we owe it all to you, Etta."

"I don't know what you mean by owing. I'm always glad of an excuse for
Class Day. And it was Dan Mavering who really managed the affair."

"He was very kind," said Mrs. Pasmer, with a feeling which was chiefly
gratitude to her friend for bringing in his name so soon. Now that it had
been spoken, she felt it decorous to throw aside the outer integument of
pretense, which if it could have been entirely exfoliated would have
caused Mrs. Pasmer morally to disappear, like an onion stripped of its
successive laminae.

"What did you mean," she asked, leaning forward, with, her face averted,
"about his having the artistic temperament? Is he going to be an artist?
I should hope not." She remembered without shame that she had strongly
urged him to consider how much better it would be to be a painter than a
lawyer, in the dearth of great American painters.

"He could be a painter if he liked--up to a certain point," said Mrs.
Saintsbury. "Or he could be any one of half-a-dozen other things--his
last craze was journalism; but you know what I mean by the artistic
temperament: it's that inability to be explicit; that habit of leaving
things vague and undefined, and hoping they'll somehow come out as you
want them of themselves; that way of taking the line of beauty to get at
what you wish to do or say, and of being very finicking about little
things and lag about essentials. That's what I mean by the artistic
temperament."

"Yes; that's terrible," sighed Mrs. Pasmer, with the abstractly severe
yet personally pitying perception of one whose every word and act was