Anne did not respond at once. Instead, she sat staring at him, and her mother marked how a small glow of red came into the daughter’s cheek. Then Mrs. Cromwell also stared at little Hobart Simms; and for the first time noticed what a good profile he had and what a well-shaped head. Slowly and wonderingly the daughter’s eyes turned to meet the mother’s, and each caught the marvel of the other’s thought: that it was this unconsidered little Hobart Simms who fitted Mrs. Cromwell’s definition of a “superman.” “Why, yes,” Anne said, slowly. “If you really care to go for a walk, I’d like to go with you, Hobart.” Mrs. Cromwell watched them as they went forth, outwardly the most ill-assorted couple in her sight that day; for Hobart was a full “head” the shorter. They talked amiably together as they went, however, and Mrs. Cromwell’s heart was lightened by the sound of Anne’s laughter, which came back to her even when the two had gone but a little distance. The mother’s heart might have known less relief, that afternoon, had she suspected this walk to be the beginning of “anything serious.” And yet, had she been a good soothsayer and seeress she might well have been pleased; for not many years were to pass before Hobart Simms’s electrified fellow citizens were to remind one another frequently that Napoleon was a little man, too. VIII MRS. DODGE’S ONLY DAUGHTER THAT capable and unsentimental matron, Mrs. Dodge, was engaged in the composition of an essay for the Woman’s Saturday Club (founded 1882) and the subject that had been assigned to her was “Spiritual Life and the New Generation.” Her work upon it moved slowly because the flow of her philosophical thinking met constant interference, due to an anxiety of her own connected with the New Generation, though emphatically not (in her opinion) with its Spiritual Life. Anxiety always makes philosophy difficult; but she sat resolutely at her desk whenever her apprehensions and her general household duties permitted; and she was thus engaged upon a springtime morning a week before her “paper” was to be presented for the club’s consideration. She wrote quotations from Ruskin, Whitman, Carlyle, and Schopenhauer, muttering pleasantly to herself that the essay was “beginning to sound right well”; but, unfortunately for literature, the window beside her desk looked down upon the street. Nothing in the mild activities of “the finest suburb’s finest residential boulevard” should have stopped an essay, and yet a most commonplace appearance there stopped Mrs. Dodge’s. Her glance, having wandered to the window, became fixed in a widely staring incredulity; then rapidly narrowed into most poignant distaste. She dropped her pen, and from her parted lips there came an outcry eloquent of horror. Yet what she saw was only a snub-nosed boy shambling up the brick path to her front door, walking awkwardly, and obviously in a state of embarrassment.