The ladies murmured their gratitude, Mrs. Deering with an emotion
that suited her thanks, and Miss Gage with a touch of something
daughterly toward me that I thought pretty.



CHAPTER VI



"Well, what DID you make of her, my dear?" Mrs. March demanded the
instant she was beyond their hearing. "I must say, you didn't spare
yourself in the cause; you did bravely. What is she like?"

"Really, I don't know," I answered, after a moment's reflection. "I
should say she was almost purely potential. She's not so much this
or that kind of girl; she's merely a radiant image of girlhood."

"Now, your chicquing it, you're faking it," said Mrs. March,
borrowing the verbs severally from the art editor and the publisher
of Every Other Week. "You have got to tell me just how much and how
little there really is of her before I go any further with them. Is
she stupid?"

"No--no; I shouldn't say stupid exactly. She is--what shall I say?-
-extremely plain-minded. I suppose the goddesses were plain-minded.
I'm a little puzzled by her attitude toward her own beauty. She
doesn't live her beauty any more than a poet lives his poetry or a
painter his painting; though I've no doubt she knows her gift is