" whimpered Jane, quite quivering with pleasure. "I can't sit here and listen to anything like that. What right"--with a feint of maiden indignation--"what right have you to say that Mr. Br--that anybody is--is my--" "Beau," supplied Mrs. Bates, serenely. "Beau--that's what I said. Old-fashioned word, I know; but I can't think of a better one." "You're just dreadful; you are," stammered Jane, trying to withdraw as best she might from too pronounced an attitude of protest. She fingered the length of ravelled bordering that drooped from the hair-cloth cushion of her chair and ran an eye, pretendedly speculative, up and down the pink and green stripes of Mrs. Bates's wall-paper. "I'm pretty sure he wouldn't go--the gentleman who is to escort me to the lecture," she said, with another return to her vain paraphrase. "He's earnest. He's serious. Besides, he hasn't got a dress-coat." "Hasn't got a dress-coat?" "He doesn't approve of them. He thinks they're ugly and foolish and--and not right. He believes that society is--well, not exactly wrong, but--" "All the same," declared Mrs. Bates, "he will receive a ticket, and I shall contrive to let him know that there's a place waiting for him." "Oh, no! No, you mustn't! What would he ever think of me?" "I shall, too." "No! Don't--please don't. He wouldn't know what to think. He might think that I--" "I shall, too!" repeated Mrs. Bates, more loudly and stubbornly. "I shall, too!" She knew that anything less marked than this would be a chilling disappointment to the girl before her. "And if he hasn't got a dress-coat, why, he can just get one. I'm sure if a young man cared anything for me--" "Oh, don't talk that way--please don't!" implored Jane, half hiding her face with a kind of despairing joy. "Don't say such things, I beg of you!" "--I should expect him to make some little sacrifice for me," Mrs. Bates completed. "Let him come and look at us; we may not be half so bad as he imagines." "Sacrifice." What a delightful and comforting sound the word had to Jane. It vitalized in a moment all her story-reading of the past ten years. That anybody should ever be moved to make a sacrifice for _her_! "But he used to live in the Settlement," persisted Jane; "he used to work there. He doesn't approve of Charity Balls; he thinks that isn't at all the way to do things." "Well," said Mrs. Bates, thoughtfully, "it's _a_ way; but there are better ones, no doubt. Come, cut that lecture altogether. He could pick up more in half an hour with me there at his elbow than he could learn in half a dozen courses of lectures, however extended they were." "And have you act as you acted at Rosy's afternoon? You'd paralyze us both." Jane blushed at her "both."