He went up to Mrs. Horn for a moment's hail and farewell, and felt
himself subtly detained by her through fugitive passages of conversation
with half a dozen other people. He fancied that at crises of this strange
interview Mrs. Horn was about to become confidential with him, and
confidential, of all things, about her niece. She ended by not having
palpably been so. In fact, the concern in her mind would have been
difficult to impart to a young man, and after several experiments Mrs.
Horn found it impossible to say that she wished Margaret could somehow be
interested in lower things than those which occupied her. She had watched
with growing anxiety the girl's tendency to various kinds of
self-devotion. She had dark hours in which she even feared her entire
withdrawal from the world in a life of good works. Before now, girls had
entered the Protestant sisterhoods, which appeal so potently to the young
and generous imagination, and Margaret was of just the temperament to be
influenced by them. During the past summer she had been unhappy at her
separation from the cares that had engrossed her more and more as their
stay in the city drew to an end in the spring, and she had hurried her
aunt back to town earlier in the fall than she would have chosen to come.
Margaret had her correspondents among the working-women whom she
befriended. Mrs. Horn was at one time alarmed to find that Margaret was
actually promoting a strike of the button-hole workers. This, of course,
had its ludicrous side, in connection with a young lady in good society,
and a person of even so little humor as Mrs. Horn could not help seeing
it. At the same time, she could not help foreboding the worst from it;
she was afraid that Margaret's health would give way under the strain,
and that if she did not go into a sisterhood she would at least go into a
decline. She began the winter with all such counteractive measures as she
could employ. At an age when such things weary, she threw herself into
the pleasures of society with the hope of dragging Margaret after her;